“You understand don’t you? If you had known, if the roles were reversed, you would’ve done the same thing, right?” He’s desperate for me to understand, that much is clear in his tone. There’s no bravado, no emotionless, controlled, mask. He’s real, this is real. “You would, Roxie, you’re just frustrated that I did it first. Please,please, understand.”
“You told me I was nothing, that I meant nothing to you. That what we had was nothing. I gave you plenty of chances during that fight to tell me something was wrong, but you doubled-down. You… You…” I’m so fucking angry and sad and frustrated that I’m losing the ability to form words.
“It was the only way you’d actually fight me. You know that. You were pulling your punches until I said that.”
He’s not wrong, but I’m not going to let him know that.
“So were you!” I yell at him, holding my shoe out at him as if it’s an extension of my hand.
“Of fucking course I was! Do you think I wanted to do that? Do you think I was excited for that fight? Do you think that anything that happened that night was something that made my life better?” He’s yelling right back at me, but instead of getting annoyed, I feel fucking relieved. This should’ve happenedyearsago.
“Every single moment since I knocked you out has been a test. A test in how far I’m willing to go to keep you safe, how much I’m willing to take to let you be free. How much I can control myself for the one moment of control I didn’t have.” Themoment he says that, his eyes widen like he said something he shouldn’t have.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing.”
“There’s that damn word again,” I mutter before getting more stern. “Tell me what all happened.”
“Roxie–”
“What. Did. You. Do?!” I scream, fed up and at my limit.
“I killed him!” Ty screams back, his arms going behind his head and it takes everything in my power not to look down at his abs flexing the motion. “I killed him,” he says again, softer this time, almost like he’s never said it out loud.
“Who?”
“Mickey. I killed Mickey Frank.”
“How?”
“It was after the fight,” Ty drops to his knees and his voice cracks. Watching as his shoulders hunch forward and his hands cover his face, I so badly want to hold him. To give him any part of me to hold onto while he’s finally telling me all he's been through.
“Ty,” I whisper.
“He took me out of the tunnel and wasn’t going to let you go.” His hand drops from his face and he stares up at me with a renewed desperation. “He wasn’t going to let you go, Roxie. You were going to forever be trapped under him. He said he was never going to let you go… No matter what you did. He was going to keep you under his thumb, and was going to…” he swallows a lump in his throat, shaking his head before continuing. “He was going to make sure you were… That you were…” Ty never ends up finishing that sentence, but I know him.
Ty would never go to that extreme if it wasn’t something intense. Something terrible. Something worse than what I’d already gone through.
“When I realized you were going to always be in danger, I lost it. He realized it too because he pulled his gun on me, but I… I got it. I gothim.” Ty’s eyes are glazed over, unseeing as he thinks of the past and what happened.
I need to throw up.
What the fuck did I make him do?
“After it happened, I knew I had to call my uncle. He’s a bit of a mob boss and handles shit like that all the time. I hadn’t called him in years, I hadn’t seen him in years. My dad used to tell me not to ask for help from Marcos, ever. And I took that to heart. But this… I had no one else to turn to for help. But that help, it came at a cost.”
My hand flies to my mouth in horror and all that I can think is, ‘I did this to him.’ That this is all because of me.
“What did it cost?” I whisper brokenly.
“I had to work for him for six weeks. Doing whatever he asked. I learned how to intimidate people more than I already did. Breaking fingers, kneecaps, learning how much to hurt before causing lasting damage, then… Then he had me start crossing off his enemies, people who’d crossed him, and who owed him. One by one.”
My eyes widen even further, and I swear, my heart stops beating.
“Ty,” I gasp.
His eyes flash up to mine and I see the moment I said the wrong thing. Not even said the wrong thing, but my tone was off because he shuts down.
