by Elle Thorpe
“Oh, that’s rich. Of course you fucking think I did it.”
“Can you blame me?”
“You know what, brother? You got a real funny way of asking for help. One that feels a whole lot more like you looking down on me and treating me like the scum on your shoes.” He stepped back and went to close the door in our faces.
I stuck my foot out and caught the door with the heel of my hand. “No, stop. Wait. I’m sorry. That was a low blow. I swear, I didn’t come here to get into it with you.”
“Jayela was my sister,” Mae said quietly.
Hayden and I both glanced over at her in surprise. She’d gone completely quiet as the two of us squabbled like we had as kids.
“Please. If you know anything…” Her voice dropped to a desperate whisper.
Hayden studied her, sizing her up, assessing to see if she was worth his time and effort. Or perhaps determining how she could be useful to him in the future if he helped her now. You never knew with him. His gaze flicked to me before it focused back on her, but I didn’t miss the flash of pain in his gaze that he tried to bury.
It cut through me like a knife.
“I know what it’s like to lose a brother,” Hayden said slowly.
The knife twisted. We’d been close once, the two of us. But now there was nothing left of our relationship.
Hayden’s gaze raked over Mae. “You got cameras or microphones on you or something?”
“No,” I assured him. “Nothing like that.”
“Because I will fucking kill you myself if you’re lying to me.”
I swallowed hard. This man might have been my blood, but he wasn’t the kid I remembered. He was colder. Harder. There was an edge to him that I’d lost or maybe never had at all. “She’s a teacher. Not a cop.”
Hayden finished his assessment. “Yeah, there was a hit on her. But don’t ask me who carried it out because I honestly don’t know. Not that I’d tell you anyway, even if I did, but that’s the truth.”
“Bullshit,” I interrupted. “You know. You telling me that someone took out a cop and then didn’t run his mouth about it?”
Hayden lifted one shoulder. “Ain’t all of us as dumb as Winger. Some of us are smart enough to know when to keep our mouths shut.”
“Could it have been DeWitt?” Mae asked. “He said he ordered the hit, but maybe he carried it out, too…”
A slow grin spread across Hayden’s face, before a chuckle built steadily from deep inside his chest.
“What’s funny about that?” I demanded.
“Everything. DeWitt?” He snorted. “DeWitt is a low-level nothing. He couldn’t order a hit if his life depended on it. He ain’t got the authority, or the know-how. And he certainly couldn’t carry one out. Man is dumber than dogshit.”
I frowned. “He’s running around Saint View Prison right now, telling everyone he runs your crew. Even the guards have an eye on him. He’s got pull. The men are following him.”
Hayden rolled his eyes. “He can say what he likes on the inside. And if those other dumbasses in there want to follow his lead, then that’s their problem. They’ve got an IQ of about three between the lot of them. How do you think they all wound up in there, while the rest of us are out here walking around? The dumb go down. The smart stay free. That’s how it is around here. I’m telling you now, DeWitt didn’t order that hit. Or execute it. He’s not the person in there you need to worry about.”
“Who is then?” Mae asked.
“Come on. You trying to get a bullet in my back?”
Mae blanched. “Of course not. But someone I care about very much is in there, and if he’s in danger…”
Hayden glanced over his shoulder and then stepped out of the doorway fully, closing the heavy door behind him. He spoke to me. “Put a new roof on mom’s place, and I’ll tell you.”
I frowned. “She needs a new roof?”
“The place leaks like a fucking sieve every time it rains.”
I ran my hand through my hair, guilt and remorse chewing away at me like a rodent. “I send her checks all the time. She never cashes them.”
“Yeah, trust me. That’s a bone of contention between her and me, too. I’ve been telling her for years that she needs to take your money, but she won’t. So just pay a fucking company to get out there and do the work.”
I could do that. “Done. And anything else she needs as well. Just tell me. I’ll get it sorted.”
Hayden eyed me. “You actually mean that, don’t you?”
“I do. I want to help her. And you, too, if you’ll let me.”
Hayden shook his head. “That ship has sailed, brother. I’m all grown up now. Don’t need your help no more.”
We stared at each other, years of history tightening the air around us until the tension was almost unbearable.
Hayden was the one to break it, steering the conversation away from our nonexistent brotherhood. “Anyway. DeWitt ain’t your problem. If you got someone on the inside you care about? Tell them to stay away from Scythe. He’s ten times worse than DeWitt could ever hope to be.”
“Scythe?” I scoffed. “That his weapon of choice or something?”
“If the rumors are true, it is.”
I balked. “You serious?”
Hayden shrugged. “He’s somewhat of an urban legend around here. That he uses a scythe to slash the throats of his victims. So I don’t know if there’s any truth to the story or not. But apparently the guy was born with a scythe-shaped birthmark on the back of his hand. He treats it like a calling.”
“Jesus,” Mae whispered. “My sister’s throat was slashed.”
“Jesus won’t help you with him, lady.”
I drew his attention back to me. “And this guy is in your crew? Got a legal name?”
Hayden shook his head. “We don’t do legal names around here.”
“Okay, well is he here? Can we talk to him?”
