37. Chapter 37 – Olivia
Chapter 37 – Olivia
I hummed a tune that I had no recollection of learning; it seemed it had always just been in my brain as I rocked Aurora, or Rory as Maddox had already taken to calling her. We were in our regular chair next to Peyton’s bed in her hospital room. We visited every day.
But today, they were discharging me and Rory. Yet Peyton remained asleep, like she was trapped in her subconscious and couldn’t get out. Leaving her felt impossible, as if they were telling me I had to leave behind a part of my physical body.
I couldn’t do it.
So I was stalling. And hiding from the nurse on the maternity floor who told me she’d be around to discharge us in an hour.
Four hours ago.
I wondered if Dane could smuggle in another roll out cot for me to stay with her.
Dane was currently cleaning up some loose ends with Maddox, though I was told there were guards around in their absence, but I was glad I couldn’t see them.
The one guard I ached to see more than anything, was that blonde supermodel who two timed Maddox’s trust by sleeping with Damon while working to protect me. No doubt, she was the one who fed Damon information about my outing with Peyton that day and led him right to us.
That bitch had conveniently gone MIA after the fall of the entire Hell Eaters Crew the other night. Go figure.
And Tamen. He was the other person I’d give something important up to for some answers.
Real answers, not the vague and veiled ones I got from Maddox and Dane since the entire ordeal. They handled me as though I would shatter.
Tamen never did, not even when I was vulnerable and in harm’s way, which made me sure that if he were around, I’d get some real fucking answers out of him.
“Where’s the bear?” A deep, rumbly voice echoed from the doorway, surprising me as I looked up to see the Englishman himself, leaning on the frame with a smug grin.
Maddox and Dane assured me he wouldn’t hurt me, but they were both unable to hide their distrust and dislike for The Duke from their tone. Which left me on edge as he looked down at my baby asleep in my arms.
“You mean Maddox?” I asked, knowing that perhaps my only real opportunity to get answers was in front of me.
“Do you know any other man as ugly or as furry as a grizzly?” He raised one eyebrow mockingly and then smirked as he leaned up off the frame and came into the room.
Shutting the door behind him.
The hair on my arms stood up as I watched him move with a sort of power that seemed impossible to obtain with his tall build. Yet he moved with grace and ease.
And I was weary.
“What are you doing here?” I questioned, torn between telling him to get fucked and begging him for answers. But when he neared the side of Peyton’s bed and gazed down at her slumbering form, the urge to claw his eyes out burned brighter than any need for knowledge.
“You know,” He started, still staring at my sister, “When I heard that Dane had let someone into his solitude aside from Mrs. Straight, I thought he intended to torture her with his insanity.” He looked over at me fleetingly, “Before he killed her for the fun of it.” Returning his almost caring gaze back to Peyton, he continued. “So I traveled to the States for the first time in years, so I could check in on him.”
I sat silently, letting him tell the story without interrupting him.
He continued on, “Peyton surprised me when we met. She wasn’t what I expected.”
“How so?” I asked, never having heard the story before.
He chuckled, “Well, for one she threw two different lamps at my face and had a footstool in her hands, ready to fire again when Dane finally showed up.”
I smiled at the mental image of Peyton attacking Tamen, a man bigger than a monster, with lamps. “She’s a firecracker.” As soon as the words left my lips, sadness followed them, laced with uncertainty whether she’d ever wake up again. “I don’t know what I’ll do if she doesn’t wake up.”
He looked over at me again, but his stare was indescribable. “You’ll go on with life, because you have to. You have no choice.”
I scoffed at his coldness and scowled at him. “Easy for you to say, considering you’re technically to blame for most of this situation.”
He stood up to his full height and turned to face me, towering over me even from the other side of the bed. “I made you join Damon and The Velvet Cage?” He countered, “I made you steal money from powerful, influential men?” Cocking his head to the side, “I made you invoke the urge for revenge in Maddox and then sit by and simply watch as he eliminated dozens of those powerful influential men simply because he wanted a way in between your thighs?”
