Chapter Twenty-Two
Tomás
Luca left without any sort of advice for me.
Wear a mask. Hide who I was. That wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t just act like nothing between Enzo and me happened. As if Luca wasn’t there to kill me. I couldn’t wear a mask.
I walked out of the bathroom and straight into Wren.
“Whoa,” he said, saving his drink from spilling on him. “Are you leaving?”
“I need to get out of here.”
Before I could move past him, he grabbed my arm. For a moment, I thought he was going to drag me kicking and screaming to our assigned table. Wren was Alessandro’s son. His son. The last person I wanted to see me this way. Not that I believed Wren, like Luca, was here to kill me, but that I felt a mark of shame every time I looked at him. As if what Enzo did to me were my fault. As if Enzo being a deadbeat father had been my fault too. Maybe Kieran was right and I needed to play the martyr. Everything felt like my damn fault.
“Follow me.”
Fuck. I needed out of my head. That may have been the reason I followed Wren back to the kitchen.
“Hey, Tate, you got another one?”
A tall, thin kid with floppy ears and large eyes lifted his head. I swear to God, he reminded me of a scared doe staring at headlights. “For him, fuck yeah.”
Wren smirked at me. “He has the good stuff. Not Jack’s. Trust me.” I did trust Wren. A few months ago, he’d been jumped by an assassin looking for me. They’d taken Henry as a bargaining chip and Wren had felt responsible. Then I had crashed his car, which he hadn’t hated me for. And with River getting married, Wren was allowed to be a hot mess. And hot messes did well together, sharing weed.
Tate led us down to a cellar and near a case of cigars. He smiled, showing a row of straight white teeth. “Our secret, Tom,”
“It’s Tomás, and yeah.”
He pulled out jars of the stuff. I watched as he casually rolled a few as he talked. “It’s about the size of the pieces. The flavor hits you in the beginning, but the strongest is the last bit.” He handed me three. “Test it. Let me know what you think. I could use a handler if you’re interested.”
“Did you sell to Jack?”
He made a face I took as hell, no. “Jack didn’t respect the natural process.” I took the handed joints.
“Let me sample the goods and I’ll let you know.”
He nodded. “I like you, Tom,” he said. “Stay away from echo and don’t get killed out there tomorrow, but this might help.” He handed me a bag with a few more. “You can pay me when you get back.”
Fuck it. I’d probably come back in a body bag. I took it.
Wren showed me the rear entrance and gave me a salute. “Can you…” I didn’t need to elaborate. Wren knew I needed the out.
“Yup. I’ll tell them you got the runs.” He winked. I laughed.
Once outside, I lit the joint. That first hit was pleasant. I hadn’t eaten and the buzz was starting to send tingles down my body. I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. The sounds of wildlife sputtered all around me. The growing greenery and smell of spring rain were starting to grow on me.
Like mold.
I started to chuckle when I heard someone walk out the back. A big, prickly someone. I decided I didn’t really like Wren anymore.
Maddox caught sight of me, growled, or it was just his usual rumble, and leaned beside me before reaching for the joint in my hand. I thought about fighting for it, but I wasn’t usually a joint hogger. That was Daniel. I reluctantly let it go. At first, I thought he was going to lecture me like he had when he kidnapped me. Okay, maybe kidnapped was a strong word. He had saved my life. But he had lectured me about smoking too much weed. He’d lectured me about doing well in school. About doing something productive with my life. After I tried suicide by his bodyguard and he had saved me, we had matching scars. He’d taken a bullet in his shoulder for me. And I had the scar of the bullet above my ear reminding me how close I’d been to dying. Maddox Brennan had saved my life. I didn’t know he was my half-brother then. He did though.
“Who hurt you?” he asked then took an inhale of the joint. The end of it lit, he leaned back, chin inched up, revealing his thick neck. Everything on Maddox was thick. Then he let the smoke out of his too full lips. He looked nothing like Daniel. Daniel was all Moya while I was all Katarina Ruiz, my mother. The bits and pieces of her Maddox and I shared made us look more alike.
“Nobody important.”
He made a sound at the back of his throat and released the smoke. “You taking off?” he asked, handing me back the joint.
“That’s the plan,” I said, taking it.
“You can’t always run, kid.”
“Running’s all I got now.”
He kicked at his feet as if he needed to move too. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how we left things.”
“You mean, you threatening to kill me.”
“After you threatened my brothers.” He realized what he said and cleared his throat. I wasn’t part of the “brothers” equation.
“Why did you even let Daniel go?” I whispered. “Why did you save me? You don’t owe us anything.”
“Growing up, I always felt different. Cillian, he was strict, but I always felt as if he and mom always argued about what to do with me the way they didn’t with Tristan and Liam. My mother, she was perfect.”
The sting in my chest from his words hurt. “That’s fucking great,” I chuckled with malice in my voice. “While you were living the perfect life with a fake mother, our mother hated me because I reminded her of you . She’d…” I swallowed. The words stuck in my throat. And why bother spilling my dirty laundry. I’d never go back to that part of my past. Maddox gave me a way out. Though I couldn’t stop thinking about her. My mother. Was she still even alive? Did I really care? I took another hit of the joint, cutting off the conversation. I decided I was going to take everything Tate gave me tomorrow night and lay on the grass and stare at the stars until Luca found me. Not a bad way to go.
