Fight for Me: The Complete Collection

by Jackson, A. L.

  And every time we collided, I only crashed into a brick wall.

  “No, thank you.”

  “I wasn’t asking.” His voice was gruff.

  Hard and demanding.

  An extension of the man.

  I exhaled heavily. “You have a bar to run. And I’m not a little girl, in case you hadn’t noticed. You don’t need to worry about me.”

  “You know that’s impossible.”

  The jab of a knife.

  That was what it felt like when he said things like that. A million little cuts over the years that left me continuously bleeding out.

  “You haven’t shown up here for a year. Why now?”

  He flinched, a streak of vulnerability flashing through his face. “Lillith came into Olive’s earlier. She said you bailed on her for drinks the other night, and you haven’t been to the bar for, like, a week. Texted you to check up, and you didn’t text back. Like I said, I got worried.”

  Shit.

  The last thing I needed was this man melting me.

  “I rescheduled on Lily because I had a test I needed to study for. She knew that. I turn my phone off during the meetings so it doesn’t cause a distraction, and I barely just turned it back on in the car. And it’s been three days since I’ve been in the bar. Three days.”

  Exasperation filled the last.

  And there he was showing up as if he missed me.

  But the way that he was looking at me had me wondering if he might. And those were dangerous thoughts I had no business entertaining.

  “I’m a big girl, Ollie. I’m home. Safe. You can go on your way.”

  That intense gaze flashed, and his mouth pinched into some kind of unfound resentment.

  “Yeah. You’re safe. This time. Thank God, considering you were walking around at this time of night with your face buried in your phone, paying zero attention to your surroundings. You should know better than that. Which is why I will drive you next week.”

  Annoyance blew out on my breath. He was impossible. “I was paying attention. I already had my phone programmed to 9-1-1 and mace in my hand. You think I didn’t notice someone driving like a creeper into the lot?”

  “Paying attention? Hardly. You could have been gagged and shoved in my trunk before you even realized what was happening.”

  I cocked my head. “The gagging I might be up for . . . not so sure about the trunk.”

  Sometimes I couldn’t help but toss his nonsense right back.

  Ollie growled. Actually freaking growled, and chills were flashing across my flesh, a whirlwind of energy that skated my skin like a rough, demanding caress.

  “Not a joking matter, Nikki,” he grated, taking a jolting step forward and getting right in my face.

  No.

  He was right.

  It wasn’t. Not after Sydney had gone missing fourteen years ago.

  She’d left a chasm right in the center of us.

  A black hole in our bright, shining sky.

  Gaping and bleeding and pleading.

  She’d wandered out into the night and disappeared without a trace.

  That night, I’d lost both of them. Sydney was gone and Ollie had all but turned to stone.

  Yeah. We still ran in the same circle. A circle that was tight. As close as family, the bonds forged between us just as important. Maybe more so.

  The thing was, Ollie and I were on the opposite sides of that circle, keeping each other at arm’s length and a world away.

  Yet, somehow, after all this time, he continued to remain possessive of me. Keeping me under his guarded watch. As if I were a child he needed to protect. As if he’d forgotten everything we’d been through together.

  What we’d almost been to each other.

  I’d made the mistake of falling for him a long, long time ago.

  When I was little more than a kid.

  The problem was, he would never allow himself to fall for me.

  Oliver Preston was armor and stone.

  Bitterness and venom.

  Broken fragments.

  Shrapnel waiting to burst.

  What made it harder was that there was no missing that huge, giving heart that he kept stunted. Hidden in the darkest kind of shadows.

  That made him dangerous to my sanity. Poison to my heart. Yet, I always found myself back in his bar with my friends as if it didn’t mean a thing, pasting on a smile and a tease while the man was slowly killing me.

  But tonight? It all felt like too much.

  “Seriously, Ollie. Don’t burden yourself by worrying about me.”

  He hesitated, throat bobbing. “But I do. Can’t change that. No matter how hard I try.”

  Emotion rushed. So tight. I felt the prickle of the tear blurring my eye before I even realized it was streaking down my cheek.

  “Shit,” he whispered. One of those big hands darted for my cheek.

  I jerked back. “Don’t touch me.”

  His hand dropped like a rock.

  “Shit,” he whispered again, this time a hiss of frustration. “I’m sorry.”

  My head shook. I searched his expression, my own frustration bleeding out. “You tell me it’s impossible for you not to worry about me, but as far as I’m concerned, I shouldn’t even cross your mind.”

  He flinched, and beneath his beard, his thick throat rolled with his swallow. I got the feeling the man was swallowing a torrent of things he couldn’t allow himself to say.

  Guard up.

  Shields on.

  “You’re always on my mind,” he admitted, voice low, scraping with the admission.

  It was so unexpected it knocked the breath from me.

  “You don’t get to show up here, sayin’ things like that to me. You don’t get to yank me around, Ollie. I won’t let you do that to me. Not anymore.”

  He swore quietly under his breath before he slowly brought that penetrating gaze up to meet with mine again.

  Eyes tangled.

  Spirits tied.

