6. Nash
SIX
NASH
"You died seven years ago."
I couldn’t believe it. I watched her die with my own eyes. Saw Rowan slit her throat that day on the bridge.
Angel wasn’t moving. Neither was Rowan. Hell, for that matter, I couldn’t bring myself to move, either. Of course, now was the worst time for this to have happened, because the girl— the target — fuck, was she really Harper? —saw her opportunity and made a run for it.
For the first time in our career, the three of us just . . . let her go. Not a single muscle between us moved for several moments after she took off around the corner.
Then came the blame game.
Angel snapped back to himself first, shaking his head like a dog. "What the fuck just happened?" he muttered, hands clutching the side of his neck on either side as his gaze swung from me to our younger brother in stunned confusion.
I blinked once, twice, three times before I could form a coherent sentence. "I think we just let a target go."
"A target? Not just any target," he snapped, anger rising in his voice. "How is she still alive?"
Our gazes swung to Rowan, who stared after her like she would come back into the dead-end alley any second. If I’d been him, our gazes probably would have burned a hole straight through me on the spot, but it must not have registered to him.
I stepped in front of him and snapped my fingers in his face, pleased when he seemed to wake from his daze. "Hey there, asshole, you’ve got a lot of explaining to do."
He grumbled something under his breath that sounded an awful lot like go fuck yourself and started to head for the car. He didn’t pay us a whit of attention, didn’t offer any explanation, nothing. Just kept walking, even after Angel and I began to trail after him.
The fucker was bent over the side of the Torino, laughing- fucking laughing— when we caught up to him.
"The fuck’s so funny?" Angel demanded, walking around to the driver’s side of the beast.
Rowan just pointed at the tire and laughed some more, the sound bordering on a mental breakdown.
"She slashed our tire! You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!" Angel stormed to the trunk and yanked out a jack and tire iron, grumbling the whole way. "Can’t fucking believe I’m fixing a tire right now." Rowan knelt and reached for the tire iron, trying to be helpful, but Angel was having none of it. "No, go fuck yourself, asshole. You wanna help? Start talking."
Rowan’s face darkened as his eyes cut away in any direction but at us. "Nothing to say that you don’t already know."
"Fuck that, you’re a bald-faced liar," I whisper-shouted, already angry that I’d been denied the chance to carve up a target and that I’d apparently been lied to for the past seven years. "You know damn well there’s a story to tell, and you better start talking, or I’m out."
Rowan’s eyes cut to me with a knowing glare. "You won’t leave."
"Says you," I spat, moving to pull the spare tire from the trunk. "I think you owe us the truth, at the very least."
"How is she still alive?" Angel snarled, his anger reaching a fever pitch. If our brother didn’t start talking soon, he’d snap, and nobody wanted to see Angel on a rampage. He might have a better hold on his personal demons than me, but when he snapped, it was to a degree even I was wary of.
I took it out on other people. Targets, bad guys, scum. He took it out on us.
Rowan cleared his throat, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. "Obviously she survived. Not sure what else you want from me."
"How?" I spun the tire iron in one hand as Angel slipped the old tire off and walked it to the trunk. "Why? Did you know? "
"Of course he knew. How else do you think he could have the frame of mind to stop us?"
Rowan sighed deeply, a sound that held the weight of seven years of a secret he’d shouldered alone. "I didn’t know she was here. I knew she survived, sure, but I thought when she got stable enough to run, she’d take the money and the fake ID and go far from here. I didn’t expect she’d just cross the river and hide in plain sight."
"How does someone survive a fucking slit throat when they’re dumped in the fucking river?" I already knew the answer, but I wanted him to say it. I wanted him to admit to faking her death. Needed to know that the brother I thought I could trust had been lying to me, and to Angel, for seven years. About something this big, at that.
"I didn’t cut deep enough," he started, his voice low and filled with shame. "And there might’ve been a fishing boat under the bridge when I shoved her. He pulled her out of the river and took her home to heal."
He delivered these facts like they didn’t carry the weight of our entire lives with them. Like telling them didn’t completely alter how we viewed him—and each other. Like he was commenting on the weather.
"And you know all this how, Rowan?" Angel hissed, reminding me of a teapot about to boil over. "Because you followed him? Because it was planned?"
His locs hung in his eyes as he hunched over and stared at the ground. "I didn’t plan to spare her, Angel, I swear. But from the moment we were told to kill her, it felt wrong. What did she ever do to us? All because her momma was rich and left her the money? How is that fair to her?"
"It wasn’t our job to determine what was fair. Father’s orders were to?—"
"Fuck father’s orders, and fuck you if you think you deserve to stand there and berate me for making that decision!" Now Rowan was seething, something he rarely did. So often we saw him in rigid control of his emotions, almost to the point of coming off as unfeeling. Watching him devolve before our eyes was almost terrifying.
