Copyright © 2018 Ace Gray

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Cover Design by Bex Harper Designs

Editing by Gray Ink
Formatting by Elaine York of Allusion Graphics, LLC
 Prologue
Filly
Brye

Present Day
Brye
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 Filly
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Six Months Later

Filly
Brye

Exclusive Bonus Scenes

Pretty Young Things Sneak Peek
Acknowledgements
Books by Ace Gray
About Ace Gray
My whole life, there had only been one rule. Don’t go to Chicago. It always made me feel like a
damsel in distress, trapped in a tower. But my life was filled with kings and queens and the most
noble knights and I didn’t need another fairytale.

I needed a bad boy.

Brye McCowan was just that. He was smooth, and seductive. Dark, dangerous and downright drool
worthy too. I saw trouble swirling around him in place of a shadow. He was my one rule personified.

And I couldn’t stop myself from kissing him.

Which was right about the time that whole fairytale thing kicked back in. Only this time I wasn’t
surrounded by heroes. These were the villains, wicked and vengeful. And Brye was one of them.
When all was said and done, when all the blood was spilled, the only thing more tormenting than the
dungeon he threw me in was knowing it was my family’s twisted secrets that put me there.
 To those who break down and let others build them back up.
It takes more strength than you know.

To Sarah Grim Sentz who broke me down and put me back together even better.
My parents raised me steeped in art and stories, paint and poetry. I knew the great sculptures of the
world, the breathtaking bush strokes of the masters. My childhood had unfurled like its own work of
wonder as we traipsed around the world. Make-believe was my only friend, but its ever-changing
intrigue kept me better company than I deserved.
The world around me was beautiful and free. The world around me was perfect.
I’d only ever had three rules. Always stay where we can see you. Never speak to strangers,
certainly don’t tell them your name. And for the love of all that is holy, don’t go anywhere near
Chicago.
We’d traveled to the ruins of Machu Picchu, inspiring my carvings coated in gold. We’d run
through the Scottish highlands and for months, every story I knew was shrouded in mist. The
Dolomites had inspired a snow bunny phase and Thailand a Buddhist one. But we never went near the
American Midwest.
Art had been the only constant in my life. Sketches, sculpture, paint, and prose. And of course my
family.
We’d always been unique. I was an American kid home-schooled in Mexico floating on the wind
to Paris and back. We had money to move mountains—I saw the piles of it under our floorboards—
but we lived simply. Family was the currency we really traded in. My uncles, Horse and Conrad,
were as close to my side as my mom and dad. I loved them. Fiercely. But…
They were protective. Sometimes overly so. Just like my parents. There was a hard edge to their
watchfulness, suspicion even. And though I’d flown to the far corners of the globe, and painted doves
and gulls and angels above, I felt as though I’d never really unfurled my wings. They were itching to
unwind.
“Filly?” Uncle Horse stared deep into my face, his brows quirked up awaiting my answer to a
question I hadn’t heard.
“What? Hummmm?” I shook my head a little as I fully focused back on him.
“What are you going to tell them?” He cocked his head and pressed his finger to his temple as he
studied me.
I started a few times, only to flop like a little goldfish out of my bowl.
“Oh, Filly Bean,” he used his favorite nickname for me when his face softened. “You need an
ironclad argument for going to The States for school and you know it. Don’t half-ass this.”
“They’re going to say no,” I whined and reached for my glass of sparkling water, my thumb
tracing shapes in the condensation.
“Hey,” he said softly as his giant hand crooked beneath my chin and lifted my eyes to mine. “Of
all the things this family is, quitters is not one of them.” He smiled at me and my insides felt like
warm cocoa. “Disbelievers is the other.”
“But…” My voice trailed off. “You know how they feel about The States.”
Something flashed behind his eyes, a darkness I caught from time to time, but then he squashed it
and his easy, sweet face was back.
 “It’s just Chicago, Bean. They’ll be okay with San Francisco.” He rubbed his thumb across my
chin then let his hand drop. “So give me the pitch again.”
We’d been trying to nail my verbiage down before I sat down with my folks and prayed. I sucked
in a deep breath, ready to try again.
“If you’re going to San Francisco…” Uncle Conrad came in singing. The first syllable of my
speech froze on my tongue.
“Knock it off, Pie,” Uncle Horse scolded.
“They’re going to give you anything you want,” Uncle Conrad whispered as he leaned in to kiss
my forehead, his pink bathrobe brushing my nervously shuffling fingertips.
“Impromptu family meeting?” My dad walked into the room and swallowed the air in one gulp.
His green eyes were so close to mine, and they did a better job than anyone stripping me down to my
secrets.
“No,” Uncle Horse answered.
“We wouldn’t dare scheme behind your back, Cole.” Uncle Conrad rolled his eyes as he reached
for a cucumber in the fridge and started to slice eye-sized pieces.
Something rippled out from my dad’s shoulders, something almost terrifying, but then Uncle Horse
reached for his hand where he clutched the counter. He wove his fingers into my dad’s and squeezed.
“No one’s scheming, Cole. Filly just has a question.” Uncle Horse turned up the temperature and
dissipated anxiety all at once.
I swallowed hard and met my dad’s unyielding eyes. Their strength and fortitude usually brought
me strength, but when I was about to be a gently lapping wave against the fortress he could be, I
withered.
“What’s going on in here?” My mom’s small voice barely preceded her small hands wrapping
around my dad’s shoulders.
Her bright blonde waves matched mine and her smile twitched up in the same way mine tended to.
Her subtle way of manipulating the boys around her, her quiet resilience, were things I tried to
replicate. The way she smashed apart the hard in my dad’s eyes gave me courage.
“I know where I want to go to art school,” I said as confidently as I possibly could.
My dad snarled, but my mom straightened her small spine and swatted his shoulder.
“Okay, shoot,” she said warmly as she came closer and collected my hands in hers.
I chanced a look up at her and read the worry plainly creasing her face. My eyes fell to her
forearm and traced the scar I knew so well, the one that had decimated my dad’s nickname for her.
Ladylove. They’d never told me how she got it, but I suspected it had to do with the shadows that
hung around conversations like this.
“Well, see, I wanna go somewhere with an institute, but also museums and an indie scene.” The
city rose in the periphery of my vision while my mom’s fingers tensed in mine. “I know Manhattan
made you two a little queasy, but I really want to be in the U.S. I mean, we’ve spent the least amount
of time there, and the movements there are so different than Copenhagen or Paris.”
My dad straightened and reached his ink covered hand over the top of where Mom held mine.
“You cannot go to Chicago,” he said it sternly, but there was a layer of fear in there too. A wild shiver
rolled up and down my spine, a small bit of exhilaration combined with the worry they’d managed to
instill in the pit of my stomach.
“I know not Chicago, Dad.” I smiled up at him and he blew out a deep breath, his matching smirk
pulled at the scar crossing his cheek. “But maybe San Francisco.”
“I don’t like it,” he snapped.
 “Cole…” My mom warned him and soothed him all at once.
“She’s an adult, Cole.” Uncle Conrad came to my defense.
The truly terrifying version of my dad came out as his gaze settled on Uncle Conrad. Ice flowed
through his veins and his quite calm, fraught with tension, was frigid as death.
“Conrad.” Uncle Horse stood and stepped into the crosshairs. “Cole.” He bent the slightest bit to
meet Dad’s eyes. “He didn’t say it quite right but Conrad’s right.” Uncle Horse turned and clapped his
big hands on my shoulders, still weathering my dad’s withering gaze. “Filly is twenty-one. We’ve
dragged her around the globe and back and not once has she asked for the next stop. I mean for fuck’s
sake, I don’t think she’s asked for anything. Ever.”
My dad’s whole facade melted at my Uncle’s words, then again when he looked down on me.
“You guys fostered a sensitive artist soul with endless curiosity and a sense for simple beauty.
You raised her well, Cole, but at some point, she has to paint the sky herself. You know this.” His soft
words made my dad’s throat wobble and my mom’s hand pulled from mine to wrap around him. “It
scares us all, Cupcake,” Uncle Horse added in a murmur.
A million words stuck on the tip of my tongue. I wanted to ask about the very real fear thumping
through the room. I wanted to rail on and on about all the reasons I should be allowed to go, all the
reasons I didn’t even need permission. But one look from Uncle Horse had me pursing my lips
together and keeping my mouth fixed shut.
“We trust you, Filly Bean, we do.” My mom pulled one of my hands up to her lips. “But monsters
don’t hide under your bed. They’re out there. And sometimes in plain sight.”

