33. Logan
I’m intimatelyfamiliar with death, and the last slow, rattling breaths Frank Sutton struggles to take reek of it. When they finally stop, Riley’s shoulders slump as if a string has been cut, her body crumpling in on itself.
Silence descends around all four of us like a shroud, and Riley’s face as she stares down at Frank’s body looks… wrong. It’s utterly blank, her eyes almost as flat and lifeless as her father’s are now.
It bothers me.
Then she suddenly explodes, surging to her feet so quickly she slips in the congealing pool of blood that surrounds her, barely catching herself before she falls on her ass.
“You fucker,” she yells as she glares down at her father’s body, her beautiful face twisted with things I can’t name, but that I recognize just as easily as I do death. Ugly, wrenching emotions.
She clenches her fists, her whole body vibrating with them, then suddenly turns away from the remains of the man who failed her, clutching her stomach and retching.
“Princess…” Dante starts, his eyes brimming over with concern.
“Don’t,” Riley croaks, flinging a hand out to stop him when he reaches for her.
He hesitates—not something I’m used to seeing my brother do—then lurches toward her when she suddenly goes from zero to sixty, from trembling in place, racked by hoarse, panting breaths, to completely losing her shit like a wild banshee.
She jerks away from Dante and punches the wall behind her, screaming as she knocks a crooked, framed picture to the floor. She stomps on the glass when it falls, grinding it into the worn carpet, then grabs a ceramic lamp and hurls it across the room, screaming out her pain like it’s shrapnel when it shatters against the far wall.
Dante makes another move toward her, but I get to her first. I don’t know why. I don’t even know how. I honestly didn’t realize I’d even gotten to my feet, and yet here I am.
“Don’t fucking start! Don’t you fucking start, Logan!” Riley wails, her fists beating against me as I pull her tightly against my chest. “I need, he can’t, it’s not, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”
She switches from fists to nails, clawing at me, but I ignore both the words and the long, red scratches she inflicts on me. It’s all just more shrapnel, and I’ve faced far worse.
I lock my arms around her as she struggles. She smells like blood. Like death and fury and sorrow. The emotions pour off her in palpable waves, and I take a deep breath and hold her closer.
I know death.
I know fury and sorrow.
Each is as familiar to me as breathing, and none of them can be fought against, or hurt, or hit… but I can be. The monster inside me is good for something after all, because it deserves all those things and more, and it pleases something deep in my soul to keep Riley safe within the haven I’m giving her, the restraint of my arms. Safe from all the emotions bursting out of her as she screams out her fury and pain.
She writhes against me wildly, her nails digging bloody gouges in my forearms.
“I won’t let you go,” I promise, dipping my head down to whisper in her ear as I tighten my hold.
She slams her head back, a good defensive move, but I duck in time to dodge it. She immediately pivots and drives her knee into my thigh, twisting and screaming like a hellcat. Crying like her heart has just been ripped in two.
“Shhhh,” I murmur, hugging her against me. It’s instinct, a long-forgotten sound I used to make for someone else.
I rub my cheek against the top of her head and shush her again softly as the emotions drain out of her, a soul-deep exhaustion taking its place. One I’m also familiar with.
“Please,” she finally whispers, her body slumping back against mine. “He can’t be… he never said… Chloe.”
I raise my eyes to meet those of my brothers. We all understand what Riley’s trying to say. Frank didn’t confess what it was he told West Point. We still don’t have a lead on finding Chloe. His death was the final betrayal.
“There’s gotta be something here that will point us in the right direction,” Dante says, his face set in a grim expression that doesn’t look natural on him. “Some clue. Fucking anything.”
“Then let’s find it,” Maddoc says sharply. Riley’s pain affects him too.
He gives me a hard look, his eyes flicking toward her in a clear command. Hold on to her while they search the place.
I do, but they find nothing.
“Fuck,” Dante spits out once they’ve gone over the entire apartment.
“Leave it,” Maddoc says when Dante makes a move to start another sweep. “Wipe it all down. We need to get out of here, and I don’t want anything left that will get us any attention once the cops finally show up.”
“They won’t know we were ever here,” Dante promises.
Riley finally stirs in my arms, looking over at her father’s body. She swallows hard. “What about Frank?” she asks, her voice a painful-sounding, raspy whisper. “Shouldn’t I, um…”
She starts to tremble, and I slide my hand up between her breasts to rest over the place I’ve marked her, pulling her back more securely against me. “No. You don’t have to do anything for him. The cops can handle the body.”
