by Ace Gray
“After everything…” I couldn’t finish my sentence.
“Yeah.”
“It’s going to split my soul in two.” I gulped gracelessly for air.
“If there’s anything left to split,” he said more a kindred spirit than anything.
I slumped my head onto his shoulder and he adjusted his grip on me. My fingers reached out for his thigh, the one still mangled by scar tissue from the bullet wound that had been sewn shut after that night, and traced over the familiar bumps and grooves.
From time to time I remembered the open wound so vividly I could see crimson covering his taut skin just like when I rushed him to the vet and watched him cut away Horse’s jeans to reveal the knot. It had been tiny and clean once the bleeding stopped but digging around to get the bullet out had left him with a whitish patch of bumpy tissue.
“We gotta get going,” Horse finally whispered as he used his grip to pull me in even tighter.
A few tears spilled down my cheeks but I nodded, slowly pushing up away from Horse. He followed me just as closely back to my room as he had sprinted to the bathroom. When I went to step into my pants he took them from me and crouched down to hold them up for me. I used his shoulder for balance and let him dress me. I was eternally grateful he just put me back in yoga pants and the sweatshirt I’d been wearing.
I shoved my sleeves down and fisted the fabric until Horse reached for my hand and pushed the fabric back up so he could weave his fingers into mine. He held tight as we left the house.
“Does Conrad know where we’re going?” I asked as he opened the door for me.
“Yeah, he’s pissed.”
I nodded. Conrad had so many “simple” answers to our problems without really understanding them.
Walk away. Screw Mickey. Kill Mickey. Move on.
He knew we were both hurting but he couldn’t relate to the pure decimation. I’d stopped trying to explain, needing my air to breathe rather than to force him to understand. Horse had given up too, using his lips to devour Conrad any moment they were both home rather than acknowledge the gaping hole Cole had left.
“I’ll keep trying to make him understand.” I sighed, wishing for the days when things were simple. The days that Cole was there to make us all make sense.
“Thanks.” He managed a smile for me as his Plymouth Hemy Cuda came to life. “I’ll try and help tonight make sense.”
“It never will,” I spat the words out more forcefully than I meant to. “Never fucking ever.”
He didn’t answer me. Instead, he stared out the windshield as the city blocks went by. His gaze got more pinched when we pulled up and idled at the curb. I couldn’t ignore the flaming cavern where the pile of unassuming bricks paraded as a townhouse next to me. I studied each wrought iron bar on the railing, each detail on the window cages; the mortar of the bricks seemed to bleed red.
My pulse ratcheted up, my breathing went shallow. The edges of my vision were starting to go a little hazy and my brain swam with both memory and panic.
“Come on,” Horse said softly as he opened my door and reached down for me. I hadn’t even realized he’d gotten out of the car. Mechanically, I reached for his hand and followed him into Satan’s lair.
Each time I’d been here since that night, I’d found something new to make my skin crawl. While Horse pulled both a knife and brass knuckles from his boots and deposited them on the coffee table, I studied a painting. It appeared to be a river of tortured souls, all dead and dying. Blood mixed with water for a truly morbid and tainted river Styx.
Every fiber of my being loathed the painting, the painting that symbolized how death flowed freely between these walls.
“Come on,” Horse said as he reached out for me and threaded his hand into mine as we started up the stairs.
The flashback of trying to help Horse down them, covered in blood, crying the most soul-shaking tears slammed into me. It was going to level me the way Horse’s bulk almost had that night. I faltered under the weight of it all and Horse had to shift his grip to all but haul me up the stairs.
If the stairs were going to bring me to my knees, the door into Mickey’s den of iniquity was going to level me. Horse pushed it open as if it wasn’t the most emotionally heavy object in the world. My insides bubbled and boiled, my motor skills were fading, but still Horse pulled.
The black velvet furniture.
The candlelight.
The throne.
The bolts for thick, metal chains.
The memory of blood pooled on the floor.
