Grayson’s suite is comfortable and welcoming, thanks to Abby. The nicest to be in, though maybe a little girly. We all teased her when she hung bright curtains over the windows, which are covered with double-thick sheet metal. All the windows here are. No good if people on the street see light coming from the Bradford.
Me, I don’t need much. I flip on the bedside lamp, a little wood and metal thing. “Not much of a view, I’m afraid.”
She moves around the space. “It’s…nice.”
I grunt like my heart isn’t jackhammering out of my chest. Like I don’t give a shit whether she likes it. This is a girl raised in a goddamn palace, and here she is in my half-empty room.
“How do you get electricity in here?”
I close the door. “Is that what you really want to ask?”
She turns around, uncertain. What happens now? That’s what she wants to know. The mood isn’t romantic like it was at the cottage, much as I want to flip up that skirt and devour her sweet pussy. Much as I want to make her moan and scream in ecstasy. We have a darker purpose here.
It probably would’ve been better to bring her to the cottage, but I don’t know how this turns out. If it’s anything like everything else in my life, it’ll go to hell, and I want one place to go where all the memories are good. Like a time capsule of something I can never have. That time in the cottage when Brooke looked at me like I was worth something.
She’s wary. “What do I want to ask?”
I go to the bureau and grab a bottle of Macallan. The good shit—older than she is. I pour two glasses. I hand one to her. “Drink.”
“What is it?”
“Scotch.”
“It’s…kind of early.” The sentence tilts up at the end. Almost a question.
I lower my voice. “Drink it.”
She takes a tiny sip. Miserably, I throw mine back. I need it more than she ever will. I pour another. There’s no amount of liquor that can make me hurt her.
“They’re going to be wondering what happened to me,” she says. “They’ll be looking for me.”
“No doubt.” I tip my head at her glass. “Finish it.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“You should,” I say softly.
Wariness shines in her eyes. Finally.
I should feel relieved that she’s starting to get what’s happening, but I just feel a deep, nauseating dread. I’ve had to do a lot of bad things in my life, but I’ve never felt this level of reluctance. Anytime we needed to kill someone, torture someone for information, I would do it. Even when you know that the guy’s a scumbag, it chips off a piece of your soul. I did it so the other guys in my crew wouldn’t have to, because I don’t really have a soul. At least I thought I didn’t. Now there’s Brooke standing in front of me, looking so strong and so vulnerable that I want to kneel at her feet.
“Why do I have to drink it?” she asks.
“Because that’s how this is going to go.”
She peers into the glass. “What if I don’t want to?”
“You want to.”
She raises her gaze to me. The trust still there kills me. “Okay,” she says. God, that trust. I’d take a haughty sneer a million times before this last dying glimmer of trust. Keeping her eyes on me, she swallows it down, then gives me back the glass.
“Good girl.” I pour another.
“I think you should take me back,” she says.
“I will. As soon as you tell me who Keeper is.”
Chapter 27
Brooke
There’s a feeling when lights are flashing in your face. When people you barely know call out your name like you’re best friends. Where it starts to feel like a dream. It makes things easier to handle. Going through a party with a cool half-smile on my lips.
It’s the same thing I do now, when I realize why Stone has come for me, why he brought me here.
“What makes you think I know anything?” My voice comes out weirdly calm. There’s a panic inside me. A full-scale Big Bang explosion, ending everything that came before. On the outside I must look the same, but on the inside everything has changed.
“Because you told me yourself,” he says, nearly growling. “I called him Keeper, but you called him Innkeeper.”
Fear whooshes in my ears. “When?”
“When you were fuck-drunk.”
I flinch at the harshness of his words. At least I know how much I revealed to him. When we were in that cottage, when he touched me. How had I let something so important slip? But I was so impossibly relaxed. I learned early on to never let down my guard, with anyone. Not for the cameras or the society mavens. Not even for my mother. But the one time I slip, it could ruin everything.
