AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Pull them up on your phone and delete them,” I grit out.
Ashe does, I watch him carefully. He has them in a password-protected folder—I’d expect nothing less—and he deletes them all with shaking hands.
“Drop it,” I say the second the last one disappears. I’m not giving him a chance to try to call for help or something. “Now stand.”
“Where are you taking me?” he asks as he gets to his feet.
“Keep your voice down,” I hiss. By now, my mom is probably already in bed with her earplugs in, but I don’t want to risk it.
Carefully, I push John through the dark house and out the back door, closing it behind us quietly. There’s a decent patch of woods behind their neighborhood, so I nod across the backyard.
It’s dark, and he doesn’t have shoes on, so he picks his way through the yard carefully. When we leave the grass and start moving through the forest, he hisses in pain.
“She has bruises all over her body from you,” I tell him once we’re far enough in the forest that the trees will absorb our conversation. “You almost broke one of her ribs.”
“What do you want me to do, apologize?” he snaps.
“Oh, no, nothing as extreme as that,” I reply flatly.
He stops and turns around to face me. “What are we doing, Wes? Are you jealous? Do you think this is a good way to get your anger out? You’re not smart enough to get away with murder.”
I bark out a laugh. “If only you knew.”
His brows knit together. “What do you mean?”
“I reached out to Uncle Dave for a job years ago.”
John’s eyes blow wide. “Wes! He’s acriminal.”
“So are you. Do I really need to remind you of that?” I shove him back around and force him to keep walking.
“Your father would be disappointed in you,” John says.
“You’re wrong,” I bite out. “He’d be disappointed in Mom. Disappointed in you, too. But he’d be proud of me for following in his footsteps.”
I don’t know if that’s true, but neither does John. He and my father barely spoke. Me, on the other hand? My dad taught me how to shoot a gun, how to throw a punch, and how to hit someone where it hurts.
I have to tell myself he’d be happy for the life I chose.
He wouldn’t be proud of how you treat Athelia.
That thought is like a punch to the gut. I shove it aside for now. I’ll deal with that later.
Once John and I are deep enough in the woods, I force him to his knees. I drop my backpack to the ground, pull out some duct tape, and seal his mouth shut. He tries to protest, but I’m the one with the gun, not him. He has to comply.
“For the record, she did come to me for help,” I tell John. It’s not a full description of how I ended up here, but it’s also the truth. “She’s always been mine. You tried to keep us apart, but ultimately, you failed.”
I zip tie his hands and feet together before holstering my gun and pulling out my knife from my pocket. I keep it in one hand and pull out a small flashlight with the other.
John makes a muffled noise when he sees the blade. The idiot tries to get up and run, but I shove him back down.
I shine my light in his eyes just to be annoying before moving to his feet. Just as I expected, they’re bleeding from all the sharp sticks and pine cones on the forest floor.
“You deserve worse than what I’m going to do to you,” I tell him, “but I want to get back tomygirl as soon as possible.”
As I drag the blade up his arm, leaving a long, shallow cut, John cries out. The sound is muffled, but it still annoys me, so I kick him in the face with one of my steel-toed boots. Blood trickles from his nose as he groans in pain.
Shoving him onto his back, I trace another shallow cut along his chest. “You wanna know what Athelia’s one request was? She wanted me to draw out your pain.”
