My Rose

8. Briggs

Chapter 8

Briggs

“I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.” ― Ovid

O ne tight red dress, matching red lips, and sneakers that contrasted so heavily with Clarissa’s shoe choice were enough to make my brain go numb. I wouldn’t let that happen again. I couldn’t. She would never be safe if she got close to me, and I could tell by the way she was looking at me that she wanted to get close.

Dean’s words rippled to the surface of my thoughts— get your head right. Find a girl. We all need to be loved. So, that was the mindset I had when I agreed to take shots with her. When I gave her my jacket the first time, she was simply cold, but the second time felt like putting my stamp on her. A stamp I wasn’t ready to put down, but did anyway, even after trying to push her away.

The second Clarissa came stumbling down those steps and asked who Rose was, I knew I’d fucked up. Bad. I’d taint the girl faster than she could blink away the tears I’d inevitably cause her, adding to the ones I already had. Her name was more than a simple moniker—she was the perfect rose, and I was the thousands of thorns stuck beneath the petals.

I slept like shit, unable to settle my racing mind. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw red. But it wasn’t blood this time. It was a lighter shade, and it paired extremely fucking well with a rounded ass that the edge of my jacket hung below just right .

The next morning, after tossing and turning all night, I fired my PI’s. Every detail was wrong in her file. Nowhere in there did it say she refrained from smiling and showing her teeth, or that she couldn’t play pool. It didn’t say she chose to wear Vans with every outfit and often forgot to dress appropriately for the weather. The file had nothing on the way she was so ready to use the voice I knew she lost all those years ago, just to tell me off like the little viper I didn’t know she was. It was all wrong .

I was already doing a better job at knowing who she was and making sure she was okay than the entire team of inattentive morons I’d hired. They’d had years to add those things to her file, years to update me with any changes. And now the things I believed I knew about her were all being questioned.

I rubbed at my throbbing head, knowing I needed to get out of it again. Yet, every time I thought of Rose, my body grew tight and my cock unbelievably hard. The thought of what that mouth could do beyond the viciousness I didn’t expect to hear was part of the reason I had zero fucking sleep the night before. That pesky, gnawing guilt that consumed me when I used to think about her was quickly becoming replaced by a desire I’d never be able to sate.

Plunging myself into the coldest shower I could didn’t quell the flame coursing through me. I did my best to push my thoughts, and my hands, away from my other head, finished my shower, and left the estate.

There was only one person I wanted to talk to. One person I could turn to who wouldn’t judge me for the things I imagined doing to Rose Fields—the woman I was supposed to stay far-the-fuck-away from but wasn’t sure I could anymore.

I parked at the far side of the graveyard on the edge of town, hoping the walk over to where my twin brother rested would help ease whatever was coming over me. He could still lend an ear when I needed it, but I’d never be able to hear what his thoughts were again.

Our father tried to define our differences as much as he could while growing up, but those differences never stood a chance against our bond. We shared everything—a womb, our deepest fears, all our hopes and dreams. How much none of it mattered we hadn’t fully grasped in our youth. The day my twin died, a piece of my soul was ripped from my body. At times, I wished it was me who was six feet under. But I was terrified of flying, and Beckett was not. I couldn’t change what happened that day, no matter how badly I wanted to.

It was foggy out, tombstones only becoming visible once they were a few feet from where I was walking, but I’d be able to find Beck’s plot even if I was blindfolded. When I reached the site, I slid down to the grass, leaning against the enormous stone that read, ‘Beloved Son and Brother,’ feeling the weight of the world crash on top of my shoulders. I don’t know how much time I spent sitting there, telling my brother about a woman I had no business fantasizing about. Soon, the sun started to peek through the fog, making it dissipate. The rays swept over the top of a hill where another grave I knew well in the distance lay. A woman with flowing, dark brown hair stood at the top, wearing a distinctively familiar black leather jacket.

I should have walked back to my car, but the grave she was at was one I also visited every time I went to Beck’s. And just like they had at the party, my feet worked to follow my desires instead of my brain, all to bring me closer to her. Her parents would roll over and curse in their graves if they knew whose jacket she was wearing, and who was now standing right above them, and for once, I was happy the dead couldn’t speak.

“Hey,” I said as I stopped walking, giving her plenty of room to ignore me, as she should.

