Chapter 31
RUDY
PRESENT
Fucking nutjob. Fuck you, Nickie. Fuck you, Prat.
“We haven’t been out this way because of the storm. Maybe we can find some more…” My words trailed off as I realized… I was alone. “Fuck you, Quentin.”
That one hurt. Out of anyone, I didn’t think that I’d lose Que, but here I was, walking in the goddamn dark by my-fucking-self.
What was fucking new? I’d always been the only one to actually do anything worth a damn in our mismatched group of fuckups. There was a reason I was the designated leader. I was the biggest fuck up of them all.
I thought about the guys. About Vix and how bad his drinking had become since we’d escaped.
The asshole had sobered up in prison, as much as he was able to while avoiding all the readily available contraband.
He’d gotten his dumbass put there in the first place for beating the shit out of his boss for taking a liquor bottle away from him.
You’d think that would have been enough to keep him off the stuff.
Clearly it wasn’t.
The twins, Donnor and Connor, were fucking computer geniuses, who lacked any real-world smarts.
Sometimes I wondered how they hadn’t landed themselves on the other side of the building, the one the state had sectioned off into an asylum with all the looners.
I mean, you had to be fucking crazy to think you’d get away with hacking into multiple government databases and then bragging about it to all your cyber pals.
Dane was probably the most innocent of us.
His shit was a pure stroke of bad luck. Sure, he’d killed someone, same as I did.
But it had been accidental. He’d hit a patch of black ice, spun out, and plowed into some rich guy’s kid.
I think that, that was what made him so angry all the time.
He was just a regular dude, and now he would always be remembered as a criminal. A killer.
Fuck, come to think of it, every time he looked in the mirror that gnarly scar served as a reminder that there was no real escaping anything for him…
Then you had Blitz. Bad drug deal and a rivalry gone wrong. Nothing all that complex, but at his core, Blitz was caring, funny, easygoing, and a good fucking friend.
As for Dash, he would be crucified for the hand he played in all this.
He was the reason any of us had a fucking chance at being normal again.
I never did see him as a nurse. He hated most of the assholes he worked with, the patients too.
Until he met Que for the first time. And then his thinking changed.
Guy became our biggest advocate after that.
And Que? Well, the fucker signed his life away when he convinced me Holly wasn’t worth mine.
He hadn’t even questioned it. What would happen to him or me.
Or both of us if—when we were caught. He’d simply said: You’ve punished yourself enough.
Let me help you. I got you. You know I’ve always been here for you, Rudolph.
I didn’t know what Prat did. He never told any of us, and honestly no one cared or judged him. He barely spoke, mostly just grunted in your direction, but the man was massive with more muscles than any of us combined. That’s what made this so hard. I couldn’t read him like the others.
Did he get away? Or did something far worse happen to him? What was I missing?
I shook my head. What was I even doing out here? I needed to grab Nickie by her hair and drag her out to that damn lake and demand to know why those keys were under the floorboard. Why they were covered in someone’s blood.
“Fuck you!” I screamed to no one and nothing but flurries of snow. Then I dropped to my knees, the weight of this shit feeling as heavy as the shackles I’d been trying to escape.
Freedom. That was all we wanted. A chance to live out our lives just like everyone else. None of us had been perfect, but I didn’t think we deserved tossing away either.
We’d found solace in one another. A family. I loved every single one of those assholes. I’d die for them. The shivers racked my spine, and I realized that just might happen if I didn’t turn my ass around and go back to the cabin.
Maybe Que talked to Nickie. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding of some sort. Maybe Prat had driven the van into the lake on purpose. Maybe he’d been followed and needed to ditch it. Maybe he’d gotten injured and hidden that key there for us to find…
Fuck! Nothing was making fucking sense!
“Where the fuck are you, Prat!”
The blaring light of the prison spotters and sniper towers climbed over the tree line, and I sighed. Maybe this was a sign that I should just turn myself in. Make up some lie about everyone else being dead and give them a real chance at freedom.
“I’m sorry, Que,” I said and headed that way.
The closer I got to the prison, the deeper the chill cut through to my bones. I could already feel the hounds snapping at my heels, smell their foul breath on my face. I was going to die out here before I—
“Oof!” Something caught on my boot, and I tripped, landing face-first in the snow. I sat up and growled before getting back to my feet and kicking at the lump in anger. “The fuck!”
The lump… moved. I froze before brushing aside my shock and crouching down to see what it was. I dusted off the collection of snow and jumped back again when I found a pair of dead eyes staring at me.
It was a body. Not just a body. But…
“Prat.”
My friend’s face was frozen in the snow, frozen in terror, bits of blood and skin peeling away as I scraped some of the ice off.
This didn’t look like the work of any animal I’d ever seen.
Animals also didn’t leave their meals behind.
And there were no bullet wounds suggesting someone in the tower had spotted him. So what the fuck had happened?
“Oh god. Prat,” I repeated aloud. “What the fuck happened to you?”
He still had Dash’s old scrubs on, but the bottoms were yanked down, exposing him to the dick. People didn’t just yank their dicks out when they were dying. It wasn’t normal…
And neither was someone else. Fucking Nickie. She’d done this. I didn’t know how I knew. I just did. It was a gut feeling, like the ones I used to get when I knew a perp was lying to me. I was never wrong then, and I wasn’t wrong now either.
She would answer for this. She would…
“Fuck! Que!” My throat felt like it was closing up. He was at the cabin. With her. They all were. “Fuck! No, no, no!” I pushed up on shaky legs and took off in a full sprint, trying to follow my boot prints back to him while the snow did its best to cover them up.
I couldn’t lose Que. I couldn’t. He was the one good thing in my fucking life. If Nickie touched any of them I’d kill her, but if she hurt him, I’d become the monster the outside world deemed me to be.
