Chapter 2
Chapter Two
My furniture delivery was late. The truck didn’t get here until noon and it took them a few hours to unload everything. Logan shook his head at the purple couch I’d ordered as it was carried inside. The color reminded me of the suit the Joker wore in Batman. I might have been a closeted superhero nerd and the Joker was my favorite villain, but that was beside the point. The couch had been a bold choice—for me. I’d lived my whole life in bland colors and played it safe because I’d been too afraid to stand out. Look at what it had gotten me.
WITSEC had given me a new life. I couldn’t take it for granted. It was time to move forward and I was going to do that bravely and adventurously. Like Shayla. So if I wanted a purple couch, then I’d get the purple couch and the bright yellow armchair to go with it.
For the dining room, I might have gone a little overboard and splurged on a six-seater, turquoise-painted wood table. My mom had used to say the kitchen table was the heart of the home. Some of my best memories from growing up were of dinner time, with my parents and sister sitting around the table laughing while talking about anything and everything. Staring at my new table with its six empty chairs made my chest tighten. My mom had been wrong. It wasn’t the table that was the heart. It was the people who sat at it.
The rest of what I’d ordered filled my bedroom and the spare bedroom that Logan was using. I hadn’t ordered anything for the third bedroom. Logan was converting it into a panic room of sorts, with a rolling metal shutter on the window and a steel-reinforced door. It wouldn’t be a completely impenetrable panic room, but it would hopefully hold up until the police arrived. He was also setting up an impressive security system with panic buttons and cameras, which he was currently drilling into the walls outside the house. To anyone else, a panic room, cameras, and security system might have been excessive. After what I’d been through, it still didn’t feel like enough. Not with Mr. X still out there looking for me.
Now that my furniture was here, I needed to go shopping for everything else I would need, like linens and coffee mugs. Not to mention there wasn’t any food in the house.
Dressed in ripped, light blue jeans, a long-sleeved white shirt, and boots that had a knife tucked into the left one, I grabbed my purse and headed toward the front door. The delivery men were about to leave, and I was following them out. I had my long lilac hair pulled up into a high ponytail because it was hotter than Hades out. Sweat was already sliding down the back of my neck .
Outside, I could smell grills cooking, hear cicadas buzzing and rock music playing from my neighbor’s house to the right. I glanced in that direction. A few cars were parked in the street in front of their house and a group of guys were working on an old classic car in the driveway. I briefly scanned over them, counting six, some just standing around drinking beer and talking while a few actually hovered over the engine of the old car. They all appeared to be friends hanging out, carefree and having fun. Must be nice.
“Miss Pierce, I need you to sign here, confirming that everything was delivered.” One of the delivery guys held out a clipboard and pen.
Hearing my new last name instead of my real last name, McConnell, was going to take some getting used to. Standing in the middle of my lawn on the stone pathway leading to my car in the driveway, I read over the receipt, verifying I had indeed received everything I’d ordered. After I signed, I was handed a copy of the receipt and the delivery guys drove their truck away from my curb.
The sound of a drill made me glance back at the house. Logan was standing on a ladder in front of my bedroom window, drilling holes to install a camera.
“Logan, I’m running to the store!” I shouted as I made my way over to my car. The group of guys hanging out at my neighbor’s stopped talking and I got that feeling of being watched. My car and a short wall made up of oleander bushes that separated their property from mine was all that was standing between us.
Logan stopped drilling and looked over at me. “What’d you say, Shi?”
“I’m going to the store,” I said, opening my car door.
“Do you have your phone and…everything?” His gaze flicked to my neighbors behind me before pointedly looking back at me. He’d noticed we had an audience and didn’t want to ask if I was armed in front of them.
“Yup. Do you want me to pick anything up for you?”
He glanced at his watch on his wrist, taking note of the time. “No, I’m good. Check in every hour,” he ordered and returned to his drilling. I rolled my eyes as I climbed behind the wheel. How was he going to handle leaving me here to fly to North Carolina if he couldn’t handle me going to flipping Target ten minutes away?
