Chapter 21
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
LYDIA
He doesn’t speak.
I can see his eyes on mine and I feel the hollow of his throat beneath the tip of my blade.
The memories of crawling around my mother are knocking on the edges of my brain and they’re overlaid with the perfect picture of Lele on the hospital bed, his eyes closed, tubes coming out of his motionless and thinning body.
You did this. I want to blame Storm for everything even though I know it’s impossible; he probably doesn’t even know about my mother, let alone who and what happened to her.
I barely know the who.
What kind of mother leaves her kids that way? What kind of mother does it when they’re home? I hate her. I love her. I needed her.
Not anymore.
She was useless, just like the locked box of cash in her closet. Sealed with a key like one for a journal; nothing that would stop anyone, just a minor nuisance which helped her sleep better at night, when she did sleep.
Just one hundred dollars that wouldn’t last a nine-year-old and her brother two weeks. Lynx raised me.
My mother left me.
But Storm is a year younger than me, give or take. Maybe Lele’s age. Maybe mine, it’s not like we’ve discussed birthdays and all of his records seem to be hidden except for the assault he almost went to prison for.
He was a kid when she was gone.
We were barely more than that the first day we met.
But I can’t check in with my brother, run business with my brother, have my brother look over my shoulder like he always does, because of Storm.
His pulse beats evenly beneath my palm.
If he’s frightened, even his body doesn’t show it.
How can you be so good at faking it?
I want to scream at him. I’m that good, too, but it took me years to get here. Too many because even now, I want to carve Lele’s name into his chest and leave his corpse to rot.
“Do what you want with me,” he says calmly.
There’s more laughter outside the closed door. We’re being circled by wolves or hyenas one; either way, I’ll put them down.
“But you better do it quick.”
“Do you know who it is?” I ask, jerking my chin toward the outside. I don’t know what he can see, but he knows what I’m asking all the same.
“I don’t need groupies.”
I press the tip harder against his flesh. He lifts his chin, his head to the door now, and I feel satisfaction and bloodlust well up inside my veins. “You might when I’m done with you.” I keep my voice a low whisper. “Who else is going to take care of you?”
His pulse is hammering hard now and satisfaction makes my chest swell. “Why do you want to kill me?” he asks quietly.
“You fucked with my—”
The thud against the door interrupts my anger-fueled answer.
I flinch and waver, but Storm doesn’t. His hand comes to my wrist, the one holding the knife, and he pushes my arm back, his other hand on my throat as he forces me to the opposite wall.
He shoves me against it and pins my arms to it, too, his fingers tight on my bones in my wrist and my throat.
With my free hand I grab a fistful of his shirt.
It’s too soft; expensive. I want to strangle him with it.
But quicker than I expect, he yanks on my wrist and spins me, pinning me to the wall with his body at my back, my cheek pressed to cold concrete, the knife loosening from my grip because he’s holding my bones too tight, just like he did in the woods.
His cocks is against my back and this time, I’m not uncertain.
He’s hard.
And it makes my blood grow too hot.
He twists his hold on my wrist and the knife falls noisily to the floor. He plants one hand on the other side of my head, caging me in, and he leans his body weight against me.
“I didn’t know who the fuck you were until you followed me in the mountains. I didn’t fuck with anything.” His voice is harsh and I can tell beneath the low tone, he’s fucking pissed.
Welcome to the club, pretty boy.
That makes two of us.
The thud at the door hammers again, but this time, neither of us react. Not even when a shot of wicked laughter sounds outside of it.
“You messed up my brother.” The words come up like knives scraping against my throat. I close my eyes tight. Let him see my pain. Let him hear it. When he folds, I’ll use it to fuck him up. “You messed him up!”
He doesn’t release me but he doesn’t say anything for a moment either.
I don’t know if he’s surprised or playing the same game I’m playing.
He arches forward, his erection driving into my spine.
“I don’t know your brother, but if there’s someone in your family I want to fuck up,” his mouth brushes my ear. “It’s your uncle.”
I frown in the dark. What? There’s a connection between his family and Lynx, sure, but that’s with his parents, and as far as I know, they do mercenary work together.
But if what Berlin said was true, there’s more questions than answers. How close are they? And does everyone hate Lynx? Why?
“In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the person trying to get to us through that door right now was sent here by Lynx Flynn himself.”
A smile curves my lips. “My uncle doesn’t hire the incompetent.”
“Oh, I think he does. Particularly when he wants to scare you instead of kill you.”
“You think they’re a warning? To whom? You?” I almost laugh at the idea. Lynx wouldn’t waste his time with Storm Leary. He’s not even helping me in my revenge now.
Even bringing Hawthorn to the hospital has to have a reason, and Storm isn’t bringing it up, so the motive isn’t him.
“No.” He flattens my palm to the wall, his hand over top my own. “You.”
The door behind us thuds again, then once more, and this time, it sounds like it’s on its last leg. There’s a creak, another thud, and Storm says calmly, “To the left.”
Then he releases me and we don’t bother looking for the weapons in the dark as another bullet goes off, lodging into the door with a sharp thump, but it won’t hold them off for long.
Storm easily moves the way he told me to, and I sense him throw open another door in the dark.
I follow close, and when I pull it shut behind us, it clangs closed and I realize it’s steel.
There’s a single lightbulb illuminating this space.
I see it as I flip the heavy steel lock closed and note a staircase of metal, decrepit looking stairs, and nothing else.