She sighs—a long, slow breath, like a balloon deflating—and lets her weight fall back on me. It’s complete trust, and it feels odd to have that from her, but also unexpectedly right. As Dante and Maddoc get to work wiping the place down, she barely stirs. Her breath is slow and choppy and occasionally broken by a twitching shudder, but she stays in my arms and, once Sutton’s place is handled, doesn’t object when I lead her out to the Audi.
I buckle her in and make sure she’s secure, exchanging a look with Maddoc before he gets into the Escalade with Dante. My phone lights up with his incoming call before I’ve even pulled away from the curb.
I throw it on speaker. Riley is quiet and seems completely numb to her surroundings now, but she’s still a part of this. I want her to be included, I want her to feel confident that we’ve got it handled, even if the conversation does nothing more than sink into her subconscious as she stares blankly out the window.
“We have to assume West Point got something,” Maddoc starts with, his voice filling the Audi as both vehicles head back toward the house. “I want people on all McKenna’s key players. If they have a lead we don’t know about, then they’re already one too many steps ahead of us right now.”
“We’ll get our people to follow every fucking one of them, Madd,” Dante says. “Do we think Sutton really did hear from Chloe, though? That wasn’t just bullshit?”
I glance over at Riley.
She doesn’t move, still staring blankly out the window, barely blinking.
It… concerns me.
I tighten my grip on the steering wheel, but refocus on the conversation at hand.
“Yes,” I say in answer to Dante’s question. “There was a call from an unknown number on Sutton’s phone. It wasn’t from Riley’s number, which means Chloe must’ve gotten smarter and borrowed a phone or found some other way to call him—and that means tracking her down by pinging cell towers will be impossible this time. The call lasted four minutes and thirty-eight seconds, and came in three hours before he contacted Riley.” I cut my eyes toward her, then force them back toward the road and continue. “That was, presumably, about four hours before… what we found.”
Before McKenna’s people showed up to interrogate Frank Sutton, which allows for plenty of time for them to have gotten wind of the contact from Chloe, if they were tapping the right sources out on the streets.
Sources I should have found.
My fury over that is useless right now. Best to store it until I need it. Specifically, when I find out why my own surveillance network failed and can use it to correct that failure… or to correct those who failed me.
“So, West Point breaks in to find out what Frank knows,” Maddoc summarizes, “then they either kill him so he doesn’t share the information with anyone else, or else they kill him by mistake, during the interrogation.”
Dante makes a sound of pure disgust. “We know those fucking weasels just trashed that place as a bonus. Sutton probably caved as soon as they threatened him. No way would he have stood up to much in the way of torture, especially not to protect his daughters.”
“Like he should have,” I add tightly, rage flashing through me again. That reason alone should have given him, should give any parent, the strength to withstand whatever West Point did to him.
“Like he should have,” both my brothers agree grimly before wrapping up what we know and ending the call.
We’re almost back at the house now, and Riley hasn’t reacted to anything she heard on the call. It’s almost like she’s gone catatonic, which just proves what I already determined back at her father’s apartment: Frank Sutton deserved to die.
He should have died protecting his daughters. Instead, it was the opposite. He betrayed both Riley and Chloe, too many times to count and always for selfish reasons, and that kind of weakness makes him an entirely different type of monster than the one I grew up with. One that the world is better off without.
When we reach the house, Riley finally stirs, unbuckling her seatbelt as soon as I stop the Audi and opening the door to leave the car before the engine stops ticking. I quickly follow. She’s walking on her own, but doesn’t acknowledge Maddoc or Dante as she passes them. It’s like her body is on autopilot, and she doesn’t seem to see or hear anything happening around her.
I catch up with her and take her arm, leading her toward the stairs once we’re inside the house.
She lets me guide her, hold her, without any outward reaction. Maddoc has one, though. He stops me, a questioning look on his face as his concerned gaze bounces between me and Riley.
After a moment, he clears his throat. “Maybe Dante or I should help her get cleaned up. Stay with her for a bit. She’s gonna need—”
“Me,” I interrupt, tightening my grip on her arm to the point that I may leave a bruise. “I’ll take care of it.”
Again, Riley doesn’t react, but Maddoc’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise and behind him, Dante looks shocked too.
I don’t blame them. It’s out of character for me. But I’m still right.
