by Ace Gray
I laid back on the bed and turned away from him. The sculpture I’d first thought of when their world was laid bare came back to mind. The pieces of my life were still wild, free spinning things, blown up and out to the wind.
“One day I woke up and realized all these little sentences added up to a story I hadn’t written. I’d been aimlessly flipping the pages, my eyes darting across each one, but I wasn’t really the author. I wasn’t even reading,” Horse continued.
“I didn’t write any of this,” I grumped from beneath the covers.
“But would you change it?”
I studied the nondescript pattern on the comforter in front of me. It’s waves and weaves in blush colors made more sense than what was in my head. If none of this had come to pass, I’d be blissfully ignorant, living a life of easy fantasy. But then the rogue, the scoundrel, the prince—the man that was all three—would have never come into my heart.
Life was complicated.
“I have no reason to, but I miss him,” I murmured.
“I’ve missed my fair share of people over the years, Filly. Ones I literally have no right to miss.” He sighed. “But right or not, I do.”
“How do you go back to before?” I asked still studying the microfiber beneath me. “Before the pain and the lies and the…whatever he was.”
“You don’t,” he said softly. “It just becomes part of you.”
“And if it consumes you?”
Because Brye would. Undoubtedly. Or at least I feared he would be the specter behind every single brush stroke, the shadow cast by every bright sunrise.
“We won’t let it,” he said with finality.
The idea of this experience not staying stuck to my skin, of the horrors being swept under the rug, of Brye fading to memory, translucent as a wisp, was even more terrifying. I clutched the comforter beneath my cheek and scooted back enough to press myself to my uncle’s thigh.
“What if that’s scarier than all the rest of it combined?” I asked.
“Love is.”
“I didn’t say I loved him.” My knuckles turned white as I clutched the bed beneath me, trying to hold still amidst the storm brewing inside me.
His big ole paw patted my thigh beneath the thick comforter.
“Filly Bean, you didn’t have to.”
“She’s here?” I asked as I looked up at the hotel.
“Saw her walk in last night.” Deirdre leaned against the wall next to me, her hair whipping in the darkening sky. “She’s with her family.” Her voice held a warning.
I couldn’t help the mirthless laugh that rumbled my chest like the thunder building in the sky. She was there. Right fucking there. But the wall of my enemy seemed more impenetrable than the steel of the building itself.
“What was I thinking?”
“That you love her. That nothing else matters.” Deirdre said it so vehemently my laugh cut off and I looked over at her.
She wanted me to walk into that hotel. She wanted me to knock on the door of my sworn enemy. And she wanted me to do it with a bouquet of roses in my hand. She knew who the Ryan’s were, how polluted that bad blood was. Not even a girl cheering for love could be that naive. Unless...
“You never answered. Why does any of this matter to you?” I twisted to lean against the wall so I could watch her. Evaluate her.
“It just does.” She spun out onto the sidewalk and started pacing. Something about the way her eyes darted to the front door then down the street made blood rush through my veins.
“Not good enough,” I snarled.
“None of your fucking business then.” She gestured wildly and I reached out to capture her wrist.
“Bullshit.” I grabbed her fingers and bent them back.
“Ouch, Brye! You’re hurting me.”
“Broken fingers are the least of your worries if I find out you’re lying to me. Did you do this for my father?” I shouted.
She scampered in the direction I was twisting her hand as I threatened to crush it. Deirdre spun once, twice then tried to shove at me. My face scrunched up when she caught the edge of my brand, but I didn’t let go.
“I told you, for Filly!” she screamed and I tossed her aside. She winced when she caught herself against the wall.
“Why would you do anything for Filly?” I followed her and caged her in, an arm braced on either side of her.
“Well, it’s really more for me,” she said softly as she massaged my wrist and her cheeks flushed crimson.
“Huh?” I dropped one of my arms.
“Do you think I wanted this? Any of it?” She shook her hand out as she slid down the wall to sit on the sidewalk. “All I ever wanted was what you two have,” she whispered, becoming small. “The man that got me in, he seemed like that at first. All sugar cookies and champagne. But then he brought me to a dinner party, just like you brought her, and it became this spiral…”
I pictured the night of our family meal, how she’d gleefully drunk the bitter wine. How she took glass after glass.
“I cried every time it wasn’t him for the first six months. It’s a fine line between pleasure and pain, tears and orgasm. Men hear what they want when they’re balls deep inside you.”
“I was one of those men.” I folded up to sit on the concrete beside her.
“Yeah, but you were just as broken as I was. We were almost comforting.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes as she pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. “Seeing you with Filly brought back those first few months when it was good. When I had hope.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“To who? You as you grieved and grappled with the good and evil of your soul? To your dad?” The way she said his name was explanation enough.
“To the boy who brought you in.” I turned to watch her and it was a shadow of her own making that covered up her face.
“I did. But his heart went black when I wasn’t watching,” she said softly. “His priorities shifted. The family became everything. He thirsted for power, not love. I forgave him of so much... that was what finally broke me. That I’d forgiven him those sins. Sins that should have never been forgiven.” She rested her chin on her knees.