“Don’t waste it, Filly Bean.” Uncle Horse ruffled up my blonde hair like I was still the little girl
wearing fairy wings and painting whorls on the garden walls of our Paris home, not a grown woman
packing up the contents of my Puerto Escondido bedroom. “Your parents can be unshakeable when
they want to be.”
“I know.” I smiled at the memory of my dad folding, of him saying that he wanted nothing more
than to lay the world at my feet.
“Let Conrad help you pack.” He smiled the broad and beaming smile of a conspirator. “Lord
knows he hasn’t assembled a fall wardrobe in far too long.”
“Next you’re going to suggest I let you and Dad drive me in that junky old Charger all the way to
my new doorstep.” I winked then held my breath, praying that I wasn’t pushing my luck too far.
“Wouldn’t mind that one bit.” He picked up the small Horse figurine I kept on my desk then
fingered the paper cranes that always littered our homes. “But I think we all agree that it’s time.”
“Thank you,” I said softly and stood on tippy toes to kiss his cheek.
“Anything for you, Filly Bean.” He kissed my forehead. “I pray you never know how serious I am
about that.”
That same shudder shot down my spine from earlier, the terror and thrill dancing like a ghost wind
across my skin. I closed my eyes and let the weight of some unseen force fall on my shoulders. It was
unsettling and grounding all at once, like acceptance of my already woven fate.
When I opened my eyes again, Uncle Horse was gone, and I was alone with the bright colors,
sharp cactus and steel sculptures of my childhood home. Nothing had changed and yet everything had.
For the first time, I was leaving this house on my own, headed for a simple reality rather than the
fantastical world my family had created for me.
A reality where I could visit Chicago any damn time I pleased.
 I’d never been a disobedient child, but for as long as I could remember, I’d been told only one
thing in this world was off-limits. My parents should have known that making it forbidden made it all
the more tempting. Had they never said anything I don’t know that I would have gravitated toward the
Windy City, but now the sculpture garden of Millennium Park called my name. There was no other
museum I wanted to spend time in more than The Art Institute of Chicago.
I wanted to see the works of my mom’s displayed in different galleries.
As quietly as I could manage I pulled out my desk drawer and fished for the postcards I kept
folded behind it. They were tied up tight with a high top shoelace. I let my fingers run over the well-
worn papers, the pinpoints on my road trip that no one needed to know about. I’d been planning this in
the darkest corners of my heart, so secret I barely whispered to myself about it.
One last adventure, one foray into the world of Fairy Tale on my own, before I settled into a life
of complete and utter normalcy.
My father raised me ass deep in savage violence, punctuated with pain and pure hedonistic pleasure. I
knew how easy it was to kill a man, how skin felt against my skin whether alive and willing or plied
with mortis and death. My childhood was nonexistent and only a small part of me knew to yearn for it.
Death was my only friend and it’s ever-fixed eventuality gave me more peace than I deserved.
The world around me was darkness incarnate. The world around me deserved to burn in flames.
Blood, dark and red puddled on the pure white in front of me and for a moment the inky black of
my soul ebbed back. For a moment I was back on the lake. Back in the first and only night I felt
human. Back to the night I lost my soul for good.
“Come on, laddie.” My father’s gritty voice brought me back to the moment. “Fuck her.” He
jerked his chin toward the snow white girl in front of me. The snow white girl that was naked, rolling
on ecstasy, and reveling in the blood that dripped from my split lip onto the soft plane of skin below
her belly button.
“I don’t really feel like it,” I answered with a shrug. And I didn’t. I never did when Rosalyn
ghosted into my thoughts.
“We’re all waiting for dessert,” he countered as he motioned around the table to his most trusted
associates, each seated in order of importance away from him, the king, as they descended to me the
prince. Each seated watching, waiting for me to fuck the little toy in front of me.
The same small part of me that knew I should have grown up differently, knew that this was wrong
at best. Depraved at worst. But it was all I’d ever known.
“I’ll beat you again, m’boy.” My father went to rise in his chair, but I stopped him with a glower
and a signal of my hand. The only thing less appealing tonight than drugged up pussy was another
beating.
“Fuck you,” I spat the words at my father and saw the small speckles of blood that mimicked
splatter paint on her stomach. I reached down and let my fingers smear the blood across her skin.
Then down. And down. Then between her thighs into the hot, wet and slick of her. I couldn’t help but
groan.
“Atta boy.” He recognized the submission that he’d beat into me over the years. No one would
touch me—I was the heir to an unholy throne—but the exception was god himself. Or the god my
father believed himself to be.
So I slid into the nameless, faceless girl and did what I did best. I forgot. I forgot about Rosalyn. I
forgot about the kernel of good tucked way deep down inside of me. I forgot about everything but the
feel of a tight cunny, the jiggle of voluptuous breasts and the heat that roared through my blood when I
realized the men around that table envied me. Desired me.