Riley does need to get cleaned up, but she needs more than that, and I’m the best one to give it to her. The emotions overloading her right now aren’t just familiar to me, I’ve lived, breathed, and battled them. They’ve seeped into my soul and become part of the fabric of my being. I have no experience offering comfort, but comfort isn’t required. Riley simply needs to know she’s not alone in the dark, empty place she’s currently buried in. A place I know all too well.
I’m not sure how to put all of that into words, but these are my brothers, so I don’t have to.
Maddoc exchanges a look with Dante, and an entire non-verbal conversation passes between them. Then Dante claps me on the shoulder, and Maddoc gives a sharp nod. “Okay, do it.”
He scowls, then shakes his head without saying anything further. He doesn’t like seeing her this way. None of us do. But they both trust me with her, and he turns away, following Dante out of the room.
I take Riley up the stairs and into the bathroom. She’s covered in blood, and even though it’s the middle of summer, I know she’s cold. Not on the outside maybe, but death leaves a chill that creeps into the blood and bones and marrow if it’s not rooted out.
I push the plug into place in the tub and turn on the water, adjusting the temperature until it’s warm enough to do that.
Riley stands by the door where I left her, staring blankly at her reflection in the mirror behind me. I move in front of her, blocking her view, and strip off her ruined clothes, putting each blood-soaked item into the trash. The bruises I once put around her neck are long since healed, but the scar I left on her chest is still there. It will always be there.
And it’s not the only permanent mark I’ve left on her.
I frown when I notice the stitches at her waist. The bullet that grazed her didn’t go deep, and she hasn’t complained once. I remember touching her body, though. Piercing her soft skin as I lay down the line of stitches. Leaving my mark on her body in a way that will always connect us.
I haven’t forgotten about the stitches. On the contrary, knowing she has something in her flesh that I put there is something I’ve thought of often over the last few weeks. But seeing them now, I realize they need to come out. Indulging my own desire to leave proof of my effect on her is hurting her.
I don’t want to do that. Once, I did. But now…
“These need to come out,” I say, running my finger over the rough line of precisely placed stitches.
Riley doesn’t react.
I leave her for a moment to fetch the correct tools—razor-sharp medical scissors for precision work and a pair of sterile tweezers—and then kneel down next to her hip and do it.
I did leave them in too long. Small beads of blood form as I remove the sutures, her pale flesh pulling toward me as I gently tug each stitch out. The smooth curve of her waist is marred by the irritated line I leave behind, but a part of me is pleased. The scarring here will be subtle, but present.
I want her whole body covered in my marks.
I want to claim all of it.
I go still for a moment, the unfamiliar emotion almost overwhelming me. Then I carefully fold it tightly, then fold it again, tucking it away for later.
I dispose of the medical waste, check the temperature of the water in the now full bathtub, and put Riley into it.
“Sit,” I tell her when she doesn’t.
Riley doesn’t respond, but a single tear tracks down her cheek.
I wipe it away and stare into her eyes. They’re not empty. They’re too full.
I can’t take away the pain or the anger—those have marked her just as surely as the knife and needle I wielded on her body, and will be scars she bears forever—but I can help her drain them. Reassure her that the fears they’re wrapped in, fears for her sister, aren’t going to come to pass.
We won’t let them.
I lower her down into the water, crouching next to her as I start to wash away the blood. “Maddoc has had our people tracking West Point’s activities ever since your sister left. Up until now, we’ve kept that to our own territory and the borderlands, but tonight changes that.”
Riley doesn’t respond, and when the water turns murky and dark, I drain some and add in fresh water, then start on her hair.
“Not one of McKenna’s key players will be able to move without a shadow. If they get near your sister, if they even get wind of contact again, we’ll know it. We’ll get there first.”
The water darkens the deep blues and purples she’s colored her hair with, turning the natural brunette roots almost black. I work my hands through it carefully, massaging the shampoo through the heavy waves and carefully separating the tangles until the whole, lush mass of it is clean again.
Slowly, her body goes from stiff and unresponsive to something softer, but she still doesn’t speak. Water trickles down her tight curves, beads on the smooth, satin expanse of her skin, blends with the tears which intermittently trickle down her cheeks as I go on, outlining all the measures we’ve taken to ensure that we find Chloe.
Once I’ve removed all traces of her father’s death, I help her out and dry off every drop of it, then check the small divots left behind from the row of stitches. They’re closing nicely and shouldn’t need any further care, but I swab them with antiseptic anyway. This time, Riley tracks my movements, but she still makes no effort to take over. She’s like a living doll, and I manipulate her body with precision and care as I finish.
