Page 85 of Haunt Me

“Then you can choose it without our support,” my father says. “Seventy-two hours, Astra.”

The line goes quiet except for my mother’s unsteady breathing.

“I love you both,” I say. “I hope one day you can actually hear that instead of just the part where I disappointed you.”

Neither of them answers.

“Goodbye,” I whisper and end the call before either of them can say it first.

I set the phone down on the nightstand and stare at the ceiling, waiting for the guilt to arrive the way it always does.

It comes. I think it always will. I’ve hurt people I love, people who believe, in their own way, that they’re only trying to protect me.

But beneath the guilt something else also exists.

It’s not relief or even happiness. It’s resolve.

Seventy-two hours or not, I’m not going home because I’ve been ordered to do so. If they want to punish me for that, they can. I’ve spent twenty-three years being funded, guided, and approved of.

I’d rather be broke and myself than wealthy and someone else’s idea of me.

Samuel

The first thing I understand is the cold concrete against my cheek. The second is that I can’t feel my hands.

Everything begins coming back in pieces and out of order. The way a nightmare does once you're finally shaken awake. The car. The whiskey. The river. Ridgeback’s men closing in from every direction.

After that, nothing. Just black and the dragging sense of time passing without me being fully in it.

I try to lift my head and the room spins, slow and sick, refusing to settle. My wrists are bound above me, the rope biting deep enough that my fingers have gone numb and useless. When I blink, the shapes around me refuse to hold still. Exposed beams. A rusted forklift. Somewhere, water drips in a slow, patient rhythm that sounds too much like the ticking of a clock counting down to something I don’t get a vote on.

A warehouse. It has to be.

My ribs ache, reminding me of the beating I took. My mouth tastes like copper and dirt. I try to swallow, but there’s nothing left in my throat to swallow.

“Well, well. Look who’s finally awake.”

A figure steps under the low, swinging bulb overhead. Broad through the shoulders, gray threading through a beard he hasn’t bothered to trim in a while, a Ridgeback patch stitched over his chest.

Cullen.

I know that face better than I want to. Every man in Blackwater does. Ridgeback’s president, the one who gave the order to put half his club on Raven’s doorstep and got his own men buried for it.

“It’s about time we meet face to face.” Cullen crouches in front of me, forearms braced on his knees, studying me.

I try to spit at him and manage nothing but a dry, cracked cough.

He laughs low and unbothered.

“I like him already.”

“Blackwater’s gonna come for me,” I say and hope quietly, viciously that it isn’t true. What I actually want is for this to end fast enough that I don’t have to keep fighting for a life I’ve stopped wanting. If Cullen finishes what the reiver started, I won’t have to find my own way back to her. He’ll do it for me.

“I’m counting on it.” Cullen straightens, nodding once to someone who’s past the edge of the light. “That’s rather the whole point.”

The first hit lands before I finish bracing for it, a boot to my ribs that knocks what little air I had straight out of my lungs. I hear myself make a sound I don’t recognize as mine, something animal and involuntary, torn loose from somewhere deep inside. The world grays at the edges, narrows, and comes back wrong.

“Not too much,” Cullen says, almost bored, like he’s giving instructions for how well done to cook a steak. “I need him breathing when Knox sees him. Beaten half to death is useful. Dead’s just a body.