Page 22 of Irrevocably

“Okay, not a bad – would you stop fucking clicking that goddamn pen, Kill.”

Killian stops clicking and sighs. “Are we done here?”

“What?” Lazarus demands. “You have somewhere more important to be?”

“He does,” Thea says. “He’s desperate to go play Call of Duty with a bunch of ten-year-olds.”

I watch the three of them bicker good-naturedly. They’re easy with each other; the bond between them, from twenty years of growing up together and looking out for each other, is strong. I’m not part of that ease. It’s foreign to me. I don’t know their in-jokes or references, and I don’t have that bond with them. I’m on the outside looking in.

Not that I need to be anywhere but outside. If you don’t have anyone, you can’t lose anyone, and I don’t want anyone. Not a girlfriend or a wife or children. Not a family in the way my siblings are family.

When Enzo first took me, I was so homesick I cried myself to sleep every night. I missed my mother and all I wanted was for my big brother to find me again and take me home. But Enzo had no time for a child’s tears. He had no time for a child, period. So I had to learn to be an adult very fast, to be self-sufficient, cold. To have no wants, no desires, no dreams. Nothing that could be manipulated or used against me.

Of course, I do have one particular thing that I want, one thing that Enzo has promised me on completion of this mission. He’s going to release me from my oaths to him and to the Tribunal, which means that finally, after twenty years of complete obedience, of dealing out his justice, of torture and killing, and being a weapon in his hand, I’ll be free.

I’ll be free of the world I live in now, free to make my own decisions, to be the master of my own life, to never again be under someone else’s control.

I will do anything for that. Anything at all. Even betray my flesh and blood.

Everything has a cost and I will pay it.

Chapter Eleven

ASTRID

The study hall is in the Swan Building, one of the older buildings on campus, and it’s kind of like how I’d imagine an old English university, with stone walls and a wooden ceiling full of exposed beams. Bookshelves line the walls, and the space is full of long tables with plenty of space to study.

It’s quiet, the high windows letting in a bit of late fall sunset, and I’m down in my favourite corner, near the back, at the end of one table so I don’t have to put up with neighbours.

I’m staring at my laptop screen, struggling to make sense of the chemical compounds on it, but no matter how hard I concentrate, I can’t figure them out.

I’m tired from staying up most of the night finishing Professor Bright’s assignment, and while I think it’s better, I don’t know if it’s A-Plus better. I don’t have time to obsess over it, though, because there’s this chemistry thing to do, and midterms to start studying for, not to mention an English paper to write.

It’s been two days since Lucien Frost told me about my dad and Wolf, and the Hellhounds MC. How there’s some kind of weapons business going on at the port and they’re all involved. And how he wants me to get information from Dad about why the police aren’t busting it wide open.

That’s all the time he gave me to find out. Two days.

Hardly enough time to process what he told me, let alone actually talk to the father I haven’t been able to talk to about anything important for years.

I take my glasses off and rub my eyes, that damn balloon inflating as the pressure inside me builds, and that’s the problem. There are too many pressures, and I can’t afford to break.

The day before, when I woke up, I decided that there was no reason why I should lose my shot at med school just because Lucien showed up. So, I’ve been concentrating on finishing my assignments. I’m risking Lucien making good on his threat to tell Dad about the cutting, but the two days aren’t quite over yet. I’ve texted Wolf to ask if he had time to catch up, so tonight he’s coming to our house.

Tonight, I have to find the courage to ask him if what Lucien told me is true, and I’m afraid of that conversation. For a long time, I’ve been talking to him as Connor Black, the boy, the friend he used to be, but now I have to talk to him like Wolf, the biker, and that man… Well, he’s a stranger to me.

Connor used to be my protector, a really good guy. A little rough around the edges from his tough upbringing, but with a good heart. I honestly can’t imagine him being involved in anything violent, but…

I press my fingers into my eyes hard enough that bright spots flare behind my closed lids. If he is involved in something like this, it will change our relationship, irrevocably.

Anger stirs in my gut, at fucking Lucien and what he wants and how, in the space of a mere couple of days, he’s upended my entire life. Not that that life was going too well to start with, but it was okay. I was making the grades I wanted, at least. But now…

I hate that I feel so powerless and afraid, at the mercy of a man I don’t know and who’s agenda remains a mystery. And whose hand around my throat I can’t stop thinking about.

The balloon presses hard against my ribs and finally, after another ten minutes of trying to breathe through my panic, I collect my stuff and make a break for the bathroom. It’s occupied, unfortunately, but the stall down the end by the wall is free, so I walk quickly into it and shut the door.

I sit on the toilet lid and get out my knife. I decided to wear a skirt today – it’s pleated and tartan, like a kilt – which makes things easier, so I haul my hem up to the tops of my thighs. There are faint lines there, too, from past cuts, but I need to leave the cuts on my arms to heal, so thighs it is.

I slide the blade across one thigh, and the pain is a balm, the fear escaping, a kind of calm enveloping me. For some reason I feel his hands around my throat the way they were in that alley, his fingers pressing on the bruises he’d left there from the time before, and how good that ache felt. How right.