“You did well today.” My father still sat in his perfectly pressed suit opposite of me at the ornate
dining room table of our downtown Chicago mansion. “In the end anyway.”
“A compliment?” I sucked in a deep breath not giving a damn that I was still naked as the day I
was born. “From you?” I smirked.
 “Someday, when you take this over, you will understand. It is better to be feared than to be
loved.”
“Then thank the fair folk MacCowans don’t have hearts.”
He raised his glass to me, his smile growing until it caused him pain where it drug across his
destroyed cheekbone. I likewise raised mine.
“Is it drugged?” I asked, knowing that most of the booze in our house was. When his minions
weren’t afraid, they were fucked up, making for our own odd brand of loyalty where it mingled with
addiction.
“Does it matter?” He tipped his chin as a toast before swigging from his glass.
And the answer was no. It never did. My life was all things wrong and dark and debasing. There
was no adventure, just an exploration of all things wild and wicked. So I tipped my chin just as he
had and raised my glass a little higher.
“Sláinte,”
The bitter taste clawed at my throat, but I choked it down. That bitter taste equated to bliss. The
second I was high on X I could forget again. Turns out my loyalty was bought the same way as all the
lackies—with blood and drugs.
“I wanted to talk to you about Cole Ryan,” my father said just before he drank again.
I arched my eyebrow. That name came up from time to time, usually when my father was feeling
wickedness and vengeance flow freely. I’d been told the story of Cole Ryan beating my father within
an inch of his life while permanently disfiguring his body like other children were told bedtime
stories.
“What about him?” I asked as I shifted in my seat to prop my heels up on the table.
“Any news?”
I shook my head as I let my fingertips drag down the valley of my abs.
“You’d be the first to know.”
I sat staring at the painting, studying the brush strokes and composition, evaluating the artwork. It was
supposed to turn my stomach. The red splattered every which way represented the gruesome spray of
blood. I tilted my head and compared it to the scene in the warehouse last night and smiled. It had
only been three men and three executioner style bullets but the way they’d fallen, the spatter… My
bloodlust and artistic impulses had been temporarily satiated.
“Brye,” Emmett, my bodyguard, my friend for lack of a better term, interrupted beside me. “We
should be getting back.”
“Just a few more minutes.” I waved him off, knowing that I didn’t need to beg or plead. “Please,”
I added anyway.
Emmett nodded and stepped back, knowing my fondness for art. It was creation while I was
destruction. When I was here, I could slip inside the recesses of my soul to appreciate the beauty in
this world. And I loved beauty because it’s equal and opposite—ugliness—had grown like ivy to
overtake my heart.
My eyes swept the room as natural as the breath filling my chest. I never knew who was waiting,
watching. When my eyes shifted side to side, it was in time with the wretched ticking of the clock I
called a life. It was habit.
There was nothing out of the ordinary except…
She was small, but she filled up the room with golden light as warm as sunshine. The thin shirt
she wore covered every inch of her except the shoulder it slid off, but her silhouette was visible
beneath in the bright natural light of the museum. Long legs peeked out from a tight short black skirt. It
wasn’t the pure poetry of her body that drew me toward her though, it was the way she trembled as
she reached toward the painting in front of her. And when her fingers fell away, she let the tips tap on
her shimmering pink lips in thoughtful ponder.
A contented smile spread across her face and she sucked in a deep breath. When she blew out a
heavy exhale it inflated her smile as she turned away from me and began a slow and easy shuffle to
the next piece that caught her eye. She moved gracefully and walked on her tiptoes despite wearing a
fresh pair of tennis shoes.
I wanted to wreck her, possess her.
I followed from a distance, studying her as I had the artwork earlier. Her lines were far more
delicate and artistic than the work around me. Her colors more vivid too. Her hair was golden leaf
more dazzling than the top of the Carbide & Carbon Building. Her eyes were a chilling seafoam
green, inviting me to swim in the tumult of thought behind them.
She twisted toward the form behind her, studying the stone where it wove on itself freestanding in
the center of the gallery. I stepped to the other side and let my gaze flit from the marble to her face and
back again.
“You can just ask me my name, ya know.” She smiled without raising her eyes from the stone. Her
fingers were roving too close again, following the contours of the figures in their embrace.
“I didn’t want to interrupt,” I purred and she shuddered beneath my voice.
“I’m Filly.” She looked up from under feathered lashes, and my heart tripped on itself. I couldn’t
help but furrow my brow as I rubbed my chest.
“I’m Brye.” I didn’t hold out my hand to her and I couldn’t explain why. Touching her just
seemed…significant. I settled on tracing the shape of the sculpture in between us as she had.
“Is that short for Brian?” She studied me closer now, her eyes seemed to strip me while she
waited for the shapes my mouth would make. I shifted under the scrutiny but couldn’t look away.
“No, it’s Irish. Celtic originally.”
She nodded and turned away, finding another painting to get lost in. I missed her appraisal as soon
as it was gone and hated myself a little for it. That didn’t stop me from stepping to her side. I told
myself I was giving slow chase to my prey as I kept my hands clasped behind my back but in reality,
she made me feel human. Something I hadn’t felt since...I tried to shove the memory of Rosalyn down
the second it bubbled to the surface.
“What are you doing?” Emmett hissed under his breath as he stepped toward us but I shot him a
sharp warning look and he froze. I knew it was a shit idea unless I was going to fuck her in the
bathroom, but something tempted me to steal a few more minutes in the art museum. To steal a few
more minutes talking to Filly.
“This one is so sad,” she murmured in front of a piece that looked anything but to me.
“I don’t see sad, I see chaos.”
“And isn’t chaos somewhat sad?” She turned to me and narrowed her gaze to really evaluate me,
much the way she did the painting. The weight of it settled on my shoulders and reached around my
throat. Or was that my heart? I hadn’t felt that thing work since… I sucked in a deep breath.
She saw right through me. It was those big, doe eyes. The spoke their own language. They made
me sure of it. She saw the monster. She saw the turmoil, the torture, the burden I carried, too. But
what was worse was that she saw the last little bit of goodness tucked as a kernel into my soul. She
knew me. In a glance, she knew the ins and outs of me.
I hated it.
And yet I craved it too. It took everything in me not to lean in and kiss her. To steal her goodness
and breath to fill me up and keep me afloat through what would come later. Because the shit would
assuredly come later, and while I hated this moment for its softness, someone finally saw inside. No
one had bothered to try in years.
She tried to hide her small smile as if she could actually hear my thoughts.
“See the brush strokes in the piece,” Filly interrupted my thoughts as she turned away from me,
her face drawn as she pointed up toward the canvas. I followed her finger. “They’re thick, frantic,
which does say chaotic. But they’re sweeping, supple, unending in their movement too. And if you
step back the image itself feels…” She took one flutter step back. “heavy,” she finished as her hands
came up and circled herself as if she needed shelter from the weight.
Filly was an unexpected surprise no doubt about it. She was beyond beautiful and the shape of her
mouth as she spoke made me imagine filthy things, but it was her eyes that I was drawn to. The shape,
the color and the way she saw the world. Her observations could have been about me, about my
insides, just as easily as they were about the painting. The want to hear more made my skin crawl.
Being stripped made me feel alive and I didn’t deal in life. I forced myself to think about the
bullet wounds from last night gracing her forehead. As soon as I did, fear real and present curled up
in my throat.
I could have sucker punched myself.
“Brye, please.” Emmett cleared his throat behind me. “She’s bad news.”
Unchecked defensiveness flared in my chest and the mere reaction gave me pause. My eyes went
wide and my head swam a little when I finally turned to face him.
“Roz,” he said her name low and the warning was inherent. He’d been there to watch her
disintegrate into nothing. He’d been there to watch me grow hard and cold since that night on the ice.
He was right to warn me if for no other reason than I missed Filly as soon as I turned my back on her.
Men like me didn’t wax poetic, we whacked poets.
“You know what I love about art?” Filly spoke and her voice was no better than a siren song; I
