I bow my head, my fingers tight around my phone, the birds and creatures of the night so alive in the woods, but it’s my pulse in my own ears I hear the most.
Absentmindedly, I bring my hand up with the phone in it and scrub my knuckles over my throat.
I feel the scar there, the raised lump, and tension coils through me.
Another memory. This one is more recent. But it’s the same sense that haunts me.
I’mthereagain, in the maroon, pristine hotel suite, and Dad is calm and the other man watches me and I’m on my knees sobbing and thesmell…It’s stuck in my mind like some sort of olfactory imprint.
Olfactory.I almost laugh out loud, thinking of the look Cortland would give me if I saidthatword around him. We’ve known each other since high school, and I’ve been there with him through hell and back, but I know deep down, no matter how much he loves me, he thinks I’mjusta dealer. He’s never been the academic between us, but I imagine he believes me to have a few dozen brain cells left and with as much as I used to smoke weed, he might be right. Then there was the coke, but that wasbeforethe hotel room with Dad, and fucking a girl so hard I nearly broke her and…
No.
I’m not going down that road.
I force my eyes open as I stand beneath too many trees, crickets humming in the dark, nothing around me I can see but woods, and beyond the thick canopies overhead, stars. The nightis brisk, and the cold chill slithers down my neck beneath the black T-shirt I’m wearing that cost me way too much money but I like how expensive things feel.
You might be in trouble, Wolf.
I don’t know the number but the number knows me. They wouldn’t use the nickname if they didn’t. Not even Cortland knows it, and he’s my closest friend. It wouldn’t be hard to guess but it’s not a text people would casually send.
It’s a local area code and not the person I want to be texting me.
I wish it was Sloane Stevens splashed across my screen instead.
I would never admit those thoughts to anyone though.
It’s something I need to let go of, this schoolboy crush. She’s too smart, so she’s graduating a year early which means come spring, she’ll be gone from Ely U and Ellicottville, too. Remi’s best friend, I see her often enough when she’s visiting her “nephew,” as she refers to Lyle, but we’re nothing more than friends.
It’s all we should ever be. She wants to move to the coast to be near her sister and start her own business when she graduates with her marketing degree. And maybe more importantly, Sloane is sweet. But she’s also hot, and a fucking tease, and while I’ve only fuckedtwo girlsin the past two years, she acts more chaste than I actually am.
But only when she’s around me.I hear things from Remi. I know Sloane gets fucked more than I care to think about, ever since things didn’t work out with her and the last guy she was seriously into.
It doesn’t matter anyway.
This isn’t Sloane.
I tap my tattooed fingers along the side of the phone for a second, knowing I should ask who it is, but if Iamin some kindof trouble, I need to be smart. I copy the number, open up an app my dad told me about that one of his developer friends made, one nearly no one else on the planet knows about right now, and paste the number into it.
In the dark, my brows furrow.
It doesn’t bring up a name, no doubt because whoever it is lives in the same world I flirt with, but it’s got a commonly associated IP address and the app tells me where it originates from.
The Hollows.
Out of reach from Ellicottville and Aben, the neighboring town, which is where I grew up after we moved.
Stone Fell is another territory; a place Dad doesn’t like me to go. It’s not unsafe for civilians; it’s unsafe if you’re a Leary.
The Hollows is in a part of Stone Fell that’s pretty desolate, although I’ve heard rumors about those hills. It’s a place with a lot of land and I imagine if you had a lot of money, it would suit a drug lord just fine.
But I don’t know who it is.
I’m not really far in.
I’m not even sure why Dad warns me away from the place. He says it’s on someone else’s territory, in terms of dealing, but all of that is beyond me.
I bag the product and give it to the lower dealers and I show up at the motel to reup the supplies and I do a lot of midnight runs to rich houses, slipping coke and pills under doormats for their overnight deliveries.