I put my black Toyota 4Runner in reverse and when I went to look out the rearview window to back out, I caught two of the guys next door watching me. They both had the same shade of pale golden blond hair. One of them had it styled in a faux hawk where the other had that messy, I-just-rolled-out-of-bed style. Their eyes were the same color of light blue or aquamarine. I couldn’t tell from how far away I was.
They were both really attractive. If my life wasn’t messed up, I’d be crushing hard. But my life was an actual nightmare and that was why I didn’t just see two gorgeous guys when I stared at them. I only saw twins.
I looked away with a clenched jaw and backed out of the driveway.
By the time I returned home it was dark outside. Whoever said retail therapy could make you feel better was a liar. After hours of shopping and filling my car to the max, I still felt a heavy sense of dread. Friday would be here before I knew it and then I’d be alone.
Turning off the car, I sat in the darkness, staring at my new house. This wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I should have been moving into a tiny dorm room and scrambling to find my classes on a big college campus. A tear escaped my eye and I quickly wiped it away.
“So much for being brave, Shi,” I grumbled to myself. Who was I kidding? Buying brightly colored furniture didn’t make me brave. At the end of the day, I was still me.
I sighed heavily. I needed to stop beating myself up. Change and moving on took time.
But how did I move on when he was still out there?
I opened one of the bags I had on the passenger’s seat and pulled out a new pack of cigarettes and a bottle of Jack. I’d been using Shayla’s fake ID to buy booze to drown my sorrows. It was a perk of being a twin that I’d been definitely taking advantage of over the past year.
I stared at the bottle of Jack as temptation to open it gnawed at me. Sitting there, I thought back to a time I’d used to look down my nose at Shayla when she’d first told me that one of her bad-influence friends had made her the ID. She’d laugh at me now if she could see the hypocrite I’d become with how I had smoked like a chimney and drunk like a fish this past year.
I made no excuses for how I’d chosen to cope. I knew it had been bad. At the time I hadn’t cared. Therapy hadn’t been working as fast as I’d wanted it to, and I’d been desperate to numb the pain. At first Logan hadn’t said anything when he’d caught me smoking or smelled liquor on my breath. As long as I’d continued my therapy and hadn’t slacked off in self-defense training, he’d turned a blind eye. That was, until he’d found fourteen empty liquor bottles hidden under my bed. Logan had dished out some tough love then. He’d told me that my vices were just a band-aid and if I ever wanted to move on, I needed to do it the right way. He was right. I was working on quitting smoking and it’d been a while since I’d had a drink. Running helped the urge. It was a healthier outlet when things become too much to handle. Nicotine, however, was a tough drug to kick. I was slowly winning the battle, though. I was down to one cigarette a day.
I was very proud at how far I had come since I’d lost my family. But then days like today happened. With the news of Logan leaving in less than a week…I was struggling.
I broke my unblinking gaze from the bottle of Jack and set it on the passenger’s seat. It wasn’t that I had an addiction. I just needed to stop using it as a crutch.
Pulling my lighter from my purse, I got out of the car. In a lazy attempt to hide from Logan, I walked around to the back of my 4Runner and perched my butt on the bumper. I put a cigarette between my lips, set the new pack on the bumper next to me, and cupped my hand around the end of my white cancer stick as I lit it. That first drag of nicotine had me closing my eyes, dropping my head back against the rear window of my vehicle before blowing it out slowly through my lips. Without opening my eyes, I took another drag, basking in the euphoric feeling .
“Smoking kills, you know,” a masculine voice said, startling me. My eyes snapped open and I whipped my head in the direction of the source. Standing on the other side of the oleander bush was one of the twins I’d seen earlier today— the one with the messy bed-head hairstyle. I watched as his eyes roamed over me from my lilac ponytail to my boots.
“So can sneaking up on a girl at night,” I said.
