Chapter 3 #9
His eyes opened as he backed away from my chest. My shirt falling, the fabric falling across my swollen breasts. Something moved through them so fast I almost missed it.
Hunger.
Grief.
Fear.
Then he gave me that crooked, beautiful, doomed little smile.
“Then she had amazing taste.”
I should have stepped back.
I didn’t.
The grief inside me opened, and something warmer rushed in behind it. Reckless. Alive. Desperate to prove I was still made of blood and breath and want, not just bruises and damage.
I rose on my toes and kissed him.
Not a brush this time.
A real kiss.
For one heartbeat, Dylan forgot to be careful.
His hand slid to the back of my head. His mouth moved against mine with a restrained ache that made my knees tremble for an entirely different reason. The world narrowed to him, to the cold wind and his warm hands, to the taste of midnight and danger and something I had no right wanting.
Then he pulled away like it cost him.
“Careful, Beautiful,” he said roughly.
I reached for him again.
He caught my wrists gently.
Not hard.
Never hard.
But enough.
“You’re still seventeen,” he said.
My cheeks burned. “A kiss isn’t illegal.”
“No.” His voice was low. “But that’s not what you’re asking for and we both know it.”
I swallowed.
“And even if age wasn’t part of it, your father is Edge. The enforcer. I’m newly patched, not suicidal.”
“You’re scared of him?”
“I’m intelligent about him.”
That almost made me smile.
Almost.
Dylan’s thumb brushed the inside of my wrist, tender enough to undo me.
“This kind of thing burns people,” he said.
I looked back at Mandy’s grave.
The wildflowers trembled in the wind.
“Exactly,” I whispered. “That’s why.”
His expression tightened.
“Destiny.”
I loved the way he said my name. Like a warning. Like a prayer he didn’t believe in but couldn’t stop repeating.
“I know,” I said.
And I did.
I knew he was right.
I knew I was seventeen. I knew I was broken open and raw. I knew I was leaving by dawn, maybe leaving the country, maybe leaving this entire bloody chapter of my life behind before anyone could ask me what really happened.
I knew Dylan had his own ghosts and maybe he’d become a part of mine. The first man who gave me a taste of real passion. That elusive alive feeling that made me feel free and chasing the stars across the desert sky.
Dylan let go of my wrists slowly.
“We need to go,” he said.
I nodded, but I didn’t move right away.
Dylan walked beside me back to the horse close enough that his arm brushed mine, far enough that he was keeping the promise I didn’t have the strength to keep for both of us.
“I’m not tired,” I whispered.
His quiet laugh disappeared into the night.
By the time the ranch lights appeared through the trees, my body was shaking with exhaustion.
Dylan felt it.
“You’re about to collapse,” he murmured.
“I made it.”
“You did.”
There was pride in his voice.
Soft.
Dangerous.
Beautiful.
We slipped back inside the way we had left. The house was still quiet. The fake body from pillows still lay under the blankets, undisturbed. The sheets were cool.
My bones ached.
My mouth still remembered his.
Dylan pulled the blanket up around me and tucked it beneath my chin like he had any right to be tender.
At the door, he paused.
“Get some sleep,” he said.
“Dylan?”
He looked back.
“Thank you.”
For a second, the mask slipped.
The flirt. The criminal. The newly patched outlaw with too many secrets and not enough fear.
All of it fell away, and I saw the man underneath.
The one with a story he hadn’t told me yet.
“Anytime, Beautiful,” he said.
Then he was gone.
I closed my eyes before the room could start spinning again.
By sunrise, they would try to send me away.
By sunrise, everyone would be moving pieces around a board I barely understood.
By sunrise, I might be gone.
But tonight, I had stood at my mother’s grave. I had given her wildflowers. I had cried without breaking. I had kissed a man who knew better.
And for the first time in a long time, I didn’t feel like Destiny was just my name.
It felt like something I could still choose.
By the time we reached Cabo, the world had turned blue.
Blue sky. Blue sea. Blue pools cut into white stone. Blue shadows beneath palm trees. Everything looked too bright, too clean, too expensive. The kind of place people came to forget their lives for a week and post pictures pretending they were happier than they were.
The house JD had arranged wasn’t really a house.
It was a fortress pretending to be a villa.
White walls. Terracotta roof. Bougainvillea spilling hot pink over stone archways.
A courtyard with a fountain. A pool that seemed to pour straight into the ocean.
High gates. Cameras tucked discreetly where tourists would never notice.
Men posted where guests would assume they were gardeners, drivers, staff.