Her trust, her total submission, does something to me. I’ve had many people under my control under other circumstances, but all of that was taken. This is different. This is given.
I open the bathroom door, releasing a cloud of steam into the hallway, but I don’t hear my brothers. They trust me to take care of Riley, and I will. When Riley makes no move to leave the bathroom under her own power, I lift her into my arms and carry her to her room.
It’s late, but even if it wasn’t, I know firsthand how drained she must feel. For a moment, I consider finding her something to wear, but then I dismiss the thought. I’ll make sure she’s warm enough under the blankets on her bed, and even though I’ll leave her to sleep, I prefer knowing she’s naked, with the marks I’ve left on her exposed.
I help her into the bed, and another tear spills down her cheek as I straighten the pillows and then arrange the bedding around her. I’m tempted to capture it and save it, maybe taste it, but when she lets her eyes drift closed I leave it alone. Sleep won’t heal her, but it will restore her, and I want that.
I smooth the damp waves of her hair back from her face, then adjust the blanket again, tucking it around her shoulders before letting my fingers drift beneath it to trace my mark between her breasts. Another tear leaks out, and without opening her eyes, she wraps her hand around my wrist, holding it there.
I wait, and eventually her heart rate slows. Her breath evens out. Her grip goes slack.
I start to pull away, and her eyes snap back open, full of a silent plea. Still full of pain, and loss, and all the blood I tried to wash away too.
I hesitate, but she doesn’t let go of my wrist, so I slip into the bed next to her, both of us on our sides facing each other as I continue to lightly rub the mark I left on her. This time, she doesn’t close her eyes, and the silence wraps around us like another blanket, cocooning us together with the pain.
I’ve never laid in bed with another person. Never been close enough to a woman that I could feel each exhale flutter against my throat. Never touched someone’s bare skin, touched their most vulnerable places, without the intent to cause harm. So it makes no sense that being here with Riley feels like coming home.
Or maybe it does. Pain has always been my home.
I blink. For the longest time, home was the place where terror lived. Then it became the horror I escaped from. Here, in this house, it’s become a fortress of safety and order, but the feeling seeping into me as we lie in silence, breathing together, is something entirely new.
“I hated him.” Riley’s lips barely move, the whisper hoarse and raw. Under my fingers, her heart beats faster, pulsing, pounding against the tips of my fingers.
I press them into the scar. “He deserved it.”
Her breath stutters, then she nods, finding my other hand and bringing it to her cheek. She tucks it under her head like a pillow, squeezing her eyes closed and letting tears flow onto my palm.
“After my father was killed… after she killed him…” And Emma. “I ran.”
Riley nods without opening her eyes, the hollow emptiness inside her like a vacuum, sucking the story I’ve never told anyone—not fully, not even my brothers—out of the darkest depths of my heart.
“I didn’t know she’d been caught until years later. I didn’t realize…”
She hadn’t even tried to cover it up, or hide. When the police showed up, I found out later, my mother was sitting next to the bodies eating the lunch she’d prepared for all of us. A true monster.
Riley’s eyes open, and the words come again.
“I didn’t realize she’d been captured until Jonas, Maddoc’s father, mentioned it in passing. He had his finger in a lucrative contraband ring up at Whitehorn, the women’s prison upstate, and he didn’t realize she was my… that we were related. He mentioned her crimes though, and I knew. I looked it up. I found out she was…”
Riley blinks, and I take a breath. Then let it out. Then another.
“She was on death row, but that takes years. I went to see her.”
It was a mistake. I thought seeing her behind bars would fix something, heal something, but all it did was awaken the monster within me, like calling to like. I didn’t want to see her behind bars. I wanted to gut her the same way she’d—
I slam the door down on the memory of Emma. I can’t.
“She wrote to me afterward. Every week. She told me how bad it was there. How much she suffered.”
A familiar flare of satisfaction blazes in my chest, and without thinking, I flex my hand, caressing Riley’s cheek. Her eyes are latched onto mine like she’s untethered and I’m the lifeline she can’t let go of, can’t even blink, without drowning. But I’m a monster too. She needs to see that. She needs to know that. I want her to know me in a way no one else ever has.
“I looked forward to each letter. To the proof that she was miserable. It still wasn’t enough, but then she got cancer. She begged for my help. The medical care in prison is almost non-existent, and the type she had was brutal, and slow, and excruciatingly painful without treatment.”
I close my eyes for a moment, savoring my memory of all the pain-drenched words she wrote like a fine wine.
