Page 72 of The Hangman's Rope
She’d really broke down then, and I wanted to find and kill the motherfuckers all the more for her suffering.
It was an ugly business. Getting betrayed by her friend, betrayed by these men, then fucking betrayed by her own bodyall in the span of a few hours – the trauma, the worry, the heartbreak, just fucking all of it.
“I want it so they can’t ever do this to anyone else,” she said, her voice shaking… “I just don’t know if I can go through it. All of it. The lies that will be told and the excuses they’ll make.”
She looked up at me, her tear-stained face a beautiful thing, her eyes wide with fear and something else I couldn’t name. I was about to say something when the kettle finally started to whistle on the stove.
I pulled back from her, went around the kitchen island, and pulled it off the flame of the gas burner.
I was quiet as I poured the scalding water into the cup, watching the tea bag suffuse the water with color.
I set the kettle on an unused burner and sighed.
“There’s another way,” I told her, and I turned back in her direction, pressing my hands flat to the counter and leaning on them, silently willing her to understand what I was offering.
“If what you’re suggesting is that you find them and kill them for what they’ve done to me…” she trailed off, was quiet for a long moment, and then she raised her eyes to mine and said, “I want that… but not if it is going to cost you anything. I don’t want you to hurt yourself on my account… go back to a place,” her eyes dropped to my dog tags, “that you maybe never wanted to go back to. I don’t wantthat…but if it won’t hurt you?—”
I gathered her hands off the kitchen island into mine and held them. She dragged her eyes back to mine and I smiled.
“Baby, I never dreamed you would ask, but legitimately now that you have – it’d be my pleasure to deal with these fucksticks so that you never have to; ever again.”
Her face looked surprised, her lips parting slightly with the emotion. She sat, softly stunned, and swallowed hard.
“You’d do that for me?” she asked quietly.
“Was going to with or without your blessing,” I said evenly. “You just made it easier.” I shrugged crisply, a quick rise and drop of my shoulders.
“Why?” she asked simply and I swallowed and slid the cup of steeping tea carefully in her direction. She took it between her hands, warming them on the mug and dropped her eyes to stare down into it.
“Several reasons,” I told her honestly. “We don’t need Savannah getting a reputation for this drug floating around – scares the tourists away and it’s bad for business. We don’t want this kind of heat and scrutiny going up by local or national law enforcement, either. That’d likewise be bad for business… the main reason, at least for me – I can’t speak for my brothers – is that I like you, Lorelai. Maybe even more than that… hell,definitelymore than that at this point. I already told you; I love you. As far as these streets are concerned, that makes you mine. They hurt my baby girl. That’s enough of a reason for me to do some overdue violence.”
“It wouldn’t bother you at all, would it?” she asked. “Hurting them.”
I shook my head slowly and evenly, holding her gaze with mine.
“You make me soft, Sweetpea. You see a side of me no one has in a very long time, if ever… now I’ve got to ask, now that you’re getting a better picture of the kind of monster I am – are you okay? Because you know I’d never hurtyou, right?”
She stared at me, speechless, her eyes wide and those lush lips of hers parted slightly and she whispered, “I love you, too. You make me feel safe like no one ever has… and I think… I think part of that isbecausedeep down I knew it. I always have known that you’re capable of great violence… and I still trust you, and that you wouldn’t hurt me. You’ve had plenty of opportunity, have you not?”
“I have,” I agreed, gravely.
“And yet you haven’t… hurt me, that is, you’ve ever kept me safe.”
I nodded, and we stared at each other for several moments in a silence I could neither declare comfortable nor uncomfortable.
“I want to watch you hurt them,” she finally confessed. “I want to see them as afraid as they made me… I want to watch the light go out and I want to know for a fact that they can’t and won’t hurt anyone else the way that they hurt me. I want to watch you take from them everything they took from me and more.”
Her voice shook and dripped with a venom, a poison, that let me know that she was deadly serious.
“That can be arranged,” I said softly, shifting my stance carefully. I didn’t want her to see how much she’d just turned me the fuck on with her thirst for blood and vengeance. I was afraid that would be a thing to make her falter in her stance, which was pretty fucking loud and clear.
I turned away from her and pulled a beer out of the fridge, twisting off the top. I turned back and held it out in a toast. She raised her tea and clicked it with the glass bottle.
“To watching some motherfuckers burn for their sins before they even get to Hell,” I said dryly.
She looked slightly pained, but also grave.
“To a long life before I join them,” she murmured.
