Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Christian
“For fuck’s sake,” someone says, the disapproving hiss swimming through my semi-conscious mind. “There you are.”
A firm hand shoves at my shoulder, shaking me free of the foggy nightmare I’ve been trapped inside.
What the fuck?
I force my eyes open, and instantly regret it. The morning sunlight feels like a glass shard straight to my fucking retina. Squinting, I turn my head away from the window.
I wince. It doesn’t help that Jackson’s ugly-ass face is two inches away from mine.
“Damn, what happened to your neck?” he asks, pulling air through his teeth.
Last night, I found an ancient first aid kit in one of the drawers and roughly patched myself up. Thankfully, she missed every major artery—though, I suspect that’s only because I moved at the exact moment she lunged. “Eve stabbed me with a letter opener.”
“Wow, respect,” Jackson laughs. “That girl has some serious balls.”
“Did you want something?” I hiss, the wound on my neck throbbing now that I’m conscious.
He moves over to the kitchenette and starts making an espresso. “You weren’t answering your phone. We’ve been looking for you everywhere. Skye finally told us where you were.”
As I pull myself up into a sitting position, an empty whiskey bottle rolls off my lap and hits the carpeted floor with a dull thud.
“ Damn ,” I breathe, stretching my sore muscles. This couch is not comfortable. It may actually pull out into a bed, but I was too drunk last night to manage all that, so I fell asleep where I sat.
My mind wanders to Eve. Last night, she took the envelope and left, the finality of our conversation hitting me like a punch to the gut. After I patched myself up, I grabbed the nearest bottle of whiskey and poured it down my throat. That was the only way to keep myself from chasing after her, which is what every fucking cell in my body was screaming for me to do.
But even completely wasted, I couldn’t escape the carousel of images cycling through my brain—the shock on her face, the horror, then finally the pain when she realized how deeply I’d hurt her.
I’m the worst fucking monster…
“Drink this,” Jackson says, shoving a tiny cup of black espresso in my face. “Cash said he needs to talk to us urgently.” Then he pulls out his phone and shoots off a text to someone. “Okay, I told Cash where we are. He’s walking over now.”
Gulping down the espresso, I set the cup down and rise to my feet. Mistake number three. A migraine instantly blooms behind my temples, and suddenly my brain feel like it’s inside a fucking rock tumbler. “What happened last night? I took off to find Eve after the gunshots rang out.”
My thoughts in that moment were only for Eve, and when I couldn’t find her, my entire world, all the chaos around me, shrunk to a single pinpoint of focus— find her, keep her safe.
Jackson starts making another espresso. “It was fuckin’ chaos, man. Turns out, it was Yates and Diaz who fired off the shots. Campus security called the cops, but Andre dealt with it.”
Good. It’s what we pay them to do.
“Who got shot?” I ask, rubbing my temples. I only know it wasn’t Sin. I saw him as I was leaving the beach. “Any of our guys?”
Jackson leans against the counter and takes a sip of his espresso. “Not one of ours,” he says cryptically, purposely not filling in the blanks.
“Are you going to tell me who did get shot?” I ask through gritted teeth. I’m on edge this morning, and seconds away from fucking losing it.
“One of Sin’s guys.”
Fuuuck.
Tilting my head back, I rake a hand through my hair. God- fucking -damn. I look at Jackson. “Is he dead?”
“He took it in the shoulder.” He drains the espresso, then sets the cup aside.
“Where’s Eve?” I ask.
“She went straight up to your bedroom last night.”
“Lucas straight up wants to kill the motherfucker for what he pulled last night, but I said we needed to talk to you first. Something like that is likely to start an all-out war, which means all the Sacred Sons need to sign off on it.”
Fuck. My head is both pulsing and spinning. “Yeah, th—” My words are cut off when Cash comes waltzing through the open door.
“Heyo!” he calls out, stopping short when he gets a look at me. “ Oh, damn ,” He glances at Jackson. “What the fuck happened to him?”
“Eve stabbed him.”
Cash nods. “Sounds like something she’d do.”
Sitting back down on the couch, I rest my forearms on my thighs and rub my eyes. This is the worst hangover I’ve had in a really long time. I can hardly think. It’s fucking brutal.
“Actually, Eve is the reason I need to talk to you,” Cash says.
That snags my attention, and I look up at him. “What is it?”
“Well, I have good news and I have bad news. Which do you want first?” He pauses. “Actually, scratch that. One is dependent on the other, so let’s start with the good news—I’ve found your would-be assassin.”
I angle my head, headache forgotten. My muscles tense. “Who?”
“Yeah, see that’s the bad news,” Cash says, looking between Jackson and me. “It was one of you.”
“Great job, Sherlock,” Jackson laughs. “We already knew it had to be a member?—”
I stand up slowly, talking over Jackson. “Give me a name, Cash.”
He stares at me for a second, like he already knows I’m not going to like what he says next. “It was Lucas.”
