I’ve never fucked up more than I have with her, but that ends now.
20
KNIGHT
Sitting in the darkness, I swirl the whiskey in the bottom of my glass, my thoughts lost on Harper. It’s been almost twenty-four hours since she was attacked in the morgue, dragged into the women’s bathroom, and almost raped. There’s not been a single one of the 1,440 minutes that have passed where I haven’t been filled with the most enraging fury.
How dare somebody put their hands on my girl and manipulate her into silence.
She bled out on the cold concrete in a parking garage believing she couldn’t tell me. She passed out in her car, filled with fear, believing he could do whatever the fuck he wanted to her. She hid the rose from our front doorstep because he conditioned her into silence. She sat and cried in her car after being sexually assaulted, not prepared to tell me because she already knew that I would let her down. And fuck, she was right to doubt me.
But not anymore.
Elias is going to pay for the pain, fear, and horror he has caused Harper, and the moment justice is finally served, I can put this behind me and spend the rest of my life groveling for forgiveness.
She should have left me. She should have packed her things and walked away, because who the fuck am I to deserve her now? I barely deserved her before. I was the luckiest motherfucker to walk the planet to have a woman like Harper-Rayn Madden agree to be mine, but now, I wouldn’t blame her if she wanted nothing to do with me.
I can’t imagine what she felt when I told her that her meds were wrong. I told her she was sick, that she should schedule a meeting with Dr. Carzy, that the horrendous things she went through were all in her head.
Fuck, just the thought of it makes me sick to my stomach.
Staring down at my phone, I look over the screenshot of my brother hidden beneath the mask from the morgue security cameras. To anyone else, it’s just some bastard in a mask, but not to me. Despite the mask, I see him. His height, his stance, the shape of his body, and the way he walks. I’ve seen it my whole life. There’s not a single doubt in my mind that this is Elias, and had I had the decency to look into what Harper was trying to tell me, I could have seen it for myself days ago. I could have dealt with this before he beat her in a bathroom. I could have put him down like the fucking animal that he is.
Every single time Harper said he had been at our home, I found nothing but blips on my home security system and figured Harper had turned them off. But looking deeper and after having one of the guys on my team dig through the metadata of the footage and piece together what was missing, I was able to find exactly what I was looking for.
Every single instance when Harper had claimed Elias had appeared was right there to see, and every second of it destroyedme. All I had to do was look a little deeper. All I had to do was give her the benefit of the doubt. And now my failure will live with me for the rest of my days.
Footsteps sound through the darkness, and I throw back what’s left of my whiskey as I lock my phone and slip it back into my pocket, an eerie calmness settling through my body. The footsteps come closer, and just as they finally enter the overly extravagant sitting room, I reach over to the side table and pull the string for the small lamp beside the armchair, flooding the room with a dim light.
“You really thought you were going to get away with this?” I ask my brother, watching as he pauses in the entryway of the room, the slightest widening of his eyes the only hint that he’s startled by my presence.
He recovers quickly before striding across the room to his private bar and pouring himself a glass of scotch. He takes his time, his gaze resting on mine as he lifts the glass to his lips and takes a generous sip. It’s not until he puts the glass back down on the bar and braces his hands against the counter that he finally decides to play his fucked-up little games. “I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t attempt to insult my intelligence, brother. I’m not doing this bullshit back-and-forth with you,” I tell him, placing my empty glass down on the side table. “I never took you for the type not to own your shit.”
He’s silent for a moment as he takes another sip, and as his gaze narrows, it occurs to me that he thinks he’s still capable of intimidating me, just like he would when I was young and impressionable. He believes he’s untouchable, that despite my clear disdain for what he’s doing, he’s going to walk away from this with me bowing my head in resignation. Either that, or he needs the time to figure out how the hell to play this.
“She’s mine, Knight,” he tells me. “She belongs to me, and if you knew what was good for you, you’d walk away.”
I laugh, shaking my head in disbelief as I get to my feet and slowly stride toward him. “I can’t do that,” I murmur, resisting the urge to ball my hands into fists, not wanting to give myself away too soon. “I’m in too deep.”
“What? With her?” Elias scoffs in disgust, looking at me as though I’ve lost my goddamn mind. “She’s feisty and has an attitude that needs to be fucked out of her, but she’s not somebody you get in deep with. She’s a toy to smack around. A whore with a tight little cunt just like her mother.”
I stare at him, and seeing that I’m not buying his shit, he goes on. “Come on, little brother. You’re out of your element here. I’m giving you one chance to walk away,” he tells me. “You’re not cut out for what I have planned for her. You’re too weak. Too pathetic.”
“And what exactly do you think you have planned for her?”
Darkness swells in his stare, and the sick smirk that pulls across his lips makes my stomach churn. “Don’t play dumb, Knight,” he tells me, stepping in closer as though he’s about to share some big secret. “You’ve had a taste of that sweet cunt, you know how tight she is. You’ve sat across from her while she went off at her mother. You’re a Slater. The same blood that runs through my veins runs through yours, so don’t try to tell me that you don’t understand, that you don’t feel that need to break her into submission. It gets you hard, doesn’t it? That’s why you’ve been shacking up with her, right? Just waiting for your moment to crush her.”
Bile rises in my throat, and I take a calming breath, wanting to play this just right. “I hate to break it to you, Elias. But I’m nothing like you. I don’t want to break her into submission. I want to have a fucking life with her. So if you want her, if you want to take what’s mine, then you’re going to have to getthrough me, and we both know that you couldn’t touch me even if you tried.”
“There’s only one problem with that,” Elias boasts. “You’re too fucking weak. When it comes down to it, you wouldn’t pull the trigger. You’re too good, Knight, and that makes you weak. It’s why our father never cared for you. You’d rather see me locked behind bars than put me in the ground, and I’m telling you now, you’re going to have to put me in the ground in order for me to stop. I’m taking that girl one way or another. I’ve put in too much work for you to fuck with my plan now. She’ll be mine, Knight, and when I take her, I’m not only going to break her, I’ll fucking destroy her.”
I let out a breath, my hand balling into a tight fist, and then with the force of a fucking freight train, I snap my fist across Elias’s jaw, sending him flying back against his private bar, every expensive bottle of alcohol rattling on the shelves.
The bar breaks under his weight, and as he groans in pain, I hold my hand out and indicate with my fingers for him to stand. “Get up,” I growl, unable to stand seeing my brother look so weak and pathetic, the exact things he’d just accused me of being.
Elias gets to his feet, his hand rubbing over his jaw as his venomous stare locks onto mine. His hands ball into fists, and he comes for me, already swinging, but I beat him to the punch, my fist slamming straight into his stomach.