  Hostages to the intensity that tightened my chest and filled my lungs.

  How the hell was I ever supposed to get over him?

  “I won’t apologize for caring about you. For worrying about you. But the last thing I intended was to show up here acting like an overbearing asshole. I just wanted to check on you.”

  Tingles raced my throat. Damn him.

  I gathered myself and pasted on one of those smiles.

  Fake and brittle.

  “Don’t worry about me. I’m just fine. See.” I lifted my hands out to my sides. “All in one piece. So you can leave, go on back to whatever or whoever it is you usually do on a Tuesday night.”

  Bitterness oozed out with the words.

  I didn’t mean for it to. Human emotions were such tricky little things. They could be fleeting and fast.

  Forgotten before we gave ourselves time to ponder them.

  Or they wiggled their way in, so deep that it was impossible to imagine they hadn’t been part of us all along.

  They came and they went.

  They skipped out before they took hold or they lasted a lifetime.

  Anger. Joy. Hate. Hope. Fear.

  Attractions and crushes and obsessions.

  The people who knew me best could say I suffered from any one of those emotions when it came to Oliver Preston. Lillith teased me relentlessly, and I let her, played it off as if it really didn’t mean all that much.

  He was the one thing I didn’t fully let her in on. She believed my feelings for him amounted to nothing more than a mad crush.

  The problem was?

  I just . . . loved him.

  I did, and I had for too many years, and it hurt too much that he didn’t love me back.

  I took a step back. “I need to go.”

  I turned on my heel and headed for the exterior steps of my run-down apartment. Even though Gingham Lakes had seen a major rejuvenation over the last decade, this area had not.

  I couldn’t afford anything else. I
wasn’t exactly raking in the dough managing Pepper’s Pies.

  But it was enough.

  Enough to get by on until I finished school.

  As I mounted the second-floor landing, I peeked over my shoulder.

  I shouldn’t have.

  My heart stuttered at the sight of him. At the fact he kept looking at me in that way I wished he wouldn’t. In a way that made hope and need glow hot.

  His presence solid as he stared up at me from where he stood beside his car.

  So thick I couldn’t do anything but breathe him in.

  Intoxicating.

  The man was a drug.

  I jerked my attention away and rushed for my apartment door, only to stumble in my tracks.

  A harsh gasp sucked into my lungs.

  Shocked.

  Stunned.

  Then my heart took off racing in a panic of fear.

  Horror beating a path through my veins.

  Dread took me whole.

  My hand went over my mouth, and I choked out, “Oh my God.”

  I could feel Ollie pounding up the steps. Two seconds later, he was in front of me and pushing me back.

  His stance protective when he ordered, “Don’t move.”

  4

  Ollie

  Bitch.

  It was spray painted in red across her door, and pieces of wood were splintered where a sharp object had been rammed against the door.

  Probably an axe.

  My heart raced like a motherfucker, anger and protectiveness and fear this blistering heat that churned a thousand tons of adrenaline through my veins.

  My chest cinched tighter with every step as I inched forward.

  It made it harder and harder to breathe.

  Hit with the overpowering urge to make sure she was close, I reached back for Nikki.

  Not sure whether to wrap her up and run with her or rush the fuck inside and take out any asshole stupid enough to still be in there.

  Take out any piece of shit who might threaten her.

  A fucking landslide of jagged rocks scraped at my throat, and I looked back at Nikki who was watching the whole scene through wide, horrified eyes.

  Totally shocked.

  My insides curled. Every worry I’d ever had surfaced. A surprise attack.

  “You still got 9-1-1 up on your dial?” I gritted through clenched teeth, inclining my ear toward the door, trying to listen for any movement inside.

  The frame was splintered. Lock knocked loose. Door hanging open an inch.

  “Yes,” she whispered, voice choked.

  “Call it. Tell them to hurry,” I urged, nudging the door open with the toe of my boot and taking a quick peek in to look around her tiny apartment.

  Stillness echoed back.

  But the place . . . it was trashed.

  Pictures had been torn from the walls. Lamp knocked to the floor. Couch flipped, ripped apart. In the kitchen, which ran along the far back wall, boxes and cans of food were strewn across the floor.

  Ransacked and ravaged.

  I roughed a shaking hand over my face, trying to see through the red blaze of hate that clouded my vision.

  I could feel my control slipping.

  My sanity shifting.

  Fuck. It’d been shifting all along—since the night my sister had gone missing and I’d become an entirely different man.

  My cool had been nothing but a front as I waited.

  As I watched.

  As I forced myself to hang back, feign patience, until a debt came due.

  It was what kept me moving every day. Hunting for my sister.

  It was the singular focus of my life. What I’d devoted myself to.

  Could feel a splinter of that focus breaking off as my hands curled with the crushing need to chase down any fucker who would even think about hurting Nikki.

  Nikki.

  Nikki. Fucking. Walters.

  This girl threatened to be my undoing.

  From behind, I listened to one side of Nikki’s conversation with the 9-1-1 operator. “Yes, that’s the correct address. The door is busted in, and it has been spray painted.”

  “It looks like it was splintered with a sharp object.”