The Reaper himself, Mickey Maloney.
It was all there. Every single disgusting, revolting image from my memory. Except for the glowing green eyes.
Those had gone dark the night I killed my stepfather. And now when I looked up to where Mickey sat in his darkly ornate chair that passed as a dark and demented king’s seat, I barely recognized the man that sat to his right. The right hand of an unholy God.
Cole wore a pressed suit, perfectly tailored to his ripped physique, hinting at the musculature underneath. The only tattoos visible were the ones peeking out of his collar or covering the back of his hands. His hair was shaved even closer on the sides and the top was slicked back. The plump lips I remembered intimately devouring me were thinned into a hard line like they’d never smiled, like his cheek actually couldn’t dimple.
The wounds had healed from that night—God only knew how—except for a scar that looked surgical across his cheek and a faint line that still split his lip. I wondered how that scar might feel against my lips every time I saw it.
My heart couldn’t decide if it was going to grow wings and flutter out of my chest or melt into black tar and finally liquefy out of existence. Sure, Cole was here. He was alive. He was gorgeous and alive. But his eyes weren’t the ones that I fell for. They were the dark black eyes of a soulless monster.
2.
Cole
My insides knotted, sucker punched as always, when Horse shoved Elle into the room. My light and my love were there on full display but I might as well have been across the universe. I couldn’t hold either of them. Hell, I couldn’t speak to either of them.
I wouldn’t.
The memories of the night Elle killed Jimmy Ponies when she should have ended me were still too vivid. Every time I closed my eyes I watched her tremble right in front of me, I watched her shoulders heave with belligerent sobs. My heart broke over and over.
Then I recalled her swivel, leveling the sights at Jimmy and pulling the trigger and my insides fell to pieces. Tiny, jagged, death punch shaped pieces.
She hadn’t been good with the gun and her suddenly self-assured shot blasted into Jimmy’s stomach. Mickey’s answering laugh was so haunting it rung in my ears from time to time. He’d questioned whether she was going to kill me and when she replied with a tearful, borderline violent no he welcomed her to the family.
I’d never wished for death as badly as I had in that moment.
Except maybe now. And every other time I saw her in this room but couldn’t touch her, talk to her. Death would be the only escape from what I’d done to her. To them.
I’d gotten Horse shot. I’d tangled up a loyal loving man in my personal fairy tale and I’d abused it. To the point of almost no return.
When Mickey dismissed Elle and Horse, she’d fought back, despite everything. She’d wanted to stay. Even with Horse still bleeding from the fucking gunshot, she’d picked me. Whatever heart I had left in that moment froze over. I’d ruined her. Completely. I hadn’t even been able to look up at her and tell her to go.
But eventually she did—thank fucking God—and Mick had really worked me over when she left. He’d done things to my almost-corpse that still made me shudder in the waking light. At night… It was a good thing my nights were consumed with murder. It was the lesser of the two evils.
Only once he thought I was dead did he stop. He revived me only to demand my loyalty. I gave it willingly, desperate for it all t
o stop, sure that as soon as I could use my hands again, they’d get busy killing the real monster in the room—me.
Since then my gun had been pressed to my temple more than a few times, my finger ready to pull. But Elle stilled me, giving me one weak moment of hope.
I wish I’d deleted the video she sent me. Her beautiful bright blonde hair blowing around her as she first pointed to the big beautiful pools she called eyes, then down to her sweet heart, accentuated by perfect cleavage, and finally at me.
I got a single fluttery moment of love beating back through me before I realized she wasn’t pointing at me. She was pointing at a tattooed dude that fucked her in an airplane bathroom then went to a funeral with her. Not a fucking monster that had made her a murderer. I’d shoved that phone into the back of a dresser drawer along with my feelings for her.
When she was in front of me, it was harder to remember why I did this. Those yoga pants hugged every single inch of her, accentuating her curves, reminding me of the skin I used to claim. Her sweatshirt was casual and hid a little bit of her form, but I knew the dips and valleys of her body well enough that it gave me hints.