His lips curled up on one side. He looked right around my age or maybe a little older. He had nice skin. It was smooth and tan, proof he lived in the desert. I probably looked like a ghost and stood out like a sore thumb here with how pale I was.
He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his dark jeans. His t-shirt was black and form fitting, which showed off how lean and fit he was. “I wasn’t exactly quiet when I approached. Then again, you seemed lost in your head for a moment there.”
I smirked. “You’re saying it’s my fault you startled me?”
He rubbed the back of his head with a shy smile. “Wow, this friendly introduction isn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be.”
I decided to cut him some slack and held out my hand over the oleander bush. “I’m Shiloh Pierce. Are you one of my neighbors?”
He stared down at my hand before engulfing it with his larger one. “Colt Stone. And yeah, I live here with my brothers.” It took a lot of effort not to react when he said brothers.
“Shi, you out here?” I heard Logan call out from the front porch. I gave Colt a small smile before stepping back to look over at Logan.
I purposely took another drag to show him I was smoking. “Yeah. I’ll be inside in a minute.” Logan noticed Colt standing behind me and crossed his arms over his chest. When I saw the evil glint spark to life in his eyes, I inwardly groaned.
“You’re not peer pressuring one of the neighbor boys into smoking, are you?” he drawled as if really serious.
“Well, you know me. My life of debauchery wouldn’t be as satisfying if I didn’t add the corruption of others,” I said, my tone sounding caustic.
Logan’s eyes went vacant for a moment before his expression turned sad. I knew that look. He got that way when I did something that reminded him of my mom. “Yeah, that sounds about right. Carry on,” he replied in a deflated tone, then turned to go back into the house.
I stared at where he’d retreated into the house for a moment, biting my bottom lip with worry until I remembered Colt standing behind me. I turned back around on my heels and found him staring at my house with a puzzled frown.
“Sorry about that,” I said, bending down to put out my cigarette on the ground and walking over to the trash bins sitting by the curb to throw out the butt. “My uncle thinks it’s funny when he tries to embarrass me.”
“Your uncle?” he said, tone riddled with surprise.
He wasn’t the first to assume that Logan wasn’t my uncle. In fact, it had happened all the time back in that small town in Alaska. Logan and I were only sixteen years apart in age and because he took extremely good care of himself, he looked a lot younger than he actually was. Everyone had mistaken him for my boyfriend and rumors had spread like wildfire because that was what happened in a small town. I’d overheard two girls whisper behind me once that Logan and I were into BDSM and that was how I’d gotten my scars, which was freaking disgusting. “Yeah, he’s my mom’s baby brother.”
Colt opened his mouth to say something but was cut off when someone yelled, “Colt!” A guy stepped out the front door of Colt’s house and glanced around. When his eyes landed on us, a look of intrigue took over his face and he walked over. “What’s going on?”
As he got closer, I got the feeling this was one of the plural brothers Colt had mentioned. They looked very similar, but he was clearly older and taller than Colt by a few inches and his eyes were brown. They had the same pale golden hair. His was shaved on the sides and styled messily on top.
“I was just introducing myself to our new neighbor. This is Shiloh. Shiloh, this is my brother Keelan.”
I reached over the oleander bush again. Keelan gave me a charming smile in return before he shook my hand. “Shiloh, huh? That’s a pretty name.” His voice was smooth and oozed flirtation.
A year ago, I would have swooned. Now, all I felt was caution. It was astonishing how something traumatic could leave you changed to certain things and boys were one of them. “Thank you.”
“Colt! Keelan! The movie is about to start!” a really deep and growly voice shouted from inside their house.
I took that as my cue to leave. “I better get inside. It was nice meeting you.”
“We better go too before Knox hunts us down,” Colt said to Keelan and took a step back. “See you around, Shiloh.”
They both gave me gorgeous parting smiles before walking back into their house. I scooped up my pack of cigarettes from the bumper and opened my trunk to start unloading my purchases.