Storm doesn’t stop to look back as he jogs up them. His form is tall and lean and I note the muscles in his back beneath his white T-shirt.
Cursing myself for paying any attention to that, I get moving when another deeper thud resounds against the door from the room we just escaped.
As I follow Storm up, my breath comes in shallow inhales and exhales and I smell something meaty, pungent and strong, enough to make me gag.
Storm rounds the landing to the next staircase and he glances down at me, his eyes connecting with mine.
He smells it too, I know. I can tell in the way his body tenses for one second, but there’s another gunshot from down below and we keep going.
I’m sprinting now, but at the top of the stairs, the next door is propped open and Storm only stands there.
I crash against his back because I expect him to move through, but he flings out an arm to hold me back.
When I grab his wrist to move him out of my way, he shifts his stance and circles his arm around my front, yanking me back and close to his body, nearly choking me with his forearm.
I almost slip and the stench here is stronger and I stop digging my claws into his skin and I… freeze.
He says nothing, but his grip is like a violent embrace and a way of keeping me safe all at once. Because when I look down, there’s blood on the pale gray cement floor. Oozing onto the stairs. I was lucky to have missed slipping on it when I ran up here.
The thing keeping the door propped open is a person.
Or…was.
They’re curled into a fetal position, eyes open and unseeing, staring up at the bulb dangling from the ceiling.
Bloated and gray skin, mottled blue in places, arms curled into their chest. They look like my brother did before his seizure.
And it’s a man, I realize.
A moment of fear that makes me want to vomit shoots through me but I push it aside when I realize it’s not Lele.
Storm is unmoving at my side.
And all I can think to say is, “I could use the bones.” It’s a desperate grasp to keep from sinking into the past. To hold onto the now when I’m not a child and my mother isn’t the one leaking all over the floor.
There’s still no movement from Storm, but he says, “What are you?” in a voice that scares me. Eerie, toneless, utterly empty.
He still has his arm around my throat as he half-cradles me, half-traps me to his side. My nails, all ten, are pushing into his skin. I’m not fighting him, but I’m not sure I’m holding on either.
Would I fall if he wasn’t here?
The Lydia who walked into Orange without a flinch, without a word, all to find my brother, she wouldn’t. The Lydia who regularly meets with a table of all men, she wouldn’t. The Lydia who rose from the ashes of her mother’s brain matter, she wouldn’t.
But the one who kneels at Lele’s bed, the one who casts protection spells for him every night—spells which obviously failed—the Lydia who wakes up crying, cold and shaking from a dream that was real…she might.
I don’t know Storm and what I do know, I don’t like.
He can have the bluest eyes and the biggest dick, but at the end of the day, he’ll be lucky if his corpse gets a coffin.
But I don’t let go of him.
“I use them for rituals.” I answer his question without directness. I don’t know what he means. Is he shocked too? At the body at our feet? The stench of meat? The death in the marina? How does he know so much about this place anyway? What is he asking me?
The laughter from before echoes downstairs.
There’s thudding, movement, bumps in the night.
They might get through that steel door. They might not.
Either way, we stare at a body.
Me, at the eyes. So wide. So blind.
Storm is looking in the same space, but I don’t know what he sees.
Reality is different for each of us, isn’t it?
“You did this.” He speaks quietly.
My brows furrow but I don’t look away from the dead. Like if I can endure it, I’m healed somehow. If I can keep focused, if I don’t flinch or gag or vomit, I’m whole.
But what is he saying?
What does he mean?
The laughter grows closer.
The door…it clanks.
Someone flipped the lock.
They had a key?
We hear footsteps on the stairs.
My pulse skyrockets and I start to turn, but Storm tightens his grip on my throat, his forearm barred around it, and he doesn’t let me move.
I glance at him.
He’s staring at the body.
Slowly, I follow his gaze.
Dark, greasy hair. What must have been pale white skin before the blue spread.
He looks vaguely familiar but I don’t know him, do I? I can’t know him…can I? Have I seen his photo recently? Fox showed me Indie, and this guy was in a photo, wasn’t he?
“You did this.” Storm says it again.
He isn’t looking at me.
The footsteps grow closer.
The laughter, it’s jagged and maniacal.
We’re going to get shot in the back.
I won’t let that happen.
I start to throw his arm off me.
He grips me closer, pressing me to him as he turns my way, our bodies flush. I tilt my head back to look up at him, my breasts crushed to his core.
“You.” His eyes flash. “If you come near her—”
But I don’t get to hear his threat. The footsteps clank closer, heavy breaths too, and Storm shoves me away, swoops down, and when he stands again, he has a gun in his hand.
The body on the floor.
The man must have had one.
I don’t have time to marvel over it before we both turn to look back the way we came, and a man with a full, ungroomed beard, wide eyes, no shirt, and dirty, loose jean shorts starts to barrel toward us.
He has a gun in both hands, and his eyes are glassy, like he’s high or drunk.
He laughs as he sees us, and I can smell the liquor on him an entire staircase away.
He raises the gun as his eyes dart from me to Storm and back.
I feel a pang of sympathy.
He’s drunk and maybe he was homeless, but either way, he was bribed.
If he shoots us, though, we die.
But before he can, Storm fires at my side.
The bullet hits the man between the eyes.
He collapses backward as the gun falls from his hand.
His body bends at an unnatural angle, and he’s splayed on the steps, head down, knees bent, mouth open.
I take a breath.
My eyes go to Storm.
He has the gun in his hand.
“Someone will be looking for him. But who will they look for next, Lydia?”