In the end, I was grateful Horse played down her beauty in this room. Her long blonde waves were thrown up in a knot, her blue doe eyes were sad and sallow and her plump lips were a simple pale pink. The hood of her sweatshirt covered the curves of her neck. Thank fucking God. Neither Mickey nor I needed a reminder of what she could really be.
“Delightful, the gang’s all here.” Mickey was already laughing beside me. I wondered if I’d gotten enough strength back in my forearms to reach over and strangle him. Just like usual, the lack of an avenue out stopped me from finding out. “Elle, come here,” he said it warmly and patted his thigh.
She automatically looked over at me as if she was asking permission. I pinched my face and turned away from her, hoping one of these days she would get the message.
You and I can never be an us, Elle. I’m the angel of death and you, well, you’re life personified. I dragged you down once, it almost killed you, I wish it had killed me. You won’t live through it twice.
I’d repeated the words numerous times, prepared for the moment she asked. Because my fearless Ladylove would eventually ask.
Fuck.
I couldn’t call her that. Not even to myself. If I wasn’t careful, I’d start thinking of her that way again rather than a knot of scar tissue on my heart, every bit as painful as the fucked up one on my thigh. She twisted and pulled at my heart at the weirdest times the same way that barely fixable knife wound did.
Soft footsteps and the faint smell of cherries told me she’d followed Mick’s command and was mere inches away. Something deep inside me screamed to turn and look at her but I squashed that voice and pulled the switchblade from my pocket and used it to clean the dirt out from under my nails.
“Beautiful as always,” Mick purred and it made my insides churn.
If he touched her, I’d stab him simple as that. I’d die getting out but I’d gladly go down in flames to keep his hands off her. From that night, it was still the thing that made me vomit. More than all the other fucked up things that had gone down.
“What do you want, Mickey?” she spat the words at him and inside—deep, deep inside—I smiled.
On the outside, I had to be different, very different. I twisted swiftly in my seat, sensing where she was more than anything and took the knife from my fingertips to her throat. She gasped and stumbled a step back. I simply twisted the blade so the point was at the tip of her chin. I sat forward as I used the blade to lift her face.
“Watch yourself, Elle.” I made sure to put extra venom in my voice.
Her plump bottom lip started to quiver.
“Get your hands off her.” Horse lunged and batted the knife away. “What kind of a monster puts a knife to a woman’s throat?” He shoved his face into mine and I could read the real question plainly in his eyes.
How could I threaten Elle?
The real answer was that I had to. The answer I gave him pulled a giant asshole smirk to my lips. “I seem to remember you with the knife a time or two, Horse. Only you usually moved it left to right.” I pulled my thumb across my throat to mimic slitting it.
My heart thudded, knowing what a dick thing it was to say to Horse, but I wasn’t about to lose the facade now. They both had to hate me. It was for their own good.
Mick broke out laughing, his twisted fucking chuckle raising the hairs on the backside of my neck.
“I’m so glad you three lived. You’re all so very entertaining.” Mick clapped his thigh in the seat next to me, still cackling.
“How dare you.” Horse paid no attention as he stepped to me.
“Watch it, Horse,” I said with a sneer.
“Me watch it? You watch it!” he shouted as his toes slid beside mine.
The dips and grooves of his perfect abs were right in front of me, his manliness on display where his tight t-shirt hugged every muscle of his torso. The perfect sculpt of his body had never influenced our connection, it had just made him look all the prettier behind the woman we were sharing.
But it was his chocolate eyes. The intensity, the warmth and the way they danced that drew me in. I found myself leaning toward him without any real forethought. He smelled like Elle, like she’d been wrapped up in him so tightly she couldn’t see straight. I remembered the way that scent had lingered on me.
