PROLOGUE
DEKE
DEATH IS Adebt we are all born owing.
It’s something that money can’t buy nor can it be traded.
You can’t bargain for more time. When it’s up, you accept it like a fucking man.
I’ve never been afraid to die. Or to love, for that matter.
Aren’t they the same?
You surrender to a fate you have no control over. You don’t get to choose when or how you die, just as you can’t choose when and who you fall in love with.
Some couples get a happily ever after while others are toxic for one another.
My love was like that.
She lied; I believed every word.
I hurt her; she forgave too easily.
It was a vicious circle of deceit and sex wrapped in a pretty black bow. Neither one of us could quit.
I wrapped my hand around her throat, and she begged me to breathe.
She stabbed me in the heart and demanded I bleed.
She might as well have been fucking poison, but I would have drunk her anyway.
That was the kind of obsession I had for her.
I knew how it would end—total devastation.
A war zone of broken bones and bleeding souls.
I should have hated her, but that’s the funny thing about love—it’s out of your control. And even when it leaves you with two black eyes, you beg for more.
People are afraid of the unknown, but I never feared death, and love was no different.
She was going to destroy me, and I was going to let her.
It was a game that could only end one way—a slow and torturous death.
CHAPTER ONE
DEKE
IDARE YOU
A little game my friends and I have played since we were kids. Every Sunday, we get together and write a dare, and the lucky son of a bitch whose turn it is gets to pluck one from the glass bowl and fulfill it. You have a month to complete it; once your time is up, you must face the consequence if you haven’t. Each dare has one, but none of us has ever refused the dare. Some are harmless. Others illegal. Just depends on whose dare you get and what their mood is at the time.
My best friend Eli dared our friend Cole to ride a skateboard down a hill. He did it, of course, but ended up with bruised elbows, scraped knees, and bloody hands. After we all ran down the hill to help him stand, we found him sitting on the ground with a smile on his face. It was as though he enjoyed the pain and the sight of the blood. And from then on, we found ourselves daring one another to do something that could either get us killed or thrown in jail. We didn’t care. Nothing scared any of us, for that matter. But as we got older, the dares got more dangerous and then turned illegal. Girls got involved and … well, let’s just say the game went from eight boys fucking around to five friends trying to figure out how we ended up haunted by our past.
We fucked up along the way. Some of us fell in love with the wrong girl. And some of us would die at the hands of others. It was a sick game we were going to end. And finish it is exactly what we had to do. Even if that meant killing one of our own. We were sharks and not all sharks can swim with others.
Sixteen years old