turned back to face her whether I wanted to or not. “It’s ugly.”
“What?” I arched back and my eyebrow shot up.
“Most people like art because it’s beautiful, and don’t get me wrong, some of it is. But when an
artist decides to create something ugly, they’re putting so much of themselves out there. They’re
showing raw truth. There’s a different kind of beauty in that.”
Fuck. Me.
She knew my soul. Or the void it had left in my chest when it evaporated for good. I started to
walk away. It was really the only thing to do with a girl like her. No kinky sex was worth the way she
made me feel…things.
There’s a different kind of beauty in that. Her words spun in my skull. They spun in my heart.
I shook my head again. I didn’t have a heart. I housed ugly.
There’s a different kind of beauty in that.
“Have dinner with me?” I asked over my shoulder, looking back at her beauty and not thinking
about the ramifications, just about her words.
She hadn’t moved from her thoughtful pose in front of the sorrowful painting, she still held onto
herself, still considered the complexity of what was in front of her. I waited for one, two, three
heartbeats and she didn’t flinch. She didn’t answer. I sighed, feeling a weight slip off my chest as I
turned to follow Emmett from the gallery.
“Tonight,” she said at the last moment. “I’m only in town for one more night.”
“I’ll pick you up.” I kept my back to her as I thanked the demons that watched over me.
“I’ll meet you,” she replied.
I smirked and shook my head. I pulled my wallet out of my back trouser pocket and thumbed
through for something to write on. There was nothing but a twenty dollar bill. One I happened to know
was counterfeit and covered in cocaine. I smiled as I snapped for a pen from Emmett.
“Brye,” he warned. I arched my eyebrow with a smirk as I snatched the pen from his hand.
The address was scratchy on the fibrous bill, but in the end, it was legible. I turned and rolled it
into a small cylinder out of habit before I handed it to her. Either she didn’t notice or didn’t care
about the meaning of that shape as she lifted it to her eye like a telescope.
“See you later, alligator.” She laughed before she fluttered to the next piece of art, studying it the
same way she had the chaos painting.
See you later alligator? I chuckled at the innocent phrase, at the virtue and naiveté that seemed to
seep from her. I got a little hard when I thought about snuffing it out.
Emmett walked quietly at my side as we strode out of the museum and purposefully to the car
idling at the curb. I could feel his unspoken words the second we were out of the gallery, I waited
until my hand was on the door to ask.
“Let me have it.”
“Dinner? Really?” His disapproval was thick in his voice.
“I couldn’t help myself.” I shrugged as we slid into the backseat beside each other.
“She could ruin everything.”
 I rolled my shoulders first then my neck. Fuck him. Dinner wasn’t going to ruin my claim to the
throne. Some chick wasn’t either. If that night on the ice hadn’t torn me to shreds, nothing would.
Nothing could.
As if reading my mind, Emmett murmured, “Rosalyn?”
“She was a long time ago.”
“And in some ways, she’s still every day,” he answered knowingly from the seat next to mine.
“She’s just a quick fuck.” I waved Filly and tonight off as much for his benefit as mine.
“Liar.”
Somehow Filly had spoken to the soft, untested flesh still hidden by the scar tissue that had
formed in Rosalyn’s absence. The scar tissue I tried to deny. I smiled as I thought of the first moment
I’d laid eyes on her, on that timid would-be touch toward the painting. Would she quiver like that if
she reached out to touch me? Would she tremble beneath me? Would she see the beauty in my ugly?
Or would it be her blood dripping in place of Rosalyn’s, staining the pure crystalline snow a
deep, dark crimson?
“It’s just fucking dinner,” I snarled.
“I pray, Brye.” Emmett helped chase the ghosts away. “Every fucking day I pray to God for you.”
My shoulders tensed and I spat the words out like they were broken glass. “Emmett, God doesn’t
come to Chicago anymore.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about Brye. Shadow followed him, I’d seen it lashing out from his suited
form, hungry, angry and wild. There was something wicked in him. I could tell if for no other reason
than I had always been drawn to the villains in my parents’ stories; they were the ones with the depth,
with the stories to tell. And I was inexplicably drawn to Brye. I mean, the way he’d looked at me
when I spoke about the art... Something had brightened up behind his eyes, something I was sure he
tried to keep a damper on.
He was unlike any of the boys I’d known. Where the boys of my childhood seemed to chase my
skirts and pray for kisses, I got the sense Brye wouldn’t chase anything. He’d simply take. A shiver
crawled up my spine.
I looked up to find a man with bright blue eyes watching me from the park bench across the path.
My breath caught only for me to realize a moment later it wasn’t the exact right shade of icy blue. I
smiled briefly as I compared him to Brye. He was handsome enough but missing the something more
that overtook the room in Brye’s presence. The man licked his lips, but it was Brye’s, pillowy and oh-
so-kissable that I could envision. I shook my head at myself, at the way I’d remembered each and
every detail. When I looked away, I caught sight of a man jogging, sporting the same closely shaven
haircut as Brye. His strong jaw wore the same scruff. I pushed up from my bench before realizing it
wasn’t him. It was obvious when I look at his body. Brye’s body was…
Oh, sweet Lord, his body was drool-worthy.
I was intimately acquainted with the perfect form, the Adonis of Greek sculptures but Brye—shit.
I wasn’t a virgin despite my dad and insane Uncles’ best efforts, but I’d been all gangly limbs and
rushed kisses. I’d never gotten to run my hands along the taut muscles and deep valleys of a man. And
damn was Brye a man complete with hooded eyes that seemed to undress me leisurely but thoroughly.
The simple scent of his deodorant was crisp and cool and lingered in the space next to me even after
he was gone.
He’d lingered with me even after he was gone.
I took a deep breath as I strolled along the Lakefront Trail, hoping the wind would whip Brye
away from me. I had no business being intrigued by someone in Chicago. Let alone him. The gentle
lap of the lake as it waved against the concrete breaker helped soothe my whirring mind. He was
trouble. Undoubtedly. And likely the type my parents had warned me of. Or maybe they were
exaggerating about it all. After being here for a few days, I couldn’t fathom why my parents hated this
city.
It screamed them. Art. Architecture. Grit and grind. All with a hint of magic. I scanned the
buildings nearby and could almost picture them driving the Charger up these streets or casually
leaned against a brilliant building. For some reason, I felt like I was home.
Oh the questions I’d have once I was safely in San Francisco. Even if it did put me in unending
shit. I’d let their vague answers slide for far too long.
I strolled toward the Navy Pier and my stomach rumbled at the divine scent wafting from the
tourist pizza spot crowning the walk. It may have been kitschy and far too busy, but deep dish was one
of the last things on my to-do list born from tattered postcards and a stack of photos, maps, and
smashed pennies.
“Bar or dining room, gorgeous?” The gruff man smiled warmly at me.
“Bar, please.”
He jerked his head toward the woodgrain U bar and I slid onto one of the furthest chairs. He
checked my passport, then smiled up at me.
“Parlez vous Francais?”
“Oui. But English is my first language.” I took back the most recent incarnation of my passport, the
one that listed our old Marseilles home as my address.
“What’s a nice girl like you doing alone in a rough city like this?” The bartender slid a coaster in
front of me and leaned over the bar. He had thick Italian flags unfurled on both wrists.
“Chicago is wonderful.” I felt everything I’d seen in three days fill me up and ride the rush of my
words.
He laughed and rearranged a few of the cocktail napkins. “I suppose it’s not too terrible here at
the Pier or over at Millennium Park but don’t let that fool you. It’s not safe out there.” His eyes darted
to the door, then to his tattoos, and something about his tone, his movements, reminded me of my
parents for a totally different reason.
I swallowed. Hard.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you.” He cupped his hand over mine and I watched the flags on his
forearms ripple in what seemed like the winds of fate. He smiled reassuringly. “Drinks on me.”
“A good hoppy beer.” I pushed my unease down. “And a Chicago original deep dish.”
“Coming right up.”
I swiped to open my phone and googled Chicago Italian. Mafia auto-filled into the search bar.
The results almost cost me my appetite. Headlines about gang violence, blood feuds, and FBI
investigations filled my screen. One, in particular, caught my eye and sent blizzard shivers down my
late summer warm spine.

