by Ace Gray
“I’m proud of you son.” He didn’t hand out those words often. Almost never actually. But that wasn’t why it sat wrong on my shoulders.
“Just take her.” The words tasted wrong and bitter in my mouth, but I said them anyway.
I looked over at her from under my eyelashes and she’d crumbled in my father’s arms. I’d tried to tell her I was dark. That I was wrong and immoral and fucked up. I’d tried to make her listen but she just wouldn’t. That was how we ended up here.
My heart slammed against my chest, countering with its own brand of violence. Nothing in me wanted to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, we’d ended up here for a different reason. One that landed squarely on my shoulders.
She’s a Ryan, I reminded myself.
My dad started to pull her out of the coffee shop. She screamed my name again, but when I didn’t flinch, she started to fight. She jerked against him, kicked against him but he didn’t waver. She screamed and a few people murmured about 911 but when I shot them a glare no one actually reached for their phones.
I shoved my hands in my pockets and tried to shove my feelings down with the same force as I watched him manhandle her flailing body on the way to the black SUV idling at the curb. As soon as he shoved her in the door, the vehicle started shaking on its shocks. I smiled when I imagined her clawing at his skin to draw blood or shoving the heel of her hand into his nose. I got a little hard at the idea too.
But then they pulled away.
My heart slammed into my chest again, this time so brutal it took my breath. I clutched at my chest only to remember how her hand had curled into my chest last night. How watching her drive away last night had been a brand of torture all its own. Yes, she was a Ryan but she wasn’t a monster and I damn well knew it. She was mine.
As soon as I realized, I bolted out of the coffee shop. The fresh stitches Emmett had sewn let me know just what a terrible idea that was but I didn’t slow down. I shoved through the people on the sidewalk, breaking into a run whenever I could. When I saw the SUV stopped at a light, I broke into a sprint.
I didn’t know what I’d do when I got there, or what blood price I’d have to pay to have her, I just knew I regretted letting her slip from my fingers. And I was horrified at the thought of her pretty little corpse laying in my dining room.
Just when I was close enough to grab the door, to grab her, the light turned green and the car pulled away. The hot metallic of the handle even brushed my fingertips. But then they were gone. I tried to run again, but each step jolted my bones. Each step seared.
When the car turned the final corner and disappeared out of sight, my heart panicked, fluttering in my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. Not past what I’d done anyway. Because it was me who’d done it. I’d pursued her, seduced her. I’d craved her and caved to her. Then when it mattered most, I stepped back and acted like none of it matter.
Hopelessness drug me down to my knees there on the sidewalk. I hunched over and buried my head in my hands. The hollowness inside me was its own kind of awful pain. It reminded me of the night on the lake...
“No,” I murmured to myself.
I’d turned myself to stone after that. I’d worked at it. I couldn’t feel what I’d felt for Rosalyn about another woman. I wouldn’t.
But the vision shifted and it was Filly with her neck slit open as my father carried her across the ice. It was her body that sunk into the water when the ice shattered around her. It was her fingertips I felt when my lungs burned so badly I knew that the reaper was coming for me too. I saw her drift into the darkness of the lake and of my heart and I knew.
I had tried not to feel what I felt for Roz ever again, and on a technicality, I had succeeded. Because when it came to Filly, I felt more. I felt too much more, and I was fucking terrified.
“Stop!” I screamed at a decibel that hurt even my ears. “Get your hands off me.”
I fought with every small ounce I had. Shoving, kneeing, putting my manicure to use. Everything my dad and uncles had ever taught me about self-defense played out in that backseat.
None of it mattered.
Brye’s father held me tight, leveraging his body to handcuff my wrists. I didn’t stop moving, I didn’t surrender. He hooked me through the headrest of the front seat and I yanked and fought so hard that the man seated up front shook like he was on a roller coaster.
I twisted my body just in time to see Brye beside us, his chest heaving as he reached for the door. We were a few blocks from the coffee shop and he’d run for me. He’d come to rescue me. I fought all the harder and screamed.
