CAPITAL = ASSETS — LIABILITIES
I laugh once, breathless, and it turns into a choke in my throat.
I pick it up, hold it between my fingers like it’s fragile. Like it’s proof this wasn’t a hallucination. A memory floods through me of her at a table, biting her pen, scowling as if she could change the result on the notecard with just a flash of her eyes. And me, surprised that doesn’t work, because there isn’t much that her eyes can’t affect.
Another memory… A smile, shy, open, as she trusts me to help her with something that mattered to her.
Something wet drips from my cheek and onto the notecard. I shake my head, then crush the card in my fist.
The job’s done. By tomorrow, I should have June back.
I stumble to the bathroom sink and turn on the faucet. I splash my face hard enough with cold water to sting and look up into the mirror. I don’t look like the man Molly kissed in high school. I don’t look like the “normal” guy I tried to pretend I was. Instead, I look like what I am — a liar with a conscience he can’t drown; a man who’s been awake in the wrong life for too long.
I open the cabinet above the sink. Another bottle. I take it down, hesitate, then set it back like it’s a loaded gun.
The alcohol didn’t erase anything last night. It only made the images louder — Molly’s mouth forming my name in the dark; her hand on my chest afterward, light as a promise, as her heart comes unguarded, open, something shy and wary as a wounded animal; her voice yesterday, sharp as shattered glass.
What the fuck, Gator?
And the worst part isn’t that she hit me.
It’s that she looked at me like I’d taken something from her she can’t ever get back. That, even if she lives through the day, the damage I did to her will stay with her for the rest of her life.
A piece of her — a beautiful, caring, tender beating piece of her — died because of me.
I brace both hands on the counter and breathe through the tightness in my chest.
It doesn’t help.
This pain is something I’ll carry for the rest of my life.
The Sons of Sorrow may let me go when all this is over; they may let June and me free to start lives somewhere far from here, but I’ll never really be free of them.
That’s if they let me and June go.
Midnight isn’t a businessman negotiating terms. He isn’t trustworthy. He’s a predator. Murder and control are his religion. That patch on his chest that says ‘Enforcer’ isn’t just a job title for him, it’s a calling, it’s a bloodstained declaration of what dominates his crooked, blackened soul.
He is a monster who doesn’t hand your sister back alive once she’s served her purpose; he doesn’t hand her back at all. Because there is no “after” with men like Midnight, not until you’re dead.
My phone rings.
I don’t even need to look at the screen to know it — that’s him. The promised call.
I answer. “Yeah?”
“It’s time. We move on them in one hour. Be there and be ready.”
“And June?”
“I’m keeping her close. You do what you’re told, and you’ll get your little sister back. All you have to do is go just a littlebit longer, Gator, and I promise, I’m almost bored with fucking with you. Soon, you and your little June will be able to run off somewhere, start fresh, and try to forget that the only reason either of you two are still pulling breath is because I allowed it. You owe me your life, Gator. You and June.”
He sounds like he’s going to keep going, hell, he’s probably hard, but I cut him off. “One hour. Got it. I’ll be there.”
I hang up the phone and I push off the counter, move through my apartment like a man on autopilot. I put on some fresh clothes, grab my wallet, keys, a gun. I stop at the closet and stare at the leather jacket hanging there. It’s not my cut, but it’s the closest thing I’ve got. And above it, hidden on a top shelf behind a stack of shoe boxes, is my helmet.
I pull it down and hold it.
Just for a moment, I allow myself to feel what it’d be like to be on my bike, riding, free of this bullshit, with Molly on the seat behind me, her legs and arms clinging to me as we scream down the winding roads around Ironwood Falls.
