“Aubrey!” I yelled. She opened her eyes and looked up at me, her face paling as though she had seen a ghost.
“Maxx?”
“Who else would it be?” I asked, hardly able to hear her over the pounding of my heart.
“But I thought... I...” She was choking on her tears.
I got her up off the floor and practically carried her to the couch. I put my arms around her and held her while she noisily fell apart.
“What’s wrong? What happened?” I asked her, crooning softly in her ear as I stroked her hair. Aubrey took a shuddering breath and finally stopped crying. She pulled back slightly, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand.
“I found them,” she said. It wasn’t an accusation, just a simple statement. I didn’t need to ask what she was referring to, because of course I knew.
“I saw,” I replied.
“Where were you tonight?” she demanded, her eyes still wet with tears, but now lit with a fire that scared me a little.
“I told you, I was with Landon—”
“Don’t give me that shit!” she seethed.
This was the moment. The moment I could tell her the truth. Tell her everything. Or I could be a fucking coward and hide the dark secrets inside me.
“Yeah, well, that wasn’t my original plan, but I did end up over at my uncle’s house,” I began.
“What do you mean it wasn’t your original plan?” She was angry. Now that she was over the tear fest, she looked ready to commit murder.
“If you found the drugs, you probably already have an idea.”
Aubrey pulled out of my arms completely and moved away. “You were going to the club. I knew it, but I didn’t want to believe it. But then I saw the painting—”
“Wait. What painting?” I interrupted.
Aubrey frowned. “The one on campus. The one for the club,” she said, looking at me as though I had lost my mind.
“That wasn’t me, Aubrey,” I told her truthfully. I had no idea what she was talking about, but if there was a painting on a building somewhere for Compulsion, it wasn’t my doing.
Aubrey didn’t say anything. I grabbed her hand and held it, hoping she wouldn’t pull it away. “You believe me, don’t you?”
“I didn’t know what to believe,” she whispered, though she didn’t take her hand away. Small miracles, I supposed.
“I came here. I found the drugs and I sort of lost it. So I went to the club to find you.” Her voice was ragged and broken.
“You went to Compulsion? What in the hell, Aubrey!”
Aubrey’s face flushed, and she gave me an indignant look. “Yeah, well, given my discovery, I don’t think you’re in a position to give me shit about anything!”
Point taken.
“So I went there and there was a raid—”
“Wait! What? A police raid?” Marco had been right. The policehadbeen watching the club.
I could have been there. I would have been caught in the middle of it. I needed to remember to thank my bastard uncle for inadvertently saving my hide.
“Police were pulling people out of the club in handcuffs. I saw your friend Marco get loaded into a patrol car.”
“Fuck, really?” I ran my free hand through my hair.Shit.
