Chapter 18 Sixx
Sixx
When the wall lifted, I found myself outside.
It was dark, people were screaming all around us, but I was standing in the middle of my friends.
Hayat was tearing into Bentley and Evan, her hair flying in every direction as she attempted to get close enough to beat some sense into Bentley.
Evan was doing a good job of blocking her with his long arms.
If she should have been going after anyone, it would be her brother, but that was just my opinion. All Bentley cared about was protecting Ali. Evan had forgotten how to do that.
Just like every other time the wall fell, I didn’t remember much of what had happened after it descended.
Vague snapshots of the fight floated into my mind.
I hadn’t put Gaviria in a single hold, just gone after him hard.
If he was the PCC’s golden fighter, their undefeated champion, and I destroyed him, what did that say about them…
and me? Was it my skills that had helped me dominate or just the violent side of myself that had taken over?
I wished I could remember more of what I’d done, how I’d done it. More importantly, I wanted to remember how the fuck we’d gotten out of the warehouse and into this parking lot blocks away from the center of mayhem.
Abi bent over, heaving so loudly it shut everyone else up.
A woman I didn’t recognize stood beside her, rubbing her back, her blue eyes occasionally scanning around us as she had a whispered conversation with Abi.
Those eyes seemed to laser through the darkness in a way that had the hair lifting on the back of my neck.
Abi heaved again, and Ali whimpered, wrapping her arms around herself a little tighter, and then Hayat restarted her raging.
“Look at what you’ve done to Abi! She was so worried about you idiots that she made herself sick.”
Tough love was one of Hayat’s love languages.
So were cooking and feeding everyone. My grumbling stomach reminded me that I hadn’t eaten more than a greasy drive-thru burger the day before.
Given my workout from beating the shit out of Gaviria, I was freaking starving.
Hayat was full force in tough-love mode, though.
The newcomer muttered something to Abi that was too quiet for me to hear with all the other chaos going on around us.
From first glance, I figured she was older than Hayat by a few years.
Abi kept shooting her glares that held a haunted hurt that got worse each time she looked at the new girl.
In the near distance, people were running, shouting, slamming doors as they got into their cars and squealed their wheels in their hurry to leave.
A few times, I thought I heard what might have been gunfire, but it could have just as easily been a vehicle backfiring.
Remembering Lunatic scratching his head with his gun before the fight started, I felt a chill slither up and down my spine.
Catching her breath, Abi straightened and pushed away from the car she’d been leaning against. A little wobbly, she crossed the distance separating her from her sister and wrapped Ali in a hug.
At first, Ali didn’t respond, standing statue-still in the embrace, but then I heard her choked sob as she hugged Abi back. “I-it’s all my fault.”
“No, it’s not,” I argued, shifting closer. I started to touch her face, but I realized my hands were covered in blood. Fuck. My knuckles were ripped all to hell, but it wasn’t just my own blood staining my skin. A few more snapshot-style memories of the fight filtered through my mind.
I couldn’t touch my daisy girl with blood on my hands. If I got her dirty with that fucker’s blood, there would be no coming back once the wall descended again.
“Baby, don’t cry. Everything is okay. I told you it would be. I promised, didn’t I?” She started crying harder, the sounds tearing at something vital within me. Breaking me in a way only Ali could do.
Had I promised?
Double fuck. I couldn’t remember that either.
Abi kissed the top of Ali’s head, gently rocking her, while I stood there feeling helpless as my girl cried like her heart was broken, Abi attempting to calm her in a way I couldn’t with another man’s blood splattered on me. “Whatever the reason, it’s over now,” Abi soothed.
“No, it’s not,” the new girl announced, her chilly-blue gaze landing on me, unblinking. I imagined I looked like a deranged monster, covered in sweat and blood, eyes wild, having just beaten a man unconscious.
At least, I thought he was unconscious. A few more snippets of memory played out in my mind as I struggled to remember the fight.
Gaviria’s eyes rolling back in his head, the loud thud of his body hitting the blood-covered mats beneath us.
Loud because the music had been abruptly cut off.
Then came total darkness as someone killed the lights. For all I knew, he was dead.
Hayat and Abi both shuddered every time they looked at me, yet this girl watched me with rapt attention.
It could have been the nearby streetlamps or the occasional flash of headlights as they danced over her face, but her eyes seemed to gleam with fascination.
“You don’t compete in a fight club, dominate, and then walk away after one fight.
People took notice of you in there tonight.
The fact that you’re under the age of eighteen doesn’t matter.
