Chapter 16
Hunter
I plan on giving Rayne the short version, and instead, I bare my soul to him.
He’s on his bed, I’m on mine.
He took a shower after he fucked my mouth, and now his hair is still a little damp, sticking in a million different directions. I want to go run my fingers through it, but that would just distract me.
Because I’m going to tell him the truth.
The whiskey in my blood is affecting me more than it should.
And yet again, Rayne’s clawed his way right past every last shred of willpower I have left in me.
“Talk,” he says to me.
“Impatient much?”
“Yes. I’m impatient. First of all, tell me what the fuck you want.”
At first I don’t respond.
I like that I got to him, but I don’t like the question.
What do I want?
I want to be alone.
I cannot even picture a life where I am not completely alone.
And my whole lifetime, people have been hell-bent on making that impossible.
“In life, you’re forced into almost everything,” I tell Rayne, my tone coming out lifeless.
“School first, from preschool to elementary into middle and high school. Then, it doesn’t end.
College is next, and if you have a father like mine, he tries to shove you into the same one he attended.
I escaped that, going to London, but now look at me. Here at Crimson.”
“Crimson is a great college.”
“I’m aware of that,” I tell him. “But I just want to be alone. It’s all I’ve ever dreamed of. I salivate about the day I get my inheritance and I can buy a plot of land where no one can ever find me again. I’m not meant for this world, Rayne.”
“How very edgy of you,” Rayne says, and he’s clearly unimpressed.
But I don’t expect him to understand.
People never do.
They assume I want to be alone because I’m on some high ivory tower, or that I believe I’m above it all.
But it’s not that. Because I’m well aware of another thing, too: their world is worse with me in it. I also want to be alone so that I’m not inflicting myself on everyone around me. My urges. My chaotic rage.
The way fights always end up with my hand on someone’s neck, cutting off their breath, or my knife on their skin, threatening them until they beg me to stop.
But I never want to stop.
I always end up hurting people.
Endangering them.
So if I can’t stop what’s inside me, I need to be alone. At least then I won’t have to hold myself back from wanting to fucking strangle every living person who’s ever wronged me.
“Tell me something real, now,” he demands. “How did you end up in a mafia family?”
I pull in a lungful of air. “I didn’t seek out the Thornwick crime family in London. They found me. I had a part time job at a pub in a bad part of town. Bad people came to that pub, and I served them liquor.”
“You and Weston don’t need jobs. You have access to giant bank accounts, and when you turn 25 you’ll have inheritances worth millions. Why work at a bar?”
“People in bars get violent. Moth, meet flame.”
“Naturally,” he mutters.
“Acting like you’re above it, Colson? You’re a moth to my flame, too. You like the violence inside me. Admit it.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“Honesty before everything. You know I’m unhinged, and you keep coming back.”
“I don’t know why I can’t keep my cock away from you, but that’s not what we’re here to talk about. Talk about the bar. Now.”
I lick my lips. “Working at that bar, I got… a reputation.”
Rayne raises an eyebrow. “What reputation?”
“I kept the place under control.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
I bite the inside of my cheek and reach for one of my butterfly knives nearby. It makes me feel better to have something in my hand.
“If a fight broke out, I’d jump over the bar and put an end to it.”
Rayne gives me a dubious look. “So you thought you were the Batman of your little pub, didn’t you?”
“No. But the customers started to think that. One night, I defused a situation between people who turned out to be one step shy of the mafia and a man who owed them money. They noticed me.”
“Everyone notices you.”
I look him up and down. “Especially you, king.”
He gives me an upward nod. “You’re not going to distract me. Tell me more.”
“I didn’t know they were a crime family at first, but I had a feeling. They started asking me to do things for them. Store mysterious boxes behind the bar, feed them information about patrons, all sorts of little weird shit.”
“Why did you do it?”
“Because it felt dangerous, Colson. It made me feel alive.”
He gives me a hard stare. “You wanted this?”
“At first. It only went on for about a year. And then there came a time when I really got sick of it. They tried to make me a pawn, and I’m not a pawn.”
Rayne nods. “You’re a king.”
“Guess we both need to feel like we’re royalty in our own little worlds,” I tell him. “I didn’t need their money. I’d rather protect myself. And eventually, I refused to give them information about a particular person.”
“What person?”
“My father.”
Rayne furrows his brow. “They knew your father?”
“My father visited me in London. They were very quick to realize how wealthy he is. And they wanted a piece of it.”
“So you protected your own father from being robbed?”