Hayden stared at me, then grabbed me roughly by the arm and yanked hard. “What the fuck, Liam? You’ve been out of Saint View so long you don’t get how this place runs anymore. Can we talk to him?” He threw my words back at me in a high-pitched taunt. “No, you can’t fucking talk to him! Scythe ain’t just a regular gangbanger. He isn’t hanging around on the streets with the rest of us and doing petty crimes. He’s the real deal. The guy is a complete nutjob. A real screw loose sort of guy, you know? You could invite the guy to dinner at your granny’s house, and he’d stab her right through the heart for getting a lump in his gravy, then he’d sit back down and finish his meal. He’s that sort of psycho. The Mafia go to him when they want someone taken out quietly. If there was a hit that nobody is taking the glory for, but the target is dead, it was probably him. The man’s reputation is legendary enough. He’s swift and vicious. Deadly.”
I shook my brother off. “Well how do you talk to him then?”
“I don’t. And I hope I never do. He finds you. And if he does…”
A chill skated down my back.
“…you’d better fucking run.”
33
Mae
That night at the men’s prison, distraction racked me to my core. For once, I was glad my class was full. I put a blackboard of verb conjugations up, then wandered the aisles of my classroom, studying each man’s hands, looking for scythe-shaped birthmarks.
Vincent peered up at me curiously as I hovered over him. “Are you okay, Miss Donovan?”
I scanned his hands quickly. No birthmarks or tattoos, so I forced a smile. “I’m fine. Thank you.” And then I moved to the next prisoner to do the same.
Before I’d quite finished checking the whole class, Rowe pulled me into the empty corridor, shutting the class in.
“What are you doing?”
I confessed everything. From going to Saint View with Liam, meeting his brother, and finishing with, “Do you keep records of the men’s tattoos and distinguishing marks?”
He nodded. “Tattoos, sure. They’re periodically pho
tographed.”
“But birthmarks, though? Do any of them have a scythe-shaped birthmark on their hand?”
He frowned. “Scythe-shaped? I’ve no idea. When we photograph tattoos, we’re looking for gang symbols mostly, so we know who runs with who on the outside. It helps us separate rival gangs and keep fights to a minimum. Birthmarks are only photographed if they’re prominent and used as identification. There might be a photo of a birthmark on a hand if it’s dark enough, but we don’t exactly have a ‘weapon-shaped’ tag on the system, like we do for gang affiliation. It would just be in the guy’s regular file.”
“So I’d have to go through every man’s file in order to find something like that?”
Rowe nodded. “If there was a photo taken at all. If the birthmark is faint, or the intake officer on the day was in a rush, they wouldn’t have bothered.”
I groaned. “There’s hundreds of men in this prison. This is like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“Heath’s a big boy. He can look after himself.”
“Can’t you do something?”
Rowe shrugged. “Like what? There was no direct threat made. This whole prison is filled with violent men, Mae. You can’t forget that. Even if we could identify him, this scythe guy is no more a threat than any of the others. They’re all capable of messed-up things.”
I understood his point, but that wasn’t going to stop me worrying about Heath. I couldn’t get the things Liam’s brother had said out of my mind.
After shift, I retrieved my phone from my locker and checked it, hoping for a message from Liam. There were missed calls and a voicemail, but they were from Tori. With Liam still on my mind, I hit the voicemail button and held the phone to my ear.
“Mae! I just got off the phone with my priest! We did it! The warden at the prison approved two visitors to the infirmary on a weekly basis to bless the sick, deliver last rites, and take confession from anyone who wants to participate. We start tomorrow afternoon…”
Whoa. We?
The rest of her voicemail was her prattling on about how she’d be assisting the priest during each of his sessions, since they didn’t have any nuns who could attend. He wanted a woman to be in attendance when he was working with the female prisoners.
My immediate gut reaction was to ring her back and tell her no.
The exact same reaction she’d had to me taking a job here.
But Tori hadn’t been able to stop me, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop her either. There was such excitement in her message, one I hadn’t heard in her voice for a while. She loved her stay-at-home mom role, but she’d lost a little piece of herself when she’d finished up at her social work job. She was missing that part of her life. Tori was a good person to the very bone. Her calling in life was to help other people, and maybe this wasn’t the way either of us had expected her to do that, but I knew it would be important to her.
So I didn’t call her back and try to talk her out of it. Instead, I sent her a Muppet flailing GIF, Kermit flapping his arms around wildly, to express my excitement. This was good news, I reminded myself. They’d assign Tori and her priest a guard, and she’d be just as safe as I was.
I got in my car, with the intention of heading home. I twisted around the streets, driving without thinking. But it wasn’t my house I found myself in front of. Without even thinking about it, I’d blown straight past my own street and deeper into Providence, parking in front of Liam’s place. It was late, but I didn’t call. I just took the fancy elevator up to his apartment on the top floor and waited for him to open the door.
I didn’t even bother with a hello as it swung open. I’d spent all afternoon and evening stewing on what had happened that morning, and I didn’t have the energy left for polite greetings. “What’s going on with you?”