“I never used the name Innkeeper,” he says. “That told me you know the man. And it’s not a fucking surprise, is it? Not in the circles that you run in.”
I swallow past the dryness in my mouth.
The cabin was beautiful but rustic. Raw. He used that to seduce me. This hotel room with its old-world grandeur and strange intimacy? He’ll use this to hurt me. Make me tell.
I wrap my arms around myself.
Daddy came to every ballet recital. He worked late every day to afford my private school tuition. We might not have a normal happy family, but it’s mine.
Stone will protect his crew, even if they did something wrong. That’s the way I have to protect my father. He deserves justice, nothing more. Not revenge.
“He’s somebody to you. That’s why you’re keeping it from me. Family or friend. One of your girlfriends’ daddies.” He gives me a hard look. “Maybe even yours.”
I try not to react, but some things I can’t control, like the way my heart bangs against my ribs. There’s movement on my face, like a flinch. But it feels far away, like my muscles belong to someone else.
“You should just tell me,” he says simply. “You’re going to, in the end.”
The threat is ten times worse because of the calm way he delivers it. If he were beating his chest, it would seem like an exaggeration. But I know the calm, cold reality here. He’s going to hurt me. “Why? Because you’ll make me?”
He watches my face, seeing everything, saying nothing.
I stand my ground, senses humming from his nearness. Or maybe that’s the scotch. “I can’t.”
Still he says nothing.
I swallow. Stone can’t trust anyone, but I can. I trust Detective Rivera. I trust the system, even knowing it failed Stone. I trust my father, even if I shouldn’t. “I won’t.”
Threat runs thick in the air between us. “I’m not fooling around, Brooke.”
“You don’t want to hurt me.” I gaze into his eyes, looking for the man who couldn’t drown me. The man who carved that tiny bird. The one who made up a fairy tale about a rivet.
“No, I don’t want to hurt you.” His tone is soft, but there’s darkness underneath—the darkness of hundreds of hopeless nights. “But I do lots of things l don’t want to do.”
He does those things for the men in his crew. For the boys who were down there in the basement with him. For the ones who might be held now. That’s part of why I respect him, why I love him, but there’s also something broken in it. The way he acts like killing people doesn’t matter. Like it doesn’t break his heart again and again.
My pulse races. “I don’t know anything—not for sure.” It’s the last words that change everything for the worst. The confession I didn’t mean to make. He knows I have something specific. Even his gaze is colder. More resigned. Like he knows this is going to get messy.
Fear arrows through me. Instinct takes over. I whirl around. I bolt past the bathroom, to the door, fling it open.
A large hand smashes it back closed.
I turn around, shoulder blades flush against the door. He stands in front of me, half caging me, dark stubble gleaming under high-cut cheekbones. The door is hard on my back, but my knees are jelly. “Please.”
He shakes his head.
“We’ve been on this collision course for two years, me and this Keeper. Longer. There’s only one way out—my bullet in his brain.”
Fear threatens to overwhelm me, but I force it back. I force myself to focus on the handsome, furious face in front of me. “Think about it, Stone. You once said you can’t have a regular life like other people, but you can. You can start now with this one step, seeing that justice is done instead of poisoning your soul with more violence.”
“Poisoning my soul? It’s a little late for that. It’s a black well in there.”
“No,” I whisper.
“There are boys out there being kept like animals. Worse than animals, and what you know could help me find them. Do you not give a shit about that?”
“Of course I do! I want those boys to be rescued. I want justice for them, and for what happened to you. That’s why I forwarded my information about Innkeeper to the police.”
He straightens. “You did what?”
“It’s what the police are there for.” I’m pleading with him, praying he’ll understand even though I know he won’t. “They have resources you don’t. Resources to find the boys, and to help them recover once they do.”
“You think the police aren’t in on it? God! That’ll just tip them all off.” He scrubs his face. He seems angry. But tired, too. So tired.
