Chapter 20
CHAPTER
TWENTY
LYDIA
“Indie Danther’s body is sitting at the bottom of this lake as we speak. Do you want to join her?”
I know her name. It doesn’t stop the blood from going cold in my veins. He put her there, that’s easy enough to hear in his voice. Why? I told Fox to drug her. Payback for sleeping with my brother and giving him what put him in a coma.
“Let me go.” I speak calmly. I won’t fight him unless I have to. Not with a gun to my head and my cheek pressed to the leather of my own passenger seat. But if necessary, I’ll fight for my life.
I know how.
“No. We tried that once.”
I think of the cliff at his back. “You’re not as lonely as you pretended to be.”
“Not now.”
I don’t know what he means, and I don’t have time to think about it when he threads his fingers through my hair. But he doesn’t pull. The restraint throws me off more than the act would have.
He strokes the muzzle of the gun against my cheekbone, his weight at my back. “Roll over.”
“I’m not your dog.”
“If I want you to bark, you’ll fucking bark. If I need you to beg, you’ll fucking beg. Roll over, Lydia.”
We both know you obey commands so well.
He doesn’t say those words, but it’s there, between us.
Does he ever think about it?
What did his family give him? The same my uncle gave me?
Regardless, I might despise his words but I’m also not getting myself shot in the back of the skull because I’m too prideful and stubborn. Working in this life long enough, you realize posturing closes deals but it won’t always save you from getting killed.
I swallow hard and I know he hears it, but he doesn’t say anything. As I shift my body to comply with his demand, he lets the strands of my hair glide easily through his fingers and some of his weight on my back eases up.
When I’m on my spine, the center console digging into my sacrum, his face looms over mine.
The door of my car is still ajar, the interior lights illuminating the lightning blue of his irises and throwing the black of the gun into stark shadow.
He’s not fully in the car; with his height, he’s cramped leaning over me like this, but it doesn’t stop him from doing it.
He has one tattooed hand planted beside my head, and he gazes down at me with no expression in the hard lines of his face.
I keep my own hands by my sides. My knife is between us but his knee is in the middle of my thighs and there’s no way I could unsheathe the blade without him stopping me and potentially killing me in the process.
Accidental or on purpose, I’m not sure. He seems eerily calm right now, and that makes him frustratingly unpredictable.
If he really doesn’t have a reason to live, the way I assumed back at the cliff’s edge, he’s more dangerous than I am.
Someone who has nothing to lose won’t hesitate to gamble it.
“What is it you think I owe you?” he asks. His mouth is only inches away from mine and he smells like spearmint, his breath on my skin as he stares at me. “Because the way I see it, you’re the one who has crossed over to my side of the tracks.”
“A life,” I tell him in answer to his question and it’s only because of the things I’ve seen since I was born that keep my voice from cracking as my mind fills with Lele and I refuse to tell this idiot my brother is the one thing I have.
The one thing I’ve ever had. Uncle Lynx may or may not be the asshole Eve and Lele act like he is, but even if he were a saint sent from God herself, no one could understand the ache Lele and I feel every second of every day. We have always only had each other.
Maybe one day, in a funeral home beneath a cloud of rain, this man felt like an escape. A future. But that was over before it ever started. Besides, back then, and probably now, he was just a fucking boy.
He rests the gun on my chest, which heaves beneath him but I ignore it and thankfully, so does he.
“And who is it that you think I killed?” The same expressionless tone. The same dead eyes. Dead, but tired. The shadows beneath them are thick. I wonder if mine look the same. Sleep is a rarity when you don’t have set working hours, but with Lele at Astor Memorial, it’s been even worse.
I hesitate telling him.
How many secrets are still between us? Forced apart with divided territories, we could rip our entire worlds to shreds if I don’t do what I need to and put him down.
But right now, the way he’s acting, unless he’s just very fucking good, he seems to have no idea why I’ve been after him.
The thought is red hot rage under my skin.
He’s experimenting with drugs he ordered to be created and he has no thought for the lives he wrecks in the process.
I can’t pretend my moral code is much stronger but I meant what I told Ten.
