“Not now.”
I don’t know what he means, and I don’t have time to think about it when he threads his fingers through my hair. But he doesn’t pull. The restraint throws me off more than the act would have.
He strokes the muzzle of the gun against my cheekbone, his weight at my back. “Roll over.”
“I’m not your dog.”
“If I want you to bark, you’ll fucking bark. If I need you to beg, you’ll fucking beg. Roll over, Lydia.”
We both know you obey commands so well.
He doesn’t say those words, but it’s there, between us.
Does he ever think about it?
What did his family give him? The same my uncle gave me?
Regardless, I might despise his words but I’m also not getting myself shot in the back of the skull because I’m too prideful and stubborn. Working in this life long enough, you realize posturing closes deals but it won’t always save you from getting killed.
I swallow hard and I know he hears it, but he doesn’t say anything. As I shift my body to comply with his demand, he lets the strands of my hair glide easily through his fingers and some of his weight on my back eases up.
When I’m on my spine, the center console digging into my sacrum, his face looms over mine. The door of my car is still ajar, the interior lights illuminating the lightning blue of his irises and throwing the black of the gun into stark shadow. He’s not fully in the car; with his height, he’s cramped leaning over me like this, but it doesn’t stop him from doing it. He has one tattooed hand planted beside my head, and he gazes down at me with no expression in the hard lines of his face.
I keep my own hands by my sides. My knife is between us but his knee is in the middle of my thighs and there’s no way I could unsheathe the blade without him stopping me and potentially killing me in the process. Accidental or on purpose, I’m not sure. He seems eerily calm right now, and that makes him frustratingly unpredictable. If he really doesn’t have a reason to live, the way I assumed back at the cliff’s edge, he’s more dangerous than I am.
Someone who has nothing to lose won’t hesitate to gamble it.
“What is it you think I owe you?” he asks. His mouth is only inches away from mine and he smells like spearmint, his breath on my skin as he stares at me. “Because the way I see it, you’re the one who has crossed over tomyside of the tracks.”
“A life,” I tell him in answer to his question and it’s only because of the things I’ve seen since I was born that keep my voice from cracking as my mind fills with Lele and I refuse to tell this idiot my brother is the one thing I have. The one thing I’veeverhad. Uncle Lynx may or may not be the asshole Eve and Lele act like he is, but even if he were a saint sent from God herself, no one could understand the ache Lele and I feel every second of every day. We have always only had each other.
Maybe one day, in a funeral home beneath a cloud of rain, this man felt like an escape. A future. But that was over before it ever started. Besides, back then, and probably now, he was just a fucking boy.
He rests the gun on my chest, which heaves beneath him but I ignore it and thankfully, so does he.
“And who is it that you think I killed?” The same expressionless tone. The same dead eyes. Dead, but tired. The shadows beneath them are thick. I wonder if mine look the same. Sleep is a rarity when you don’t have set working hours, but with Lele at Astor Memorial, it’s been even worse.
I hesitate telling him.
How many secrets are still between us? Forced apart with divided territories, we could rip our entire worlds to shreds if I don’t do what I need to and put him down.
But right now, the way he’s acting, unless he’s just very fucking good, he seems to have no idea why I’ve been after him.
The thought is red hot rage under my skin. He’s experimenting with drugs he ordered to be created and he has no thought for the lives he wrecks in the process. I can’t pretendmy moral code is much stronger but I meant what I told Ten. My coke is pure and I don’t dabble in pills. If someone dies from my product, the risk was always there, and I never increased it.
Maybe that’s what I tell myself to live with what I do, but what else could I be anyway? Lydia James Flynn was born to fall into the gutter or rise to the top of the kilos. I picked one and, in my opinion, it’s the better choice. Regardless, it’s not that I judge Storm Leary for fucking around with new product. I can pretend that’s my motive, but selfishly, I’m a hypocrite. That’s okay. This world doesn’t play fair, and neither do I.
I was created from it, after all. How is one to learn the rules when they’ve only seen them in the aftermath, broken?
I don’t answer his question though. If I tell him about Lele, he could find him at the hospital, and whatever the fuck his father was doing there, he doesn’t seem to know Hawthorn Leary paid my brother a visit.
Sure, we have guards, and the nurses and rotating shift of doctors are bought and paid for, but Storm has his own connections, and Lynx is allegedly bringing part of those in. His parents may run parallel to my work, but mercenary bullshit is far more violent than what I do on a daily basis.
Since I haven’t been able to verify Berlin’s little tip, I don’t know exactly what kind of sabotage I’m dealing with yet.
Storm traces the barrel of the gun along my lips.
I know better than to act afraid.
