Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Dare
I jolted awake when my foot fell off the edge of the couch. Not fell—I was pushed . Ty stood at the end, his arms crossed and a frown stretching over his face.
“Yeah,” I croaked and rubbed my face. “What’s up?”
His head cocked.“Why are you torturing yourself?”
I grimaced, burying down a groan as I sat up on the couch. I’d slept on the leather sofa in the rec room every night since Athena had taken over my cabin. One more dumb thing to add to my list of idiocies; there was a guest cabin with a perfectly good bed, but I couldn’t bring myself to sleep there. Not when I felt like I needed to be here—guarding the hallway and the elevator like there’d ever been a time or a possibility for someone to break into the compound.
I rubbed my face. “Not you, too.”
“Someone has to.You’re almost handling this badly in an impressive way at this point.”
I stilled, looked at him, and then laughed. “Fuck you. ”
“I’m serious, Dare. Enough is enough.” He took a tone I hadn’t heard before—at least around me. It was almost…parental.
“I’m handling it—handling myself.” Lies tasted like acid on my tongue—the image of Athena, a fallen angel on her knees, her mouth stuffed full of my cock, and begging for more—more of all my broken pieces that would inevitably tear her apart. “Fuck,” I hissed and ran a hand roughly through my hair.
“Yeah, seems that way.” His sarcasm was unmistakable.
Tension pulsed through me.“Is that what you woke me for? To give me shit?”
“No, I came to tell you that I confirmed Athena’s story.” His jaw pulsed. “Her account hasn’t been accessed since the deposit; I have the recorded call where she asked the bank to freeze it because of suspicious activity and worried it was her almost ex-husband trying to stall the divorce.”
I tried to swallow but self-loathing swelled in my throat. Of course, Rob had told Ty to confirm the information. Like we all needed more proof that I was the fucking villain here.
“Yeah.” I stood. “Is that it? Because we have a lead I should be exploring.”
It was early-fucking-o’clock in the morning, but what the hell. Crime didn’t sleep. At least if I went to Ivans’s house this early, I wouldn’t be tempted to go back to my cabin and sit there and wait for her to wake up.
I grabbed my jacket off the back of the couch where I’d thrown it last night, my brain too scrambled to think about anything but her. The feel of her. The taste of her. God, I was so fucked. Like Lucifer imprisoned by Persephone in his own hell.
“No, it’s not.” He grabbed my arm, meeting my surprised stare. “I’m worried about you.”
My jaw locked. “Don’t be. ”
Harm was the leader of our unit—the president of our Vigilante club—but there was something about Ty that was like a father to the rest of us. Maybe because he was a little bit older than the rest of us, or maybe it was this—the way he stepped in when the rest of us took something too far. Like his duty extended beyond justice, but to take care of the rest of us, too.
“Like I said, you’re failing at hiding your feelings for Athena in an impressive way at this point,” he rumbled and then lowered his voice. “You need to stop punishing yourself for Amira.”
“Dammit.” I pinched the bridge of my nose like I could cut off the memories. “How I feel about Athena has nothing to do with Amira—Athena knows about Amira. She knows…” Too late, I realized what I’d revealed.
“You told her?” He gaped at me.
Last night was the first time I’d spoken that story out loud since…since it happened. The guys—the unit knew what happened, and Rob knew because Harm had told her, but that was it. I’d never told anyone about Amira who hadn’t been there—been a part of the fallout—until Athena.
“I had to.” I brushed him off. “After the way I treated her, she needed to know why.”
“Bullshit.”
I fought to remain unfazed. “Why else would I tell her?”
“Because you care about her,” he said simply like it was just one more of his unbreakable facts.
“Of course, I do?—”
“Because you want her to care about you.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I’m trying to keep her away from me.”
“And you’re doing that by staying with her in your cabin into the middle of the night? ”
Shit. I hissed out a breath. Of course, he saw. He saw everything.
“What do you want from me?” I said, my voice thick.
“For you to stop punishing yourself. Ryan would want it, too.”
“I’ll stop when you do the same. Just because you’re better at hiding it doesn’t mean I don’t see that we carry the same weight.” The words were out before I could stop them, but there was nothing I could do to take them back, no matter how the sudden wounded expression on his face made me want to.
Ty hadn’t only lost Ryan. After we came home, he’d signed on for one more mission with his oldest friend and mentor, and that mission had claimed his life, too.
Ty stepped in front of me. We were similarly built and matched in size, but there was an invisible weight to him—something that was both a shield and a weapon the way it protected him and wounded me.
“If I had someone who cared to fight for me—who gave me peace—I would,” he said, his voice low.