“Not everybody is corrupt. Detective Rivera—”
“Is one of the good guys? Really? You sure about that?”
“I am.”
“Fuck.” Frustration radiates from his broad shoulders. “You don’t know. You can’t know that for sure.”
“You have to trust somebody sometime.” The words come softly, but they land like bombs. Obvious, because I mean me. I want him to trust me, even though he won’t. Maybe he can’t.
Green eyes blaze under inky lashes just inches from my face. My skin tingles, as if his gaze has weight. Mass. Force. “I have to trust somebody? That’s what you think? Who should I trust? Who?”
My belly twists. It was a stupid thing to say—to Stone, anyway. He was thrown to predators when he was most vulnerable. Failed by every system imaginable. Forgotten. Left for dead. The ultimate lost boy, leading his band of lost boys out of hell.
But he never really escaped. He’s still trapped in hell, or more like the hell’s inside him now. He seems almost to vibrate with it, a furious dark-haired god, tormented and torn.
He trusts nobody. Why should he?
“You need to tell me who Keeper is before they all get tipped off and move those poor kids somewhere we can’t find them—now,” he gusts out, breath warm on my forehead. His hand slides up from my waist in a deliberate threat. Higher, higher. To my throat, his hand hot against my skin.
“You’re scaring me,” I whisper.
“About time.” Soft, heavy fingers bracket my chin. His touch is achingly gentle, even as it threatens. “Don’t make me choose.”
I close my eyes, bracing for the worst. He won’t choose me.
Heavy fingertips tremble along my jaw, tracing a path toward my ear, shifting my hair in a way that tickles.
I steel my spine, replaying Madsen’s grunts like a tape loop in my mind. Is that what he’s going to do to me? It hurt Stone to do that; I know that now. He isn’t some cold-blooded psychopath, even though he probably wishes he were. It hurt him to do that to a bad man; what will it cost him to hurt me?
“Tell me,” he mutters, almost an incantation. “Fucking tell me.”
I want to tell him, to spare him the pain, but I have my own broken heart. Doesn’t he understand that it would kill me? It would kill me to see my father tortured and killed, knowing I could have stopped it. Maybe Stone does know what it would do to me. Maybe it’s worth the sacrifice. I’m collateral damage. “Swear you won’t kill him. Swear you won’t hurt him.”
A laugh, cruel and sharp. “I’m going to rip his balls off his body and feed them to him.”
I shake my head. “Then I won’t tell you who he is.”
A knuckle brushes my neck. Will he choke me? Lock me up? Pretend to drown me? “Do you really want to play this game?”
“This isn’t a game,” I say.
“No,” he growls. “This is a basement of boys, somewhere in this city.”
“Then let Detective Rivera find them. He’ll save them. He’ll bring Keeper to justice. If you only care about saving them, you’ll take the deal. I’ll tell you as long as you promise not to kill him, not to hurt him. This is how you save those boys, Stone.”
He studies me, his eyelids low. It’s a line in the sand. I’m offering him justice. He wants vengeance. Maybe that’s always what would have broken us. The single and brutally important fracture point.
Stone’s hand settles around my throat. He doesn’t squeeze, but it’s clear he could. There’s enough strength in that hand to cut off my air. To break my neck. My breath comes shorter. “No deal,” he says finally, and it sounds like regret. Maybe he does regret what he’s going to do to me. How he’ll hurt me. Torture me. Kill me?
There’s a hitch in my chest. A crack in a foundation that should never have formed.
“Because you have to choose those boys,” I say in a burst of clarity. “Because it’s who you are.”
“Yes.”
“Except you’re wrong. You think you have to give up your humanity to save them, but you don’t.”
“Give up my humanity? You know who you’re talking to here? Other men, they might dream about that soft cunt you let me have. They might want to fuck your pretty little mouth again, but all I want is blood. My humanity is long gone, baby.”
“You’re wrong. It’s too late—I’ve seen you. You’re a good person. You have a good heart.”
