16. Riley
Dante savesmy head from slamming into the wall behind me by cradling the back of it, but that doesn’t stop my heart from lurching when Maddoc calls out, his voice as sharp and forceful as the sound of his knocking.
“Dante.”
Despite the obvious urgency in Maddoc’s voice, Dante doesn’t show any sign of being fazed by the interruption, his fingers gently massaging my scalp for a moment before he slips them out of my hair, smoothing the waves down as he answers.
“Present and accounted for,” he calls back without taking his eyes off mine, a lazy smile hovering around his mouth.
“Well, I need you present and accounted for out fucking here,” Maddoc snaps through the door. “There’s been a development.”
“About Chloe?” I blurt, shoving Dante away and scrambling toward the sink to clean the mess off my body.
The beat of silence that follows my question has my eyes snapping up to meet Dante’s as I belatedly remember what he told me. Maddoc, the fucking hypocrite, has a rule. None of them are supposed to touch me.
My face flushes with heat, but Dante just smirks, once again reading me like a book, and gives me a tiny shrug.
“We’ll be right out,” he tells Maddoc, plucking my shirt off the towel rack it landed on and holding it out to me.
“Fuck,” I whisper, snatching it from him and tugging it over my head.
“Nah, it’s fine,” Dante says, fixing his own clothes before helping me straighten the last of mine. “Come on, princess.”
He opens the door, and Maddoc immediately narrows his eyes at us. His irises are a startling mix of grays, lighter near the pupils and darkening near the edges, and right now, they make me think of storm clouds.
Even if I hadn’t already seen how well-fucked my mussed hair makes me look in the mirror, the expression on his face tells me loud and clear that he knows exactly what just happened. Or at least, close enough.
He turns a look on Dante, and they have a quick but intense non-verbal conversation that includes Maddoc clenching his jaw and Dante shrugging again. I can tell Maddoc wants to say something, but fuck that. I need to know if they’ve got a new lead on Chloe.
“What happened?”
Maddoc’s attention immediately shifts back to the matter at hand, his jaw clenching even tighter.
“We need to go,” he says. “Now.”
Nerves shoot through me, killing off the last traces of my afterglow, and Dante’s laid-back expression morphs into something deadly serious. Maddoc turns on his heel without giving any further explanation, and even though I’ve got no clue whether or not I was supposed to be included in that “we,” I follow when Dante takes off after him.
Neither of them stop me, and when we get downstairs, neither does Logan. All four of us head out to the car, Maddoc getting behind the wheel and peeling out of the driveway before his seconds even get the doors closed.
The silence is a crushing, almost suffocating weight in the car. Dante methodically checks several weapons he’s carrying and Logan’s fingers fly over the small screen of his phone in the front seat while Maddoc navigates the Escalade toward a sketchier part of town. It’s an area I’m pretty sure Maddoc’s map showed as lying right on the edge of the Reapers’ territory, and despite the fact that they betrayed me, lied to me, the idea of her stumbling into another gang’s territory is even worse.
It’s enough for my fear to overcome me. Even though I’m not sure I actually want the answer—not with the three of them looking grim enough to put shards of ice in my veins—I need Maddoc to tell me.
“Is this… is it about Chloe?” I whisper, the words like sandpaper as they leave my throat.
I swear to fuck, if he tells me she’s dead or was taken or something, I’m going to lose it no matter how determined I am not to look weak in front of these men. But Maddoc doesn’t draw it out or torture me. His eyes flick up to meet mine in the rearview mirror, and for just a fraction of a second, his gaze softens.
I swallow a sob of relief before it can escape, jerking my hand up to cover my mouth.
Maddoc’s eyes return to the road in front of him, his grip on the steering wheel noticeably tightening. “No. It’s not Chloe.”
“Then what’s up, Madd?” Dante asks.
“A West Point attack,” Maddoc bites out, causing Dante to punch the seat next to him and let loose with a stream of curses, while Logan goes dangerously still.
Maddoc rattles off a few more details that obviously mean more to his seconds than they do to me, and before I have time to settle my emotions, we arrive at a run-down building that looks abandoned.
A small group of men are stationed around it, looking cagey, but I can tell by the tense way they all go on alert when Maddoc gets out of the Escalade that they’re Reapers.
“Report,” Maddoc snaps, striding toward the entrance with Logan at his side. Dante takes my elbow and pulls me in next to him, following behind.
One of the Reapers starts spitting out details of the attack, but goes quiet when a woman walks out of the building. A woman with blood on her.
My heart drops. The sight is too close to my worst fears about finding Chloe. But then her eyes flick toward me and I recognize her from having met her at the Reapers’ house a few weeks ago, and I realize it’s not her blood. And she’s not my sister.
I repeat that part to myself, trying to slow my heart rate. It’s not Chloe.