Rose wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing along the sleeves, and then froze with her fingertips biting into the fabric. “Are you following me now?” My actions hit home from the night before, but it was making my body tense up more than I’d like it to. If only she knew I had taken it upon myself to be her personal bodyguard and should have been following her this morning to this very spot, yet it was purely a coincidence that we were here at the same time. If only she knew I fired the staff I did have tailing her for years. I had always been following her, in my own way.

I pointed down the hill towards the grave I’d just walked from. “Here for my brother. You?” Selective truths it was, then.

Her blue, puffy eyes moved between the spot I’d pointed to and then back over to me. “Oh.” She took in her bottom trembling lip, which lately had been driving me utterly fucking wild for no reason. But this time it made my stomach churn uncomfortably. I took a step closer when she pulled her gaze away from me and fixated on the two tombstones in front of us. “These are…were, my parents.” She sniffed, holding back what must’ve been a barge of tears.

As if my dead brother possessed my body, my hand reached out to squeeze her shoulder. At least I told myself that’s what was happening, because I thought I’d made up my mind—Rose needed to stay away from me. Far, far away. I pulled my hand back and shoved both hands into my back pockets .

But it was too late. She turned and rushed into me, wrapping her leather-clad arms through the space between my arms and waist, flattening her palms against my back. She pressed her cheek to my chest, and I knew she could hear my deceiving heart thundering beneath my ribs.

I didn’t know how to comfort people, especially when I was trying so hard to push them away and failing miserably at doing so. Fuck. My hands slid up her back, one making its way to the space between her naturally wavy hair and neck. If she knew what these hands had done before, she wouldn’t be within a mile of them, let alone allowing them on her body.

She pulled back, her chin raised just above my chest as she stared up at me with furrowed brows, probably remembering my words from the night before.

I can’t be your friend, Rose. I’m no good.

I pulled my hands away and tucked them back into my pockets where they never should have left, but she didn’t release me. So I did the only thing I could think of that would snap her out of it, because it— this —wasn’t going to happen. Whatever she needed me to be, I wasn’t it. I couldn’t be it .

“Margot and John?” I tried to draw her attention back to the graves, back to her parents. But it was another solid minute of her just staring up at me, her body pressed against mine too comfortably.

I swallowed and inclined my head towards the stones. “What happened?” It wasn’t something people wanted to answer when standing on top of their deceased loved ones. And the fact that I already knew exactly what happened to them was another proverbial slap to the friendship she kept trying to form between us. Not that she knew that part.

She finally dropped her hands and turned back toward the stones and the loss of her warmth sent a coldness I’d never experienced before down my back. “A fire,” was all she said.

I glanced around the graveyard. “Where’s August? He doesn’t support his friend out here?” The scarce times he was spotted out with her didn’t line up with the intensity of the friendship she believed they had. It made me sick.

She just sighed, seemingly exhausted by the thought of August. “No. He was busy.” She sounded unconvinced, just as I was. He was probably fucking Clarissa right at this very moment. Good fucking riddance to both of them. “For the next week, actually.” She let out a forced laugh.

“Right. Busy,” I repeated, staring at the way her hair rolled down her back while biting my tongue.

Rose turned her head over her shoulder. “What happened to your brother?” There was no malice. She was curious. She didn’t seem as informed about my family as the rest of the town, or really the world, was, and something about that was more relieving than it was frustrating.

“Plane crash.”

“I-I’m sorry. I didn’t…”

“Don’t apologize, Rose.” I cleared my throat, our eyes locking. “You had nothing to do with the plane, or his desire to fly them.” I normally grimaced just thinking about planes. Taking off. Landing. All of it sucked. But looking right into her eyes, which were almost the same shade as a clear day’s skies, I felt grounded.

“He flew planes?” Those eyes I was still staring at lit up almost like Beck’s did each time before he flew.

I glanced up at the clear sky, losing that grounding. “Yeah. He was obsessed with flying. Being in the air. Said the sky offered him a freedom that he couldn’t find on the ground.” Now that I filled his shoes, I understood the latter part, at least.

She nodded, following my gaze up before I snapped my attention back down. “I was young when I flew in a plane, so I don’t remember much about it. But you sound like you don’t like them that much.” She looked down at her shoes when I didn’t reply right away. I was too shocked to.

“You’re right. I don’t like them at all. Never have.” I didn’t need to glance at the dates on the stones to know it was almost the anniversary of her parent’s deaths, and her friend couldn’t make it. I wasn’t an expert on friendships, but if Dean needed me to go with him to his parent’s gravesite, I wouldn’t hesitate.