“Bingo.”
“Damn, Hunter. Who says you don’t value your bloodline?”
I shift on the bed, leaning forward. “I despise my father. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to sell him out to a crime family, Rayne. So the family ambushed me.”
“Ambushed?”
“They showed up at my apartment and attempted to kill me.”
Rayne’s eyes go wide. “You’re not serious.”
Deadly.
Fucking.
Serious.
“They’re quick with a gun, but I’m quicker at realizing when someone is hiding in my bedroom closet when I get home.
They shot at me as I ran back out into the street, but I got away.
I ran so fucking fast, probably four miles away, ducking behind every dark corner I could find until I knew they’d lost me. ”
Rayne truly looks scared, now. “What the fuck, Hunter?”
“I got on the first random bus I could find. And then I went north. I hid myself away in Liverpool for a few months. I paid for everything in cash, which is always one resource I’m lucky to have. It gave me long enough to apply for transfer to Crimson College. And then I was gone.”
“That’s fucking terrifying.”
“It didn’t scare me. But it pissed me off. And that’s why I’m going to protect you from whoever is messing with you. It pisses me off that I can’t get revenge on the people who deserve it, so I need to channel that energy into something else.”
“You should just stay out of it.”
I give him a cold look. “Never.”
“You should,” he insists. “Don’t get yourself hurt just because you can’t let go of a grudge.”
“The people attacking you deserve to be stopped, Rayne. They’re sloppy. They can’t even use a smaller dart to try to tranquillize you. They nail amateurish photos of you to the front door. They don’t even know how to scare people effectively—”
“But I am fucking scared,” Rayne says loudly, cutting through the quiet in the room. “I’m scared, Hunter. I’m not afraid to admit that like you are. I’m so fucking scared—”
I toss my knife onto the desk with a clatter and stand up, crossing the room to where he’s sitting on his bed.
I stroke his soft hair with my palm, looking in his eyes.
“You never need to be scared when I’m with you,” I tell him.
I mean every fucking word of it.
His hair still smells fresh from the shower and the scent of him near me is intoxicating.
He has a broken look in his eyes.
And as I gently stroke his hair, he leans forward, resting his head on the front of my body. A flare of possessiveness hits me strongly, like a wave crashing over my body.
Rayne’s demanding.
Mouthy.
A pain in my fucking ass.
But he’s also so raw with me in a way that I can’t get enough of. I like it when he’s near me. When his body is against mine like this, it feels correct.
We fit together.
And no one’s ever fit with me like this, Rayne.
My heart is pounding.
Everything feels too overwhelming, all of a sudden.
He knows the truth even though he shouldn’t. And I need to fucking come back down to Earth.
“I’m going to sleep,” I tell him softly.
He doesn’t respond.
And I stroke his dark hair for another minute before I go to bed alone.
I’m in a dark room, and something is very wrong.
My hands fumble along each of the cool stone walls, but I can’t find a lightswitch anywhere. I don’t know how I got here, but I’m very aware that I’m trapped.
It’s like a cave, but not a natural one.
A tunnel, maybe.
I move forward, grasping in the dark, trying to feel anything that could serve as a tether back to something I’m familiar with.
Where is Weston?
Where is anyone?
Suddenly, I hear a voice call out from far off. It’s a distant echo, but instantly, I know who it is.
“I’m here,” Rayne is saying.
Over and over.
And deep down, I know in my bones that he’s in trouble.
And I’m more than certain it’s my fault.
“I’m coming,” I try to call back to him, but my words come out as a mumble, like it’s hard for me to speak at all.
And then a chill goes down my spine.
“No,” Rayne is calling out now.
I’m running out of time. It’s still so dark, and I feel like the further I stumble forward, the further away I am from Rayne.
I need to get to him.
When I try to scream out to him, my lips are sewn shut. No sound makes it out of my chest, and now I’m flailing, my heart pounding, knowing I’m not going to be able to get to him.
When I turn around to head backwards, I’m met with another cold stone wall.
It’s sealed off.
Fully trapped.
And my whole body suddenly feels paralyzed, like I’m in a straitjacket, sending impulses to all of my limbs to just fucking move, but nothing happens.
This is a dream, I finally know.
A nightmare.
Paralyzed in my sleep, and no way out.
I used to suffer with sleep paralysis all of the time when I was younger, but it hasn’t happened in years. A cold fear hits me and suddenly it’s like I can see shadows along the walls, but nothing is right.
I’m trying to open my eyes.