“It sounds like you’re speaking about me.”
“You lost your way, not the good inside. That’s what I saw last night. That’s why I followed her and that’s why you have to fucking fight for her. For all the girls that pinned their hopes and dreams on someone who doused them.”
I sucked in a heavy breath, tasting in the fresh air blowing in with the storm. The hint of rain was on the wind and a few became wet freckles on my cheeks. The weight of what I was really facing hung on my shoulders.
“I’m sorry, Deirdre. For my part in it anyway.”
“I’m sorry for how I treated you.” She looked over at me from under her eyelashes. “And for touching her.”
“We could do this all day.” I chuckled as the warm rain spattered a little harder.
“Is it wrong that I enjoy the confessional?”
“Not at all.” She stood when the droplets picked up and wound her hair up in a bun before she started to slink back into the shadows. “He’s disowned you. It’s official. We’re supposed to kill you on sight.”
I nodded, not expecting anything less.
“Thank you.”
“It was nothing.” She shrugged.
“It’s not nothing. He could kill you too.”
“Can’t kill what’s already dead inside.” She shrugged.
“You’re not,” I countered. “Or at least I don’t think you are.”
Her smile didn’t reach her eyes in the bright white of a street lamp but mine did. I meant it. The silence we shared held the shape of gratitude and the weight of hope. Even my hope for her.
“Deirdre, out of curiosity who was the boy?” For some reason I just needed to know.
“What?” Her eyes went wide.
“Who was the boy from the story?”
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She took a deep breath and when she let it out, lightning flashed across the night sky. Lit the way she was, I realized sorrow and gray acceptance had always colored her features. Whatever love she’d had, it had betrayed her. It should have made her soar, but instead, she fought to survive. She managed a rueful smile when she finally answered.
“I’m surprised Emmett never told you.”
The rain pelted my chest as I sat against the far wall of the hotel far longer than I intended, lost in thought. We were all so detached from the way we ruined lives. The darkness seemed like our only companion, but in reality, it was the blind we hid behind. If only I’d come out of that hole once or twice I might have seen Deirdre. Really seen her.
I might have saved her.
The longer I sat in the rain, the more I knew that her referred to Filly too.
I was going to walk in there and…what? Say sorry? Did I have the audacity to think that doing the right thing in the very end made up for any of the sins I’d leveled against her?
“Fuck.” I banged my head back against the wall.
Without Deirdre’s passionate words it was hard to convince myself I should fight for Filly. She deserved better. She deserved freedom and I was shackles. Honestly, the only reason I’d really ended up here at all was because I had nowhere to go. Nowhere that I wasn’t a dead man walking. And she my dying wish…
“Put your hands up. Slowly.” A deadly, frigid voice interrupted my thoughts. The barrel of a gun pressed to my chest a heartbeat later.
I did as I was told as I squinted through the pouring rain. My hands slid up along the rough spackle of the wall as I blinked away the raindrops.
The blonde man before me was recognizable even though I’d never seen him. My father’s stories of a man cut from ink and anger, a man both fractured and calculating, someone haunted, someone wicked, was standing before me, pressing a Taurus Judge to my barely healed heart.
“Why are you here?” Cole Ryan cocked his head the slightest bit when he asked.
I thought about answering in cryptic phrases and riddles but I couldn’t.
“I had to make sure she was safe.”
“You better not mean my daughter.”
“Don’t bullshit me. Is Filly here? With you?” I sighed, uninterested in a pissing match today of all days. “Did you get my messages?”
“Don’t bullshit you?” He asked through gritted teeth, making the veins on his neck dance and his dark tattoo ink with it. “Don’t bullshit you?” He was a formidable man like this, with ice in his veins and murder in his heart. “Let me tell you son—”
“I am not your son, nor will I ever be. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the reason I have Satan for a father.” I let the full burn of my venom drip and hiss on my voice. “You’re the reason that demon did things to Filly.”
Something wild flashed behind his eyes just before he dug the barrel of his gun into my wounded chest. I tried to hold his unwavering stare, but the way he ground on my skin pulled a wicked wince from me and fresh blood from the wound.
“What do we have here?”
Cole Ryan used the barrel of his gun to lift the rain-soaked fabric to reveal my brand. It stung like a bitch and cracked more times than it didn’t when I moved. But it was my family crest, distorted. I’d known that the second I saw those idiots wielding the poker. I didn’t need to waste time looking at it. I had no regrets, not even now as it damned me. I’d taken it for Filly.
“I know that crest.” He used the gun to trace the outline.
“I bet you fucking do.”
“I oughta kill you outright.” He snarled and stepped closer to me.
I grabbed the barrel and pressed it hard against my chest, directly above my heart. “Do it,” I dared. “Fucking, do it. My father sure as hell would.”
He evaluated me, distant and detached, no feeling reflected in his face, every bit the monster I’d grown up believing him to be.
“You know you deserve it,” he bit out.
“You know I deserve it because you were in my shoes first.” I stepped toward him despite the burn in my chest. “So do it,” I taunted again, rain pouring down and spattering from my lips.
