Chapter 13
STONE
Idon’t trust her.
For the past hour, Aria has trailed behind me, doing what she can to keep up.
In the tunnel, it wasn’t a problem. Sure, she lagged behind every now and then, but where the fuck was she going to go?
She had no choice but to keep her fine ass moving.
Out here, it’s different. If she falls behind, she slows me down.
And if she slows me down . . . Well, that’s not about to happen.
It’s been a big day for her, and I’m sure her body isn’t used to the kind of abuse it’s been through today. For the first part, she was probably running on pure adrenaline, but that’s long gone. Now, it’s up to nothing but stamina and self-preservation.
My interview started at 10 a.m., and considering the sun is setting, it’s got to be close to 6 p.m. Neither of us has eaten, had any water, and as far as I’m aware, she hasn’t stopped to pee. The menace I knew couldn’t go ten minutes without a snack.
There’s no doubt about it, she’s more than uncomfortable.
But that’s not why I don’t trust her.
She’s going to make a run for it.
I saw it in her eyes back at the sewer line.
She’s terrified. In the tunnel, she’d foolishly allowed herself to think she was going to make it out of this alive.
That much was clear when she raced toward the end, but once we were out, and I had her up against the crumbling concrete, she saw it in my eyes.
She knows that she’s not escaping me. She knows that every step she takes is bringing her one step closer to the end of her life, and she’s desperate.
Help is not coming her way.
I’m not a man who goes back on his word. When I say something, I mean it, and no amount of shared experiences today, or the other thirteen years I spent at her side, will change that.
Aria Ashford will die by my hand. It is set in stone. There’s no point trying to save herself now because all she’s going to do is give herself false hope, and I don’t need her making this any harder than it already needs to be.
There’s too much history here. No matter how intent she is on pretending it doesn’t exist, when it comes down to it, she won’t be able to ignore the years we spent having each other’s backs in the most horrendous situations.
I get lost in my thoughts, keeping up my pace, when her heavy breathing softens. Her steps become lighter, more precise, as though suddenly being careful.
Ten minutes ago, she was huffing and puffing, but now she’s a fucking assassin following me through the woods. I don’t fucking think so.
I watch her from my peripheral, already shaking my head.
I knew it was coming; I just hoped that it wouldn’t come so soon.
We still have so much ground to cover. It’s been hours since the riot started, and I’m sure that, by now, SWAT rolled in and gassed them all.
They will know I’m missing. Some will presume I’m dead, my body among the piles of mangled men and rubble, but it won’t take them long to figure it out. They’re going to come looking.
Right now, we need to focus. I’ve shown Aria kindness by allowing us to walk.
If I were alone, I would have sprinted the full twenty miles through the tunnel, but she doesn’t have that kind of stamina to keep up with me.
I would have exhausted her too soon, and she would have been a dead weight for me to carry.
She’s tiny. I would have thrown her over my shoulder and carried on, but carrying another human being isn’t maintainable.
She starts looking around, discreetly trying to glance left and then right, picking whichever route she thinks will somehow lead her to freedom, and I sigh. I do not have time for this shit.
I thought she took my warning seriously. I thought she understood. But it’s not the first time I’ve seen people act out in fear. Desperate people do desperate things, and Aria is no exception to that rule.
Don’t be stupid, Menace. This isn’t going to end well for you.
As if on cue, she takes a deeper breath, the sound breaking through the woods behind me. Then, like lightning, she takes off in a fierce sprint, her exhausted body not taking her nearly as fast as she needs.
“Fuck.”
She’s small and fast, and I bet she assumes my brute size will slow me down, but I’ve been training for this.
I’ve been working toward this breakout for years.
Sure, it came a little earlier than anticipated, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not ready.
And while my abundance of muscle sure as fuck slows me down, my long stride makes up for what I’m lacking.
I sprint after her, breaking past the bushes as low-hanging branches whip across my face. I follow her every step, ducking and weaving through the trees like a fucking maze.
“Come on, Menace. You can’t outrun me,” I holler behind her. “Where do you think you’re going to go?”
“I’m not your menace!” she cries, her arms pumping as fast as they can go, trying to propel herself deeper into the thick bushes with no clear plan in mind.
Rage consumes me. After everything she has done to me, everything she’s put me through, how dare she think she can try to escape me.
She gets ahead for all of three seconds before my long strides eat up the distance between us, and if I wasn’t so fucking exhausted, I might have let her think she got the best of me, but today is not the day. We don’t have time to waste on this bullshit.
Aria screams like this is some fucked-up scene out of a movie as I quickly catch up to her. Then, only allowing for one final step, I close my hand around the back of her neck, slamming her against a thick tree trunk, instantly bearing down on her.
“You wanna fucking do this, then let’s do this,” I roar, my hand not moving from her throat for even a second as she trembles in my hold, her eyes filled with the kind of fear that I’ve only ever seen once in my life. “Your time for bullshit is up. Start talking, and maybe I’ll end this quickly.”
Aria grips my wrist, frantically trying to claw her way free, her nails digging deep into my skin, but the adrenaline pulsing through my veins keeps me going.
“Start. Talking.”
Tears well in her green eyes, flowing over her lower lashes and down her cheeks, and I almost laugh. There was a time when those big, fat tears would have brought me to my knees. Not anymore.
“I swear,” she chokes out, desperately pleading. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t do whatever it is you think I did. I’m not . . . I’m not her.”
“You can’t fuck with me, Menace,” I snap, digging my hand into my pocket and pulling out the Polaroid I’ve kept of her pretty face since the day I took the goddamn picture.
I hold it up in front of her face, roaring with frustration.
“This is you. Riley fucking Maddox. The real you, not this bullshit version of yourself, Aria Ashford. There’s no mistaking it.
