8. Imry
8
IMRY
My hair is standing on end. My face is itchy with the hair I haven’t shaved in a few days. There are bags under my eyes. I look rough.
I stare at my reflection for a few more minutes, wondering what the hell is wrong with me. I feel blah and lack the motivation to do anything.
Sighing, I leave the bathroom, flicking the light off on my way through the door. My bedroom is dark. It’s not the middle of the night. I just have damn good blackout curtains. Since my bedroom is at the end of a hall, there isn’t even much light coming in through the crack at the bottom of the door.
I crawl back into bed and burrow under my blankets. My mind is pretty empty right now. Even thinking feels too… big. Too much. So I drift in and out of sleep for a while longer until my bed shifts, making me open my eyes.
Not that I can see anything. It’s far too dark.
I don’t need to see anything, though. I know when twin bodies bring me into their arms, sandwiching me between them, that my two/thirds brothers are here.
Obviously, I made an oversight. Of course, they’d come looking for me after a few days if I vanished.
For a while, we don’t speak. We just lie there with them holding me, which I’m grateful for. Sometimes, I forget how much I miss hugging my brothers. However, this silence doesn’t last forever.
“Ready to tell us what’s really been going on with you?” Avory asks.
I sigh heavily. “No.”
“Tell us anyway,” Ellory says.
“There’s not a lot to tell. I fucked up and now, here I am.”
“I know it’s not the bloody kind of fucked up,” Avory says. “We’d have heard about that.”
“This has to do with Haze, doesn’t it?” Ellory asks.
I scowl and don’t answer.
“Did he reject you?” Avory asks. “Want me to castrate him?”
“I can cover him in blood and tie him to the trees beyond Kairo’s house for the coyotes,” Ellory suggests.
“We can cut off his fingers, one at a time?—”
“Nooo. Let’s cut open his head and feed him his own brain! I read that in a book once.”
I pick my head up to look between them. It’s too dark to see, but I can see their grins all the same. “What the fuck? No!”
Twin laughter comes from both sides of me.
“Look, I—” I don’t want to speak it out loud. With a frustrated huff, I let myself fall between them again. “I’ve been sexting with him for months. Two weeks ago, we fucked, and I might have freaked out a bit after and ghosted him for a week. The other night he was going to the club to hook up and I might have freaked out again, this time from jealousy, and subsequently, we fucked again. Now things are just weird, and I feel like I’m… floating awkwardly.”
Unwanted. That’s how I feel.
Which is stupid because I don’t want to get involved with anyone, and yet, here we are.
My brothers are silent. Maybe they see the holes in my story that need further explanation. It’s like a veil of Swiss cheese between us.
“That explains the paintings,” Ellory muses.
I snort. “Yeah. They started when we began texting,” I admit. The newest painting is the scene from three nights ago when he rode me. The moment he came. The way his back arched, the orgasm expression that’s burned into my head. How his pecs and biceps flexed. The tension in his neck. The tear in the corner of his eyes as he came.
The spray of his cum as his dick bounced.
He’s the single sexiest man I’ve ever seen. The best sex I’ve experienced. It’s like our bodies just fit together in a way that rarely happens between two people. He enjoys the rough contours as much as I do.
I take a breath to shove the image from my mind.
“You’ve been afraid to let anyone new into your life for two years,” Avory says. His voice is quiet. Gentle. “Stop letting Darren still have that control over you, Im.”
I flinch at his name.
“You deserve happiness, and he deserves?—”
“To be skinned alive,” Ellory mutters.
“Not the picture I was going for, but yes,” Avory agrees.
I smile despite myself.
“It’s too complicated,” I argue.
“Why?”
“Because he’s always going to be a part of our lives now. Two of his best friends are married into our family. I’m willing to bet my left nut that Myro and Jessica will also get married. That means our families are going to be together all the time. It’s already too complicated.”
“Let me see if I understand this,” Ellory says, and I know he’s going to point out that I’m being dense about something. “It’s a bad idea to get involved with someone who already has strong ties and loyalty to our family. Someone who already lives here on our property. Someone who we all really like. You find that too complicated… Am I right?”
