Chapter 8
CHAPTER
EIGHT
STORM
The Hollows are under the darkest cover of the storm.
Rain beats hard against my windshield and I strain my eyes to see in the gloom.
The paved road is smooth; the asphalt probably hasn’t been here but a few months.
There are no lines dividing up lanes on this street and I’m not entirely surprised.
It’s desolate out here. Technically, the Hollows is this entire corner of Stone Fell, half an hour from the city center, rolling hills and mountains surrounding fields and forest both.
But aside from a single trailer park tucked up back by a creek, I haven’t seen a house yet and according to the GPS, there’s a big one on Riddle Lane.
I’m sure my parents would know all about this place, considering they’ve consistently warned me about sticking to my own town’s lines with work.
But some of their secrets I’d rather stay in the dark about.
I learned that in gruesome ways growing up.
Besides, I don’t want to ask them for help if I don’t have to.
It makes me feel like I owe them, or I forgive them, and I don’t have room for either.
So far, all I’ve found is the thick treeline bracketing the road like guards.
Nothing human would get through that in this storm, so I watch for fallen branches as the only opponent.
Red and yellow and orange leaves twirl before they thwack violently alongside the rain on my windshield, and I curl my fingers tighter on the wheel.
With my illegal tint, it makes the interior of the Jeep feel darker and more foreboding out here, but I’ve got a gun in the console alongside those coffin nails, so I’m not scared.
I just want to know who the fuck is texting me and why they’re leaving threats at Sloane’s door. It has to be the same person, right?
Wolf, they called me.
If they work in my world and live in that big ass house I saw on the map, they’re not a street dealer and they’re not a step up.
Something bigger. A boss? A supplier? But I don’t know of any of those in this area because I keep my nose in my own business.
It’s not just my parents who want me to stick to Ellicottville.
Franklin wouldn’t let me deal outside my space.
I’ve got money, my family has money, but my coke dealing isn’t the only thing paying for my lifestyle and pills usually don’t build this type of empire.
Not anymore. I mean, they did pay for the Armani shirt I’m wearing and the slacks too, but I work at the marina and I do runs for Dad when we’re on speaking terms. Runs with envelopes of evidence I never look inside and don’t want to know about.
Not drugs, he always tells me, and I usually believe him.
After what I saw in the hotel room, I believe him that much more.
My parents don’t play.
I don’t want to do what they do and that’s why I don’t let them pay for anything of mine, but they’d already saved nearly a hundred grand in an account for me by the time I turned eighteen.
They didn’t tell me about it until last year.
They probably thought it would make up for when I saw a woman’s throat pooling with blood before it spread over our kitchen floor, Dad on his knees on top of her, the tang of death in the air.
They thought wrong.
I remember trying to tell Cortland. How I’d seen my first corpse. But my best friend was going through his own shit, and even if he hadn’t been, I knew then I couldn’t bring him into this anymore. We don’t talk like we used to because I don’t want to put him in danger.
Regardless, I have access to the money now but I haven’t touched it. I’m letting it grow and I’ll be damned if whoever lives on this street thinks they’re going to blackmail me for it.
Judging by what I’m seeing though, they wouldn’t need it. So if money isn’t the motive, what the fuck is?
I duck my head and stare at the twists and turns of the road curving ahead.
The trees don’t get any thinner and the rain isn’t letting up.
I consider turning around but decide against it.
I need to see this house at the very least. At most, I’m going to confront the fucking owner.
I’m not scared of much and it’s not because I think I’m invincible. It’s something worse.
I run the back of my hand over my nose and bump the hoop in it, wincing as I do. Laying off the coke has helped it heal better; I’ve had my nose pierced for years now but blow makes everything in that area sensitive. Thinking of it, I want some, but I tamp it down.
I’m not an addict. Dad made me say it one hundred times in the hotel. I could barely speak when he let me stop, my voice was so fucking hoarse.
The road turns again and I hug the curves, wondering if I’ll see another vehicle passing the opposite way. But in this weather, I don’t think so.
I glance in my rear view for the same reason though, just to check. Nothing but dark skies and winding asphalt.
This is not how I expected to spend my day off but someone is fucking with me and I’m not going to my dad to ask who it is and I’m not going to play games with them.
