Fix this.
That was a promise I could keep, and it killed me, the thought of being without Shea. Of letting her down. Because I loved her so goddamned much. So much it eclipsed all reason. So much that I’d let it all go, give it up to keep them safe. How many times had I promised it? Just didn’t know being struck with the reality of losing them, staring it down through the wicked eyes of depravity, would be so excruciating. A rending crack right down the middle that broke me in two.
“This ends now.”
He scoffed, raked his teeth over his bottom lip.
“And how’s that, Mr. Stone?”
“You’re going to tell me what you did to them. What you did to Shea. To Mark. To my brother.”
When I said their names, a fragment of the composure I was barely clinging to flew out the window. Exposing what was inside.
Vulnerable.
Martin caught it and smiled a venomous smile. “I always do what has to be done.”
“Not good enough,” I grated. All I needed was a little evidence. Something condemning, so I could send this asshole straight back to hell where he belonged. Where he could rot. Even if I was rotting right alongside him.
He took another slow swill of his drink.
“What do you want to hear, Mr. Stone? You want to hear your best friend wasn’t a strung-out addict? That he had some other reason to succumb to the drug running hot through his veins, slowly snuffing the life out of him until he lay there wasted? A heap of decaying garbage face down on the floor? Because we both know that’s exactly what he was. Just like your brother.”
Fiery dots of hate glimmered across my vision and I felt an earthquake shaking beneath my feet.
I fought to maintain my footing on the rippling ground.
He grinned. Goading. Prodding like a branding iron. “But there are some things people just shouldn’t know.”
He skirted around the details, luring me into his fucked-up cage-match, forced me into a ring made up of chain links and barbed wire and razor blades where nobody came out alive.
“What did you do?”
He ignored my question with a slow, repeating shake of his head as if he were getting lost in contemplation. “Some would call it brave. Others would call it stupid. Just like Delaney…sticking her nose in places it didn’t belong. Trying to use it against me.”
He grinned. “Yeah. I guess I’d call it stupid, too.”
That malicious grin widened when he saw the shudder roll through me, another reaction I had no chance to contain.
With the glass in his hand, he pointed at me like we were the best of friends sharing an inside joke, tipping it my direction as he chuckled through suggestive laughter. “But that Delaney Rhoads. Mmm. She’s quite the fuck, isn’t she? Can see why you’re hung up on that one. Those legs. Of course, she cried like a bitch the first time I took her. Tore her open like a brand new present, just like her momma had offered me.”
Fury.
Like a strike of lightning to a dry, withered tree.
A force of nature. An act of God.
Unbridled and unchecked.
I didn’t even realize I was moving until the moment my body connected with his.
I flew into him like the crack of thunder. The stool crashed to the floor and we tumbled over the top of it.
Jennings and I were a tangle of limbs and aggression and the foulest kind of hate.
I scrambled to get on top of him. I went straight for the throat, squeezing at his lifeline, because God knew I wanted nothing more than to squeeze the life out of him.
Like he’d done Mark.
My teeth ground.
His depraved eyes darkened, something vile and wicked, sucking me down into the depths of his barren soul.
I squeezed harder, my breaths grunted through the rage dripping from my words. “What did you do to Mark? To my brother? To Shea?”
I was desperate.
Fingers dug into the back of my hands as he struggled below me.
He gritted out the words. “Do you know who I am? What I’m going to do to you?”
Not if I ended this first.