Fuck. Their faces.Why had I said those words? Why hadn’t I thought of something else?
Because,a small voice in my mind reminds me,you knew they would never let you go if they knew the truth.
Soul heavy and head weary, I stumble towards the bed. I don’t even bother to strip off the clothes I’d worn to the football game. I crawl beneath the sheets, wishing I’d brought something of the guys’ things with me. A jacket that I could pull closer and bury my face in as reality settles around me and I resist the urge to cry. Instead, all I have is the smell of clean sheets that have likely never been used before and an ugly, hollow pit in my stomach.
35
NOLAN
Ithrottle the bike beneath me until it goes from a rumbling purr to a massive roar. The lone headlight at the front washes a beam of light across the black pavement, illuminating a path straight through the trees on the back road set in the middle of bumfuck nowhere a few miles outside of Silverwood’s town limits. My fingers clamp down on the handlebars, tighter… tighter…
Her face flashes across my mind’s eye and I grit my teeth, jerking up. The front wheel pops up off the black asphalt and my body tilts as I grind my heels and force the body of my Indian to remain in a straight line. A moment later, the tire slams back into the ground and I speed up. The dial of the speedometer shakes and slides all the way over, rising higher and higher, bypassing eighty… ninety… almost a hundred miles per hour.
Fuck her. Fuck her and her perfect lying mouth.
Again, I’m thinking about her. I can’t seem to stop myself. She’s in my head and under my skin. Two days after her betrayal, and I can still smell her on my sheets even after several washes. She’s branded on my fucking soul and that can only mean one thing—that this thing between us is far from over.
I plan. I’m a planner. A schemer. I want something and I make it mine, no matter the consequences. Silverwood is a cesspool of violence and cold exploitation. I’ve had the goal of getting out for so long and nowomanis going to stop me.
Still, I thought she’d at least show up to school today. I thought we’d see her, we’d know then if it was real or not, but no. There’s been no sign or sight of her. It’s not right. None of this fucked-up town is right.
From the moment people had willfully ignored Sancho Medicci’s abuse of his wife and son simply because he was ‘good for the community’, I’d known it. It wasn’t just him, but Darrio and my own father too. People are inherently selfish and when they’re gathered into communities like this? They’re worse.
No one wants to get involved. The more people there are around, the less likely anyone is to actually do something about a wrong. They simply close their eyes and hope someone else comes along and stops it. No one wants to stick their neck out or they run the risk of it getting snapped.
It’s always beenusversusthem. Kids against adults. Rich against poor. Men against women. You find your team and you fight against whoever you don’t fucking trust.
She found us—we found her.So, why ruin it now?
Juliet might have tried to play it off, she might have said she didn’t want what we offered, but I know the truth. She fought us. She didn’t trust us and it wasn’t until we showed her we would always come for her that she finally softened.
She’s not the type to walk away that easily. Something—orsomeone—forced her.
I straighten on the bike as the cold wind whips past me, over my shoulders and through my leather jacket, biting past the fabric to fill me with the sensation of needles piercing flesh. We’ve never been this fucked up. Lex is lost. The shock of losing her, of her walking away, has sent him so far into his ownmessed-up head that he can’t see reason. He refuses to pick up the phone and I’ve had to resort to breaking into his house to check on him.
He’s not there and the only hint I have that he’s even still alive is the note he left, telling me not to try and stop him. I don’t know what he’s even planning. I’ve lost all of the insight I had into my own men. Gio is MIA and though he’s more receptive to my texts and phone calls, it’s one-word answers and a hollow tone.
We’re broken and she’s the reason.
I drop back down onto the front of my bike and throttle the engine again. The dial on the speedometer shakes as I shoot forward, climbing a set of rolling hills and rounding a bend so fast that the bike slants to the side. My body tenses as my knee comes within an inch of the pavement on the curve before I straighten back up.
Out here, in the backwoods where there are no lights and no people, the darkness creeps in along the edges of my periphery, growing closer and closer. Almost as if I’m being chased by all of the bad things I could potentially do, each of them craving to sink into me and force me to do their bidding. I can’t let them catch me. If they do, it’s all over. Not just for me, but for Lex and Gio, too.For her.
I have to fix this.
In the distance, lights glow back at me, a beacon that lures me away from the encroaching violence that threatens to steal my sanity, my logic. For a moment, I’m not sure if I want to seek it out.
There’s something entrancing about the shadows. The bike beneath me slows—one hundred… ninety… eighty… miles per hour. The moon hangs heavy and fat above my head, swollen and glowing. My eyes flick up towards it and for a moment, Iwish I were religious. I wish I believed in a big man sitting above me in the sky with all of the answers.
What the fuck am I supposed to do?
The question echoes in my mind, a plea reaching out across space and time to an unknown entity that may or may not answer. It’s stupid. No one is there. If they were, then they’re just as bad as the abusers and rapists and monsters they watch and do nothing about.
The lights in front of me grow larger and larger, swelling until I forget about the moon and my own spiritual argument entirely. With a frown, I throttle back and stare into the twin beams directly in front of me. It takes a moment for my muddled mind to catch up with what it is. A truck in the center of the fucking highway.
“Shit!” I veer to the side as it barrels down the road, swerving through the center with massive blacked-out windows and black-and-silver chrome. The wheels of my Indian shriek against the pavement as I spin, coming to a heart-thumping stop.
Several yards down the road, the massive crew cab stops as well. Red taillights glowing as the driver places it into park and pops the driver’s side door open. With a curse, I punt the kickstand down with my foot and reach up, yanking off my helmet.