“God, you’re cold.”
“Wrong.” He challenged, “I’m English.”
“Same thing.” I sneered, looking away from him. “Which is saying something, because you share blood with Dane, who’s literally unhinged, yet you’re the cold brother.”
“I don’t share blood with Dane.” He stared at me, burning a spot on my cheek as I looked at my sister instead of him. “I share blood with Lincoln. Dane is the byproduct of the man who sired us both, turning him into a cold-blooded assassin.”
That was the first mention I’d ever heard of Dane’s lineage, aside from the occasional mention of Tamen’s name over the years.
And to say I was curious was an understatement.
“Your father is to blame for his—” I hesitated, but Tamen went on.
“Insanity, yes.” He finished. “In a way, Maddox’s too.”
Now I was really fucking curious. “How so?”
He grinned, knowing he had me on the hook for information neither man would freely give up. “Has Maddox ever told you how he got his start in our world?”
“No.” I admitted, “He doesn’t talk about his past much.”
“Figures.” Tamen tsked his teeth and then sat down on the window ledge, crossing his arms and ankles like he was relaxed while I was on edge and jumpy from his presence alone. Just a few days ago, I thought he was going to be the one to kill me, after all. Those feelings don’t just go away. “He was a loner, way too fucking weird to have friends and far too big and bulky to go unnoticed. That kind of attention tends to attract the wrong kind of people.”
“What do you mean?”
“When he was a kid, he caught the attention of a scumbag gang that ran in his streets. They wanted to fuck with him simply because he looked like an easy target. He was big and dumb and far more fun to torture than the other twats on the block. So, they started fucking with him.” Tamen shrugged like it was no big deal, “Stealing his food and backpack, pushing him around and tormenting his everyday existence for the fun of it.”
“He was eleven, wasn’t he?” I whispered, remembering how Maddox told me he was eleven when he killed his first person.
“Bingo.” Tamen whistled, “He took their abuse for a few weeks before he snapped, which, to be fair, was a few weeks longer than I would have guessed he could last. But one day, they cornered him in the back of their school, after class, and started their same old bullshit.”
“What happened?”
Tamen shrugged, “I don’t know, details were pretty scarce because of the gore of it all. Supposedly, Maddox fought three of them off at once, but when the adults finally found him, drawn by the animalistic cries of the punks that fucked with him, there was only a red sludge left on the concrete walkway. Even his teeth had chunks in them.”
“You’re fibbing.” I shook my head, refusing to believe that Maddox would have been so—fuck, animalistic.
That was exactly what Maddox was.
It was exactly what Maddox would have done.
I’d seen it with my own eyes as he tore through the Hell Eaters in that hallway, trying to get through Tamen to me the other day.
“The look in your eyes says you know I’m right.” Tamen droned on.
“How does that involve Dane? And you?” I snapped, trying to piece the story together in a way that would link Maddox, Dane and Tamen all together in the same universe.
“Easy.” Tamen held my stare with that cocky arrogance that made me want to shove my foot up his dick hole to make him sing soprano. “There’s no place in the public for boys like Maddox. They’re too skilled and too nuts to function around ordinary people. Kids like that end up in special institutions.”
“Homes.” I whispered in disbelief.
“No.” Tamen said, and for the first time since he walked into the room, there wasn’t any mirth or crass in his eyes as he held my stare. There was only that familiar darkness. “A home for kids would have been a paradise compared to where we ended up.”
“We?” I questioned.
“Coincidentally enough, when Maddox arrived, Dane was already there. They committed Dane years earlier, when he was six.”
I shivered, imagining a six-year-old little boy in a place like that, and I hugged Rory tighter to my chest. “And you?”
That bitter grin grew on his face again as he reached into his suit jacket pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, taking one out and putting it between his lips. “Me? I wasn’t a prisoner there like them. Though I should have been.”
“Then how were you involved?”