Infamous crime boss, Mickey Maloney, found murdered in Mexico

Mexico. The connection seemed significant if for no other reason than the way my hair stood on
end. I closed the browser and my thumb hovered over the phone icon as I considered calling my
parents and telling the truth. I’d talked to them this morning, making up an elaborate story about a
turquoise workshop in Taos, New Mexico.
If I told them I was here…
I pictured tears pooling in my mom’s eyes like they sometimes did when she watched the sunrise
and thought no one was watching. My throat went dry when I thought about the terrifying quiet fury
that stilled my father when he caught the corners of her eyes starting to shimmer. Even Uncle Horse
would fist and flex his hands while his Hulk shoulders rolled and he cricked his neck.
Fuck.
Calling wasn’t an option. I slammed my beer too fast when it arrived, hoping to wash down the
ick that had settled there, then picked at the full pie in front of me. At least it would be good leftovers
tomorrow as I quietly drove away from this city and kept my few days here as a secret until the exact
right moment.
Go now. The whispering voice of the wind seemed to nudge me.
I shook my head and savored a green pepper that had slipped into the deep black cast iron in front
of me. Not yet. The voice deep-rooted inside me countered.
Brye was temptation and a reckless impulse, but there was something pulling me to him.
Something I knew I should ignore, but just couldn’t. I wanted to go to that dinner. I needed to know
what was pulling on me with only half-hearted consent. I sipped the second beer a little slower, but
my vision started to swim all the same. Right and wrong went a little fuzzy.
I reached into my purse to find my wallet and pulled out some cash. The top bill was the
scratched twenty. Fate had made sure it found its way back into my hand at that moment.I’d accepted
early on that magic wove in its own way through the Ryan household. Was that what tethered me to
Brye? And if so, was it the pure magic of fairy tales or the something darker that always held me just
a little more rapt?
With a deep breath, I threw money on the counter, took my pizza and went back into the Windy
City. The warm air wrapped around me as I walked back to my Air B&B then got ready for my date. I
tried not to pay attention to the inkling it was a date with destiny.

He was waiting just inside the restaurant. Or probably was. I was already a few minutes late when I
froze outside and opened back up the should I, shouldn’t I debate. I was supposed to be faceless,
nameless in Chicago, only here to walk the halls of some of the greatest museums in the country and
explore secret and forbidden corners.
This city was off limits for no other reason besides because I said so. Other parents probably
overused that line but mine had always been so honest, so open… They hadn’t said it to be dicks,
they’d meant it and when I was honest with myself, Brye was the personification of off limits. I
sighed and turned on my heel, ready to steel my resolve and settle the swirling questions in my brain
on my own.
“Going somewhere?” Brye was the suited brick wall directly behind me that I almost crashed
into.
He was wearing a perfectly cut light gray suit that hugged him in all the right places. The crisp
white shirt he wore underneath was unbuttoned a few buttons and hinted at the contours of his chest.
He sported a new thick cut on his chin, held tight with two thin butterfly Band-Aids. For some reason,
the little bit of grit mixed with a fresh streamline suit made him all the more tempting. Bad boy with a
better wardrobe. I tried to wet the desert cracking in my throat.
“I’m sorry I was late, it was an…interesting afternoon.” He thumbed the sore spot on his chin and
winced.
“Oh, uh, it’s fine.” I took a step back from him.
The same shadows I’d envisioned earlier seeped from his body, reaching for mine like ropes that
could bind. The duality I’d recognized inside him had solidified into something as formidable as
stone with the company of darkness. There was no gentleness in the man before me. He made my heart
hammer and my palms sweat. He was wicked.
I wanted him even more.
“Is this a bad idea?” I hadn’t meant to ask out loud.
“Having dinner with a beautiful woman is rarely a bad idea.” His voice was smoke tendrils
unwinding across glass as he stepped toward me.
“I’m leaving tomorrow.” I gulped and stutter-stepped back once more. He simply followed,
almost pressing himself to me. “I was never supposed to be here.”
He looked down on me for a moment and cocked his head as if he was deciding something. The
look he gave me was indecipherable and that sent me off-balance. I could usually read people so
well. When his face changed again, I knew he’d made a decision, just not what about. The whole
world froze while I waited to find out. Whatever hung between us in that moment was significant, I
just didn’t know what it was.
“Secret’s safe with me,” he said just before his hand slid to the small of my back and pulled me in
tight. Scorching heat bloomed across my collarbone as my hands flew out to steady myself against the
sudden movement. He was all washboard abs and sculpted muscles beneath my braced fingertips and
his intoxicating, fresh laundry and cool spice of deodorant wafted around me again. I tried to swallow
the knot in my throat. I’d been screwed when he was simply intriguing but if this became more...
“Never was a fan of rules myself.” His dark honey voice slid across my skin just as his hand explored
the curve on my backside a little too low as he turned me.
It was so unabashedly forward, I should have driven my knee into his crotch and shoved his body
into the street. Instead, I looked up at him, with wide eyes. Wide eyes that were asking what the fuck
are you doing and will you do it again. He smirked and arched his eyebrow as he looked down at
me, still a good six inches shorter in heels. He knew damn well what he was doing, he was seducing
me and he had no intentions of stopping.
I was in such unending shit.
“Shall we?” His fingers gently drummed at my back and I felt the goosebumps rise beneath.
The answer was no. Hell no. I needed to get out while I still had the good sense to do so. But I
found myself nodding. My body was operating on its own, drawn to him as it had been since he
crackled to life in my periphery. I rolled my eyes at myself as he turned me toward the restaurant.
Brye reached around me for the door and my skin sang where he grazed my arm. He was close
enough that his warm breath danced on the back of my neck. One little tremor shook me head to toe.
“After you.” He held the door and when I looked back to thank him, he was watching me so
intensely, his eyes hooded, that I lost the words completely and could only nod. His answering husky
chuckle shot right between my thighs.
I took a deep breath while he checked in with the hostess, trying to steady myself but then her
smile curled up as she gave him the once-over. Something primal and colored green curled in my
stomach--another something I’d never known toying with my body. I put my hand over my stomach to
try and calm the foreign beast. When he gave her his name, her face fell and she took a small step
back. She must have seen the same darkness I did and it made me smile, the feeling in my stomach
suddenly satiated.
“Mr. MacCowan, right this way.” The hostess walked a little too fast in front of us and shook
when she gestured to our table, small and secluded on the open, breezy patio.
“You make them anxious,” I said simply as he reached to pull out my chair. I leaned toward him
automatically, and every single molecule of my skin vibrated, hoping, wishing, praying to feel that
little quake and shiver that his touch had brought on before.
“You pay close attention.” He smirked as he returned the favor and examined me as he took his
seat across the table.
“That’s not an answer.” I met his gaze and held it.
“My father makes them nervous.” His thumb lifted to graze the butterfly bandages again and I got
the feeling it was a subconscious movement, a ghost of a thought.
“Did he give you that?”
His hand dropped automatically from his face and the light flickered behind his eyes. He looked
me up and down again and his plump lips moved side to side beneath his teeth.
 “He’s a monster, but then again, so am I.” Brye’s voice was soft, seductive but with an edge. I
gulped. Even though I’d known, hearing the words made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“Does that scare you?”
“Yes.” I bit my lip and sucked in a deep breath. “But I kind of like that. I’m interested anyway...”
“Hmmmm,” he mused as he leaned in and templed his hands in front of his face. “A girl who likes
ugly and evil?” His voice turned up along with his positively devilish smile.
“A girl who likes something with depth,” I corrected.
“And you think I’m a man of depth?” He leaned in closer and the stories I could see behind his
eyes entranced me. There were layers there, so many layers. Ones I didn’t think even he knew about.
“Unending,” I answered unequivocally.
He eyed me then sat back. “And if I were to say that you strike me as naive?”
“I’m not naive.” My back bristled at the comment.
“Fine,” he relented. “Innocent then?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
His smile grew and somehow softened. “Absolutely nothing. Perhaps I find you as oddly
refreshing as you find me.”
Blush rose in my cheeks. It wasn’t quite a compliment but it made my insides hum.
“Champagne,” he ordered from our server the moment they approached our table. “Are you even
old enough to drink champagne?”
“Of course I am. I just turned twenty-one. But honestly, I prefer beer.”
He let out a deep, rich laugh that brightened his entire being and changed the colors I saw
surrounding him. Where there was shadow before, now I saw shimmer. It was breathtaking. He was
breathtaking.
“That’s a good look on you,” I said as my smile widened to match his.
“Beer drinker looks good on you too. I mean I would have guessed white wine or vodka soda.
Again, oddly refreshing to be wrong.”
“I grew up splitting my time between Mexico and France. I always preferred a Pacifico to any
wine.”
He cocked his head and the most adorable crinkle appeared over his brow. “Do you prefer the
desert to vineyards?”
“No.” I shrugged. “I love the wild and untamed of the desert. The sky is always such an incredible
blue compared to the bland of the dirt. Life itself is bright, lived in a thousand colors there. But
Paris,” I sighed. “There’s a magic in Paris. And the museums...” I trailed off feeling the longing for
them like that of an old friend well up and break against my chest.
“You talk about the world as it relates to art. Most people are the opposite,” he observed with a
softness in his voice.
“It’s a family thing.” I blushed again, I couldn’t help it. “Tell me about your family.”
“There’s not much to say.” He shrugged but shadow fell on him all the same. “I’ve never left
Chicago and don’t really need to. My father runs the family business and someday I will.” The was a
finality to his voice that seemed self-assured, but I sensed the hint of sorrow laced beneath.
“Do you have a say in the matter?” I took a guess.
“No, not that I want one. But disobedience isn’t taken lightly in our family.”
“Haven’t a clue how my folks would take it.” I rolled my eyes just imagining my dad puff up his
chest and turn that furious shade of red. My mom would soothe him like always but then...what?
“Oh man, innocent doesn’t even cover it,” he chuckled.
 “Chicago is a start.” I shot him a look then smiled. Words were easy with Brye.
“Explain.”
“I’m not supposed to be here.” I turned toward the door, my eyes traveling to the escape of Grand
Ave. “I’ve been able to travel anywhere in the world, any time, but not here.”
“You said that before, troublemaker.” He smiled a devious smile.
I laughed. “The very fact that no one even suspects I’m here says how totally untrue that is.”
“Well, Chicago is full of bad men. Murderers and mayhem.” I met his gaze and studied it. He kept
saying it. I’d seen it. But I didn’t know what to actually do with the information. Did I follow my
head? My gut? The sizzle of my skin against his?
“Champagne,” our server interrupted, presenting the bottle for us.
“Just pour it, please,” Brye waved off the offered taste.
He did, then arranged it in the ice bucket he brought tableside. I watched him work for a moment
before my temperature started to rise. Brye hadn’t taken his eyes off of me, he barely even blinked,
and it made my blood bubble. I couldn’t meet his gaze again. Not while different parts of my body
toyed with the word murderer the way his mouth massaged it. I studied the scrolling font of the label.
The condensation as it built in a ripple on the sterling silver bucket beside us. The couple a few
tables over and how their hands intertwined making shadows in the flicker of candlelight.
“To bad decisions,” Brye interrupted my thoughts with his deep honey voice that called my eyes
to his. He raised his glass and waited for me to do the same.
“To bad decisions.” I clinked my glass to his and tried to shove aside the feeling that it was the
words, not the glass that had echoed in my bones.

