Chapter 12
Iopen the door, blurry-eyed a few days later, after a far too blissful few nights with Knox, to see Ralston standing with two other men. As always, he has a disgusting and jovial grin on his face, like the world owes him everything and he knows it.
Fucking dick.
“Well, at least you’re knocking this time,” I mutter, crossing my arms.
“Your boyfriend put a new lock on the door,” he says, stepping in and walking straight past me, leaving the other two men. “Is he here?”
“No, and he’s not my boyfriend.”
“That’s the thing,” Ralston turns, eyes suddenly incredibly dark and dangerous. “I don’t trust you, and I don’t trust that club. You’re going to stop seeing that man while you’re working for me.”
"Like hell."
He sees my face, steps closer. "This isn’t a fucking joke, Callie."
"Does it look like I’m joking?" My nails bite into my arms. I try to look past him, focus on the hideous beige walls.
“You’re going to do as I’m asking, because if you don’t, I will take your brother out. Or have you forgotten about him while you’re throwing your legs in the air for that biker?”
I scowl, my face tight. “I’m with him for my brother, remember?”
He makes a tsk tsk noise, walks into the kitchen, and sets his phone on the counter. “You’re worse at lying than your shithead brother, but that’s not the point. The point is, you’re done with the club.”
“No,” I say firmly, as if I have a choice.
Ralston stares into me for a good ten seconds, then smiles, pulls something from his jacket. It’s a small black USB drive. He tosses it onto the counter. “I thought you’d decide to make this difficult.”
I stare at it, confused. “What the hell is that?”
“I didn’t want to have to hurt you, Callie, but considering you’re refusing to listen, I am left with no choice.”
He pushes the USB across the counter with one thick finger, like it’s a bomb ready to go off. “I suggest you watch it before you see your boy again.” He’s still smiling, but it’s the kind you see on a dog right before it bites.
I stare at the thing. “Why?"
Ralston shrugs. “You’ll see, and when you’re done watching, we can finish this conversation.”
“What if I say no?” I snap. “Or go fuck yourself?”
He steps closer, crowding my space. “You think you know what you want, but you’re about to find out otherwise. I can promise you, Callie, once you see that, you’ll thank me for this little intervention.”
“Fuck you,” I mumble, but he’s already heading out, his goons wordless behind him.
The door slams. My kitchen smells like aftershave, and I fight the urge to clean again, just to get the smell of him out of here.
I stare down at the drive, then pick it up.
My hands are shaking. I don’t know if I want to see whatever is on here, and yet my curiosity tells me I’m going to watch it, even if I shouldn’t.
My laptop is stuffed somewhere in the car—so I step outside and tiptoe across the gravel. I pop the trunk and grab the laptop. My hands never stop shaking, not even when I get back inside and put in the USB. No folder names, just a single .mp3 file. “PLAY ME,” the title says. Real subtle.
I double-click.
Static. Then a voice—two men, both distorted, but I know one of those voices so well. Knox.
“We got him running the shipment,” the other man says, a voice I don’t recognize.
“Yeah,” Knox’s voice, cold, efficient, nothing like the way he talks to me.
“He’s an idiot, but he’s perfect for this.
I need him gone, out of the picture. Harper’s not the same since he’s been around.
She’s up to something, and the two of them are going to get in trouble, or worse, killed.
I don’t know what they’re doing, but that fucker is an addict and I don’t want him around. ”
A pause.
“Long as it doesn’t land on me, we’re good, brother.”
“It won’t. I’ve got it all covered. Just make sure Ruger goes down clean. If he brings anyone else into it, I’ll do what I have to,” Knox murmurs, low.
The air goes out of my lungs.
I listen now, numb, as they keep talking—details of the route, set times, names I barely recognize. At one point, Knox laughs. It’s a hard sound, nothing like how he laughs with me.
The file ends.
I don’t move for a full five minutes. When I finally do, it’s to close the laptop and set my forehead against it, trying to breathe through what I just heard. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it is a misunderstanding.
I know I’m not wrong.
It was clear as day what I heard.
My brother’s in prison because of Knox. He lied. He set Ruger up. He did it for Harper, but that is beside the point. He has spent the last month lying to me, fucking me, making me fall for him when all along, he knew why my brother was gone and he did nothing to change it.
He didn’t tell me, he didn’t even try.
Not to mention Ruger and Harper were up to something together, another blow, another betrayal from the people I love the most. Everything in me is ice and glass. I want to throw up, or smash something, or just cry from the sheer broken pain in my chest.
He let me fall in love with him, and all along he has been lying.
I drill my nails into my palms and try to figure out if I want him dead, or if I want to crawl into his lap and scream in his face until he gives me his heart so I can crush it in my fist. Either way, this pain is unlike anything I have ever felt.
It is bitter, broken, and empty.
My phone pings beside me, and I look down to see a message from Knox.
Morning sunshine, thinkin’ about those sweet lips. Ride?
That actually hurts, so badly a pained noise is ripped from my throat.
He is acting like we could be something, like one day, when this is all said and done, I might mean something to him but the stark reality is, I will never mean a single fucking thing to Knox. I am a plaything, something for him to do to bypass time.
If I mattered, he would have told me.
I don’t fucking matter.
Harper was the only one who mattered.
Not me.
Never me.
I AM A QUARTER OF A bottle down, some cheap alcohol I found in my uncle's cupboard, when the rumbling of a bike alerts me that Knox is coming. I have ignored every message, every call, and I knew eventually he would show up.
So, I have sat here, on the porch, drinking the pain away, but only making it a million times worse.
It hurts.
I’m angry.
I want to scream.