I scowl. “When you put it that way…”
He laughs. “Im, you’re not listing reasons not to pursue something with Haze. You’re listing reasons it’s a good idea. So let’s try this again. Why is this too complicated?”
“I don’t like you,” I mutter.
Both brothers laugh. Their arms tighten.
“I don’t trust myself to make a good decision,” I admit. “I don’t trust myself to treat him the way he needs to be treated. I’ve already proven that by literally avoiding him, ignoring his texts, for nine fucking days because I’m… a wreck. He doesn’t deserve that bullshit.”
“Big brother,” Ellory says, pressing his face to mine, “not everyone is Darren. You know that, right?”
“I didn’t say?—”
“What you didn’t say is you’re afraid to let someone close to you because you might get hurt again,” Ellory interrupts. “You’re afraid to trust someone else to treat you the way you deserve to be treated. You’re afraid to let someone love you.”
His words feel like a noose tightening around my neck. I can’t take a breath. He’s totally right.
“You’re getting far ahead of the situation,” I argue. “We’ve had sex. All our conversations, except the sorry excuse I paraded around as an apology, have been sex centered. I don’t love him, and he doesn’t love me.”
“You’re right. But you like him. You wouldn’t be hiding in bed if you didn’t believe he’s the kind of guy you can fall for. If he was just a friend who you could fuck and move about your day after in peace, this entire situation with you obsessively painting him and ghosting him and being miserable in bed wouldn’t be happening,” Avory says.
“I really hate you,” I repeat.
He kisses the back of my head. “Did you tell him why you ghosted him?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“Okay.” They don’t respond for a minute. Perhaps expecting me to add to that. So I do. “He also said all right.”
“That’s it?”
“Do you blame him?” I counter.
“I’d like to say yes and be angry but… I suppose not,” Ellory says. “Nine days is a long time to be ignored after sex.”
I nod. Definitely is. Especially when you consider I chased after him and acted like a possessive boyfriend in public. And the fucker still held me after like I was important to him. Like he understood far more than what I was willing to tell him. He held me like he cared.
“What happened just now?” Ellory asks.
“Nothing,” I say.
“That’s a lie. I can feel the way your entire body just tensed.”
“You’re infuriating.”
“Tell me.”
“He didn’t say he forgave me, which I pointed out. But… he held me after I told him. And I fell asleep in his arms.”
“Aw,” Ellory says, his arms tightening around me. That wasn’t an ‘ aw, how sweet .’ That was an ‘ aw, now I understand why you’re so affected by this man .’
I truly hate my brothers. It’s the kind of hate that is a complete and utter bullshit lie.
“Is there anything else you’ve left out?” Avory asks.
“I left in the morning before he woke up, but I texted him when I got home. Just so he knew I wasn’t going to ghost him again.”
“And since then?”
I shake my head. “We’ve texted a little, but it’s not the kind of texting it was before. Now it’s like we’re making a point of texting just so it’s clear there’s no ghosting going on. I hate it.”
“I imagine you do. It sounds awful,” Ellory agrees.
“What do you want to happen?” Avory asks.
I don’t even know. I want it to stop. I want it all to go away. I want to go back in time to six months ago and not turn our conversations into sexy talk. Sure, most of it was teasing and meaningless, but even that felt… like we were building something. Right?
To me, it did. I just didn’t realize it at the time.
Maybe if we’d started fucking right away before it dragged out for months and the foundation of something began, it’d be different. I think this would hit a whole lot differently if that had happened.
Why didn’t it? Why didn’t he come over the first time he threatened to? Did I tell him not to? Did I stop sending him sexy shit in response, which might have given him the indication I didn’t actually want to fuck?
Where would we be right now if he had come over? We’d be like Myro and Jessica. That’s what would have happened. The thought nearly makes me snort.
But none of that is what Avory asked. What do I want right now? Something I can actually make happen. I can’t go back in time. If I could, I wouldn’t just go back six months. I’d go back eight years and not get involved with Darren. Then this moment right here would be a lot fucking different.
“I don’t know,” I say at last. “The only thing that keeps filling my head is going back and changing what happened so that right now would be different. I don’t know what I want except that I don’t want this. I hate this.”