“She doesn’t—” I exhaled deeply and protested once more. “She doesn’t give me peace; she doesn’t even know who I am.”
His head lowered. “She might not know your full name, but you just told me she knows more about you than any of us.”
“No, she knows what you know.”
“Wrong,” he countered. “We know what happened. She knows what happened to you. There’s a huge fucking difference.”
I gritted my teeth, fighting against his statement. There couldn’t be a difference. She couldn’t be different.
“I’m going to check out the address,” I declared, moving away from the conversation like it was a tightly packed explosive. I reached the door before I turned and asked,“Are you coming or am I going alone? ”
“I’ll meet you out there.”
We pulled into the development right at the time when half a dozen soccer moms were out for their morning runs, all of them staring at us, leathered up on our Harleys like we were death eaters from another realm rather than bikers.
We were out of place, there was no doubt about it. Even at a slow speed, the rumble of our bikes gnawed straight through the perfectly crafted middle-class background noise. Lawn mowers. Pool splashes.
Ty followed me down the dead-end street. The houses were straight out of the American dream storybook. Two-story monstrosities landscaped to perfection. The one we were looking for was just before the cul-de-sac and obscured by two massive trees in the front lawn.
“We should make this quick,” I said after we parked at the curb. Nothing like getting the cops called on us while we were hunting a criminal they couldn’t manage to catch.
The house we wanted had a white brick exterior with all the windows drawn shut. Compared to the neighboring homes, the lawn was less kept up on. The house a little dirtier. From a distance, it fit in, but up close, it wasn’t cared for—a good indication that it wasn’t somewhere to live but somewhere to hide.
“Yeah.” Ty agreed, his stare calmly tracking every detail of our surroundings like he was preparing for another ambush. “I’ll take the front.”
“Got it.” We strode up the driveway, at the end, he veered for the path to the front door, and I ducked around back.
The upkeep was practically nonexistent behind the house. Weeds were overgrown everywhere. The grass wasn’t cut. What the hell was this place? I moved onto the concrete patio, positioning myself closer to the house and resting my hand on my weapon. I peered through the window.
Kitchen to my right. Dining table to my left. A doorway into the living room— Athena’s paintings. I tensed, seeing the stack of three propped against the couch. And then on the floor— blood.
“Dammit,” I swore and reached for the handle, the bad feeling in my gut growing when I found the door unlocked.
The smell of death was the first thing to hit me when it opened. It was the kind of smell you couldn’t forget, not when I’d breathed my fill of it overseas. I cleared the space in swift, silent movements, making my way around the island and then the table and chairs over to where blood streaked on the floor, leading me to?—
“Dare.”
I spun and instantly lowered my weapon, seeing Ty in the doorway to the living room.
“Front door was open.”
“So was the back.” I holstered my gun and stared at the two dead bodies on the floor, a gun in each of their hands. The one closest to me was face-up, blood covering the front of his shirt from three bullet holes. “It’s Brandon.” I held my breath as I bent forward and took a closer look to confirm; meanwhile, Ty crouched by the other body that was farther away.
Well, now we knew where Brandon had gone—and why we couldn’t find him. I’d have to tell Athena?—
“Dare…” Ty turned and looked at me, his expression unreadable. “It’s Ivans.”
I stilled and then straightened. No. “No,” I echoed my thoughts, moving to stand beside him. It couldn’t be… “Shit.”
It was .
Ray Ivans was dead. Shot by Athena’s ex-husband, from the looks of it.
“Shit.” I repeated the curse on a deep exhale, staring at the still body of a man we weren’t even sure was alive for almost two decades, and when we did realize he was, we weren’t sure we’d ever track him down.
I crouched and scanned the still lines of his face. The facial reconstruction he’d gone through made him appear nothing like the doctor who’d told Rob’s parents not to worry. He looked younger than he was, though gray peeked at the edge of his hairline. And from this angle, up close, the scars of his surgeries framed his face like the seal between past and present.
“I’ll call Rorik,” Ty muttered, rising and reaching for his phone.
Someone needed to break down the scene and do an autopsy on the bodies, and it was probably better that it wasn’t the police.
It seemed too easy—too unreal for the man we’d been hunting for years—to wind up dead in our laps.I should be thrilled. Fucking elated. Ivans was dead, and that meant Athena was safe. Instead, I thought about last night. I thought about the way she gave me her mouth and then her body, the taste of her sweet pussy like oxygen on my lips.
I remembered the way she’d responded to the truth about my past—the truth of what had broken me. Christ. And when Athena begged to touch me, I almost revealed the rest of my sordid trauma: that I hadn’t let a woman touch me since. But no matter how much I revealed, it changed nothing, certainly not the truth. I wasn’t her savior; I was simply the first man to break her heart.