He snorts, jaw set, gaze distant.
“I saw it in the river the first night,” I continue. “Every time we were together, I saw it. In the tiny bird you carved.”
“A broken piece of shit.”
“Not to me. I love it.” There’s pain in his gaze, but I don’t shut up. I won’t shut up. “I love you.”
“Stop it.”
I reach up for his hand, still snug and warm around my neck. Instead of pulling it away, I squeeze harder. First with one hand, then with two. I press his hand so tight around my throat that I see black spots behind my eyelids. He’s right; this isn’t a game. Lives are at stake. And I’ll give up mine before I give up my father’s.
Darkness closes around the edges of my vision.
“Fuck,” I hear him say. “Fuck.”
I suck in breath without thinking, my body reacting on its own, air like fire in my lungs, the pressure on my neck gone.
“Fuck, baby.” Gentle fingertips alight on my face. Soft, warm lips come down on my cheeks, my chin, my forehead. He’s raining kisses on me. “Fuck,” he says between kisses. “Fuck.” Then he takes my lips, devouring my mouth like a starving man.
My body ignites. I grab fistfuls of his soft flannel shirt, knuckles against the hard planes of his chest. Pulling myself against him even as I push him away. I’m clinging to him on a stormy sea, wanting his comfort even as I know I’m going to drown.
The tears don’t go away, even when he’s holding me, kissing me. They come faster. A flood. They spill onto my lips, and when his tongue touches mine, I can taste them. Salt. Fear. Grief tastes like the ocean.
“I never could’ve hurt you,” he mutters, moving his lips over my eyelids, sipping my grief. “Not for anything. I would have ripped off my own arm, but you knew that, didn’t you, little bird?”
A sound behind me. The knob turning.
Stone grabs me, pulls me to him, one arm slung around my chest, bracketing me to him. The other around my neck. If he pulled any tighter, he’d be choking me.
But that’s not what this is.
A large form darkens the door before emerging into the soft light of the room.
The big one from before—Grayson. He glowers at us. He’s the one who just got out of prison. He wasn’t re
leased or anything official like that. He broke out. Escaped.
Another man comes in, fists balled at his sides. Knox. The blond one. Sharp as a blade.
They both have that hard look of someone who’s given their share of violence. Taken it, too. My heart breaks for them even as I know what they’re here to do.
“You’re done,” Grayson says, nice and soft.
Stone pulls me against him. “Out.”
Grayson’s voice stays low and calm. “It’s done. You didn’t break her. I don’t think you can, which is interesting, but it doesn’t matter. We can do it.”
“I got this,” Stone says.
A sudden silence firms up around us, cold and hard as ice.
“You don’t,” Knox says, incredulous. “Not at all.”
“Told ya,” Grayson mutters.
“No one touches her,” Stone says.
Another guy crowds into the room, long blond hair nearly white. Stone swears under his breath and shoves me behind him. There’s a snick and a flash. A blade appears in Stone’s hand.
I suck in a breath.
“What the fuck, Stone!” Grayson says, looking harder than ever before. Like every gilded edge in him turns to steel. “You’re gonna fight me?”
“You fought me,” Stone says, sounding just as hard. There aren’t any people left in this room. Only metal and rock. Only me, light as a feather. “When I went after Abby, you stopped me.”
“That was different. You just didn’t want her here. Your own fucking rules. But this girl? She’s holding secrets, secrets that protect them. Since when do you pick their side?”
“I’m not on their side,” Stone says, soft with menace. “I’m on hers.”
“So that’s the way it is,” Knox bites out.
“That’s right.”
“Fuck that,” Grayson says. He picks up a chair like it’s a toy and swings at Stone. With a roar, Stone absorbs the hit. Something cracks—wood? Bone? I scream and melt into the corner.
Stone has hold of the chair. He shoves back. Grayson falls.
Need you Now (Top Shelf Romance Book 2) Page 106