A palm crushed to my face a second later, choking off the sound. My body crashed back into Brye’s father’s body and my arms went tight, steel biting at my wrists. He shoved his tie in my mouth then his elbow into my chest. I sucked in at the sudden pain and almost swallowed the silk in my mouth. It was disorienting and I automatically yanked on my wrists to free my airway.
Handcuffs clanked against the headrest then cut into me. I panicked and sucked the silk down further. I managed to compose myself long enough to start spitting it out. After a quick sip of air, I got the rest out.
He snatched the fabric and dove for my feet while I was still gasping for air. I couldn’t fight him as he bound my ankles, not while I was fighting to breathe. He had my legs bound a moment later; he’d obviously had practice. The damp fabric dug into my skin.
“You’re a monster,” I spat.
His smile turned up, but he didn’t answer me. The way it curled as it pulled up his cheeks said plenty. And a moment later his blast of an elbow to my temple kept me from replying. Kept me from anything at all as my whole world went black.
“What are you going to do with her?” I asked my father as he sat cleaning dirt out from under his nails with a machete at the head of the dining room table. “Or what have you already done?” I tried to swallow the lump in my throat.
“I haven’t decided yet.” He cleaned his last two nails before he even looked up at me. And when he finally did, he arched an eyebrow. “You care what happens to her,” he leveled the accusation at me.
“She’s a Ryan,” I offered up a non-answer with a shrug.
“That she is.” His gaze narrowed. “And I’d like to know why you had her and didn’t bring her to me.”
My insides clenched and I forced myself to stay quiet long enough to think through an answer. Each of my words were a gamble with both of our lives.
“I didn’t know,” I said smoothly, deliberately.
“Hmmmm,” he mused. “In and of itself a problem.”
“I gave her over as soon as you asked.”
“That you did.” He rose from his chair and began to walk toward me, swinging his machete as if it were nothing but a child’s toy in his hand.
I swallowed hard. My body bore all too many scars from my father. Each doled out when he was furious, or worse, disappointed.
“But were you going to?” He flicked the knife up to my cheek and I felt the blade against the scruff of my cropped beard. “Emmett said you care for her.”
Emmett was asking for his own type of punishment. “I’m a MacCowan, I care for money, drugs, sex, and power. Not her, never her.” I made sure to force ambivalence into my voice.
He flicked the machete from my skin, leaving a trail of heat along my flesh. The absence of a sting told me that he hadn’t drawn blood. Yet.
He studied me for a second, seeing what I wasn’t sure. Then with cat-like reflexes, he spun the machete in his hand to grip the blade rather than the handle. His entire face pinched and he became the definition of fury as it vibrated off him in waves.
“We’ll see about that.” His voice rumbled just before he swung at me. The thick wooden handle cracked into my temple and pain shot blinding through my brain just a moment before my whole world went dark.
You cannot go to Chicago.
My dad’s words thumped in time with my head in the groggy darkness. I’d never thou
ght to ask why. They were being overprotective, dramatic. Irrational or full of prejudice even.
Monsters don’t hide under your bed. They’re out there. And sometimes in plain sight.
My parents were nothing but love and light, art and poetry. My childhood was a fairy tale. They’d warned me but the bubble of bliss and magic they fostered never hinted that they were serious. I didn’t believe…
But I opened my eyes to find every nightmare I’d never thought to have wrapped in a luxurious suit where Brye’s dad straddled a backward chair beneath the single bulb hauntingly illuminating the room. The dungeon. If his wicked look didn’t tell me how unbelievably fucked I was, the ache of my shoulders and the bite of the thick steel cuffs digging into my wrists sure did.
I screamed as my heartbeat jackknifed.
“Well hello there.” His voice was inky black ribbon, smooth and silky where it traveled across my skin. I involuntarily shivered. “I never introduced myself. My name is Connor.”
