Chapter 14
STONE
It’s well beyond nightfall as we continue through the thickening woods, walking in companionable silence, both of us deep in thought.
I no longer have the overwhelming need to end her life, but that doesn’t mean I trust her.
She could be lying. Hell, she’s good at it.
I taught her well. But if her story is true, and she has no recollection of her past from before seventeen years old, then I’ve given her more than enough to think about.
Her stomach has been growling for hours. Hell, it’s been that way since we were in the tunnel, but there’s not a lot I can do about that right now.
My top priority is getting us somewhere safe, far away from anyone who’s going to hunt me down. Then once we get through this bushland and find a small town, we can focus on stocking up on everything we might need. Until then, we’re living off the land.
Growing up the way I did, this isn’t exactly my first time being on the run from the cops.
It’s definitely the first time it’s been at this magnitude.
It’s not even the first time Menace has been on the run.
Though I suppose she has no fucking clue about that, meaning she probably also doesn’t recall all the tough lessons that shit taught us.
The thought of her accident has my gaze shifting toward her.
Her stare is focused heavily on the uneven ground beneath her feet.
It’s almost pitch black out here, the moon being our only guiding light.
She’s struggling, and judging by the way her arms are wrapped around her body, she’s starting to get cold.
I had every intention of walking through the night.
It won’t be long until the guards figure out how I escaped, and that I did so with a hostage.
When they discover that sewer line, it’s going to lead them directly into the very woods that we’re in.
When that happens, we can’t be here. But I also can’t keep punishing her like this.
She didn’t ask for this, and if she is being honest, then she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, having no fucking idea of the history she held with the man she came to interview.
Fuck.
Clenching my jaw, I give in to the inner turmoil. “We can stop here,” I murmur.
Her head snaps up, her eyes going wide as though barely believing my words.
“Oh, thank God,” she says, heavily collapsing against a big tree before dropping right down to her ass.
She sits against the trunk, bracing her elbows against her knees as she hangs her head, closing her eyes as the exhaustion of the day quickly catches up to her.
As she rests, I take a few more steps before pausing and looking out at the vast bushland ahead of us. We still have who knows how fucking long ahead of us, but if we can rest for a few hours, we should be good to continue at a better pace and cover more ground.
“Do you know how to make a fire?” she asks.
I look back to find Aria scrounging through the fallen foliage around her, picking out a bunch of sticks. “No.”
“Shit,” she sighs. “Damn. I think all you have to do is rub them together. It couldn’t be that hard, right? If cavemen could do it, surely we can figure it out.”
“I know how to start a fire. What I meant was no, we can’t. It’s too risky,” I explain. “You might as well shoot up a flare telling every fucker within a hundred-mile radius exactly where we are.”
Aria groans and tosses her little collection of sticks aside before leaning back against the tree once again, tipping her head back and staring up at the starry night above.
“We?” she questions. “There’s no we about this.
This is all on you. You’re an escaped prisoner, and I am nothing more than a poor hostage that’s been dragged into your bullshit, so excuse me for not really caring if a swarm of cops close in on us and get me the fuck out of here. ”
I grit my teeth, frustration burning through my veins. “The answer is still no.”
She sighs and closes her eyes. “Fuck. This is going to suck.”
“Escaping a prison isn’t meant to be a breeze.”
“This really isn’t how I anticipated my day going,” she murmurs. “This was supposed to be my big break. And it would have been had Jedd not stolen the interview out from under me.”
I scoff. “You think that’s why the interview wasn’t going to be a success? There shouldn’t have been an interview in the first place. If you wanted your big break, then you should have picked someone else’s life to exploit. Mine was always off limits.”
Aria rolls her eyes. “You know, I’d been awake from my coma for about two months, stuck in the hospital, doing rehab, and re-learning how to walk when I first saw your trial come up on the TV.
I don’t know what it was, but there was something about your case that just sat with me, and I found myself watching it every day.
I’ve obsessed over it for seven years, desperate to find out what really happened that night. ”
Letting out a breath, I sit down against a tree, kicking my tired legs out as I stare at the ground, the events of that night replaying in my head like the worst form of mental torture.
“That night was never supposed to happen. It destroyed everything we had built. It took you away from me, and nothing has ever been the same.”
I feel her stare against the side of my face, watching me far too closely. “The girl you were trying to protect,” she murmurs, “the minor that was mentioned during the trial, was that . . . is she me, Stone?”