“Want to kill someone?” Ellory asks. “Let your frustrations out? I have a couple contracts metaphorically sitting on my desk while we wait for Loren to snap.”
I laugh. “He’s not going to snap.”
“He will,” both say.
“I’ve spent far more time with him than either of you have. He won’t. Trust me.”
“He’s a sociopath with violent hunger. What makes you think he can turn that off?” Avory argues.
“He can’t. It’s not about turning it off. It’s about what he constitutes as the most important priority in life and that’s Oakley. His well-being and his happiness. If I had to take a guess of what we can expect to see from Loren in the future, it’s not him coming back to need a kill. It’s that in those moments when his need for violence strikes, he’s going to become more obsessive with Oakley and tunnel focus on making him happy.”
“That seems insanely unwise,” Avory says.
I shrug. “Unless Dad can convince him otherwise…”
“I think it might need to be a family effort to convince him otherwise. It’s going to destroy him if he lets himself go so long that he ends up accidentally hurting Oakley. Then there’s the other outcome I see happening, where Oakley witnesses him killing in cold blood. It’s one thing to understand that Loren’s killed men to keep Oakley safe. It’s another thing entirely to not only see Loren murder but for seemingly no other reason than that he wanted to,” Ellory says.
“The only way we’re going to curb Loren like that—because he knows far too easily when we’re trying to steer him—is to call him in for backup when we’ve gotten ourselves in over our heads. Which is a dangerous line to walk all on its own,” I say.
“Like Uncle Noaz did a couple months ago,” Avory notes.
I nod. “Yep. Loren didn’t hesitate to go when Uncle Noaz needed him. That’s going to be the key.”
“Uncle Noaz didn’t actually need backup,” Avory muses. “What he needed was to be able to get his injured husband out of there, the two newborns to safety, and a nearly dead Miranda some urgent medical attention.”
“Ah,” I say. “So it’s not that Uncle Noaz was in trouble and needed help because they weren’t. It was that Uncle Noaz had other priorities they needed to tend to.”
“He’s going to catch on to this, too. It needs to be done sparingly. When we see that Loren needs to let off some violent steam,” Ellory says.
I nod in agreement.
“How the hell did we start talking about Loren?” Avory asks, laughing. “We were talking about you and what you need right now.”
“Actually, I think that’s what I needed right now. I feel a little better not thinking about the mess I got myself into. Concentrating on our little brother is a good distraction that allows me to breathe a little.”
Ellory snorts. “Talking about our sociopathic baby bro murdering people is comforting. What the hell does that say about us?”
I grin. “It says that we love our brother just the way he is and will do whatever we need to in order to make sure he’s not getting himself into trouble he can’t get himself out of without a bloodbath.”
“You know, I think if it came to Loren with his knife and an army battalion, I’d still place my bets on Loren,” Avory says.
“Of course you would. We all would. The military might be trained to kill in wartime, but their training is in warfare tactics. We’re trained to defend ourselves by whatever means necessary. Loren is a cold, emotionless, unremorseful, relentless killer. And we’ll fight to our last breaths to keep him alive. We’ve built an entire underground empire just to give Loren a safe outlet. The military has rules, guidelines, and morals. We do not,” I say.
“Ah yes,” Ellory muses. “I can feel the comfort settling over me.”
I laugh and close my eyes. I definitely needed this.
“Maybe that’s what you need,” Avory says. “A bloodbath. Let out your aggravation on a bunch of assholes who need their lives ended. I bet it’ll give you some clarity.”
“You haven’t been on a job practically since Loren began obsessing over Oakley since he only trusts you with his husband. Maybe you also need that outlet,” Ellory says.
“Maybe,” I hedge, though I don’t think I do. I don’t kill for the same reason Loren does. I kill when Loren goes in like he’s a damn god and thinks he’s immortal. Sometimes, I need to do what I need to do so he lives another day believing he’s invincible.
Besides, I vet these contracts with Avory and Ellory. I already know the laundry list of reasons these targets need death. I’m not sorry that, at the very least, I witness their end, but when needed, I get to be the one who ends their reign of terror.
My brothers are right. There’s something about reflecting on murder that is comforting. What the fuck does that say about us?