Protection dressed up as paradise.
I hated how beautiful it was.
Regan took me upstairs before anyone could fuss over me.
The bedroom she chose opened onto a balcony facing the ocean.
White curtains breathed in the breeze. The bed was huge and soft, covered in linen so clean it almost offended me.
Someone had set out clothes for me already: loose dresses, oversized shirts, sandals, sunglasses large enough to hide half my face.
“Bathroom’s through there,” Regan said. “I’ll have food sent up.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t ask.”
I turned toward her, ready to snap, but she only raised one eyebrow.
Something about that stopped me.
Maybe because she didn’t look afraid of me. Not of my anger. Not of my bruises. Not of whatever ugly thing might come out of my mouth if I got pushed too hard.
She just looked steady.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
The mattress gave beneath me, soft and unfamiliar. My body wanted sleep, but my mind kept pacing like a caged thing.
Regan crossed to the balcony doors and opened them wider. Ocean air rolled in, warm and salted. It touched my face gently, nothing like the desert wind on the hill.
For a while, neither of us spoke.
Then Regan said, “You went to her grave last night.”
My head snapped up.
She didn’t turn around.
“You heard?”
“No.” She looked out at the water. “But you came down this morning different.”
Different.
I didn’t feel different. I felt hollowed out. Bruised in places no makeup would touch. Raw. Tired. Still angry. Still scared. Still me.
But maybe something had shifted.
Maybe the grave had taken one small piece of the weight back.
Or maybe it had given me something worse.
I folded my hands together in my lap and stared down at my knuckles.
“I had to go,” I whispered.
“I know.”
“You’re not mad?”
“At you?” Regan turned from the balcony, her face softening. “No.”
“Everyone else would be.”
“Everyone else is running on fear.” She came to sit beside me, not too close. “Fear makes people controlling. Even good people. Especially good people who love someone and don’t know how to save them.”
I swallowed.
The ocean kept moving outside, bright and endless, like it had no idea search warrants had hit the clubhouse or my name was sitting in the center of a storm back home.
“The grave was defaced,” I said.
Regan went completely still.
I looked at her, and the words scraped up my throat.
“Someone spray-painted it. Red.” My voice thinned. “Across her name.”
Regan inhaled sharply.
The sound was small, but it changed the room.
It wasn’t shock exactly.
It was pain.
Old pain.
Familiar pain.
“What did they write?” she asked.
I looked away.
“Destiny.”
I pressed my lips together, but the words were already there. Burning behind my teeth.
“They wrote whore across her name.” My eyes stung. “And underneath it, on the stone, they wrote like mother, like daughter.”
Regan’s face changed.
Not into pity.
Something sharper.
For a second, she looked exactly like the kind of woman who had survived loving dangerous men and had never quite forgiven the world for making that necessary.
“Who saw it?” she asked.
“Dylan.”
Her gaze flicked over me.
Of course she heard what I didn’t say.
“And?”
“I tried to clean it off.” My voice cracked despite my best effort. “With my sleeve. Like an idiot. Like if I rubbed hard enough, I could make it not be there. But it just smeared. The red got on my hands.”
I looked down at them like it might still be there.
It wasn’t.
Dylan had washed it off when we got back. Quietly. Carefully. Like he knew soap could remove paint but not the words underneath it.
Regan reached over and covered my hand with hers.
“That wasn’t yours to carry,” she said.
“It had my name in it.”
“No.” Her voice sharpened. “It had someone else’s poison in it.”
My throat closed.
“I hated seeing it,” I whispered. “I thought I was going there to make peace with her. Or say goodbye. Or be angry. I don’t even know. But then I saw that, and all I could think was that people still hate her so much they couldn’t even leave her grave alone.”
Regan’s fingers tightened around mine.
“They hated her,” I said. “And then they looked at me and decided I was just another version of her.”
“You’re not.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“How?”
“Because I knew her.”
The words sat between us.
Heavy.
Regan looked toward the balcony again, but I had the feeling she wasn’t seeing the ocean anymore.
She was seeing firelight.
Desert.
A girl she used to be.
A man she had never stopped loving.
“I wanted Edge the minute I saw him,” she said quietly.
My chest pulled tight.
Regan laughed once, but there was no humor in it. “I know how that sounds. Dramatic. Stupid. Like something girls tell themselves because they don’t know the difference between love and a man looking at them like they matter.”
I didn’t breathe.
“I was crashing a bonfire party,” she continued. “No one knew I was Tarak’s little sister. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I knew that, but I was young and angry and determined to prove nobody owned me.”