I shift my gaze to Aria, taking in the fierce longing for answers in her green stare, but I shake my head. “Don’t ask questions you don’t truly want the answers to, Menace.”
“I do,” she tells me. “I’ve gone years without knowing a damn thing about myself. I want to know who I am. I want to know where I come from, and how the hell I ended up here, because right now, not a goddamn thing makes sense to me.”
I consider her for a moment, holding her stare. She has every right to know about herself, but that doesn’t mean I have to tell her about that night. That’s not something I’m willing to get into. Maybe ever.
“Your name is Riley Maddox,” I start, deciding not to sugarcoat a damn thing.
“You have no family. Your dad was a deadbeat who took off on you, and your mom sold herself for her next fix. You were put into the system at four years old, then placed in the same foster family with me and my—” I pause, letting out a breath.
“The three of us became a family. We got you through school. We had your back. We protected you from the world and taught you how to survive it.”
She stares at me as though staring at a complete stranger. “You’re my family?”
I nod. “I’m all you’ve ever truly had.”
“What about the other guy? What happened to him?”
“Dead,” I state, letting her hear the coldness in my tone. “You don’t need to fear him.”
“Why would I fear him?”
I shake my head, needing her to understand where this deep rage comes from.
“It was just you and me for a long time, Riley. We were unstoppable together. We could have had the whole fucking world in our hands, and we didn’t give a shit what kind of chaos we caused.
Right up until everything changed. You were only seventeen, still a kid, but I trusted you to have my back, just as I did for you for all those years. And when you didn’t—”
She sucks in a breath. “I didn’t know,” she pleads as though the very fear of me ending her life is still in the forefront of her mind, but that truth is, how the hell could I possibly follow through if I’m not certain about this?
How could I take her life if she never truly betrayed me?
It’s almost comical. If she knew why I really killed those men and became a monster, she would never fear me.
She would know what kind of man I truly am, and that I’m just doing what I have to do to survive in a world that wants to push me out.
I turn my attention back to the darkness beyond, cutting the conversation short, unable to handle the swarm of confusing emotions pounding through my body.
I don’t know what to believe. Don’t know how to feel.
For seven years, all I’ve thought about was revenge on the girl who stole my life out from under me and saw to it that I spent the rest of my life behind bars.
There’s so much pent-up rage there that I don’t know what to do with it.
She could have saved me. Could have protected me just the way she always vowed.
The way I always did for her without fail.
“Go to sleep, Riley. This is the only rest you’ll get for a while.”
“It’s Aria now,” she whispers, having no connection to her real identity, and despite not trusting me one bit, her exhaustion is too much. The second she tips her head back against the tree and curls up against it, a deep sleep claims her.
I sit in solitude, listening to the subtle sounds of the creatures around me. There’s an owl in the distance. Crickets chirping. And maybe a coyote or two. But they don’t concern me. My only thoughts are for the sleeping woman beside me.
There was a part of me that feared never seeing her again, and just knowing that she is here with me is comforting.
She was my foster sister for so long. I was only seven when she came to us, and I claimed her as my own the moment I laid eyes on her.
I knew she had to be protected, that there was something so innocently beautiful about her, and I wasn’t going to let that light fade from her eyes.
She fell in so easily with my brother and me, but now, I have no idea what that dynamic is.
Just because she’s my menace doesn’t mean she’s Riley Maddox anymore.
This woman beside me is Aria Ashford, and she’s different.
She’s a perfect stranger who wears Riley’s face, and that’s not something I’m going to get used to easily.
Though some things never change, and there’s no denying that Aria comes fully equipped with Riley’s fierce attitude. And being on the run with a woman who is that headstrong is going to be one hell of a challenge.
Reaching into my pocket, I pull out the small Polaroid photo I’d taken of her all those years ago and rub my thumb across the shiny paper, right where she’d marked it with her name at the bottom: Menace.
She was so innocent back then. We all were.
It was a time long before the real world caught up to us.
I was seventeen and had given her the stupid camera for her birthday and insisted she needed a photo of herself.
She’d never had one before, and that photo has lived with me ever since.
Even in the face of escaping the prison, I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving it behind.
As for the other Polaroids in my pocket—the rest of my kill list—I fully intend to make my way through them.
Whether they know it or not, each one of them is directly responsible for the innocence that faded from Riley’s eyes.
They’re the reason I was there that night—the reason I’ve spent the last seven years becoming unstoppable.