I hear his boots hitting the front steps before I see him—slow, measured, deliberate, that I-own-the-world way he carries himself. I want to disappear into the planking, fall through the porch and into some fucking alternate reality where none of this has ever happened.
The door creaks and then he’s there. He just stares at me for a second, all that lazy confidence, like he could just walk back in and everything would go back to normal.
“You’ve been hiding out?” he says finally, boots thumping across the porch.
I don’t answer him.
I don’t even look at him.
I roll the bottle from one palm to the other, staring out past the yard.
“What the fuck is going on?” His eyes flick to the bottle.
I set the bottle down, stand, and refuse to look at him.
He grunts, like he’s getting impatient, but I guess even he can feel this is different. “Callie.”
I just turn and walk straight through the doorway and into the house.
I don’t even check to see if he’ll follow.
I know he will. I grab the laptop off the counter and jam the USB in.
My hands are shaking, but I don’t care if he sees that.
The audio file is still there—just sitting, taunting me.
Knox comes up behind me, looming. I can hear him breathing.
“You want to tell me what the fuck is going on?” His voice is already changing, sharpening.
I turn the laptop toward him and hit play.
The voices fill the kitchen, and it’s like being punched in the stomach all over again. I watch his face as he hears it, sees the words he never wanted me to know play out aloud, the version of himself he’s careful not to show me, laid out in jagged black and white.
He doesn’t look away. He doesn’t flinch. He just stands there, jaw going hard, every line in his face turning to stone. It ends in silence. The fucking worst kind, the kind that’s heavy as an avalanche, waiting for me to breathe, waiting for me to do something, anything at all.
I wipe my face, because I don’t want to cry but my cheeks are already wet. I grab the bottle and hurl it at him. It bounces off and hits the floor, randomly smashes, glass sprinkling across the room. I wish it had taken out a chunk of his heart the way he just took out mine.
I finally speak, “Did you ever plan on telling me? Or was I just going to be your little toy until you managed to forget about Harper long enough to satisfy yourself?”
He doesn’t answer right away. He looks at the broken glass, then at me, those wolf eyes so goddamn empty it breaks me all over again. “It ain’t what you think.”
I laugh. It’s a deranged little noise that makes me sound as crazy as I feel. “You set up my brother. You lied. You made me fall for you and you did all this, knowing exactly what you were doing and why. You fucking asshole.”
“It ain’t what you think,” he says again, his voice so low it’s gravelly and deep.
“No,” I cry. “No. You don’t get to stand there and pretend you’re the good man when you’ve been lying to me from the second we met. Tell me, when were you going to end it with me? Once Ralston was finished? When you got bored? Maybe a little longer?”
Something flickers in his face. “I had no fuckin’ choice.”
I laugh again. “Oh, how fucking original.”
He steps forward, crowding me, and for the first time ever I am not comforted by his size, his heat, the way he smells. I want to shove him through the wall. I want to run. “You don’t know the whole story.”
I scream it, knuckles white on the counter behind me. “You put my brother in prison for something he didn’t do. He didn’t deserve that, Knox. He never deserved it. He is a good person, broken maybe, but good. Then you fucking lied to me, you lied and you made me fall in...”
My voice trails off, breaking on a sob.
He doesn’t answer. He just stands there with his hands fisted.
My voice is shaking so bad I can’t even control it, but I force myself to keep going.
“You made me trust you,” I say, air rasping through my teeth.
“You made me believe you weren’t like everyone else and then you just—” I cut myself off. “You lied. You. Lied.”
“I did what I had to,” he growls. “I didn’t know you then, don’t you fuckin’ understand that. It wasn’t about you.”
“It is about me. He is my brother. You are fucking me every night. If you cared, you would have told me. You would have—something, anything! You let me look you in the eye and you let me believe you were on my side.”
He slams his open hand against the counter, so hard something falls off and lands on the floor with a crash. “I didn’t know you were goin’ to matter. You were never supposed to mean a goddamn thing to me!”
“Well, lucky for you, you don’t have to worry about that anymore,” I choke out, not even trying to keep it together anymore.
There is dead silence, nothing but his heavy breathing.
“He is all I have. He got locked away and Harper died and I had no one. I came here, and I thought...fuck, I thought I had found a family again but all along, you were just using me to cover up your filthy lies.”
He doesn’t answer. There is a raw edge to his jaw, like if he bites down any harder he’ll break his own teeth.
He reaches out for me, but I jerk away so fast I nearly fall.
He makes a noise, low and gutted, and drags his hands over his face.
“I did it for Harper,” he says finally, “the two of them were in too deep and because of that, he was goin’ to get her killed. Only way to keep them both alive.”
“And how the fuck did that work out for you?” I cry.
He flinches and I know I hit him where it hurts, but I don’t fucking care.
“You’re just the same as every other lying piece of shit man in my life. You didn’t do anything for me, you did it to get me out quicker so I couldn’t find the truth. Get out of my house.” My voice cracks. “Get out. I mean it. I don’t want to see you ever again.”
His face is a stonewall. “Callie...”
“No,” I scream. “Get out.”
He looks at me for one more fleeting second, his face unreadable, then he turns and leaves. The porch door slams so hard the glass shudders, and then I hear his boots, the engine of his bike, and just like that he’s gone.
I let my knees buckle, and I fall against the counter, sobbing so hard I can’t breathe. My hands shake, and I clutch the edge of the counter, slide to the floor, arms around my stomach like maybe I could keep my heart from falling out of my chest. But it already has.
I cry until I’m raw, until my voice is gone. Then I crawl on hands and knees through the glass and stare at the broken pieces on the floor, because that’s all there ever is. That’s all that’s left.
Me, and the broken things I keep choosing to love.