It snarled something in my chest but I didn’t react outside of digging my hands into the wood. He was still puffed up and in my face. I wanted to watch that chest rise and fall but the new me couldn’t get away with that.
I swiftly stood and shoved Horse. Unlike all the times he’d stayed firmly planted in the past he staggered back. The intense training I’d been doing since that horrific night was finally paying off. I vowed never to be powerless again.
“Sit down and shut the fuck up, Horse.” I arched my eyebrow as he caught himself. “Or I’ll make you.”
He tensed and poised to lunge while Elle’s mouth dropped open. I wheeled at him, shoving him all over again. When he backpedaled, his temper flared his cheeks reddened. He lowered his shoulder and drove his body into my abdomen. I bear hugged around him just before the seat behind me jostled with the force of his tackle.
When it didn’t bowl over, we tussled up against the wood all the same. He was still bigger but I couldn’t say he was stronger anymore. I landed a quick blow to his kidneys and then a shin to his junk. He howled and crashed to the floor beneath my chair,
I hated myself. I’d actually physically hurt Horse. But this was for his own good.
“Don’t make me do it again.” I shoved on him as he teetered on his knees.
What was left of my soul was going to splinter in my chest.
“Stop it. Stop it right now.” Elle sprang toward me and shoved my hand down to my side.
Electricity shot through my body, tingling, vibrating, ricocheting off my ribs. My hand flew to her throat.
Lust was surging through me. I wanted to squeeze her within an inch of her life until she couldn’t breathe and her eyes went hazy. And then I wanted to kiss her. Kiss her so wildly that it breathed life back into her tiny little body.
She’d surrendered her neck to me twice tonight. Before she’d been the smallest bit scared but now she simply leveled her eyes at me over her upturned nose. I didn’t need her words to know she was daring me to choke her, daring me not to love it. Or maybe even worse, daring me not to love her.
I refused.
So rather than squeezing harder, I threw her slight little bird body to the side. She crumpled to the floor beside Horse and I stepped forward to lord over both of them.
Every single fiber in my being wanted to reach out and stroke them. A gentle kiss, a tender touch and then soul splitting round of actually making love. Because no matter how we fucked, how rough it got or how fully I shared her with Horse, it was love. Love that I couldn’t run from. I had to embrace i
t and bury it deep, biting the inside of my lip and going colder as I did.
“Cole, Cole, Cole, my lad.” Mickey laughed as he clapped my shoulder. “Don’t be so hard on your new co-workers.”
My stomach bottomed out at the same time Horse shouted, “What?”
I’d known this was the plan. I’d fought it tooth and nail. Mickey had relented yesterday when I told him that the three of us together spelled trouble. I’d even brought up Siobhan. Like usual he laughed when he thought about her dying.
At least she went with her cunny somewhere enticing.
His words were as heartless as he was. But they’d thrown him off his sick and twisted game. Apparently, it had only taken twenty-four hours for him to pick it up all over again.
“I told you, Mick, I don’t think they’re a good fit. I don’t think they can keep up. I think they’re going to ruin everything.” I blew out a deep breath. “They already have.”
Horse shot me a disgusted look but Elle just slumped further to the floor. Her hands clawed at the hardwood as her back raggedly expanded. My hands itched at my side to reach out to her, to gather her up off the floor, but I kept them still.
“Well you’ve become nothing if not efficient,” Mickey stated plainly. “You’ll find an efficient solution. I know I certainly have.”
His plan for money laundering was pretty simple. He wanted to use the tattoo shop—a relatively solid cash based business—to incorporate new bills printed by the insanely talented printmaker Elle Laroux into the family bank accounts. She’d make the plates and print the money. The sculpture that started this downhill spiral at Fulton Market Kitchen proved she could do it. In the shop, I’d post rates, charge my clients less because they were “friends” then new cash would influx to make up the difference between what I charged and the posted rates. If they paid by credit card, I’d add a tip in “cash.”
But it required working with Elle. Closely with Elle.
I railed against the possibility.