“That modern stuff you were looking at today isn’t my favorite,” Brye said with a smirk as he popped
an olive into his mouth.
Our conversation had meandered into an easy place. Art was something that sparked and softened
both of us. And now he was referring to the painting that had brought us together this morning and I
couldn’t help but drop my jaw. It had taken my breath away in the crisp morning light. And now,
knowing more, it reminded me of him.
“I prefer the Impressionists,” he added as he drug a piece of bread through the drippings on a
plate.
A warm smile tugged on the corners of my lips. “Monet and his Water Lilies? I wouldn’t have
guessed.”
“Cézanne and his skulls, Degas and his dancers. There’s a skewed reality and a realism to them
both.”
“I cried the first time I saw a Degas. I was thirteen, maybe fourteen,” I said softly, remembering
the first time my mom had taken me to see them. “I stood in front of Fin d’Arabesque and saw the
dance, felt the music in my bones. I wanted to clap.”
“You’ve been to Musée d’Orsay?” He looked over, his eyes bright much like they had been when
he laughed. My heart backflipped at the sight.
“Last time I went, my heart broke all over After the Bath, Woman Drying her Nape.” I lifted the
beer I’d ordered after we’d finished the champagne and took a deep sip. “I want someone to look at
me like that. With that tenderness. That intimacy.”
“Maybe you’re not so innocent after all.” He waggled his eyebrows and bit his lip.
“That’s none of your business,” I teased as I tore off a small piece of bread and threw it at him.
 “Did you just throw food at me?” he asked, somehow managing to be both mystified and
menacing.
“You deserved it.”
He stood and took two powerful, prowling steps to my side of the table. He placed one hand on
the table and the other on the back of my chair and leaned in. The formidable man who had been
outside, who only broke when he finally touched me was back. And close. I swore I heard his
heartbeat and that mine picked up pace to match. The smell of him mingled with the booze I’d been
drinking, and for a second I felt drunk on him.
“You’re very lucky you’re different. I don’t take insolence lightly.” He was scolding me, but there
was flame lapping at his words. It threatened to burn.
“I wouldn’t recommend calling me innocent again.” I could barely stutter.
“Prove me wrong,” he challenged and I swallowed. Hard. “If you were the woman in the bath and
I walked in, what would happen next?”
My skin flushed scarlet. I tried to swallow again, but this time my throat had gone bone dry. I
couldn’t imagine telling the gorgeous man in front of me anything truly intimate, let alone sexual. I
wanted to, the inexplicable urge for him to see me as more than a little girl was almost overwhelming.
But I couldn’t. The words just stalled out. The images though...
“Is it wrong to tell you that I like it even more that you can’t? That you are innocent?” he
whispered as he leaned closer, the heat of him calling to the heat building in me.
“Why?” I croaked.
“Because when I tell you that I have been watching your long legs shift beneath the table,
imagining what kind of heaven was up under your skirt, I want you to turn a shade of pink that puts
your dress to shame.”
I did exactly that, my body a slave to his voice. To those images...
“Then I want you to shiver when you think about me slipping a finger inside you.”
My whole body trembled, his slave completely.
“Perhaps go a little breathless when you think about the way my lips would feel against yours as
they demanded you match me and my skill.”
F. U. C. K.
“Why? Why do you want me? We just met,” I managed.
He looked me up and down, his eyes moving slow and drinking in their fill. “Because you’re
oddly refreshing.” He used his words from earlier. “But watching you go down in flames would be
everything I’ve come to know and love.”
No sooner had he said those violent disorienting words did he bend the last few inches to my lips
and finally—for better or worse—kissed me.
I could touch her, taste her even now in the low city light my large windows let into my bedroom.
She’d been too beautiful not to etch into memory. Her sunshine blonde hung in loose waves down past
her nipples that insisted on pressing against a simple pink silk dress. The spaghetti straps could have
fallen off her slight shoulders and the skirt flounced just enough that I could see her upper thigh as we
walked.
Every moment tonight had been…disorienting. I was hard up for her and no amount of
rearrangement or twisted thoughts could change that. But I liked talking with her too. And the way her
hand fit in mine. She would get me talking about art and I became a whole different type of lost.
I hadn’t let someone in in years. I hadn’t really wanted to.
And that kiss... fuck. My world exploded in color when I stole that kiss from her. Bright green and
deep blue. Sunset gold and sunrise pink. I felt something. And I got hard. I would have laid her out
and fucked her on the table like one of my father’s depraved dinner parties except that we were in a
restaurant. Or that was what I kept telling myself. It was easier than admitting the truth.
I liked her.
After dinner, we’d walked through Grant Park together, her too naive to realize that we shouldn’t
walk through dark places late at night, and me the definition of the shadows that could eat her whole.
But when the illuminated three-tiered cake that was Buckingham Fountain shone on her enrapt face, I
thanked fate for her wide-eyes in more ways than one.
She studied the detail and I studied her. When she couldn’t possibly search for more figures cast
in the warm yellow light, she cocked her head and smiled. I’d started to ask her why and she’d
shushed me—something no Chicagoan would ever do to a MacCowan—and answered color then
squeezed my hand and let the changing light dance on her features.
Her words, her stories were like that too. Different. Magic. And they spoke to the part of me I’d
lost rather than the parts I’d found. She pulled me from the dark Rosalyn’s death had left me in even if
I wasn’t sure I wanted to go.
“Dammit,” I snarled as I reached down for my hardening dick. Again.
The memory of her was driving me insane after successfully driving me to drink and to fuck my
hand repeatedly.
I kept my eyes squinched shut so I didn’t see the paintings hanging on every inch of every wall in
my palatial room. If I thought about her here amongst the art, that look of wonder consuming her, those
delicate fingers desperate to touch the frames, the colors reflected back in her big doe eyes…
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I roared.
“Brye?” Emmett burst in the door a moment later, his handgun out, naturally sweeping the room.
When he saw nothing but me fisting on my dick, he un-cocked his gun and put it back into his holster.
“I heard you…”
I dropped myself and wiped my other hand over my face. “I’m fine.”
“She got under your skin.” He crossed his arms and leaned against the doorframe.
“Don’t start with me.” I stood, not caring that Emmett got a full frontal as I walked to the bar cart I
kept in my room and poured a scotch.
 “She’s innocent,” I said after a sip. “She’s different.”
“You want me to listen or talk?” he asked simply.