And maybe this part sucks but I think of Sloane across from me at The Veil staring out the window and I swallow hard.
Did I enjoy it? Yeah. I did. That didn’t suck.
She’s a break.
She’s not real.
I could tell the way she looked at me when I told her what I could do to her with those coffin nails, she could never be for me. She’s too perfect, too clean.
She wouldn’t let me ruin her, and I’m glad. I need boundaries.
She’s a daydream. Nothing more.
And the way she wouldn’t answer me about fucking Dax, another asshole I have to snoop around about when I’m done on Riddle Lane, it’s proof of that.
We couldn’t be together. She’s not made to be a dealer’s girlfriend, not right now, probably not ever, and what am I made for?
Fucking my best friend’s girl? Yeah. The last time I slept with someone besides the latex covered escort over the summer, it was Remi and technically, Cortland.
That’s never going to happen again because he’s even more psychotic about her now but it was hot and do I think about it when I get myself off alone in my room?
More than I’d like to admit. I don’t want Remi anymore though, and I don’t want Cortland like that, but it’s the last time I touched anyone willingly so it’s stuck in my head on a loop.
Yet the night after I saw Sloane, her finger in my mouth playing over and over got me there, and much quicker too. And today, watching her suck whipped cream off herself, yeah, that’s going to stay burned into my brain—
Fuck.
I slam on the brakes and the Jeep jerks forward then back, my body moving with it as the tires slide a little on the fresh asphalt. I glance to the right and see a ravine filled with trees and a streaming body of water: a fast moving fucking river.
My pulse ticks as I snap my head up and watch the black Range Rover’s driver’s door open.
I don’t bother waiting to see who it is, the way they skidded to a stop in front of me so I can’t pass and there’s no way I can do a U-turn right here.
I snatch the weapon from the console, my finger on the trigger.
There’s no safety on a Glock, well, there is technically, but if I pull this trigger, someone is getting hurt.
The Range’s door shuts and I inhale deep through my nose and out through my mouth as a man dressed in dark denim and an army green polo saunters right up to the hood of my Jeep.
He has on a ball cap but he lifts his head and stares right at me.
He’s older, I believe close to fifty now, and I know exactly who the fuck he is.
My pulse skyrockets but I don’t dare look away from him, standing like a hardass in the rain. There’s enough space between me and his fancy status symbol vehicle that I can smash him between the grill of both of them and I consider it.
Lynx Flynn.
He’s a psychopath.
I know from experience and not just my own.
The hotel room threatens to surface again, and so does the woman after, but I force it back.
I’ve got the fucking gun, and he doesn’t.
Rain pounds on the windows, over my head, all around us, and Lynx stares at me with dark eyes and pale skin and his lips pressed together in a scowl.
I’ve seen him look happy though. It was on the other end of him breaking a woman’s fingers.
“Why would you fuck with someone like that?”
“Did you see how she didn’t move? She lets him. It’s training.”
I don’t let myself think of those words. Dad’s excuse.
Lynx can’t see my weapon and he doesn’t move.
He thinks I won’t do anything.
But he grew up with my dad, both of them from that thin line between Virginia and DC. Between mountains and the federal government. Politics and lawbreaking.
Good and evil, none ever really knowing which side is which.
I know what side he’s on though.
Some people break the law. Other people toe the line and leave far more wreckage in their wake than a criminal ever could.
Lynx is the worst of both.
Then there’s his niece and the things I’m sure he did to her…
It doesn’t matter. She doesn’t matter. And she isn’t here.
I’ve learned to forget her well. At least in the daylight.
I lower the gun to the cup holder.
I put both hands on the fucking wheel.
My foot shifts from the brake and the Jeep holds steady, unmoving.
Then I find the gas.
Lynx dips his chin.
The hotel room.
My dad’s tears.
I’ve never seen him cry before that night.
Is this the person who has been sending me these fucking texts?
I take a breath.
Then I inch the vehicle forward.
He steps back.
Lynx might want to pretend he’s brave, but he doesn’t want to die. Something me and him don’t always have in common.
If my mom knew what Lynx did to my father, it would break her heart. If she knew what he did to me, he’d already be dead.
For her sake, I rock forward more.
Lynx steps back.