I have known you since you were four years old.
We grew up side by side. I know every goddamn scar on your body, every freckle, every fucking hair, so don’t try to insult me by telling me that you are not her.
Nobody on this fucking planet knows you the way I do. ”
That familiar green gaze settles on the small Polaroid picture in my hand, and I watch as confusion clouds her eyes. I know exactly what she’s thinking as her eyes track the curve of her younger face. She’s taking in her own beaming smile, wondering how she can possibly deny this.
“No,” Aria breathes, starting to shake her head, her brows pinched together. “That’s . . . That’s me, but how do you have that? I don’t . . . I don’t understand. That’s not possible.”
What the hell is she talking about? How is it not possible? “The fuck it is. I took the goddamn picture eleven years ago.”
“But . . . I was only thirteen then. I was just a child. There’s no way. I don’t—”
My grip tightens around her throat, and her gaze tears away from the Polaroid and back to mine. “What the fuck is going on, Menace?”
There’s a real fear in her eyes, but this is different. It’s as though she doesn’t even notice my hand around her throat anymore. She goes somewhere far away, her gaze dropping to my chest as she tries to figure something out, and as I take her in, I wonder if I even know her at all.
The woman I grew up with wasn’t afraid of anything, especially not me.
She was fearless, reckless, and full of life.
She was just like me. I molded her that way because it was the only way for us to survive, but the way Aria trembles and shrinks away .
. . She’s never done that before. Apart from what’s happened today, I have never given her a reason to fear me, not even when she watched me tear those six men to shreds all those years ago.
“There’s no way,” Aria breathes. “It couldn’t be.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I have no recollection of smiling for this photo,” she murmurs, her gaze shifting back to mine, a profound sadness flicking in her eyes. “But it’s just like everything else that I have no recollection of.”
I stare at her, my hand loosening around her throat at seeing real confusion in her eyes. She’s not faking this. She can’t be. I taught her how to lie, but nobody is this good.
“I . . . I don’t know who this menace is.
I’ve never heard that name before, but I think it’s possible that I could be her.
I just . . . I can’t believe that this could have been my life before.
That I’d be involved with someone—” She cuts herself off, her lips twisting into an awkward cringe before she gets a chance to finish her sentence.
“What do you mean by your life before?”
“Before the accident.”
“What accident?”
She slowly shakes her head and shrugs before slightly turning and reaching up to her hair. Taking hold of her long, auburn strands, she pulls at her thick locks, parting them before showing me a large scar on the back of her head.
I rear back, caught off guard.
Like I said, I know every scar on this woman’s body, but that one is new.
And it’s not small either. It’s almost the length of her palm, but an injury like that doesn’t come without side effects.
“What happened?” I ask, slowly lifting my hand and running my fingers over the deep scarring on the back of her scalp.
“I don’t know,” she admits, her eyes growing watery as she hesitantly inches away from my touch.
“It was maybe eight years ago. Something happened to cause this scar. A fire, maybe. I’m not sure.
All I know is that it landed me in a coma for eight months with a fracture and severe brain swelling.
I had burns across my body that were mostly healing, but I had no memory of what happened.
Of who I was. The doctors said that nobody came looking for me.
Nobody tried to claim me. I was just . . . alone.”
I shake my head. I would have known if she were in a coma for eight months.
“The doctors said there was a chance that I might get my memories back, but they weren’t hopeful, and with nobody coming to claim me, I had no choice but to start a new life,” she tells me.
“I don’t know who I used to be. My name—Aria Ashford—was made up just to try and give me some kind of identity.
I don’t know where I lived, where I grew up, what friends I had.
I don’t know if I had a family. Parents or siblings who were missing me.
I just had . . . nothing, but I know myself.
I know what kind of person I am on the inside, and you . . . There’s no way. You’re—”
A shaky breath tears from deep in my chest, and my hand completely falls away from her throat as I try to piece together everything she’s said, trying to figure out her timeline. Because eight years ago . . . fuck.
“You said there was a fire?”
She shrugs her shoulders. “I assume so,” she murmurs, reaching for the hemline of her top and lifting it enough so that I see the healed burns across her waist. “Third degree burns. There’s more on my thighs.
I had to have skin grafts, but for most of it, I was in a coma.
When I woke, the hard work was pretty much done. Still sucked though.”
Fuck.
There’s no way. That night with the fire. That was the night everything changed.
I thought she’d gotten out. I thought she was okay.
I was being dragged away by the police after slaughtering six men in cold blood, but I saw her through the smoke, and if I hadn’t gotten to her, the cops would have.
I taught her to get away. I knew it in my gut.
She had to have been okay, because the alternative is that I left her there to die.
I didn’t protect her like I should have, like I always vowed to do.
I shake my head, stepping away from her. “No, no, no.”
If she was trapped that night, burned, injured so badly she was in a coma for eight months without a clue who she was, then she never betrayed me.
My sweet menace never came forward to clear my name because she was lying in a hospital bed alone.
She didn’t know who I was, didn’t know how desperately I was counting on her, didn’t know that I needed her to speak up and save me from a hundred and ninety-two years behind bars.
All these fucking years, I kept quiet, biding my time until I saw her again, letting the rage build inside of me until I didn’t even recognize the man I had become.
All of it based on my belief that the one person who meant anything to me had betrayed me.
Hell, I’d even wondered if maybe she had died that night, that everything had happened so fast, and I just didn’t know what I was seeing through the smoke, but I knew that wasn’t true.
If she had died, I would have felt it in my bones.
I had assumed she just never came forward. Assumed she was content with allowing me to rot behind bars. Assumed she had reveled in her betrayal.
But maybe she hadn’t.
Maybe I’ve had it wrong all this time.
Maybe I’m the one who let her down.