“I’m scared of guns,” she blurted and I shuffled against my jacket, feeling the metal along my hip. But she wasn’t looking there. She had no idea how unterrified of guns I was. “I just hate how loud they are. The feeling of them.” She seemed to shiver. “Really—”

“All of it?” I guessed, and she nodded.

We fell silent. She stared off at the graves, the grass, her shoes.

And I stared at her.

Rose’s head tilted toward Beck’s grave. “So um…how old…”

“How old was he?” My lips quirked up, the image of my brother on our last birthday together coming to life. “Fifteen.”

“Young.” I nodded. He was young. Too young to leave. In a way, I envied him for it. He never got the brutal end of our father’s wrath, had never been forced to do the things I knew he would be more capable of doing than me had he lived.

“I was seven when my parents…when they died.” Her fingers dug into my jacket again. Suddenly, her cheeks flushed, and she started apologizing while taking the jacket off. “I shouldn’t be wearing this.”

“It’s yours. I gave it to you,” I said, shaking my head and pushing my hands deeper into my pockets.

“But, we aren’t friends.” Her voice cracked on the words.

Some part of me wanted to nod, to turn away and let her go on believing that. But that part was overtaken by another part of me. A larger, more terrifying part that said, “I didn’t mean that.”

“No?” Her eyebrow quirked up, and she wiped at her cheeks where the tears had long since dried. She hadn’t shed another tear since I walked up that hill, and knowing that was almost more disturbing than thinking about my brother’s plane crashing to the ground all those years ago.

I shook my head. “No, I uh…I’m…”

“Sorry?” She stifled a giggle with her palm, then let it roll through her, merging into full-blown laughter. “I’m…”

“Also sorry?” The joke wasn’t lost on me. I’d told her to stop apologizing, and here I was, fucking apologizing. But it was her laugh that had me grinning like a dumb fool .

She held her hand out, only the tips of her fingers were visible beneath the long sleeves. I bit back the groan that threatened to escape as I took in the sight like I hadn’t been doing that the entire time. I couldn’t get over how good she looked in my jacket.

“Friends?” The word reeled my mind back from the gutter it was roiling in. The slight gap between her two upper teeth flashed before being covered by her full lips as she pressed them together. I wanted to pull that bottom lip down. Instead, I extended my arm and shook her hand, which was oddly becoming our new thing—light handshakes that left me feeling cold the moment they ended.

If she needed a friend—because August would damn sure never be that for—I’d be it. I justified it would be easier to make sure she was safe if I could get closer to her, and that was all I was doing. Ensuring my guilt wouldn’t eat me alive, I then offered her a ride home.

My passenger seat did look a lot better with her in it, after all.

After dropping her off, I couldn’t get her out of my head. It seemed like every time I tried, Rose came in and invaded every corner and crevice she could work her way into. My thoughts weren’t exactly the purest thing, either. As it turns out, venting to your dead brother can only get you so far.

One quick phone call from my father changed at least some of that.

Rolling up my sleeves, I turned and pushed my back into the swinging door that led to a room I also tried hard to forget about.

“P-please, I didn’t…” the guy whose head was covered in a damp cloth said as my feet tapped along the puddles of water on the floor. Each tap of my leather boot made his body jerk in the chair he was tied to. I rolled my eyes as I pulled the cloth from his head.

“They…they said I could just go—”

“Well, they lied,” I said. “What you did isn’t exactly let-go material, Stan.”

“Wh-what did I…”

I circled his chair until he could no longer see me. As I bent down past his wet, grey-peppered hair, I said, “Now, Stan. You and I both know what you did. Question is, do you think what you did is punishable by death or can we come to some form of agreement?” Stan was an accountant that merged with a company we recently purchased. Over the past few months, Stan decided to funnel some cash—close to seven million dollars to be precise—into a private, offshore account. The discovery wasn’t made by me, not like his punishment would be.

Stan snapped his head to the side as I pulled back, his eyes following my movement as I crouched down in front of him. His silence wasn’t surprising. “Your offshore account was linked to another, Stan. Several others.” Funneling a few million from our company was one thing—maybe worthy of a day in my chair and some blackmail. But what Stan was doing with his money was enough to make my blood boil. And that discovery was made solely by me .

His posture stiffened as much as it could against the ropes that tied him down. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I smirked at him and stood. “Sure you don’t.” My fist landed across his cheek, making him whimper. “You want to try that again?”