And I knew the subtext. I was in deep shit with Filly. “She loves art,” I said, a halfhearted
surrender. “More than me.”
“All the better to hang her up on the wall and admire from afar.” He sighed and helped himself to
a glass as well.”
Emmett had been in the family for a long time. One of the neighborhood rats that got swallowed
up in the fold either because of or in order to steal cars. He’d been twelve maybe thirteen—my age—
and usually found his way into the soccer games we played in the street in front of Mickey Maloney’s
old house—our old house. He’d moved up in the ranks of the family, but he’d never strayed far from
being my friend. He’d be my right hand when this world became mine.
“Someone like her can’t live like this.” He waved his scotch around the room. “We have money
and drugs, power and sex at our fingertips in exchange for a few measly rules. It’s the only language
we speak. Sometimes that has to be enough.”
I thought about my ability to snap my fingers and have any sin in the city. My dad had fought tooth
and nail to gain that control after Mickey Maloney was killed. He’d brought me up in a world of made
men and taught me how to make myself. He’d made an empire out of a single hand-carved money
plate.
But there was a whole other part of the world that had never existed for me except for that
singular glimmer of a girl. Love. And in the deepest reaches of my fucked up heart, I ached for that.
Judging by the way Filly flashed across my perpetual night sky I wanted fireworks despite how badly
they would burn.
“I mean, honestly, what would you change?” Emmett slid into the leather smoking chair in front of
my flat screen. “What’s so bad?” He pressed his glass of scotch to his temple and watched me.
Something in the way he shifted his gaze to follow me was almost predatory. Emmett had that glint
in his eyes that I recognized from the mirror but still sent shivers up my spine. And made me hold my
tongue. He didn’t need to know the ins and outs of my heart, nor how Filly rippled the darkest corners
of it. And I did like the darkness…
“Someday you’ll be king, Brye, and you can shape the world as you please. Until then, enjoy it.
Enjoy the hedonism of it all.”
“Don’t fucking tell me what to do, Emmett.” I didn’t bother to turn and look at him.
“If I were telling you what to do, you’d know it. You’d know it because I’d say don’t touch her.
Don’t talk to her.”
I snarled at the thought.
“She’s divine and you’re a demon,” he continued. “You don’t drag her down into the muck. She
drags you out. And that ruins everything.”
I squeezed on my scotch glass, wondering exactly how hard I could grip before it splintered in my
hand. How dare he talk about her like that? How dare he talk about her period?
“Get her name out of your mouth, Emmett,” I warned.
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll make you.”
“Already Filly over family,” he sneered.
It was the final straw. Hours earlier I told Filly that I would not tolerate insolence. With her, the
mischief made me burn for her. But with Emmett...
I held my breath until my chest felt like a thick band wound tight on it, just in case I could count to
ten and let it fade. Instead I counted to thirty-seven and still felt wrath crook my fingers. He had
pushed too far. My eyes fell to the floor as I blew out the deep breath. I allowed a single heartbeat
before I whirled and my elbow crashed into his cheekbone. Scotch splashed onto my thigh as he
dropped the glass to the floor.
Emmett’s hand moved to his jaw and held it as he worked the hinge back into place. He studied
me from his hunch and I kept my chin held high. When he shook it off, his spine straightened just
before he raised his fists with an off-kilter look laced with darkness.
“I can have it all Emmett. Me. Because I’m a MacCowan. I’ll take it if I have to. I’ll take her,” I
roared.
“Fuck you,” he said with that same sneer as before.
And then his fist swung and I dodged it. Mine flew and crunched into his stomach. He doubled
over with a wheeze, holding the bruise I knew I’d left just before as his other hand flashed toward my
groin. He grabbed my balls and squeezed. I rotated at the lightning that shot through me and wheeled
his heel around to crash into the back of his knee. The joint gave out and were it not for his hold on
my junk, he would have crumbled. Instead, he sunk slowly toward my knees. He squeezed my junk
again then let go.
My face twisted in pain as I straightened myself above Emmett. A ghost of a smile hinted at my
lips as I lorded over him.
Teach you to talk about my girl.
As fast as lightning, he roundhoused his leg, sweeping mine out from under me. I crashed into the
hardwood floors of my bedroom before I even realized I was falling. Small points dug into me fast
and furious as the momentum of the fall and the weight of my body obliterated his discarded scotch
glass. I didn’t make a sound as the glass spliced into my back. I was grateful for the pain. It was a
reminder. A reminder that he was right and that I dwelt in this world, not the one of art museums, long
park walks, and stolen kisses. Filly had caught my eye because she was new and shiny. Unique but not
a reality. Not for me.
“I yield,” I said sharp and low.
Wordlessly Emmett reached down for my hand and helped me off the floor.
“You didn’t have to fuck me up.” I twisted to brush the glass off my back and felt the pull and sting
of the fresh wound.
“The look you get when you say her name says otherwise.”
I stood, woozing to the side from the fresh cut on my back. My head spun and the assault on my
balls had been enough to make me heave. I had to catch myself on the mattress, bent over and sucking
in deep breaths to try and find equilibrium.
“What happened here?” My father stepped into my doorframe.
“I was written a reminder,” I answered.
“In flesh? Good boy, Emmett.”
“Did you need something?” I let my saltiness well up and crash into my dad like the sea itself.
“Cole Ryan.” He arched his eyebrow, his question inherent.
I sighed, exasperated and when I shrugged I felt the drips if fresh blood break free of the cut on
my back. “What’s with the sudden fixation? It’s been what? Twenty-one, twenty-two years.”
“I have a feeling.”
I scoffed and rolled my eyes. He cocked his head then walked leisurely toward me. Lightning fast,
his hand darted out and he dug a finger into my bleeding back. I felt the heat of my blood trickle in
small rivers down my ass cheek.
 “And good things come to those who wait,” he continued as he ground his nail into my back. “And
I’ve been waiting a long time.”
Without another word he turned and left the way he came. When his footsteps padded from
earshot, I righted myself and mirrored him as I turned toward my bathroom. Emmett dutifully
followed and shut the door behind me before flipping on the bright overhead lights.
“Brye.” He sucked in a deep breath. Just the sound told me plenty. Adrenaline was keeping me
from true torment.
“Can you clean it?” I asked.
“Yeah, but it may need stitches.” His hands stroked down my back, checking different spots,
different muscles, dips, and grooves. I shuddered underneath his touch.
“Good thing we’re not gay or I’d think you were caressing me like a lover.” I laughed.
“If we were gay, you couldn’t handle me.” He chuckled and ran his finger down my crack I