My coke is pure and I don’t dabble in pills.
If someone dies from my product, the risk was always there, and I never increased it.
Maybe that’s what I tell myself to live with what I do, but what else could I be anyway?
Lydia James Flynn was born to fall into the gutter or rise to the top of the kilos.
I picked one and, in my opinion, it’s the better choice.
Regardless, it’s not that I judge Storm Leary for fucking around with new product.
I can pretend that’s my motive, but selfishly, I’m a hypocrite.
That’s okay. This world doesn’t play fair, and neither do I.
I was created from it, after all. How is one to learn the rules when they’ve only seen them in the aftermath, broken?
I don’t answer his question though. If I tell him about Lele, he could find him at the hospital, and whatever the fuck his father was doing there, he doesn’t seem to know Hawthorn Leary paid my brother a visit.
Sure, we have guards, and the nurses and rotating shift of doctors are bought and paid for, but Storm has his own connections, and Lynx is allegedly bringing part of those in. His parents may run parallel to my work, but mercenary bullshit is far more violent than what I do on a daily basis.
Since I haven’t been able to verify Berlin’s little tip, I don’t know exactly what kind of sabotage I’m dealing with yet.
Storm traces the barrel of the gun along my lips.
I know better than to act afraid.
“Open your mouth,” he whispers, only the gun between us.
I don’t, and I don’t say anything.
His expression doesn’t change. I’m used to the quick temper of defiance when women don’t obey the men in my world. I’m used to the indifference I feel about their tantrums, but it doesn’t stop me from expecting them.
His weight shifts, more fully over my body, and I can feel parts of him I don’t want to.
Fuck, is he hard?
If not, his cock is massive. Even if he is…
He never let me touch him that evening.
Everything was about me.
He tilts his head as he studies me and doesn’t move the gun from my lips. The barrel is cold. If it wasn’t, that’d be more frightening.
I clench my teeth and keep my lips together.
He lifts his chin to look down his nose at me.
I wait for the act of violence to force me to comply.
But there isn’t one.
He just stares.
And he doesn’t stop staring.
Seconds stretch on.
Somewhere from beyond the open door of my car, hopefully high in the mountains, a wolf howls.
My pulse beats in my neck.
His weight is heavy, pressing down on my organs, and every exhale from my nose hits the gun and reflects back to me, creating a warm sensation above my Cupid’s bow.
I shift beneath him, as much as I can, which isn’t a lot, but he registers the movement and smiles. “If you don’t open your mouth, you’ll meet Indie at the bottom of the lake.”
“If I believed you—”
He pushes the barrel between my teeth and I inwardly curse myself for giving into his bait and speaking at all.
That was the opportunity he was waiting for.
He jams it far back, the metallic-plastic mix taste of the gun is bitter and parts of it press against my molars. Saliva immediately starts to pool along my tongue, in the back of my throat, and I hate him for making me look like this mess beneath him.
You are going to die.
But I don’t try to fight him. I hold his stare easily, without blinking, but fear starts to form in the pit of my stomach.
In my mind, I’m crawling in the air of tangy blood. My knees and fingers are slippery and I’ve never seen this much red.
Someone is the source of it all, but I can’t remember much of them. Lynx said Mom killed herself. My dad, Lynx’s brother-in-law, had long been dead from an overdose of his own supply.
Mom left me. Left us.
But it always feels like there’s something more. Everything prior to that night is a blur. Usually, so is this moment in my head.
Yet right now, with a gun in my mouth, it’s all I can see.
There was a closet.
Is it my hand, reaching out to twist the knob?
Storm leans closer. His scent surrounds me and my stomach tenses.
His lips hit the shell of my ear. “What is it you think I did to you, Lydia Flynn?” He pushes the gun further.
My lip stings and I think he’ll split it.
“Tell me so I can beg for your forgiveness.”
My heart hammers harder in my chest.
I don’t understand this game, and I thought I’d seen them all.
He shoves the weapon in further and my gag reflex activates to keep me safe, my stomach convulsing and my body lifting up, but he uses his elbow on my sternum to drive me back down.