It was lucky I’d got the words out before my eyes actually registered more than just Liam’s face. Because the man wore nothing but soft gray sweatpants, the drawstring loose and hanging low on his hips. His bare chest, that seemed perfectly sculpted by gods, was enough to make any woman forget what words were altogether.
“Hi, Mae, nice to see you, too. What’s going on with you?”
“Don’t dodge the question.”
His eyebrows pulled together. “I’m not. But it’s kind of a general question. What’s going on with me right now is that I just opened the door and found the woman of my dreams standing there looking smoking hot. Yay for me.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere. You know what I’m talking about. What the hell was all of that today? You take me to Saint View and then all of a sudden we’re in gang territory and you have a brother?”
He sighed. “You want to come in? Or are we just going to do this in the hallway?”
I eyed his bare chest again, gaze dipping low to the cut ridges of abs and those delicious V lines running down either side of his hips.
When I dragged my gaze back to his face, he was smirking.
God, he was cute when he smirked like that.
“I think we should do this in the hallway.” I seriously didn’t trust myself to walk inside with him. I had a feeling that if I did, we wouldn’t be talking for long. I could already feel my resistance slipping, even though this conversation was long overdue.
Liam took a step into the hallway. “Okay. If you insist.” He took another step, and then another.
I held my hands up. “Hey. Stop there. I know what you’re doing.”
Liam raised one perfect eyebrow. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh, you know exactly what you’re doing.”
I moved a few inches backward, trying to keep the distance between us, but Liam was having none of it. He stalked me across the hall, like a panther. A six-foot, tanned, completely fuckable wild animal. My back hit the wall, and Liam followed in close, caging me in, his chest pressed to mine. I got a hand up in between us, pressing my palm over one of his pecs, trying to keep a tiny bit of distance. But Liam had other ideas. His nose ran up the side of my neck and inhaled, sending goosebumps across my skin. His lips landed on my neck, soft and teasing, licking and kissing.
“Yeah. You’re right. I do know what I’m doing.” His tongue flickered over the shell of my ear, and all coherent thought flew out of my head.
I fought desperately to drag it back in. “Nope.” I dodged his tongue, though I couldn’t get far with his hands on the wall either side of me. “We’re not playing it like this.” I ducked beneath his arm and then dodged my way around him, forcing him in a circle so it was his back against the wall. Our positions effectively reversed.
“How are we playing it then?” Liam’s look of pure amusement was both infuriating and hot as hell.
I picked up where he’d left off. I closed in on him, pushing my chest against his and my lips to his neck. I swirled the pattern up toward his ear and then let my lips brush over it as I whispered, “We play my way now.”
He groaned. “Why does that sound so dirty?”
“Because it can be, if you let it.”
“Go on then,” he challenged. “State your rules.”
“You answer a question, you get a reward.”
He chuckled. “Does that reward involve me getting you naked? Because it’s really the only reward I’m interested in.”
It wasn’t exactly what I’d been planning. I’d been planning on getting him a whole lot more naked. But if that’s what it took to get him talking, I could probably be convinced. He did look insanely good in those pants.
“Fine. Question first, though.”
“I like it when you’re bossy.”
I liked when he was bossy. But I had a mission. And I wasn’t going to be swayed. Well, not swayed too much anyway. I was already anticipating getting naked with him. But questions first. “What’s going on with your family?”
Liam slumped back against the wall. “Too broad a question. Be more specific.”
“Fair enough. Why
did your mom run away from you at the shelter the other day?”
He sighed heavily. “Because they hate my guts? Until recently I hadn’t seen either her or Hayden in years.” He said it with such sadness that it made me forget the little game we were playing for a moment.
“Why? I can tell from the look on your face, and the way that you talk about them, that it’s not what you want. Whatever happened between you guys, just fix it.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “You think I haven’t tried? It’s not that simple. Our history is complicated. I’ve spent years trying to get them to forgive me. Nothing I do is going to change their minds. It’s my fault. I ruined things between us, and there’s no going back. As much as I might want to change things, we don’t get everything we want.”
I wanted to prod more, but I could see that it was hurting him. That wasn’t why I’d come here. I hadn’t come to pry into his life. I just wanted to know him better. I wanted to understand him.
So I kissed him softly instead. I let my lips part and ran my tongue along the seam of his mouth. He was stiff and unresponsive for a moment, but then he sank in, wrapping his arms around me, and opening his mouth to kiss me back. I pressed against him, his back to the wall, and let our tongues dance.
Just like always, Liam’s kisses were everything. The sun, the moon, the air. Everything all rolled into one blinding moment, where it just felt right. When we pulled back, he continued his story without any prodding from me.
“Hayden and I have different dads. Neither of them in the picture, both of them took off after they knocked our mom up. But while Hayden’s dad was just some guy from the hood, my dad grew up here.”
“In Providence?”
“Yep. James McIntosh Banks. Son of William Easton Banks. The very definition of old-school money. That time you came to my party in high school? That was my grandparents’ place. I lived with them through all of high school.”
I let my lips drift from his and across his jawline, kissing a trail toward his neck, thinking it might be easier for him to say his truth if he didn’t have to look me directly in the face. “Why not your dad? Why live with his parents?”