"You didn’t exactly step up to kill her, did you, Angel? Couldn’t even hurt a fucking fly back then, you prick. And you wanna sit there and act like you could have done better, or would have?—"
Angel slid up next to me and yanked the tire iron from my grip, pausing for a second before swinging it wildly in our youngest brother’s direction. I sucked my teeth as I watched Rowan dodge it with ease, his eyes on the now feral middle child, wary and pissed.
They’d kill each other if I didn’t step in and stop it. Angel’s violet eyes were blown wide, hands clenching the metal rod so tight it was entirely believable he might break a finger from sheer force.
On his next swing, I grabbed the tire iron on his backswing and halted his progress, ducking as he brought a fist around, aiming for my jaw. I wasn’t as fast as Ro, though, and he caught me in the temple, ringing my fucking bell like Mike Tyson in the ring. I staggered to the side of the car, the world shifting on its axis as I tried not to fucking hurl, I was so dizzy. Thankfully, Angel’s fists couldn’t do as much damage as quickly as a tire iron, so Rowan stood half a chance now while I struggled to regain my equilibrium. Fuck, he could land a punch.
"I swear on my mother’s grave, Rowan, you’d better hope I don’t land a hit, because I’m not planning to stop once I start." He bounced back and forth like a fucking rabbit, his blonde hair half spilling from beneath his ballcap, a pale flag in the wind. Total darkness had set in, and I was only slightly more stable than I had been a minute ago. Still, I forced myself to stand all the way up and take a shaky step in their direction.
If I could get behind him and wrap my arms around him until he cooled down, maybe we could all have an adult conversation. Or maybe we could both beat Rowan’s ass.
I hadn’t settled on what side I was on in this.
"Come on, Pretty Boy, I’ve got all fucking day to dance with you," Ro goaded, his grin splitting his face in half. "How long you think you can go before you give up and go home?"
"Aw, come on, you prick, you know damn well you’re pushing his buttons. You could stop, and we could all chill the fuck out?—"
"Don’t try to talk sense into him, Nash," Angel snapped, turning his gaze on me for a split second. "This fucker deserves to be beat. He lied to us, brother. For years."
"I know, Angel, believe me, I fucking know," I crooned as I inched closer to him. "But think about it. He’s got a point. You and I were all too happy to step back and let him handle it. Can we really be mad when neither one of us had the balls to do it, either?"
"Of all the people to talk sense, why’s it gotta be you, Nash?" His arms fell to his sides, and I breathed a sigh of relief that I wouldn’t have to fight off his escape moves and the wave of nausea still working its’ magic on me. "Fuck, man- fuck!"
He kicked the replacement tire, knocking it onto the ground, and stormed off around the corner, hands in his pocket, hair flying free. A fucking skeleton of a man, literally and figuratively, his sugar skull face paint a mockery of his aquiline features and rage.
I nodded in his direction, looking at Rowan with the knowing older brother glare I’d perfected when we were younger. "Go on, you’ll worry about him if you don’t follow him home."
Rowan’s eyes settled on the Torino and then the spare tire. "You sure? "
My head bobbed in a nod, making me more queasy. "Yeah, I got this. I’ll bring her home once I’ve got this tire swapped out."
His eyes studied me momentarily, like he didn’t believe me. "Okay," he hesitantly agreed, but something lingered in the air after he’d gone that irked me. Like he thought I was lying.
The spare tire went on with ease, though tightening the lugs made my head hurt. Rowan, ever prepared, had a bottle of ibuprofen in the center console, and I yanked that fucker out and popped probably one more than I should have, but who was counting? Not me, that was for sure.
The Torino hummed to life, the dull roar of her engine a purr that aggravated my headache even more. I pulled out and just drove, and before I knew it, I was pulling into a parking lot that most definitely was not the asylum. I blinked in confusion, glancing around at my unfamiliar surroundings until my eye caught a single lit-up window on the building directly across from me.
It was her. She stood at her fucking window in the projects in a flimsy tank top and a pair of short shorts, toweling off her hair like some fucking misplaced siren, slumming it with the sea urchins.
Fuck. Harper fucking Daniels, alive and well—or, at least, surviving.
She was so close. I leaned back the seat, staring at her through my window, watching as she prepared for bed like three strangers hadn’t just attacked her in a dark alley behind her job.
"What the fuck are you thinking, girl?" I muttered to myself, eyes pinned on the figure of her as she disappeared further into her room, doing whatever it was women did to prep for the night. "You should be running, not taking a shower and prepping for a good night’s sleep."
Her shadow darted around the room, and while I couldn’t make out much from the floor below her, I could keep an eye on her. Harper or not, she was still our target, I told myself. She was a job, nothing more.
Nothing more.