“Basically.” I draw the word out longer than needed. “That and I need to wear a wire when I give them the account numbers and somehow engage them in conversation that makes them implicate themselves.”
And that’s when Chevy loses his mind.
CHEVY
VIOLET MUST HAVE been hit too hard in the head during the kidnapping. Wearing a wire. What the hell is she thinking? Why doesn’t she just go ahead and place a gun to her head and pull the trigger?
I make my fifth pass of stalking around the fire. Violet’s on the other side, sitting there, watching the fire like she just announced we were going to make s’mores instead of...
“Wearing a wire. This isn’t a movie, Violet. They figure it out and they will kill you. That basement will look like kindergarten. Have you forgotten they shot Eli this summer? Eli thinks the Riot are the ones who took a shot at Razor last month. They almost killed you. They almost killed me. These men are murderers.”
“I’m aware.” Violet finally raises her eyes to look at me, and I could strangle her for how calm she’s acting.
She’s aware. She’s aware? “Do you understand what I’m saying? When I speak, is it English that’s coming out?”
Violet pulls her hand out of the blanket, tucks her fire-red hair behind her ear, then shrugs. “They’ve already hurt me and they’ve already hurt you. If we don’t stop them, they will continue to hurt us and they’ll move on to the people we love. We have the power to end this once and for all. Don’t you want to secure peace?”
Peace. I don’t even know what that is anymore. I run a hand over my face when I honestly feel like clawing my skin off. “What don’t you understand? I can’t let you do this. I won’t!”
A tick of her head. The first show of emotion and it’s her building temper. “Can’t, let and won’t. Three words not to use with me. I’m not asking your permission. I’m informing you of the decisions I’ve made. You don’t see me telling you that you can’t be part of the club or I’m going to let you be part of the club or that I won’t stand for you to be part of the club. You’re a big boy, Chevy. You can make your own big-boy decisions and I’m a big girl and you need to learn to accept my big-girl decisions. You want a dog to order around and be obedient, I bet you can adopt one at the pound.”
“Why does it always come back to the club?”
“Because that’s how they treat me, and whether you realize it or not, you do a modified version of trying to control me, too. To be honest, you want to be with me and be with the club? I could live with that, as long as you learn that I am not your property, I am not a dog, that I am your equal and I deserve the love and respect that comes with that because that’s what a real man does when he loves a woman.”
Violet shuts her eyes like she’s just poured out her soul and didn’t mean for it to happen and I’m having a hard time catching my breath. The fragile foundation of understanding I had crumbles and I take a step toward Violet onto solid ground. An equal. That’s all she wants and it feels sickening and strange that I never understood it until now. I thought loving her made us equal, but love doesn’t necessarily mean that I listened to her. I listened...to what I thought was best for her...to what was best for me.
But to wear a wire... My throat closes and an ache ripples through my chest. She ran for the gun, and when that shot reverberated around the room, my knees gave and the pain that consumed me nearly crushed me to the point of death.
“I love you,” I say. “And I don’t want to live without you.”
Violet pulls the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “And I love you and I don’t want to live without you. Even if we can’t work things out between us, I will still love you and I still don’t want to live without you. If you go down roads I can’t travel, then I need to know you’re safe. I need to know Eli is safe, and Cyrus and Pigpen and Oz and Razor and my mom and my brother, and I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life.
“I have the opportunity to end it all. The war between the Riot and the Terror finally over. Years of pain and hurt and blood will end. What Cyrus’s and Eli’s generations could never do, I can. I won’t lie, I’m terrified, but I will not let fear stop me. I will be the one to do what no one else has been able to do. I will bring peace.”
The fire illuminates her face and there’s an edge to her beauty I’ve never seen before. Violet’s never been a shrinking flower. She’s always been a ferocious storm, but her bursts of anger were like short downdrafts that could do damage but then quickly recede. She had the temper of a child, but now she shines with a light that only comes with maturity, with growing up, and before me is a gorgeous warrior holding her head high as she readies for battle.
“Then we do this, but I’m involved. We make up a story telling them I came to you upset with the Terror over my father and that you told me the plan to put Eli away. Yeah, you’ll have to meet with them again to make the switch from you being the lead to me, but you don’t have to wear a wire for that. We tell them I want to be the one to give them the account numbers because I want revenge. I’ll wear the wire.” I’ll take the risk of death. “The Riot have been playing me, too, with my dad being a traitor. Maybe they’ll be convinced I’m flipping on Eli.”
“Even you have to admit how ridiculous that sounds,” she says. “Cyrus and Eli are your family. You would never flip on them. The Riot know this and that’s why they picked me and not you.”
“I’m breaking a promise to the Terror right now.”
“True,” she says slowly. “But I’m not asking you to betray them.”
“Eli and Cyrus will see my not telling them about you and the Riot as a betrayal.”
“But it’s not. We’re trying to save them. If you honestly didn’t believe I was doing all this to save the people you love, regardless of your feelings for me, you would have already been down the road telling Eli. But you aren’t and you didn’t tell Eli last night about the Riot because deep down you know me and you trust me. You know I would never purposely hurt the people I love.”
“Yet the Riot chose you and they were wrong. I can convince them they were wrong about me.”
Violet looks away and that one cast of her gaze feels like being hit by a car at breakneck speed. She knows something I don’t. “Tell me.”
“You failed their test.”
“What test?”
“They told you your father was a traitor. You told the board, and you believed what they said enough to not go looking for answers on your own.”
“I don’t believe what the board said.”
She bobs her head in agreement. “I know, but deep down you trust the club enough not to have asked for the woman’s name who could in theory tell you the truth and you have yet to reach out to them for that information.”
I slam my hand to my chest. “You don’t think it’s a problem for me if my father was a traitor? You don’t think it’s eating me alive?”