If anything, it only got you more attention. They own you now.”
“No,” Ali cried, lifting her head to look at her sister, her entire body trembling. “We can’t let that happen. Abi, it’s my fault. I did this. I’m responsible for everything.”
“Ali, shut up,” I barked, needing her to stop talking fast. She was in distress, and there was danger all around us, surrounding her. That stupid fucking wall could so easily fall again with how unstable I felt.
“No! Staying quiet is how I got you into this mess.” Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath and unloaded the heavy weight she’d been carrying. I wished I’d known sooner.
If this was anyone’s fault, it was mine. If she hadn’t been scared of what I would do, she would have told someone sooner. If she’d loved me less—
Nope.
I couldn’t finish that thought. There was no world where I could exist if Ali loved me less. Unstable wouldn’t come close to describing how my mental state would become without her loving me.
Restraint. That was what I needed to work on. If I’d been more controlled, I wouldn’t have done what Ali had feared all along. My daisy girl had predicted my reaction correctly. She hadn’t trusted me with what was going on because she knew me too well.
Ali hiccuped on another sob. “There was this guy. He was bothering me at school. I didn’t say anything because I thought I could handle it on my own. But he wouldn’t leave alone. He got my number. He kept harassing me. And then… He has pictures of me, Abi.”
“You sent him nude pictures?” the newbie admonished.
“She would never do that,” Abi defended at the same time I growled a warning in the other woman’s direction.
“He took them while I was in the shower after my gym class,” Ali confessed quietly, but the words echoed inside my head louder than a gong. Gaviria had spied on her in the shower. At school. Where she should have been safe. Only, she hadn’t been. I hadn’t been there to protect her.
And neither had Evan.
Don’t kill him. You’ll never see Ali again if you kill him.
I was wrong. I did have control. Fuck, I had superpower-level restraint. Because if I didn’t, Evan would already be dead.
“He’s the PE teacher and one of the assistant basketball coaches at school.”
Abi absorbed all of that with wide eyes, her hold tightening around Ali.
“He’s also in the fight club. Or gang. Whatever this thing is.
” Evan offered up the information, eager to be helpful now that the damage was done and the danger was over.
Ali flinched at the sound of his voice, and I kept my back to him.
If I looked at him, I couldn’t promise I wouldn’t kill him. Even superpowers had their limitations.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Hayat demanded, glaring from her brother to Ali to Bentley and then to me. “Why didn’t any of you? We could have done something.”
“What?” Bentley asked, his tone cold and hard, calling her out.
She and Abi were too focused on their own drama to notice much of anyone else.
Which was fine—they should live their lives and not have to worry about anyone else—but she had no leg to stand on in this argument.
She had her secrets too. Like that person named Sparks she’d been texting earlier in the week.
“What could you have done, Hayat? She was scared. Fuck, she didn’t tell any of us what was going on.
He was taunting her with shit for weeks.
The only reason we found out was because Evan overheard him threatening her. ”
I flicked a glance at my friend, and he gave a half shrug. So that was the story we were going with, not telling anyone about Evan’s true involvement in any of it. Or lack of involvement. He was going to be the fucking saint in all of this.
With everything else going on, it made sense, but it burned that Evan was going to play it off as the white knight.
We wouldn’t want to taint the image of everyone’s hero.
Bentley and I both knew neither of us would be anything but the antihero to many people in our circle.
Might as well continue to let them maintain their illusion that Evan was innocent.
If their definition of innocent meant willful ignorance, he was one hundred percent innocent.
“Let’s go home. We can sort this out there,” Abi suggested.
“If any of the parents sees Sixx like that, he’s toast,” Bentley reasoned. “And I think he needs stitches. His knuckles are dripping blood everywhere.”
I shook out my left hand. It was bleeding steadily, probably because I kept flexing my fingers and reopening the wounds, which made some of them worse.
“He’s right,” Hayat agreed, and the words seemed to taste bitter to her.
Admitting that Bentley wasn’t wrong about something went against everything inside her.
“But if we take Sixx to the hospital, they will call Ro and Sin. I know you don’t want to go this route, but we are going to have to tell them. ”
That sounded like the worst plan in the history of bad plans. Mom was pretty calm when it came to me and blood, but if she found out about the fight club, she’d switch into panic-helicopter Mom in 0.02 seconds flat.
“Not necessarily,” New Girl spoke up again, casually leaning against a truck. She crossed her arms over her chest, tilting her head to one side and then the other, never once taking her eyes off me. “I can help you out of this little predicament you kids have stepped into.”