Slight flutter footsteps were nearby, almost drowned out by the pouring rain. Cole’s eyes darted to our visitor.
“Do it,” I murmured dark and dangerous again.
A small little gasp made me wish I could reel those words back in, but then my girl spoke and it was with such conviction, such determination, that it made me invincible.
“Do it, Dad, and you might as well kill us both.”
Brye was beautiful there in the middle of the tempest. A gorgeous man with a wounded heart, dark blue chaos lashing out of his make-up. I stepped in front of my father’s gun unafraid of anything but what might happen to Brye. After all he’d done in the end, after all he’d been, I would not allow this. My family or no, I would not stand idly by while his life was on the line.
My dad’s arm dropped immediately to his side.
“Hi, Filly.” Brye’s deep voice hit against my skin like the raindrops and his fingers whispered against my hips like the wind accompanying the storm.
“Are you okay?” I asked, barely taking my eyes from my dad’s, barely twisting my shoulders to see.
“I’ve been better,” he answered as his fingertips found mine and used our hands to play with the filthy matte of my formerly beautiful dress. “But it’s good to see you.”
I squeezed his hand hoping to say the things I couldn’t right now.
“You were supposed to keep her occupied.” My dad leveled a wicked gaze over my shoulders and I wasn’t sure if it was the tone or the soulless void behind his eyes that made me shiver.
“Cole, she’s not a child anymore.” My uncle was the reckoning beside me, standing up to the wave of awful crashing from my father.
“So you let her run out here to see this?”
“It wasn’t as if I could stop her once she knew.” His voice got sharper and my dad’s face pinched in response.
“You have at least a hundred pounds of muscle on my kid.”
“She’s not a kid, anymore.”
“If one more person says that about my daughter…”
They continued to argue as I chanced a glance at Brye. He wasn’t watching me anymore. Instead, he was calm and cool as his eyes shifted from my dad to Horse and back. His hand was still wrapped firmly inside of mine.
“Stop,” I said sharply. “Stop it right now.”
My dad and Horse went silent.
“I am not a child and I don’t even know who stole that from me.” I straightened my shoulders as I stared into my father’s foreign eyes. “But I know you will not steal—” I was about to say him—to lay my fight for Brye out there whatever my dad thought—when Brye dropped my hand and moved, fast as the lightning that lit up the sky behind us.
My dad’s fist was already flying at the space Brye had occupied behind me. The answering boom of the thunder covered my father’s unearthly bellow as Brye reached him and wrenched on his arm to bend him toward the concrete.
“Brye!” My scream didn’t slow him as he drove his elbow into my father’s back and a knee into his stomach a moment later.
“He was going to hurt you,” Brye snarled as my dad heaved.
“He would never,” I shrieked as they started wrestling again.
The gun still in my father’s hand glinted in the streetlamp. I shuffled forward twice, sure that if I put myself in between them, they would stop. Brye would know he had a shield, my dad would have a reason to slow. Before I could figure out where to wedge myself, the gun went off with a deafening boom.
My scream answered it until a big hand clapped over my mouth and the sound stopped at the wall of skin.
“Shhhhhh,” Uncle Horse was sharp in my ear, but it was a soft, not hard. Urgent maybe, and I shook my head in understanding.
He wordlessly let go and slipped around me. The rain seemed to d
rive harder, masking the sounds of his few footsteps between us and the way he moved like a tiger on a prowl. He was able to position himself over top of my dad where he brawled with Brye, then in another move as pointed as lightning itself, Uncle Horse cocked back, threw his punch and leveled Brye to the ground.
“No,” I cried out.
My dad barreled over top of his body, his whole face different. Sheer panic lit up his features as he dropped his gun and gracelessly stumbled over his feet as he ran at me. Before I was able to collect a full breath, he had his arms around me in a bear hug, the kind that had always reassured me that the world wasn’t falling to pieces.
I tried to shove against him, but he held tighter until I just melted into him. My tears shamed the driving raindrops.
“Bean, I’m so sorry. So sorry,” he cooed as he shook me side to side.
“Now’s probably a good time to head back inside,” Horse warned behind me.
“Like hell I’m leaving you,” Dad called back, his voice back to warm and rich just like it usually was.
“Daddy, don’t hurt him. Please.” My teeth chattered as my dad held me back at arm’s length.
He took my cheeks in his big hands and held me as he studied me. He cocked his head first to one side then the other. What he finally saw, I wasn’t sure. “I won’t, Bean. I swear.”
“There were gunshots, there will be cops. What the fuck do you suggest we do with him?” Horse asked from where he hung back the tiniest bit.
“We can’t leave him here.” Dad sighed. “I have a feeling his family is looking for him if he helped Filly escape.”
“It’s the MacCowan way,” Horse mused.
“Please,” I cried out to both of them.
Horse’s hand blanketed my shoulder as he rubbed his thumb on my water-soaked skin. My dad leaned in to kiss my forehead.
None of us heard the scrape of metal behind us or the cock of the discarded gun. We just heard the boom a moment before my harrowed scream as the side of my calf ripped open and pain turned my entire world a blistering bright white.