Despite the fact I anticipated it, I didn’t actually think he was capable of this type of violence, and I don’t know why. Everyone should be assumed fully able and willing to commit the worst offense against you. That type of mindset keeps you protected.
I underestimated him because he’s not on my level. I assumed him a lesser wolf.
“Tell me so I can make amends or tell me so I can fucking kill you. I’ve already gotten a taste for it.
You think you know me, Lydia, but you have no idea what I can do.
If I wanted, I could watch you drown in a teaspoon of water and smile as I forced your nose and your mouth upon it.
So when I take this gun from your pretty lips, you should start talking, or you’ll see all the things you assumed I could never be. ”
How did he know my assumptions?
What are you now?
I want to ask, but I can’t speak.
Not yet.
I stay still, waiting for him to pull the gun from the back of my fucking throat.
I know he’s going to die, and I know I’m going to do it, but right now, we’re playing his game.
Not forever.
Not for long.
Slowly, after too many heartbeats in my head, he starts to pull the gun from my throat. He shifts to watch as he does it, my saliva coating the weapon, strings of it connecting me to the Glock. His eyes feel hungry, but not sexual. Deadly.
I taste iron from my top lip and I know it’s bleeding but I don’t look away from him and I don’t flinch, no matter how slow he goes.
When I can gulp down air from my throat again, the smallest ache of relief flutters through me and I hate he’s made me feel that way.
I still don’t move.
I don’t even blink.
He traces my lips once more, the cut stinging bright as he does, but then the gun is away from my mouth and I’m thinking of headbutting him, just to pay him back a little before I can pay him back fully with the price of his death, when a shot cracks off in the dark, beyond the car.
We both flinch, but neither of us move, not at first.
Our eyes are locked on one another.
We wait to see if it was an errant bullet. A hunter roaming the woods illegally, maybe a bastard looking for a wolf to kill.
But then it cracks off again, and this time, it sounds closer.
Like a warning.
“Stay close to me, or it won’t be their bullet that kills you.” He says it quickly, then he moves off me, ducking under the door jamb of my car.
I think about shutting the door and leaving him here, but I want to know who it is that seems to be shooting at us to scare us. Besides, enough bullets can go through a car window.
And one look at him standing there, crouched a little, using my door as a shield, I realize he’s waiting for me. He won’t let me leave until I do as he said.
“The marina building,” he says quietly. “The door facing us is unlocked.”
I don’t ask how he knows when another round goes off.
I crawl out of the car, wanting to grab my gun, but I don’t have time to look for it in the floorboards of the car—it’s no longer on the console—and instead, I unsheathe my knife as I run low over the gravel lot and toward the black building with the deep blue door.
A laugh peels off in the night, and it isn’t Storm’s, because when I twist the knob, he’s right behind me, and the sound was further away.
He crashes his palm forcefully against the door and we both stumble through, into the dark.
It smells damp here, bitter, and it seems like we’ve run into a small office judging by what I can see from the moonlight outside.
That illumination is gone in a blink as Storm slams the door closed at his back.
I hear the lock click as another round goes off and I wonder if whoever it is out there will shoot through the door.
But I don’t know if it’s random teenagers doing stupid shit, someone drunk off their ass doing the same, or something more sinister, and I know I need to treat it like the latter, no matter what.
It’s the same assumption I ran into with Storm, treating him like a lesser threat.
There’s no such thing in these mountains, is there?
And as I blink to adjust my eyes to the dark, I know I need to remind him I’m not a helpless victim he can move around like a ragdoll. I’m not a girl he can get away with threatening the way he did in the car.
I see him looming in front of me, gun in hand, and I lift my knee and drive it into his groin without a breath.
He stumbles back against the door and with my free hand, I pull the gun from his grip, loosened because of my attack.
He grunts and I hear the Glock clatter on the floor just as I unsheathe my knife and hold the tip of the blade to his throat. I plant my hand over his chest, keeping him pinned to the door.
The whites of his eyes only just rival the blue as he finds my gaze in the confines of our new darkness.
“You’re going to bleed before you crawl out of here, Storm Leary.”