13. Dax
13
DAX
I burst out the back door, the cold air biting at my skin, though I can barely feel it. No, all I can think about is what Callum just told me—and how fucking furious I am that he didn’t come clean as soon as he stepped through that door last night.
“What the fuck happened yesterday?” I demand, pushing Chuck aside and striding toward Charli, who has just emerged from the greenhouse. Her eyes are downcast and her cheeks are red, but I’m not about to let her off because she’s playing demure. No, I deserve a fucking answer—and I want to know if she’s willing to give it to me, or if she’s going to try and cover her ass to avoid landing in more trouble than she already has.
“Dax, calm down,” Chuck tells me. He reaches for my shoulder, but I shrug him off before he can touch me, and I round on him, my eyes narrowed.
“Did you know about this?” I demand.
He stares at me for a second. “Know about what?”
“About what happened last night, while they were out,” I reply, stabbing my finger past him and toward Callum, who has followed me out of the house.
Chuck furrows his brow, and looks between Callum and Charli, clearly searching for an answer. “I didn’t know anything happened last night.”
“Neither did I, until Callum told me just now,” I spit back. “He kept it from us. We could have been in danger, and he didn’t say a damn thing?—”
“Dax!” Callum yells, trying to shut me up, but I’m spinning out. I know it’s not going to help anyone, to have me freak the fuck out on them like this, but I can’t just let it go. Someone was prowling the woods last night with a gun, and they came after Charli and Callum. Something could have happened to them. I could have lost them?—
That thought stutters to a halt in my brain, and rage takes over. As if I haven’t lost enough already. My unit, my father. My fucking sanity, it feels like sometimes. And Callum would let that kind of danger slide? No. No fucking way am I going to let them get away with this.
“Shut the fuck up!” I yell, rounding on Callum furiously. “You could have died out there.”
“Will someone please tell me what the hell is going on?” Chuck demands.
“I can tell you,” Charli replies, her voice hollow, robotic. I turn back to her, and she stares at me, fear in her eyes. For a split second, I feel bad about spooking her, but no—I’m not going to let her guilt-trip me into thinking this is an overreaction. Chuck looks at her expectantly, and she pauses for a moment, clenching and unclenching her fists at her sides before she finally comes up with an answer.
“We were…Callum and I were shot at last night,” she finally confesses. The words hang in the air between the four of us, and I watch as Chuck registers them.
But then, instead of anger, his brow furrows, and he moves toward her. “Shit, you okay?”
“We’re fine,” Callum replies for her. “Nothing happened. We?—”
“How can you say nothing happened?” I interrupt, incredulous. “You were attacked. You could have died. You could have led them back here.”
“I would never have let that happen,” Callum cuts in hotly, his voice laced with irritation that I would even bring up the possibility—but it can’t come as that much of a surprise to him. He knows how precious this place is to me out of all of us. He knows how bad things got for me back in the city. And he knows that if I lose this place, I’ll lose myself with it.
“Of course you would,” I fire back, and I jab my finger in Charli’s direction. “You’ve been willing to walk us into trouble since the second she turned up in your life again.”
“Because she needs us!” Callum protests, and I turn to Charli, locking eyes with her.
“But she won’t tell us why,” I point out, taking a step toward her. She stands her ground, her hands clenching to fists at her sides as she stares me down. I can still feel that tension between us, the same tension that was there that day in the kitchen when we kissed, but it’s turned into something else entirely.
“You really want to know?” she replies, her voice dropping. She doesn’t want to put it all out there, but she can’t keep hiding it from us.
“We’re putting everything on the line to give you a place to stay,” I mutter, shaking my head. “And the least we deserve is to know what exactly you’re running from. What exactly you’ve gotten all of us into.”
She swallows hard, not taking her eyes off me. “Fine,” she spits. “I’ll tell you. And if it’s too much, I can leave. I can walk right out of here this instant and never look back, and you’ll never have to worry about laying eyes on me again, you hear?”
I lift my chin, silently indicating for her to go on.
She looks between Chuck and Callum and me, as though trying to reach for a way out of this, but they stand there in silence. No matter how they might go about it, they want this as much as I do.
And she knows it.
At last, she begins to speak.
“I…after Callum and I split up,” she begins, haltingly, “I was involved with this…with this guy. I met him at an event I was waitressing, for his dad—he’s a senator, pretty influential in the city, and his son, James, set his sights on me when he saw me there that evening. I was flattered at first, I guess I liked the attention, being part of the fancy side of the city, but…” She trails off.
“You don’t have to keep going, if you?—”
She lifts a hand to cut Callum off. “No. Dax is right,” she replies, voice hollow. “You deserve to know. You’re putting so much on the line for me. This is the least I can do.”
Once she’s gathered herself, she keeps going. “And he liked that too. I mean, the fact that I didn’t have any real connection to his world. He got to call all the shots, there was nothing—there was nothing I had control over. He started paying for stuff, started pushing my friends away, starting making like they weren’t good enough for me, and then for him. And I moved in with him, because—because, fuck, I thought at least he wanted me. At least he wasn’t going anywhere.”
She fires a look toward Callum, and he starts as though he’s been struck with a physical blow. Whatever happened between them, it’s clear it laid the groundwork for whatever she’s describing now—and he’s not ignorant to the fact.