Maddoc didn’t lie. Not about that.
“Payton,” Maddoc greets the woman, his face as cold as stone, as if he’s locked all his emotions behind a fortress. “How bad is it?”
Her eyes glitter, and she shakes her head.
“Fuck,” he snarls, the fortress cracking for a moment. “Troy’s dead?”
“Yeah,” Payton rasps. She clears her throat, then adds, “He wasn’t when we got here. We just lost him.”
If I thought Maddoc, Logan, and Dante looked grim on the drive over, it’s nothing compared to the ice-cold expressions on their faces as we follow Payton into the building.
A couple more Reapers are waiting inside, along with a guy tied to a chair.
No, not a guy. A… body. Or at least, what’s left of one.
He was clearly tortured.
“Oh god,” I gasp, my stomach heaving and the sour taste of bile flooding my mouth.
Maddoc curses again, low and vicious, and I wrench my arm out of Dante’s hold and turn away, squeezing my eyes closed from the grisly sight.
Dante glances at me for a moment, then turns back toward the others, letting me be. The Reapers who were already here start giving Maddoc a situation report, and everyone in the room ignores me while I do my best to pretend the air isn’t saturated with the sickening scent of copper and try to get my shit together.
It’s not that I don’t know what a brutal, horrible place the world can be, it’s just that I don’t usually have to face that fact in quite such gory detail.
“You said he was alive when you found him?” Maddoc asks, pinning each of his people with a hard gaze.
They all nod, and Payton grimaces. “Barely, and only because they made sure we got here in time.”
“They?” Logan repeats.
She nods once, jerkily. “One of those fucking weasels made sure we knew about the attack before they cleared out. Troy was barely conscious when we got here. They wanted us to find him like this.”
“They wanted to send a fucking message,” one of the other Reapers adds furiously.
Maddoc’s lips flatten. “Message received.”
“He was interrogated,” Logan states, looking over Troy’s body carefully.
I don’t know how he can do that. How he can get up close and personal and stay so unaffected. Or at least look so unaffected. But even though bile rises in my throat again, I stiffen my spine and force myself to look too.
This was done by the fuckheads who bought my sister from Frank. The same West Point fucks who treated Chloe like she was just a body to be used, and who will sadistically exploit her, or worse, if they find her on the streets before we do.
I borrow a page from Maddoc’s book, and start building a fortress around my emotions.
It doesn’t matter that the Reapers betrayed me, or that I still feel a fucking connection to each of them that confuses the hell out of me. None of that matters until we find my sister. It only matters that they’re not the ones who did something like this.
“We don’t know if Troy told them anything,” Payton is saying stiffly, “but yeah, they were definitely trying to get something out of him. He was able to say that much before we lost him.”
I keep my eyes on Troy’s body as she talks, using the gruesome sight to strengthen my new fortress, stone by stone.
I need it, because I’m useless here… and dammit, I wish I wasn’t. But I’ve got nothing to offer as Logan pulls out his phone and starts taking a bunch of pictures while Dante silently moves around the edges of the room, looking for I’ve got no idea what.
Maddoc snaps off orders to his people, his rage all but boiling under the calm, still surface he presents to them. He tells them to tighten up security around a few key points in the territory and delegates dealing with Troy’s body, but stops his people before they disperse to carry out his orders.
“Stick together.” He pauses to pin each of them with his eyes. “Have each other’s backs. That’s your first priority. We’re not fucking losing anyone else, got it?”
I turn away as they all murmur their agreement, needing my fortress more than ever. I’m reminded of Dante telling me why he decided to follow Maddoc in the first place, of the way he insisted Maddoc cares about me. And the way Dante acted like he does too.
My heart can’t afford to fall for that shit, so I head toward the exit, figuring it’s safe enough now that the place is surrounded by Reapers. One of them stops me though, telling me I’ve got to wait for Maddoc or his seconds.
I sigh, suddenly exhausted by the entire fucked-up roller coaster of a day. I lean against the door jam, trying to carefully blank my mind of everything I’ve just seen.
I shudder, then suck in a long, slow breath, desperately needing a distraction. Payton’s voice gives me one. The two guys who’d been with Troy’s body have already left, but I can still hear her back there, keeping her voice low—almost intimate-sounding—as she talks to Maddoc.
About me. And what the actual fuck? It sounds an awful lot like she’s trying to convince him that this whole twisted thing is somehow my fault.
I clench my fists, reminding myself that it’s none of my fucking business. I’m not a Reaper. I’m not part of their organization, their family. And this “partnership” Maddoc insisted on has an expiration date, so it doesn’t matter what he believes about me as long as he follows through on helping me find Chloe.
“I just don’t think it’s smart to trust her,” Payton is saying. “Not with her ties to McKenna. She could be working for West Point.”