He spat blood on the floor along with a single tooth. “It’s my wife, she—” Another punch, because that was the wrong fucking answer and he knew it. Stan’s laugh after more blood dripped to the floor confirmed it, though I didn’t need any more confirmation of what he did.

“What are you, their reaper?” Had my black fabric mask not been in place, he’d know exactly who I was. I was there just like he was when we purchased the company he worked for. Hell, he probably knew my face like most did—from the news.

“Something like that.” I smirked again and readjusted my sleeves. He’d have no way of knowing who I was, like all who sat in the same place he was sitting in now.

His voice turned dark like the devil he was. “Kill me then, reaper , if that’s what you’re going to do.”

I sighed. “Stanny boy, for the things you did, someone really should kill you. But my job is to get a confession and seek some form of retribution for the things you did, and death is too easy of an out for you. Anyone who purchases young girls from the internet and resells them to the highest bidder deserves to rot in the worst type of way.”

My father wouldn’t give a damn about Stan’s personal affairs other than the fact that he stole money from VanAndrews. He had no idea that I’d taken it upon myself to find out why people fucked us over when they did. They all had some terrible agenda, and Stan’s made the top of the list.

Stan started chuckling. “So you don’t have the balls to kill me, is that it, kid?”

I let that comment roll off me. There were people in this world who did deserve to die. Stan deserved it, but then he wouldn’t live with the agony I had planned for him. And I much preferred for his life to crumble before him, to take everything from him, then to make him the first person I’d ever killed. I wasn’t afraid to pull the trigger, but his death shouldn’t be on my shoulders.

“Oh, Stan.” I checked my watch, making a show of it, then smiled back down at him. “See, right about now, your wife is going to be coming home with your son in tow—East Killian Elementary should sound familiar to you.” Stan’s face paled. I continued, “She’s going to find a package addressed to both of them and when she opens it, she’s going to find pictures of each of the girls you sold, the amount you got for the sale, along with a file that shows your now very empty bank account.” Stan went to speak, but I held up my finger. “Wait, I haven’t gotten to the best part yet, Stan. See, in a few minutes, the police are going to come and seize your house, finding that elaborately constructed heroin lab in your basement—”

“I’ve never made heroin in my life!”

I laughed. “No, you probably haven’t. Your tastes are more linear, aren’t they?” The lab was a bit excessive, but so was selling girls on the internet—more than excessive, his true acts were vile. I just had to be sure nothing safeguarded this ass from the life I had planned for him.

“You bastard!”

I pulled the gun from my waistband and tapped it along my thigh, drawing his attention there. The silence echoed in the dark room, lit only by a single light that hung right above the devil’s head. “I wasn’t finished, Stan. Don’t you want to know what I have planned for you after? For when you return to…well, you won’t have a home anymore. Or a job. But I know the man your wife is fucking does, and he would be happy to take your wife and son back to his house because, by some odd, cosmic coincidence, he just found out about your dealings and he’s on his way to save them. From you.”

I lifted the burner phone from my pocket, confirming a text from said man, who truly was a decent enough guy. Kind of vanilla, but not everyone had acquired tastes like myself. Stan remained silent, his face turning crimson. “He got a detailed description of the things you like and the things your poor wife is going through and will be there within the next fifteen minutes to get them.” I laughed at the next part. “He even said thank you.” I dropped the phone and smashed it with the heel of my boot.

Stan stared down at the shattered pieces on the floor. “What do you want?”

I rubbed the barrel along my cheek. “See, that’s the thing. You don’t have anything to offer that my client wants.” I aimed the gun at his foot and fired. Stan cried out and I grinned back at him. “Knowing your life will be miserable from here on out might just be enough to keep him satisfied. ”

“Please, just kill me!”

I shook my head and slid the warm barrel back into my waistband. The water on the floor began to turn red, mixing with the blood leaking from his foot. “If you’re so hellbent on dying, then do it yourself.” I thought of his son briefly, of the pain his death would cause their family even though his father was a terrible person whose rap sheet didn’t stop at the sex trafficking of minors. The number of women who claimed to be sexually harassed and assaulted by him over the years was astounding. Money really did buy the worst things for some people.

Stan quietly sobbed, his head hanging low. “That seven million you stole from my client will be used to track your every move until the day you do decide to leave this Earth. You will be watched, and if you even think about divulging back into your ways, you will end up right back here again. Are we clear?” Stan’s head lolled in agreement. “Good. Someone will be back in an hour to release you.”

With that, I turned and left, shedding my mask once the door swung shut.