One more step and his ass will be on the grill of the Range, and it won’t take much to trap him there. Squeeze the fucking life out of him. I wouldn’t mind seeing his intestines come up through his mouth.
He doesn’t show a hint of remorse, and he doesn’t move sideways, out of the way, even though we both know he could.
Bravery in his shade gets you killed.
And I want him fucking dead.
I think about how good it would feel to throw those coffin nails on his corpse, his body pinned to his own car.
And imagining that, I think of Sloane, and his hands on her, watching her break the way he watched me and before then, in another life, my dad. He holds something over my family that I haven’t quite figured out yet, but he doesn’t have anything on me.
If he ever even looked sideways at Sloane, I’d pull his spine from his fucking back.
But I could stop it now. Make sure it never happens to her.
She’s precious. She deserves good things. And it was him on her doorstep with those fucking coffin nails. It had to be. Why else would I find him here right now? Same area the texts are from?
I snatch up the gun, put the Jeep in park, and rip open my door.
The rain thunders down on me, drenching my hair, causing it to stick to my temples.
I don’t bother closing the door behind me.
I hold the gun up, elbow bent, and I stalk toward Lynx, still between both our vehicles.
When I’m a foot away, by my driver’s side headlight, I stare down at him.
He quirks his lips side to side, and I know it’s his nervous tell even if other people don’t. For them, he puts on an excellent show. On Sundays, this man is in the front row at church. He’s donated to all kinds of charities in Virginia and probably here, in the Carolina mountains, too.
He’s the worst sort of trash, the type that pretends to be treasure.
I extend my arm, aiming the gun at his temple.
My shirt begins to cling to my body from the cold downpour and the gold chain around my neck feels heavy by my throat. I can feel every beat of my pulse from beneath it.
“Go on,” Lynx says, his voice loud in the storm. “Shoot, Storm.”
My finger is slippery on the trigger. I could call it self-defense, except for the fact I don’t live here and I can’t imagine he does either but he knows someone who owns the only house on this road, I’m sure of it.
There’s also a chance he owns it himself despite his domination in VA, and that wouldn’t work in my favor.
It would seem like I came to his doorstep looking for a fight.
Besides, Lynx has money. It probably rivals my family’s, and they’ve already gotten me out of trouble once with that shit with Remi.
A murder charge for one of the most well-connected men on this side of the Mississippi might stretch their lawyers and their resources too thin.
But a man like Lynx Flynn doesn’t deserve to live.
I don’t say anything. I just weigh the consequences.
On the plus side, I’ll get rid of a sack of shit if I kill him. On the other hand, I might serve the rest of my life behind bars.
I’m not so sure I’d mind, to be honest.
But then I think of Sloane with whipped cream on her nose and it tilts the scale in favor of living free.
Fuck.
Get out of my head, Sloane Stevens.
I don’t lower the gun but I exhale through my nose and I keep staring at Lynx. I don’t have to kill him, but I can scare him.
Without blinking or shifting my gaze, I quick-fast tilt the gun’s aim and fire off a shot.
It cracks into his windshield. Spiders the glass, a bullseye around the center, faint lines spreading from it, right in the middle.
It didn’t go clean through, but it’s enough damage he’ll have to replace the entire thing.
My ears ring from the shot and I almost laugh, seeing Lynx’s head turned toward his damaged Range Rover.
I saw him flinch too.
Yeah. He’s scared of some things, ain’t he?
And if he has family living in this house on Riddle Lane, I’ll get them, too.
Slowly, he faces me again, his cap soaked, my hair plastered to my skull and my skin slippery with rain.
“You just made a big goddamn mistake, boy,” he says, and I watch his face turn red.
“Stay away from her or I’ll make another one. And I won’t call it a mistake.” I turn my head and spit on the ground. “I’ll call it revenge.”
He narrows his eyes. Then he says, “I’ll be seeing you.
” He turns and gets in his Range Rover and I don’t lower the gun.
I consider firing again as he puts his vehicle in reverse, just to make him piss his pants.
But my luck, it’d go straight through and blow his brains out and there I am again, behind bars.
He backs up with one last glance to me before he turns to look out his pristine back window and after a moment, he disappears behind one of the bends in Riddle Lane.
I glance at my Jeep, the blue headlights aimed in his direction.
If he can reverse all the way back to where he came from, fuck it, so can I.