“And that’s when it started getting…bad. Worse,” she explains, her voice dropping. “Once we were living together, he was paying for everything, and he made me quit the jobs I was doing since he could provide for me. He pulled me into his world, and he made it seem like my choice. There was nobody I could turn to, I didn’t have my old friends anymore, didn’t have any family, and he was just telling me, over and over again, how grateful I should be that he had given this to me.”
Her words are starting to lace through with anger now, as if it’s finally clicking just what he did to her.
“And he started to hurt me. Not physically, not at first, he was too smart for that. But he’d put me on timers when I went out, and if I didn’t get back in time, he’d spend the night berating me, to the point where I just gave up going out at all. When I told him I wanted to go back to pick up with my studies, he freaked out on me, told me I was ungrateful—that was the first time he put hands on me. He just grabbed me that time, but it left bruises, and I know I should have left then, but…”
She shakes her head. “I didn’t see a way out,” she admits. “I couldn’t. That’s how he had made all of it, so there was nowhere for me to go and nobody for me to turn to. So when he started hurting me more, I just…I took it. I would cover it up with makeup when we had to go to one of his father’s fundraising events, because he would tell me that I would make a scene and attract too much attention if I didn’t. And I let him. I fucking let him.”
The anger, now, is turned in on herself. And I recognize it well. It’s the same anger I woke to when I was pulled from the explosion that killed my unit—the anger that consumed me for years, feeling like I could have done more, should have done more, or that I should have at least had the decency to die out there with the rest of them. The nights I lay awake, turning the events of that day over and over, trying to find some crack in the memory that would grant me peace, only to come up with nothing—that’s the look on her face right now, that bitterness, that utter self-loathing.
“And then he proposed to me,” she continues, almost with an edge of laughter to her voice. “And I said yes. Because I truly didn’t know what my life would look like without him. And even though he treated me so badly, I—I thought it was better than being alone again. I thought it had to be.”
She twists her head to the side, and I can see tears glistening in her eyes. She dashes them away with the back of her hand, quickly, as though she doesn’t want any of us to see it.
“It wasn’t until my wedding day that I realized I couldn’t do it,” she confesses. “I…I climbed out the window of that stupid hotel we were meant to be getting married in, and I left him there among all the photographers and society people who came to see him make me his. I knew if I stayed, I would never find a way out, not with who his father is. They would tie me up in legal proceedings for the rest of my life just out of spite, just to keep me tied down to him. So…so I stole that car, and I ran.”
She catches her breath, like it still comes as a shock to say that part out loud.
“And that’s how I ended up here. I thought that he would—I don’t know what I thought. Maybe that he would be so angry he wouldn’t want anything to do with me anymore. But I guess that’s not how he’s playing it.”
“You think he would send people out here to find you? Kill you?” Chuck presses, his voice low with concern.
She sighs. “I wouldn’t put it past him,” she replies. “Or maybe he’s just trying to drag me back to marry him and go through with what I promised, I don’t know. His father, he’s a powerful man, and he can get the authorities to look the other way if he wants to use methods that aren’t entirely legal to get what he wants. God knows he’s already done it to cover up the drug use and shit like that.”
Finally, she falls silent, and looks between the three of us.
“So, that’s it,” she tells us, bluntly. “That’s why I’m here. That’s what I’m running from. That’s who I’m dealing with. And if you want me gone, then I’ll go, right now?—”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Callum growls, almost as though the very thought of it pisses him off. He strides toward her and crushes her against his chest in a huge hug, pulling her close like he never wants to let her go. I can see him murmuring something against her ear—an apology, maybe, for what happened between them before?
Chuck moves toward her and puts his hand on her shoulder—a surprisingly intimate gesture, given that he’s not the most forward guy in the world. She turns to him, and he nods with certainty.
“You’re staying here,” he replies. “No way am I sending you back out into the world when that psycho is looking for you. You can stay as long as you need to, Charli.”
She thanks him with a small smile—and as she breaks free of Callum’s hug at last, she looks over at me. All three of them do. And I know exactly what they’re asking. They’re asking if this is enough. If I agree to this. Because what she just told us changes everything. She might be vulnerable, but she’s put us in the middle of all of this too. And now I have to figure out if I can handle it. If we’re not all on the same page, we’re not going to be able to take down this psycho ex of hers, and I’m the one who came out here demanding answers.
But as I look at her, something shifts in me. Yes, I’m still pissed that the life we’ve made for ourselves out here has taken such a huge hit with her arrival. And I know it’s not just going to snap back to normal when all this is done either—if it’s ever done. But there’s something about her story, about the way she speaks, about the pain in her eyes, that I know all too well.
It’s the same pain I suffered when I lost the unit. The guilt, the anger, the certainty that I was to blame—it’s enough to destroy a person, if you don’t keep it under lock and key. It nearly destroyed me. And if my brothers hadn’t been there to pull me out of that downward spiral before it completely consumed me, I don’t know where I’d be right now.
Which would make me all kinds of a hypocrite if I left her to deal with this alone.
I nod my head, just once. It still doesn’t feel comfortable, the thought of opening this place up to such danger. But if I can help her make things right, maybe it will go some way to fixing the mess in my own head.
“She can stay,” I mutter. And just like that, she lets out a gasp of relief and dives toward me, throwing her arms around me and clinging on to me tightly. I think of pulling away, but instead, I lift my hands to her waist and pull her in close to me.
I don’t know what the hell I’ve just gotten myself into. But I know there’s no way in hell I can leave this girl to face her ex alone.
No matter what it takes, we’re in it together.
And I’m not going to let anything change that.