My nails bite into my palms. There’s no way I’d ever work with those bastards.
“Riley doesn’t have ties to McKenna.”
I blink, startled by the sound of Logan’s voice. He states it in a dry, cold voice that’s nothing but factual. Not like he’s on my side, just like he’s setting her straight.
It still sends a bittersweet warmth through my chest, and I unfurl my fists and rub at the ache there.
“The fuck she doesn’t,” Payton snaps. “She stinks of it. Has from the minute you took her in. You should cut her loose before we all suffer for it.”
I didn’t ask for any of this. My only involvement with West Point is thanks to my father using Chloe to pay his debts to them. There’s no way that whatever they were trying to get out of Troy, whatever message they were trying to send to the Reapers, has anything to do with me. The Reapers were already in a gang war with them. Maddoc knows that. He has to.
But he sure as shit doesn’t say so. All he says to Payton is that he’ll take what she said under advisement, but whatever. It doesn’t hurt. It’s just another stone to stack in the wall.
I tune the rest of their conversation out, and eventually Payton leaves, the guys finish up, and we all head home. But the problem with ignoring them is that it leaves me with nothing else to distract me from replaying the sight of Troy’s tortured, dead body in my mind. Especially once we make it back to the house and they all scatter, each man having plenty of shit to do to deal with the fallout of what went down today.
It leaves me feeling a little lost, which makes me feel weak, which I fucking hate.
“Get it together, Riley,” I whisper under my breath
It doesn’t work. I’m still unsettled, and it’s not just due to the horrific images I can’t get out of my head. Troy’s death has driven home how dangerous all this shit is. Any one of us could die at any moment. Nothing is guaranteed. It seriously makes me wonder why anyone would even think about coming out from the safety of an emotional fortress.
I mentally retreat to mine, completely overloaded by this day, and head toward the stairs, but my steps slow without my permission when I hear Maddoc and Dante talking in low tones from down the hall.
I would have thought that dealing with the West Point attack would be their only priority right now, but instead, it sounds a hell of a lot like Maddoc is chewing Dante out about what happened between us in the bathroom earlier.
“You fucked her again.” Maddoc’s voice is low and angry. “After she fucking shot me.”
I can’t make out Dante’s low reply, but Maddoc sounds even more pissed—maybe even a little hurt?—when he replies, “Yeah, well, I’m supposed to be your brother.”
“You are my brother. That’s how I know exactly why you didn’t end her after she pulled the trigger,” Dante replies, loud enough for me to hear this time and with some steel under the laid-back tone I’m used to hearing from him. “Quit pretending that you don’t like and respect her even more for having the balls to do it, because we both know that’s a lie.”
Maddoc makes a rude sound. “You think I like being shot?”
“I think you like the reason she shot you. I know how much loyalty means to you, and how rare it is to find the kind that refuses to break. Riley’s got that, and she’s one of the strongest, bravest people I’ve ever met. That’s the part you like, Madd. I know you see it in her too.”
“All I see is someone who can’t be trusted.”
Dante snorts. “Oh, you can trust our princess all right. Trust her to do exactly what she told us she would from day one—whatever it takes to look out for the people she loves.”
“Person she loves,” Maddoc corrects him as my heart starts to pound in my chest. “For her sister. It’s why she’s here.”
There’s a long pause, and I have to lock my knees to keep from sneaking closer and peering around the corner to get a look at their faces. I’d bet anything that they’re having another one of those silent conversations with their eyes that only happens when, like Dante said earlier, two people know each other down to their souls.
After a minute, Dante speaks again. “Things can change. People come into our lives for one reason, but sometimes stay for another. Like the ones who start as enemies and end up brothers.”
He’s talking about the way he originally infiltrated the Reapers to betray them, but he’s also talking about more than that. It makes my chest tighten with emotions that threaten to break down that stone fortress I’ve been building up all day.
Their voices drop too low for me to keep following the conversation, but I know Dante’s right about how Maddoc feels about loyalty, and I’m not sure I want to hear how he reacts to Dante standing up for me like that. Not when my own reaction is confusing enough.
My hands are shaking and my mind is a fucking mess, so I slip up the stairs and head to my room.
Being alone with my thoughts probably isn’t going to help sort any of them out, but at least a little space will give me a chance to lay some more stones around my heart. Build up a good, solid wall between my fucked-up feelings and the three men in this house who twist them into such tangled knots, because nothing’s changed.
Our partnership is still temporary. They still want to use my sister once we find her.
And if there’s one thing that shit Dante said to Maddoc just now makes crystal clear, it’s that it’s not just the danger out on the streets I have to protect myself from right now.
I close the door to my bedroom and lean back against it, rubbing the ache in my chest.
Fucking Reapers.