He rolled the cigarette between his lips and eyed the oxygen tubes coming from the wall like he was contemplating lighting it up, which was the only sign that he was stressed from the conversation, despite his cool facade. Standing up off the windowsill, he put one hand in his pants pocket and gave off an arrogant air about him. “My dad owned the place.”
“Your—” I began, as it started falling in line, “Your father imprisoned little boys who needed mental health help? Dane was his own son; how could he do that?”
“He turned them into tools.” Tamen replied, blinking away that darkness, but I could see it lingering right behind his bright blue irises. “He used their rage and their skills and weaponized them.”
“Jesus Christ.” I deflated in the chair, imagining the horrors that Maddox and Dane endured in a place like that, but then stopped to look up at Tamen. “And you? Were you just a by-product? A casualty of your situation?”
He smirked and pulled the cigarette out of his mouth. “Me?” He scoffed, “No. I was just a little boy who wanted to be just like his strong, big brother.”
I trembled at the realization. “You wanted to be a weapon. You wanted to be just like them.”
“Bingo.” He repeated in the same creepy way he had before. “There are only two types of people in the world, Olivia. Those who are victims, and those who do the bullying. Sometimes it’s up to us to choose which side we want to be on.”
“You’re wrong.” I shook my head, refusing to allow him to characterize Maddox that way. He wasn’t bad. “Maddox and Dane, they aren’t bad people. They didn’t choose to do whatever sick, fucked up things I’m sure your dad made them do. They’re good men.”
He chuckled, “They’re insane, Olivia. They’ll even tell you that themselves.”
I remembered all the times I called Maddox a psycho, after he referred to himself that way the first time. I remembered the way Peyton called Dane a monster and cringed at how we victimized them all over again by agreeing with them.
“No.” I sat up taller in the chair and stared down my nose at him. “You’re wrong. They have moral compasses. They try to do good, they’re—” I hesitated, trying to find the right words as I looked down at my sleeping daughter in my arms, Maddox’s daughter. The exact definition of innocence and purity. “They’re line-walkers.” Looking back up at him strongly, I defended the man I loved against his own descriptions. “They walk the line of good and bad and choose when to cross over to either side, but the fact remains the same; they can cross over the line. They can be good. But you,” I cringed, staring at the man, “You gave up that choice. You decided to be bad, purely for your own benefit. You don’t walk the line; you leaped over to the bad side of it and never looked back.”
His face was almost unreadable, but the flicker of anger was there, in that darkness, nonetheless. He wasn’t impenetrable. He wasn’t immune to it.
“Yet I rescued you.” He challenged, tsking his teeth again, “What do you call that?”
“A side effect.” I replied honestly, “Of human nature trying to find some footing in your black soul. Because you didn’t rescue me.” I stood up and faced off with the giant man, clutching my infant daughter in my arms. “You kidnapped me. You tortured me and allowed Damon Kirst to drug me and harm my daughter, forcing her to be born early so he could sell her!” I took a step toward him, glad that the bed was between us, or I might give in to the urge to kick him in the nuts for the fun of it as I remembered how fucking terrified I had been during those hours of captivity. “You only called Maddox at the end because of some fucked up fondness for my sister. But face it Tamen, you’re the reason she’s lying in this bed, unconscious, fighting for her life. You helped a man like Damon Kirst terrorize us all, simply because you didn’t realize who we were until it was too late. If we had been from any other family, though, you would have gone through with it all. But if she dies,” I raised my finger up at him with all the indignation I had left in my body, “It will be your fault. And your fondness for her will be the very thing that solidifies your eternity in hell.”
His cruel, chilling grin stretched across his face, a grin that made my skin crawl and dredged up memories of his manipulative strategic shifts while I was held captive. When he confessed his unending hatred for Maddox with his voice dripping with the venom of a death wish. Tamen cocked his head, a strange, unsettling tilt that was pure Bryce family evil, and opened his mouth, but a soft, raspy voice interrupted before he could speak.
“What did you do, Tamen?” We both snapped our heads down and stared at Peyton’s blinking green eyes as she scowled up at the man before turning back to me and looking at the bundle in my arms. “What the hell happened?”