I don’t even hesitate. I launch myself at Cash so quickly, he doesn’t have time to react. I grab him by the collar and slam him against the conference table hard . “What the fuck did you just say?”
“Don’t shoot the messenger,” Cash says with a smile, hands held up in surrender. “Just delivering the facts.”
Jackson’s hand is on my shoulder, trying to pry me off Cash. “Christian, let him fucking explain.”
I stare into Cash’s face, jaw clenched, muscles pulled tight as I shove him and take a step back. “You’re wrong,” I bark. “You’ve gotten your facts twisted.”
Cash straightens and brushes out the wrinkles in his shirt. “For your sake, I wish that were true. I really do, man.”
“Lucas wouldn’t do something like that, not without talking to me first,” I say. My brother is capable of doing some really dark shit—we all are—but there’s no way he’d try to kill Eve. No fucking way.
Cash leans forward and pulls something out of his back pocket, tossing it onto the table. It’s an EpiPen. “I found that in his bedroom, for one. Hidden under some laundry.”
I look down and read the name on the label—Evangeline Savano. I shake my head. “This was obviously planted in my brother’s room.”
“You were snooping around in our fucking bedrooms?” Jackson asks, angry.
“You asked me to do a job, and I did it.” Cash pulls a slip of paper out of his pocket and tosses it next to the EpiPen. “And I found that in his trash.”
My heart thuds as I pick up the slip of paper. It’s a receipt for almond milk purchased at the campus store on the morning of the incident. Lucas hasn’t touched almond milk a day in his fucking life, and as far as I know, Wyn doesn’t drink it either. He’d have no reason to buy it.
Still, none of this proves shit.
“Someone could have put these in his room,” I say, crumpling the receipt up and letting it fall to the floor. “Do you have something concrete, or is all of your evidence bullshit?”
Cash glances down at his knuckles, rubbing them. I notice they’re red, busted up. “Some guy named Austin said it was Lucas who took the tray up to Eve that morning.” He shakes his head. “Man, that guy was hard to crack, though. He really didn’t want to tell me. Your members are very loyal. I’m impressed.” Cash drops his hand and laughs. “I always get to the truth, eventually, though.”
My mind is chaos, thoughts twisting like a cyclone in my head. “There’s no fucking way Lucas did this,” I say. “I don’t give a fuck what Austin said.”
That guy is fucking dead for bringing my brother into this.
“I had a feeling you’d be hard to convince, so I also got the name of a witness who saw Lucas in the kitchen that morning,” he says on a sigh.
Pulling his phone out, he unlocks it and turns the screen toward Jackson and me. It’s a blurry photo of a couple of members fucking around in the kitchen, cheesing for the camera. In the background, someone who looks a lot like Lucas is walking up the back staircase, and he has something in his hands that looks suspiciously like a tray.
I blink at the image, my mind struggling to believe it. But I can’t deny it now. The EpiPen, the receipt, Austin’s account, the photo...
“Why didn’t you start with the photo, dude?” Jackson yells, pissed. “You could have fucking led with that...”
“I was building a fucking narrative,” Cash yells back. “Goddamn. There’s an art to this shit. You can’t just spring a photo on someone…”
Their bickering fades into the background as I pace the length of the office, struggling to make sense of what I just saw. Lucas has been against this shit with Eve since the begining, but to go to these lengths to get rid of her… why?
Rage pulses through me. The fact that my own damn brother tried to hurt Eve…I can’t fucking reconcile that.
“ Fuck, ” I yell, turning to punch the nearest wall. My knuckles throb as I pull back, leaving a dent in the plaster. “Where is he?”
Cash shrugs, and Jackson is just staring at me, face tight, like he knows the answer but is trying to decide if telling me is worth the shitstorm it’s going to cause. “You need to calm the fuck down before we confront him. There could be a reason?—”
I push up on him and get directly in his face, my tone lethal. “Where the fuck is my brother, Jackson? Tell me now before I start cracking skulls to find out.”
Silence.
Then, finally, he says, “This morning, we couldn’t find you. And I guess he’d talked to Andre, because he told me about the text you sent, allowing Eve to leave. I said I’d continue looking for you, and Lucas said…” He rubs the back of his neck, avoiding my eyes. When he finally speaks, his voice is rough, quiet, like he’s already regretting what he’s about to say. “He said he’d look for Eve and take her home himself…”
Fuck. I reel back, my world suddenly tilting on its axis. The ground shifts beneath my feet.
He has her.
“Where?” I bite out, the single word carrying the weight of every emotion churning inside me—rage, fear, confusion—and the razor-sharp edge of determination that cuts through it all.
“I…don’t know,” Jackson says. “But Christian, listen?—”
I’m out the door and halfway down the hall before Jackson can even finish his sentence. If there’s one thing I know with bone-deep certainty, it’s this—if Lucas is alone with Eve, then it’s already too late…