For a coward.
“You blame me for what she did?”
“Yeah,” I spat. But then he’d been a baby when Cillian had taken him. What the fuck did he know? I still hated him though.
“Daniel took me off guard when he told me about us. I didn’t want to believe that the mother I thought was my mother wasn’t. That Tristan wasn’t my real brother.”
“He is your real brother,” I snapped.
“I know. But shit, Tomás. My world was upended. I let him go because I couldn’t kill him. He’d done nothing wrong.”
“How many other people have you killed that did nothing wrong, Maddox? How many families have you erased?”
He swallowed. “I have my hard limits, Tomás. Everyone I killed were in the life. They knew the risks. Even your father.”
“When will it ever stop?”
“I guess when we’re dead.”
“That may happen sooner than later,” I said.
“You’re not going to die out there,” he almost growled.
I turned to face him. Something in me just shattered. I’d been pathetic my whole life, now was no different. I couldn’t forget about Enzo. The father version of him when he’d first taken me in, that slowly turned into a brotherly love for him. Then, more. Was I jealous of Alessandro and Maddox? I felt sick to my stomach thinking about it. Maddox didn’t know Enzo the way I knew him. Maddox had saved me from a bullet, but I couldn’t save him from Enzo. And what if Maddox didn’t want to be saved? Hell, I hadn’t wanted to be saved when he saved me from the bullet.
“Do you love him?” I blurted. I didn’t have to elaborate on the him . My stomach twisted inside.
“I don’t know. It was arranged. He was meant for Imogen and he and I, we have history. I couldn’t let her marry him.”
“Because you love him.” I steered.
“I think maybe I could love him. One day. But now it’s just an arrangement.”
“Does he see it as just an arrangement?”
Maddox chuckled. “No. Enzo says he’s loved me since he met me.”
“When was that?”
“I was about sixteen when we met. I knew I was bi when I met him. So fucking weird. We got each other off a few times.”
I sucked in too hard and coughed. “At sixteen? Wasn’t he like old?”
Maddox shrugged. “I didn’t care. Neither did he.”
My stomach tightened even more. “He was what?” I did the math in my head. “He was twenty-six.”
Maddox bit his bottom lip. “Yeah.” He seemed to weigh that in his head. “Nothing really happened. Shit didn’t work out. Too much happening with the family.”
The timeline when Enzo met me lined up. It’d been after he met Maddox. It had to be that he knew who I was. He knew about me and Maddox being brothers. It had to. “Did he work with Cillian?”
“No,” Maddox said. “He was closer to my mother. She played in the symphony, loved music. It’s what we shared.”
I swallowed the lump. Had it been his mother who sold me out? “What instrument did you play?”
“Everything, but I loved the piano. I was fucking good at it too.”
I felt sick.
He chose you because he wanted you to be Maddox.
My whole life hadn’t been my own. I’d been a pawn in a game that centered around Maddox. In my mind, I knew it wasn’t his fault. But my heart hated him for it.
“Why do you call him Enzo?”
A boyish blush peppered his face. “It’s what I called him when we hooked up. He looked more like an Enzo than an Alessandro to me. Something just between us.”
Yeah. I had to fucking go. I inhaled the last hit. It muted my senses which I so fucking needed. I put it out on the concrete wall and shoved the bud into my pocket. “I’m heading out.”
“Tomás, Tristan knows about you.”
My chest felt about to implode.
“I want the others to know too.”
I wiped my face. I wanted to argue. Hell, if it’d been a few months ago before Alessandro, I probably would have. But all I kept thinking was that I only had tomorrow left. “Yeah,” I said, clearing my throat and walking away. “After the games,” I added over my shoulder.
I lifted my hood and shoved my hands in my pockets. I meant to go to Harper House, but I ended up at Arcas. It was empty with everyone still at the party. I punched in the code and let myself inside.
The first time Maddox had showed me this place I had thought it grand. A fancy house in the middle of the woods. A school that housed killers. Shit, I’d made friends here. Dasher would be protected. But Charity, Morgan, and Micah wouldn’t. And despite their training, Fox, Wren, and River weren’t infallible. They could get hurt too. We had to stick together. Survive with all our bits intact.
I made my way to the gym. It was the largest space in the house. A full weightlifting regimen, treadmills, stationary bikes, and a sparring area. The guys took their training to a whole new level. All types of blunt weapons were scattered near the wall—wooden swords and small bats. I went through each one, testing the weight, the grip, ignoring the throb in my ribs from the beat down. When I finally found one that seemed to fit, I beat the fuck out of a wooden doll until my body became a throbbing vessel of pain. At least I could give Luca a fucking fight before he ended me. I didn’t have to go like a sacrificial lamb. Like the martyr everyone believed me to be.
“You’re doing it wrong.”