If I didn’t know firsthand that death deletes the living, erases them and replaces what once was with nothing but a yawning void, I could almost convince myself that Emma and our father still exist in some way. That they were able to reach through the veil that separates them from the living and fill Mother’s body with each and every nodule of that pain in retribution for what she’d done to us… or as a final gift to me.
But they’re gone, so the cancer was some other form of cosmic justice.
When I open my eyes, I see the reflection of my mother’s betrayal in Riley’s eyes as she remembers Frank.
I hope she finds as much pleasure and satisfaction in his suffering as I did when I refused to help the monster who raised me, when I had a small part in drawing out the misery and torment of the devil who shaped me into what I became, simply by denying her.
It’s not enough. It will never be enough. But it’s something.
“My mother had to live with her cancer for five years. It ate away at her. It rotted her bones and strangled her organs. It gave her the death she deserved instead of the easy one the state wanted to give her for her crimes. She begged for help, for relief, just like they had. She suffered.”
Riley’s expression doesn’t change, but her hand tightens around my wrist and her heart beats in a slow, steady beat—perfectly in sync with mine—as she stares unblinking into my eyes.
I’ve never felt as connected to another person, never let anyone see me as clearly. It’s dangerous. It stirs the monster inside me. Makes me want to mark her again. Own her. Drag her out of the darkness she’s drowning in and trap her in mine, where I can keep her and have this, always.
I don’t mean to tell her any more, but Riley’s not the only one drowning. I can no more look away than I can keep these horrors inside anymore.
“The prison mailed me a box of my mother’s effects after she died,” I tell her. “She didn’t have much. I never answered her letters, and there was no other correspondence. Not with anyone. There was no one else in the world, no one living, for her to keep in touch with. But the one thing she had… that she’d kept with her… that she never should have been allowed to fucking touch…”
Riley turns her face toward my hand, still cupping her cheek, and breathes against my palm. In. Out. In again. It’s not a kiss—in twenty-six years, no one has ever kissed me—but it’s a connection that makes my throat tighten up with an emotion I’ve never felt before. Tighten up so much it aches.
The words force themselves out anyway, my voice raw and painful.
“She had my sister’s bracelet. I’d given it to Emma for her fifth birthday. I found it in a field behind our house, blue beads, like Em’s eyes were, with some white ones all around it. She was wearing it that day, when the monster, when our mother…” Rage sweeps through me, tangling my tongue before I manage to bite out the rest. “Our mother kept it. She took it off Em’s body. It’s in the box they sent. One of the beads cracked that day, and it’s still stained with Emma’s blood.”
Maddoc and Dante don’t know any of this. They don’t know what the prison sent me. They don’t know how I relished every letter that arrived before that for the deep, pulsing satisfaction I felt as I denied Mother any help, over and over… and how finding Emma’s bracelet in her effects felt like it robbed me of that. Like Mother was able to reach out from the grave to claw me open again, show me that she’d kept a memento, a souvenir, of what she’d done that day.
Maddoc and Dante don”t know because while they’re both intimately familiar with the darkness that pulses through the veins of the world like a plague, neither of them have been touched by the kind of betrayal I have. The unforgivable kind of a parent who doesn’t just fail their child, but takes pleasure in hurting them.
The kind of betrayal that Riley knows.
In lieu of pleasure, Frank Sutton let his weakness guide him down that dark path. He looked out for himself and only himself, at the expense of his daughters’ pain. It’s just as unforgivable, and I don’t blame Riley for wanting to retreat and escape it.
But I know she won’t forgive herself, either, if she doesn’t snap out of it.
Herlittle sister is still out there.
Chloe still needs her.
I spread my hand out, not just tracing Riley’s scar anymore but covering it completely, her heart beating against my palm.
“I know what happened today. I know what it feels like to have your soul splinter inside you, cut right through your skin and shred you to pieces as it tears itself apart. You can’t move. You can’t blink. Not without jostling those shards and letting them tear you up all over again. I understand why it shut you down.”
I won’t give her empty words or false promises. Some things, once they’re broken, can’t ever be repaired. But I can show her how to go on living anyway. I can show her she’s not alone. I can let her feel it.
I take her hand and put it on my chest, spreading it wide. “I know, wildcat.”
She stares back at me, and I really do drown in her eyes. Drown in them until they spill over and she makes a small, broken sound, sliding her hand up from my chest to cup my face. And then, tasting of salt and pain and sorrow, she finally closes them and presses her lips against mine, pulling herself out of the darkness.
And igniting mine.