  “Second floor apartment.”

  I cringed with every detail she reiterated.

  Like I was having to see it for the first time.

  “No, I don’t think anyone is inside.”

  “No one is hurt. There’s no need for an ambulance.”

  At least not until I found them.

  “I’m not sure,” she said.

  Nikki nodded and whispered at me, “She said to wait outside and not touch anything.”

  I gave a restrained nod.

  It was painful.

  I wanted to charge inside. Do a little of that hunting I was made to do.

  Protect her.

  Just like I’d had the overwhelming need to do earlier, running over here to check on her since she hadn’t returned my text.

  I was the dumbass who’d showed up here unannounced.

  But what if I hadn’t?

  Dread spiraled through me. A slow stir of something that had simmered forever.

  Heat igniting beneath it.

  All of two minutes passed before we could hear sirens approaching.

  My eyes remained on that indigo gaze, refusing to lose sight, wanting to sink deeper.

  Search for the secrets I could so clearly see hiding there.

  I forced myself to stand still.

  Her lips moved slowly as she spoke into her cell. “Yes, thank you, they’re here.”

  She ended the call and pulled the phone from her ear.

  “Who did this?” The question was nothing but shards of hatred from my tongue.

  Slowly, she shook her head, blinked in a confused, agitated fear.

  Didn’t matter. I was certain I saw a moment of clarity doused with worry flit through her expression.

  Her own intuition meeting with mine.

  “I don’t know,” she whispered.

  I wanted to grab her by the shoulders, shake her, demand more, but two officers were climbing from the cruiser that had just pulled into the parking lot below, their lights spinning through the desolate night.

  Couldn’t help but feel grateful when I saw the face of the man who started climbing the steps.

  Seth Long.

  He was an old friend from high school who’d gone into the academy right after graduation. A good guy. A good cop.

  Surprise had him faltering a step when he realized who was standing in front of him. “Nikki . . . Ollie . . . God. The last thing I expected was to roll up here and find you two. Are you okay?”

  The obvious answer was no.

  But true to form, Nikki turned and plastered on one of her smiles. “Yeah. Thank God. We’re fine.”

  Bright, blinding light.

  Motherfucking sunshine.

  A taste of sweet, sweet lemonade.

  That was what Nikki was. Felt myself itching to lean forward and glean some of it. To swim in her calm and her belief.

  They said sunshine chases away the dark. I swore, all it did was deepen mine. Amplify why I couldn’t take her. Have her.

  I was a bastard.

  A sinner.

  God knew what I was responsible for.

  He also knew what I’d be willing to do—vengeance a greed I carried in the palm of my hands.

  But that girl? She was a sin I’d never again commit.

  Seth and his partner stepped around us, their guns drawn as Seth nudged the broken door open with the toe of his boot.

  They edged in, quick to scour before Seth was back in the doorway. “Whoever was here is gone.”

  “Thank God,” Nikki whispered, releasing a huge breath.

  Relief.

  Wasn’t even sure that I felt it.

  The only thing it meant was the person who’d done this was still running the streets.

  “I need you two to hang out for a bit whil
e we take some pictures and dust for prints.”

  He swung his gaze to Nikki. “If you’re up for it, afterward I’d like you to come inside to see if you see anything missing. I have to warn you, the place is torn up. It’s not pretty.”

  Nikki crossed her arms over her chest. Hugging herself.

  My sight snagged on the dragonfly tattoo on the inside of her right wrist. Every time I saw it, it felt like my guts were being shredded.

  The way she wore her ghosts the same way I wore mine.

  “It never was,” she attempted like it was going to lighten the mood.

  I wasn’t fucking laughing.

  The second Seth disappeared, I spun back around.

  This girl was so fucking pretty it hurt to look at her. I bit back all those old feelings I couldn’t feel. “I need you to go through every single person who might have done this to you.”

  She sucked her lip into her mouth. “I can’t think of anyone.”

  I wondered if she knew I could see straight through her.

  “Don’t do this, Nikki. Don’t protect someone who doesn’t deserve protecting. What is it you’re trying to hide?”

  Seth popped his head back through the door, interrupting all the demands I wanted to make. “We’re ready for you.”

  “Thank you,” she said, sidestepping me and entering her apartment.

  I followed right behind.

  Nikki started moving through the place, cringing, clearly worrying as she took in the tornado that had ripped through her home.

  A storm.

  That was exactly what it felt like had hit.

  It was the same feeling that had been gathering strength for a while.

  Rising and lifting.

  The nightmares I couldn’t escape coming more often and more intense than ever.

  That gut-deep intuition that something was coming.

  Something wicked.

  I paced her crummy little apartment, yanking at my hair, feeling like I might go out of my damned mind.

  Seth was finishing getting her statement where they’d ended up in her bedroom while I stewed and raged in the living room.

  I could hear her voice floating from her room. “There was this box my grandma just left me. She said there were some mementoes and keepsakes in there that she wanted me to go through and share with my sister. I only picked it up a couple of days ago. I hadn’t had the chance to go through it yet. It was right up there . . . at the top of my closet.”