“What do you want from me?” I warbled as I jerked on the chain that held me fully extended, arms overhead, bolted to the ceilings, tiptoes below, barely scraping the cold and dirty floor. Fear prickled every hair on the back of my neck.
“To be quite frank, Ms. Ryan, I haven’t decided yet,” Connor answered as he turned his palm over and traced the lines with his gaze, rather than my body.
I ran through any and every little thing that might get me out of this. No one knew I was here. No one was coming. Not even the white knights from my family stories were going to save me. Unless…
“Brye!” I screamed automatically.
His father just chuckled, deep and devious, as he stood and strode toward me. He pushed hard on my stomach, unseating my toes from the cement and sending me swinging from my singing shoulders.
I cried out wildly, the morbid howl echoing off the stark walls.
“Gods above that’s a beautiful sound.” He palmed my breast and shoved my body again, this time sending me spinning.
Steel grit against my skin, heating it with a metallic and searing burn. My screams turned to erratic sobs which only seemed to egg him on. He palmed my ass and spun. My breast, my ass, my breast, my ass—over and over and over until I was knotted up on myself, my wrists tangled in steel chain that marred my skin, that pinched my bones. My toes were at least a foot off the ground and the weight of my body contorted my shoulders into a helpless arc.
Tears spilled down my cheeks.
“Would it kill them more to know you’re here?” He mused as his fingertips traced up the contours of my legs. “Or to get you back in tiny little pieces?” He yanked my shorts down in one swift move and I screamed again, tears sputtering off my lips. “I can picture your flesh carved into tiny swirls.”
“Brye, please!” He was my only hope.
“What I wouldn’t give to make them watch. Your dad, Horse. What I wouldn’t give to make them feel what I felt.”
“I don’t know what they did,” I screamed between sobs. “I don’t know. I don’t know…” The words dripped off my lips churning with the salt of my tears.
“Maybe, I should show you.” He cocked back and plowed his fist into my jaw.
“Ahhh.” My pain made the syllables ragged, the tense of my face made me almost swallow it.
Connor stood back as his blow sent me spinning back the way I came. My toes found the cement again, but my ankles wobbled and rolled, leaving the weight of my body to wrench on my shoulders.
I let the tears pour down my face, unashamed. They soaked into the sheer fabric of my tank top and turned it transparent where it stuck to my chest.
“Maybe I’ll make you mine.” He leaned in and kissed the cotton-covered dampened skin of my breast.
My body automatically reacted, shaking wildly as I scrambled away the only way I knew how. But my screams fell on deaf ears as he let his mouth travel through the valley of my chest to my other peaked nipple. I kept jerking and wobbling, my sobs as wild as my frantic movements.
The world was tunneling around me. I was hyperventilating. Pain seared through my veins. But I kept fighting. Against Connor, against the chains that bound me, against this fate. A fate that my parents had sealed even when they’d tried so hard to save me.
A fate that I had brought down on myself by tasting Chicago, chasing Brye. Brye, my beautiful darkness that I’d wanted nothing more than to kiss.
I tried to cry his name even as his father tongued my chest. Even as I sobbed. But all I managed was a whisper-thin plea.
“Please, Brye.”
He didn’t come. Not as his father fondled my breasts or stripped me bare, not as he abandoned me to hang on my wrenched shoulders. Not as I sat in the dark and cried until I couldn’t breathe with only a cold, slight breeze kissing my naked skin.
My stomach rumbled loud enough that it echoed in the room, but I couldn’t make myself care. I was numb. Inside and out. And I stayed that way for the full day that I hung there. All my parent’s words, all my missteps were playing on a loop in my head. Fury at them for not explaining themselves crept up from my empty stomach only to be extinguished by my exasperation with myself.
I hadn’t listened.
I hadn’t listened at all. And to top it off, I’d lied. They weren’t coming for me any more than Brye was.
The tears started again for the hundredth time in that godforsaken basement. Their slow drip was the only count of time.