“How many days have you ripped yourself apart over this?”
I wondered how many times I would remember her words before I forgot the sound of them from her lips or the unspoken plea to forgive myself. She couldn’t fix me. And if she knew the truth, she wouldn’t want to.
Yet,I opened up to her. I gave her part of my past and let her feel her fill. I suffered every painstaking touch, barely breathed when she found the heads of my piercings—the cross I’d nailed my celibacy to—and then died under the heat of her mouth. What kind of man was I to fuck her mouth like I had? So rough and savage. To unload so much cum I had to pull out and empty the last of it onto the grass. Sure, my cock hadn’t felt a woman’s touch in a decade, but this was more than that. This was her.
My undoing was all her.
And she’d wanted me to stay, even after all my broken pieces had cut and scraped her in order to get close.
And now, I had the proof it was safe to let her go. The thing I’d wanted from the start. Her safety. Her distance. And I should be relieved. She deserved better than me. Better than my apology. Better than all my broken shards. I was nothing more than a means to her safety, and now, my purpose was fulfilled. Finished.
So why couldn’t I stop wondering what would happen if I gave in? If I stopped walking away from her and stayed instead?
“Does this scene make sense?”
“What?” I shook off my thoughts and refocused on Ty; he was snapping photos of the crime scene with his phone, documenting all of the details so he could examine it all later.
“Does the position of their bodies seem strange to you?” He looked between the bodies. “If they shot each other, wouldn’t they both be facing up?”
My head cocked. Brandon was on his back with the three gunshot wounds to his chest, but Ivans was on his stomach.
“He was hit in his shoulder.” I point to the wound. “It could’ve made him turn as he was going down.” Possible, but was it plausible?
“I guess we’ll see what Rorik has to say,” he said, finishing up his photos. “I wonder how long they’ve been dead.”
“Brandon escaped four days ago.” I wrinkled my nose. “I’d bet around then.”
“So, Ivans busted him out of police custody and then killed him?”
“He was a loose end.” And a piece of shit. “At some point, he would’ve tied the bomb back to Ivans.”
Ty made a rumbling noise, and I couldn’t tell if it was agreement or uncertainty.
“You’ll wait for Rorik?” I said, stepping over Ivans toward the front door. “I’m going to head back.”
“To tell her?”
My lip twitched. “To take her home.”
He stilled. “You think that’s wise?”
“Brandon and Ivans are dead,” I said tightly. “She’s not in danger anymore.”
“You should wait for Rorik to confirm?—”
“Why?” I didn’t let him finish. “Even if someone else was here—if someone else did this—the only reason Athena was targeted was because of Ivans, and now he’s dead.”
“That may be?—”
“So, then what’s your concern?” I demanded.
“That you’re not thinking,” he said low.
My fist balled at my side. “This is the first clear thought I’ve had since I brought her back to Sherwood.”
She was safe. Yes, she still couldn’t see, but that didn’t require her to stay in my cabin. In my bed. She could go home. Be comfortable. Be in a place that was familiar to her. Try to get back to some semblance of her life. And then she could forget about me .
“Is it? Or are you just afraid of what will happen when she realizes who you are?”
I stilled with my hand on the doorknob. “I’m not afraid of what will happen—I know what will happen, and I’m trying to spare her any more pain.”
The past should be left in the past, and I was her past.
I turned, stalking through the door. As I closed it, I noticed a dark sedan parked across the street start its engine and slowly pull away. Goddammit, Ty. Now, instead of seeing nosy neighbors, I was seeing danger where there was none.
“Is it true?” Rob stood in the hallway, blocking my path.
My chin lowered. “Ivans is dead.”
I caught the way she shuddered, relief and rage rippling through her small form. She was happy, but she wished it had been her to face him—to end him.
“Are you okay?”
“Ty thinks there was a third shooter.” She changed topics, and her tone had me thinking she had her own ideas of who the third shooter could be.
“Ty can think what he wants,” I said and approached. “Even if there was, Ivans was the crux—the keystone of this whole damn thing. Finding him. Framing him. Whatever the hell the plan was, it ended with his life. Along with the danger to Athena’s.”
Her eyes widened. “Are you going to tell her?”
I nodded. “And then I’m going to take her home.” I walked around her, hoping to make that the end of our conversation.
“Dare… ”
I let out a breath and called the elevator, preparing myself for one more criticism—one more clear critique of my innumerable failures.
“She’s starting to see shadows.”
My head snapped to the side, the truth written all over her face:I was on borrowed time.
If I didn’t get Athena out of my life now, I’d have to tell her that one more man she’d trusted was a liar.