Back in the Arms of the Devil

Prologue

Bridger

I was thirteen years old the first time I ended up in the back of a cop car.

My dad had been T-boned a year prior and with that came him losing two things: his job and his ability to walk.

Wheelchairs were goddamn expensive and I had no problem pulling my weight around the house to make things easier for him and Mom, and that meant stealing.

Bread, milk, butter, bananas—Dad’s favorite, and I’d be damned if I didn’t give him something to look forward to.

But while I had been sneaky, I hadn’t been sneaky enough: which was why at the tender age of thirteen, I had those damn bananas ripped out of my hands and had my first mugshot taken.

The next time I felt those cuffs digging into the skin of my wrists, I was sixteen.

What should have been a typical, boring schoolyard fight—the kind I had been involved in a hundred times before—got a little out of hand when Tyler Grenville made a joke about my dad.

You buy him that wheelchair from the thrift store?

We had bought it from the thrift store, but it wasn’t any of his fucking business how me and Mom took care of Dad.

There was no chance in hell I was just going to stand there and let him say that shit, so I left one of his eyes with a bruise the size of my fist he rightfully deserved.

Twenty minutes later, I was in the backseat of a cop car and on my way to a three-week stint in juvie.

That same year I was arrested one more time, but life was getting real tough then and that also meant taking risks.

Dad needed another wheelchair after the first one went to hell, and saving up for that was an absolute mission, but I was determined to take away all of the problems that just wouldn’t stay away from my parents.

I came up with a scheme: go into the city; wait for the rich, suited up guys to leave the fancy ass designer stores in the busy streets of Chicago; follow them as casually as possible for a minute or two, and just when they were about to get into their cars, I pounced.

I’d have their merchandise in a second flat, and I was a damn fast runner. Always had been. They’d panic and cry out, but none of them ever followed me. That was for their own benefit, because rich guys had no fucking clue how to win a fight.

I’d end up lucky most of the time and get some fancy ass watch or silk shirt. I learned how to sell that shit off for a decent amount of cash that would pay for bills and groceries and eventually, Dad’s new wheelchair.

Disaster struck one late afternoon after swiping a Versace or Valentino or whatever the fuck bag out of some rich, old fuck’s hand.

It had been a normal job: grab, steal, sprint—except for the perfectly timed cop who saw it all.

I had managed to outrun him for a good ten minutes, but then the guy had to call for backup, and there went my profit for the day, and that afternoon was wasted in a cramped jail cell.

But there was a feeling of electricity growing inside of me during those days. The rush, the excitement, the way my heart would beat out of my chest as I yanked a bag out of someone’s hands. I quickly developed a lust for robbing the rich and giving to the poor.

At seventeen, I had found some luck. Not a single arrest. I was getting better, sharper, smarter, and was fast enough to outrun most of the cops on the Chicago Police Department payroll.

And now at eighteen, I was being arrested yet again, and for the first time in my life, it was for something I hadn’t done. Something I’d never, ever fucking do or even think about doing.

My arms were being pulled behind me, my front pressed up against the harsh, cold metal of the cop car. Head turned, I sucked in a sharp breath. I knew the cop who had his hands on me. Gene Bennings. There was a long history of mutual hatred between the two of us.

“You really fucked up now, didn’t ya, kid?” he asked with a laugh.

“Get your fuckin’ hands off me,” I said, teeth clenched as I tried to thrash out of the grasp he had on my arms, but those cuffs were on tight.

My eyes were clouded with the familiar blinding red and blue lights.

The siren of his car was still blaring, my ears very much used to the obnoxious noise.

It used to get my heart racing. Used to make me break out into a grin when I heard them in the distance.

“I didn’t do shit,” I said. “Get off me. Get the fuck off.”

“I’ve been waiting a long time to see your ass get locked up. I’m so glad I finally get to see it happen,” he said.

I kept trying to throw my shoulders back, but those damn cuffs were getting the best of me. He tangled his hand in my hair, yanked me up, and pushed me harshly up against the closed door of his car. “Get your fucking hands off me,” I said. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Stop lying.”

“I’m not fucking lying. You’ve got the wrong guy. Why the fuck would I do that to her? Why would I hurt her?”

I could hear some deep whispers behind me and the cuffs had me straining to look over my shoulder.

My throat was dry, everything suddenly feeling on edge as I tried to focus on the noises I actually wanted to hear.

Her voice. That was what I wanted. Her sweet, soft, calming voice.

I needed her. I was trying to focus past the sirens, past the cars zooming up and down the road—a few of them driving nice and slow to get a good fucking look at the absolute mess I was in the middle of.

