“Shit,” she sighs. “Damn. I think all you have to do is rub them together. It couldn’t be that hard, right? If cavemen could do it, surely we can figure it out.”
“I know how to start a fire. What I meant wasno, we can’t. It’s too risky,” I explain. “You might as well shoot up a flare telling every fucker within a hundred-mile radius exactly where we are.”
Aria groans and tosses her little collection of sticks aside before leaning back against the tree once again, tipping her head back and staring up at the starry night above. “We?” she questions. “There’s no we about this. This is all on you. You’re an escaped prisoner, and I am nothing more than a poor hostage that’s been dragged into your bullshit, so excuse me for not really caring if a swarm of cops close in on us and get me the fuck out of here.”
I grit my teeth, frustration burning through my veins. “The answer is still no.”
She sighs and closes her eyes. “Fuck. This is going to suck.”
“Escaping a prison isn’t meant to be a breeze.”
“This really isn’t how I anticipated my day going,” she murmurs. “This was supposed to be my big break. And it would have been had Jedd not stolen the interview out from under me.”
I scoff. “You think that’s why the interview wasn’t going to be a success? There shouldn’t have been an interview in the first place. If you wanted your big break, then you should have picked someone else’s life to exploit. Mine was always off limits.”
Aria rolls her eyes. “You know, I’d been awake from my coma for about two months, stuck in the hospital, doing rehab, andre-learning how to walk when I first saw your trial come up on the TV. I don’t know what it was, but there was something about your case that just sat with me, and I found myself watching it every day. I’ve obsessed over it for seven years, desperate to find out what really happened that night.”
Letting out a breath, I sit down against a tree, kicking my tired legs out as I stare at the ground, the events of that night replaying in my head like the worst form of mental torture. “That night was never supposed to happen. It destroyed everything we had built. It took you away from me, and nothing has ever been the same.”
I feel her stare against the side of my face, watching me far too closely. “The girl you were trying to protect,” she murmurs, “the minor that was mentioned during the trial, was that . . . is she me, Stone?”
I shift my gaze to Aria, taking in the fierce longing for answers in her green stare, but I shake my head. “Don’t ask questions you don’t truly want the answers to, Menace.”
“I do,” she tells me. “I’ve gone years without knowing a damn thing about myself. I want to know who I am. I want to know where I come from, and how the hell I ended up here, because right now, not a goddamn thing makes sense to me.”
I consider her for a moment, holding her stare. She has every right to know about herself, but that doesn’t mean I have to tell her aboutthatnight. That’s not something I’m willing to get into. Maybe ever.
“Your name is Riley Maddox,” I start, deciding not to sugarcoat a damn thing. “You have no family. Your dad was a deadbeat who took off on you, and your mom sold herself for her next fix. You were put into the system at four years old, then placed in the same foster family with me and my—” I pause, letting out a breath. “The three of us became a family. We gotyou through school. We had your back. We protected you from the world and taught you how to survive it.”
She stares at me as though staring at a complete stranger. “You’re my family?”
I nod. “I’m all you’ve ever truly had.”
“What about the other guy? What happened to him?”
“Dead,” I state, letting her hear the coldness in my tone. “You don’t need to fear him.”
“Why would I fear him?”
I shake my head, needing her to understand where this deep rage comes from. “It was just you and me for a long time, Riley. We were unstoppable together. We could have had the whole fucking world in our hands, and we didn’t give a shit what kind of chaos we caused. Right up until everything changed. You were only seventeen, still a kid, but I trusted you to have my back, just as I did for you for all those years. And when you didn’t—”
She sucks in a breath. “I didn’t know,” she pleads as though the very fear of me ending her life is still in the forefront of her mind, but that truth is, how the hell could I possibly follow through if I’m not certain about this? How could I take her life if she never truly betrayed me? It’s almost comical. If she knew why I really killed those men and became a monster, she would never fear me. She would know what kind of man I truly am, and that I’m just doing what I have to do to survive in a world that wants to push me out.
I turn my attention back to the darkness beyond, cutting the conversation short, unable to handle the swarm of confusing emotions pounding through my body. I don’t know what to believe. Don’t know how to feel. For seven years, all I’ve thought about was revenge on the girl who stole my life out from under me and saw to it that I spent the rest of my life behind bars. There’s so much pent-up rage there that I don’t know what to do with it. She could have saved me. Could have protected me justthe way she always vowed. The way I always did for her without fail.
“Go to sleep, Riley. This is the only rest you’ll get for a while.”
“It’s Aria now,” she whispers, having no connection to her real identity, and despite not trusting me one bit, her exhaustion is too much. The second she tips her head back against the tree and curls up against it, a deep sleep claims her.
I sit in solitude, listening to the subtle sounds of the creatures around me. There’s an owl in the distance. Crickets chirping. And maybe a coyote or two. But they don’t concern me. My only thoughts are for the sleeping woman beside me.
There was a part of me that feared never seeing her again, and just knowing that she is here with me is comforting. She was my foster sister for so long. I was only seven when she came to us, and I claimed her as my own the moment I laid eyes on her. I knew she had to be protected, that there was something so innocently beautiful about her, and I wasn’t going to let that light fade from her eyes. She fell in so easily with my brother and me, but now, I have no idea what that dynamic is. Just because she’s my menace doesn’t mean she’s Riley Maddox anymore. This woman beside me is Aria Ashford, and she’s different. She’s a perfect stranger who wears Riley’s face, and that’s not something I’m going to get used to easily.
Though some things never change, and there’s no denying that Aria comes fully equipped with Riley’s fierce attitude. And being on the run with a woman who is that headstrong is going to be one hell of a challenge.
Reaching into my pocket, I pull out the small Polaroid photo I’d taken of her all those years ago and rub my thumb across the shiny paper, right where she’d marked it with her name at the bottom: Menace.
She was so innocent back then. We all were. It was a time long before the real world caught up to us. I was seventeen and hadgiven her the stupid camera for her birthday and insisted she needed a photo of herself. She’d never had one before, and that photo has lived with me ever since. Even in the face of escaping the prison, I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving it behind.