I was in hell. No, some purgatory worse than hell where I waited. Waited to live, waited to die. Waited to decide which I even wanted.
Eventually I slept. Though perhaps surrendered to the pain and darkness was a better description. I was lost. Even anchored to the ceiling, I was adrift.
Until big hands wrapped around my waist and lifted me. The scream split my throat before I even opened my eyes. The arms disappeared and I dropped, and it twisted my shriek into a pained wail until a hand crushed over my mouth.
I opened my eyes to find ice blue pleading with me.
My cry cut off. Brye’s face had taken a beating since I last saw him, a welt and bruises peppering the fine cut of his features, but he was still beautiful. He still stirred something deep inside me even here, even now.
“Are you okay?” He barely breathed.
“Are you?” I pulled on my brutalized wrists wanting nothing more than to cradle his battered cheeks.
His laughed low and quiet as his arms wove back around me and lifted. He leaned into me for the slightest of moments and my legs automatically wrapped up and around his hips.
“What did he do to you?” He nestled into my skin.
It was too much. His arrival, his tenderness, it split something inside me and the tears were back, slick against his cheek.
“Shhhhh, Filly. Shhhhh.” He tried to soothe me as one hand held me firmly to his body and the other went to work on my wrists. When he freed my arm, I tried to hold him but couldn’t. The fatigue and warp of the muscles wouldn’t let me. I fell back, wrenching on my shoulder and wrist still attached to the shackles.
“Shit,” he swore as he scrambled to catch me.
He pulled me in close, his head twisting to rest against my chest. His lungs filled up once and then held it, his back wide and taut beneath me. A single finger tapped on my thigh, echoing the beat of my heart as I realized he was listening to every single shudder inside me.
“Brye.” His name slipped from my lips.
“You never answered me. Are you okay?” he asked as he unlatched my other wrist.
“No. You trapped me, then abandoned me. He chained me up. He touched me.” Fury mixed with my sobs for a truly unholy accusation.
“I didn’t trap you. I didn’t even know who you were.” He was being uncharacteristically gentle with me.
“And if you had?”
“That isn’t his decision to make,” Connor’s bone-chilling voice echoed through the concrete room, through my very bones.
“Fuck you,” I swore at him with all th
e hate in my heart. “Fuck both of you.” I snarled at Brye as I twisted, coming nose to nose with him where he held me.
“Maybe you will,” Conner added with a smirk; Brye’s fingertips dug into me. “Bring her upstairs, Brye. To the dining room.”
I shoved against his chest and when he didn’t budge, I added kicks and claws and cries. Anything to get me out of any singular part of this prison. But Brye weathered every single bit of my storm as if he had been made to do so. He carried me up each step out of the basement, slow, steady and sturdy.
He set me down on perfectly polished hardwood floor just in front of the most ornate stained-glass window I had ever seen, designed from Celtic knots and crosses. I looked up to find the most brilliant light filtering through. The cross shone brilliantly and for the briefest moment, I felt like something divine might be looking over me.
“Knowing you and knowing what I do now,” Brye murmured behind me, so low I wasn’t even sure I heard him until I turned to watch his lips move, “I would have let you go. I would have made things right.”
“And now?”
He shrugged. And though the look was dejected, hopeless even, I didn’t give a damn. He was toying with my fate—my life—and all he could do was shrug.
There were no more words. Not a single one in the English, French or Spanish dictionary was appropriate. He wasn’t even worthy of another fuck you because right now he wasn’t worth my breath. Just my unending disgust and fury.
So as he reached for my hand like he could ply me with tender gestures, I cocked my head back, collected what I could from my bone-dry throat and hacked a loogie on the side of Brye MacCowan’s asshole face.
My fists balled at my sides and every muscle in my body tensed. Had she been anyone else, absolutely anyone else I would have backhanded her hard enough to make her bleed. I held a deep breath in my chest until the pressure was volcanic. I counted to ten. Then twenty. Then I reached up and wiped her spit from my cheek.