My eyes shut tightly, trying to find her voice. Her telling me it was all gonna be okay, that she believed me, that she knew I’d never do anything to make those pretty eyes of hers fill up with tears. Fuck, I needed to see her face.

But there was none of that. No comfort from my girl, no comfort from anyone. All I could feel was the cold and painful night air of Chicago against my bare arms.

The cop was yanking at my hair again, his other hand pulling open the back door of his car.

With everything in me, I turned, looking over my shoulder, my eyes searching for my girl.

I just saw a pile of blank faces. Neighbors and others who had come to watch.

My mom’s horrified face as she pleaded with one of the many cops out the front.

And then I saw her. Her hazel eyes were big and wide and wet, looking exactly how I never, ever wanted them to look.

My breath got stuck in my throat. Time slowed down. I just looked at her. Juliette. I couldn’t hear a damn thing through all the chaos, and that damn chaos surrounded me in every direction I looked. She had to believe me. She had to.

That look on her face was proving otherwise, because I was pretty sure I had never seen her so distraught.

Lips trembling, her chocolate brown locks all messy, her eyes wet and pained.

How was it that just ten minutes ago, we were sitting on my couch with my arm thrown around her shoulder as I did everything I could to comfort her?

That she was looking up at me with her tear-stained cheeks, begging me to try and help her understand why someone would destroy something so precious to her?

That as I held her close to me, telling her that it’d all be okay, that everything would work out, that I was sorry someone had taken something so special and ruined it, that a whole heap of cops stormed into my house and yanked me off the couch and told me that I was under arrest for something I’d rather die than do?

I kept searching Juliette’s face, needing so badly for her to believe me and understand that it hadn’t been me, that I would never even think about hurting her like that.

She was the girl I loved, the girl that I knew I wanted to spend every last of my days with.

Juliette Ashford was all I could ever want.

Our eyes locked and I waited and watched for something from her, something that would tell me that she understood what was happening, but I saw her head shake and then her lips parted to let out a sob I couldn’t hear, and I didn’t need to be standing up close to know what that meant.

That wasn’t just sadness or heartache looking back at me. That was pure fucking disappointment.

I was being shoved into the back seat a second later.

The door slammed shut, and my head turned, looking out the window, back at her and the way she buried her face in her hands.

I could see Mom place a hand on Juliette’s shaking shoulder and utter some words into her ear, but that didn’t stop my girl’s body from trembling.

The engine of the cop car started and then we were moving—I was moving—far away from her, back to a place I had been to plenty of times before, but for the first time ever, I had no clue about what was going to happen to me when I got there.

Now that I was eighteen, I wouldn’t just be heading off to juvie.

An arrest meant prison. No Juliette. No me being able to bring in whatever small amounts of money I could to help look after my parents.

They relied on me and I had no problem lending a hand, but how was Mom going to handle looking after Dad all on her own if I got shipped off to prison?

The three of us needed each other, and God, I needed Juliette too.

The cop kept driving. Kept taking me away from her, from them, from everything I had ever loved.

I was exactly where I belonged, though: the poor, rule-breaking criminal on his way to jail, all while Juliette stood there in front of my run down house on my even more run down street, the South Side a stark and harsh difference to the luxurious life she had always known over in Branmore.

A rich girl like her didn’t belong in our part of Chicago, where sirens could be heard all night and homes were falling apart and you had to go through a metal detector just to get into school.

She wasn’t used to my life, but she had accepted me into hers like it didn’t matter that I was just a poor boy with twenty bucks in his wallet and a heart that beat way too fast whenever I thought of her.

There I was, back where I had been so many times, right in the back of a cop car. And there Juliette was, standing on the pathway of my crummy neighborhood, far away from her pristine life on the other side of the city, in absolute tears that I was meant to be wiping away.

Before I knew it, we were at the end of the street, turning the corner that would take us right to the police station. As I slumped back against the seat, I tried to take it all in. Tried to understand what the fuck just happened.

Her parents. It must have been them. All I had ever wanted was to love Juliette, but her parents would never let their daughter be with someone like me.

I didn’t have enough money or the right last name to ever be looked at with approval, but I didn’t fucking need their approval in the first place, because Juliette was the only one I cared about impressing.

It was them. I knew it. I fucking knew it was them.

The cuffs felt like they were tightening on my wrists as I closed my eyes, and I instantly remembered the look of pain on Juliette’s face.

She thought it was me. She thought I had set out to hurt her and break her and destroy her.

My heart ached like nothing I had ever felt before, the feeling so much worse than the cold metal digging into my wrists.

They were about to take my freedom away from me, but what was a million times worse than that was them taking Juliette from me too.