I sprint after her, breaking past the bushes as low-hanging branches whip across my face. I follow her every step, ducking and weaving through the trees like a fucking maze.
“Come on, Menace. You can’t outrun me,” I holler behind her. “Where do you think you’re going to go?”
“I’m not yourmenace!” she cries, her arms pumping as fast as they can go, trying to propel herself deeper into the thick bushes with no clear plan in mind.
Rage consumes me. After everything she has done to me, everything she’s put me through, how dare she think she can try to escape me.
She gets ahead for all of three seconds before my long strides eat up the distance between us, and if I wasn’t so fucking exhausted, I might have let her think she got the best of me, but today is not the day. We don’t have time to waste on this bullshit.
Aria screams like this is some fucked-up scene out of a movie as I quickly catch up to her. Then, only allowing for one final step, I close my hand around the back of her neck, slamming her against a thick tree trunk, instantly bearing down on her.
“You wanna fucking do this, then let’s do this,” I roar, my hand not moving from her throat for even a second as she trembles in my hold, her eyes filled with the kind of fear that I’ve only ever seen once in my life. “Your time for bullshit is up. Start talking, and maybe I’ll end this quickly.”
Aria grips my wrist, frantically trying to claw her way free, her nails digging deep into my skin, but the adrenaline pulsing through my veins keeps me going.
“Start. Talking.”
Tears well in her green eyes, flowing over her lower lashes and down her cheeks, and I almost laugh. There was a time when those big, fat tears would have brought me to my knees. Not anymore.
“I swear,” she chokes out, desperately pleading. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t do whatever it is you think I did. I’m not . . . I’m not her.”
“You can’t fuck with me, Menace,” I snap, digging my hand into my pocket and pulling out the Polaroid I’ve kept of her pretty face since the day I took the goddamn picture. I hold it up in front of her face, roaring with frustration. “This is you. Riley fucking Maddox.The real you, not this bullshit version of yourself, Aria Ashford. There’s no mistaking it. I have known you since you were four years old. We grew up side by side. I know every goddamn scar on your body, every freckle, every fucking hair, so don’t try to insult me by telling me that you are not her. Nobody on this fucking planet knows you the way I do.”
That familiar green gaze settles on the small Polaroid picture in my hand, and I watch as confusion clouds her eyes. I know exactly what she’s thinking as her eyes track the curve of her younger face. She’s taking in her own beaming smile, wondering how she can possibly deny this.
“No,” Aria breathes, starting to shake her head, her brows pinched together. “That’s . . . That’s me, but how do you have that? I don’t . . . I don’t understand. That’s not possible.”
What the hell is she talking about? How is it not possible? “The fuck it is. I took the goddamn picture eleven years ago.”
“But . . . I was only thirteen then. I was just a child. There’s no way. I don’t—”
My grip tightens around her throat, and her gaze tears away from the Polaroid and back to mine. “What the fuck is going on, Menace?”
There’s a real fear in her eyes, but this is different. It’s as though she doesn’t even notice my hand around her throat anymore. She goes somewhere far away, her gaze dropping to my chest as she tries to figure something out, and as I take her in, I wonder if I even know her at all.
The woman I grew up with wasn’t afraid of anything, especially not me. She was fearless, reckless, and full of life. She was just like me. I molded her that way because it was the only way for us to survive, but the way Aria trembles and shrinks away . . . She’s never done that before. Apart from what’s happened today, I have never given her a reason to fear me, not even when she watched me tear those six men to shreds all those years ago.
“There’s no way,” Aria breathes. “It couldn’t be.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I have no recollection of smiling for this photo,” she murmurs, her gaze shifting back to mine, a profound sadness flicking in her eyes. “But it’s just like everything else that I have no recollection of.”
I stare at her, my hand loosening around her throat at seeing real confusion in her eyes. She’s not faking this. She can’t be. I taught her how to lie, but nobody is this good.
“I . . . I don’t know who this menace is. I’ve never heard that name before, but I think it’s possible that I could be her. I just . . . I can’t believe that this could have been my life before. That I’d be involved with someone—” She cuts herself off, her lips twisting into an awkward cringe before she gets a chance to finish her sentence.
“What do you mean by your lifebefore?”
“Before the accident.”
“What accident?”
She slowly shakes her head and shrugs before slightly turning and reaching up to her hair. Taking hold of her long, auburn strands, she pulls at her thick locks, parting them before showing me a large scar on the back of her head.
I rear back, caught off guard.
Like I said, I know every scar on this woman’s body, but that one is new. And it’s not small either. It’s almost the length of herpalm, but an injury like that doesn’t come without side effects. “What happened?” I ask, slowly lifting my hand and running my fingers over the deep scarring on the back of her scalp.