“Que!” I yelled, blinded by frozen tears as I pounded snow. I never cried. Not even for Holly. Because Que wasn’t her. He was different. He was… Fuck, he was everything. “I… I love you, you fucking idiot! You better be okay!”
Love? What the fuck was I saying?
The truth. Because I did love him. It had just taken me this long to figure it out.
It made about as much sense as it didn’t.
Holly had been the rational choice. A check box.
The way my life was supposed to turn out.
I’d been a cop and she’d been a teacher.
They fit together like peanut butter and jelly.
But I fucking hated peanut butter. I loved things that weren’t good for me. Like marshmallow fluff. And Twinkie cakes and Cool Whip… And Quentin. I loved him.
And now he was in trouble because I didn’t trust my gut the first time I felt something was off with that girl.
I ran faster, and faster still, my legs burning as hot as the pain in my chest until it was replaced by something cold.
THWACK!
“Ow! What the fuck?” I shook my head and tried to regain my bearings. Did something hit me or did I hit it?
“Slow the fuck down!” A familiar voice huffed and heaved. “Not all of us have bionic legs!”
I spun around, terrified that I was imagining shit. Hearing what I wanted to hear. Then my eyes landed on him and I tackled the man like a linebacker, slamming him down onto the snow and rolling on top of him. Forcing him to drop the hand-sized ball of ice he was preparing to chuck at me again.
“Oh my god! Que! You’re okay! You’re really okay! I thought… I thought I lost you. I thought…”
“Well, you kinda did.” He grinned up at me. “You need to learn not to walk so fast. I almost fucked like six different trees thinking they were you.”
“Almost?” I laughed, as a sense of giddiness took over.
“You can pluck the splinters out of my dick later.” Que shrugged, then pushed me back to study my eyes. “What’s going on, Rudolph?”
I wiped at my face, trying to recover from the emotional whiplash. “I can’t lose you, Quentin Laurent. Ever. Like fucking ever. I fucking love you. I’m sorry it took me so long to admit that to myself—but I see it now. I get it now. It’s always been you and me. I fucking love you, Thumper.”
“?Bout time, ice king,” he grumbled, but I could see the tears forming in his eyes too. “The thing is… it never really mattered. Because you’ve always been mine. I was just waitin’ for you to know I was yours too.”
I nodded, unable to find the words to express my relief. The rightness and completion. So, instead, I grabbed his beautifully stupid, perfect face and kissed him. Pulling back to add, “Fuck me.”
Que chuckled, stopping when he realized I was serious.
I rolled my jumpsuit and underwear down under my ass and started for his next.
“Oh, fuck! Okay… Are you sure? You want your first time to be… out here? In the dirt?”
“As opposed to a prison cell like you wanted?” I laughed. After the food fight that brought us together, I should have known the guy was a romantic.
Before Que could argue with me, I slid down his body, pressed myself between his thighs, grabbed his cock, and popped it into my mouth. It didn’t take him long to get filthy and wet—hell, the fucker was so worked up he nearly came down my throat.
I popped off him and climbed back up. Watching as he swished his saliva around his cheeks before hocking it onto his fingers. Then he tugged me closer for a kiss, fucking my mouth with his tongue in time with the way his hand was fucking my ass.
This was as far as it ever went before. The one line I wouldn’t cross.
I couldn’t explain the logic to anyone who wasn’t in my head.
Why fucking a dude felt slightly less wrong than letting him fuck me.
Or maybe it never had anything to do with wrong or right.
Maybe it was because I knew that once I let him have that part of me, there was no turning back.
There was no me without him. Even though that had always been the case anyway.
Once he felt I was good and ready, Que rolled us over. Gave his dick another glob of spit and pressed it against my ass. Pushing inside me at an excruciatingly slow pace.
“Hurry up and fuck me. I need to feel your come inside me. All of it. Don’t let a fucking drop escape, you understand?” I grunted, ignoring the burn and embracing the pleasure.
“Can’t help but top from the bottom, can ya, baby?” Que laughed before slamming all the way forward.
I didn’t have time to unpack that, because he was already thumping into me. Breaking my brain and my asshole. “Ah, fuck. Yes… Make me a bottom then. Show me why you should be the one in charge.”
Que met my challenge, dominating my asshole, my mouth, any part of me he could reach and touch and suck until I was spraying come all over his chest and abs. “Just like that, baby. You’re so beautiful when you come for me. Take it. Take this dick. Make it yours.”
And I did. I relaxed for once in my fucking life, laid back, and let go.
“Fuck yes! I’m coming! You feel so fucking good, baby. So fucking perfect,” Que grunted, his body spasming, and his smile wider than I’d ever seen it before. And I knew it was worth it. Giving this to him. Giving myself to him the way he had given himself to me a long time ago.
I even allowed myself to bask in the glow for a minute, reaching up a hand to brush the blonde hair from those bright-blue doe eyes. Dropping my arm back to my side as soon as I spotted the dried blood on my fingertips.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” Que asked, immediately recognizing the shift in me.
I rolled him off my chest, tugged my clothes back into place, and jumped to my feet. Then I started pacing while digging a little one-sided path in the snow.
I didn’t even know how to explain it. So I didn’t.
“Prat’s dead,” I blurted out, my body racked with shivers that had nothing to do with the cold.
Que grabbed my hands and met my eyes. I didn’t remember him getting up. “What do you mean he’s dead?”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “That’s why I was running.
He’s dead. He was killed. I was trying to get to you.
To make sure she didn’t—” I knew I sounded crazy but if anyone would listen to what I had to say, crazy or not, it was this man in front of me.
“And I think Nickie was the one who killed him.”