jumped when he pressed against my asshole. Then I winced, fully bared teeth, clenched fists and all.
“Fuck man. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” I chastised him. “This family does not apologize. Besides, I would have done
the same to you if I’d swung hardest.”
He nodded curtly then reached for a towel to sop up my blood. I flinched the moment he got close
to my balls.
“I’m not gonna touch your dick unless you ask,” he chuckled.
“You just touched my asshole.”
He laughed as he tossed the towel in the sink in front of me. It was a darker crimson than I would
have guessed.
“Tell me more about Filly,” he changed the subject as he went to gather the first aid kit I kept in
my bathroom.
“I thought she was off-limits.” Her name did weird things to us both. Yearning and loathing and
lusting and brawling, all in a matter of minutes.
“She is,” he said simply.
“But my back is that bad?” I knew his tactics too well, she was a distraction incarnate. “Do I need
to go to the ER?”
“Just tell me about her,” he said as he began cleaning my wounds with icy cold alcohol wipes. I
winced against the sting.
“She’s different. She sees things that others miss. Or has a different way of looking at the world
altogether. She saw through me.”
“Never mind. Knock this shit off.” His words stung but not nearly as much as the shit he scraped
out of my gashes.
“She likes Degas. She could be one of his dancers. And the dress she wore last night…” I
whistled and only part because of the antiseptic he was using on my back. I made myself keep
speaking. And about her. I was hoping to associate her with the pain. “I don’t know fashion shit, but
she wore this pink silk ballerina dress.”
The way he pulled on my skin made my breath catch and tears come to the corners of my eyes.
“You would fall for a painting.”
“Fall?” I chuckled lightly even with the pain. “She was just different. An artist. And she kissed
with her whole body. Imagining that kind of passion elsewhere…”
“Don’t make yourself hard. I probably need to get you ice.”
He turned from me and filled up the bath, adding three buckets of ice when it was mostly full. I
sucked in a deep breath as I stepped in. The piercing cold hurt so much it sucked the air out of my
lungs but not the pictures of Filly from my mind. The only salve for that wound was the merciful
knowledge that she was leaving tomorrow and never coming back.
I sat on the hood of my car and watched the sunrise blaze across the lake. The way the light glinted off
the barely-there roll of water was an Impressionist dream. I could see the brush strokes. And Brye
painting them.
He had been my constant companion for the past eighteen hours or so. Both the light cast on my
vast sea and the deep shadows cast by my sun.
And being with him last night had been just that, a study in gradient. He was dark. He said it over
and over. I felt it with my fingertips just as easily as my heart. But he was light too. I mean that kiss...
that flipping, freaking kiss.
Brye kissed a way I’d never known before. His lips tried to know each inch of mine, they
caressed each bit as if they were trying to learn. His tongue spoke a language I could only interpret
through touch, the touch of his to mine. And his hands… God, those hands pawed at me as if he
wanted nothing more than to tear me to shreds.
This was what it was like to be an addict—off-kilter and a slave to that skewed reality. A slave to
those kisses that threatened to devour me whole.
“Arrrgghhhh,” I grumbled and rolled back to lay on my windshield.
My hormones were making idiot decisions for me.
If my skin against his had felt like home, if kissing him was as necessary as air or water, then
being with him…
“Stop, Filly. Just stop,” I said the words softly to myself and slid off the hood of the ancient
Charger and into the front seat.
I snapped open my phone and dialed my parents’ number. Only two rings snapped before my mom
answered.
“Filly? Are you okay?” Sleep was thick in her voice.
“Yeah, of course. I was just about to get on the road.”
“Oh, okay. Good.” My dad asked the same question in the background, pulling her away from me
for a second. She’s fine, Cole, sweetheart.
The worry in their voices hung on my heart.
“So, you’re leaving Taos today?” Mom asked and I could hear her rustling against sheets, likely
headed toward the kitchen for coffee.
“Yeah, it was wonderful.” I told the story I’d rehearsed about making jewelry, the imperfections
of stone and the difficulty of forging. When my mom, the metal worker, laughed, I knew all those years
of being observant had paid off.
“I miss having you here with me, Filly Bean but I’m so happy you’re happy.”
I was happy she could hear it in my voice.
“So are Uncle Horse and Conrad there?”
“No, it’s their anniversary. Left us to our own devices.” She giggled.
“Mom,” I drug out her name. “Gross.”
“Someday, Filly.” She laughed again. “Like when you’re thirty-five or something, you’ll meet
someone who stops your world. They’ll a shelter from the chaos, they’ll hold you together.” The
emotion was so thick and warm in her voice.
“You love Dad a lot, don’t you?” I smiled.
“I cannot live without him.”
Swoon.
“Are you telling me Prince Charming exists?”
“No, no one’s that perfect.” My dad’s voice was back in the background teasing her. “But, Filly,
there is someone who will go to the ends of the earth to find you.” She got surprisingly serious and my
heart fluttered.
But then the sounds of an intense kiss crossed the line.
“You guys are disgusting,” I screeched. “I’m still on the phone.”
“Sometimes you can’t wait. You can’t deny what your body already knows.” My mom didn’t
sound like my mom at all—she was a girl, smitten.
They both laughed and love brightened up the whole Chicago sunrise. The sunrise that seemed to
be made in shades of Brye even more now than it was before.
“Where to next, Fill?” My dad took the phone.
I made a snap decision with my mom’s words in mind. I didn’t think of the consequences. Again.
They were slipping farther and farther away, replaced by weird whispers of magic on the breeze of
the Windy City.
“Denver,” I answered on the fly. “I’m going to see the museum but I’m feeling the Impressionists
at the moment and I think the Aspens will be amazing.”
His tension rolled across the line, but he sighed. “My daughter that follows her heart into the dark
of the forest.”
“My dad that understands how hearts cannot be contained, even by a cage.”
“I miss you, Fill.”
“To the moon,” I whispered softly.
My parents answered in their telltale way, their voices the best home I’d ever known, “And
across the stars.”

I was a traitor of the worst kind. I was in Chicago and lying to stay there. I’d made the decision on the
phone, but I still sat in the front seat of my car, debating whether to actually dial. This was betrayal,
pure and simple.
But to never see him again? To deprive myself of that touch? Those kisses? It was a betrayal of a
different type. Even my mom had said that sometimes truths and wants were only evident in the very
makeup of my bones.
Before I thought too hard, I pulled out the twenty he’d written the restaurant address on and turned
it over. This was the last moment to turn back. I could start the car and head for highway eighty-eight
and begin putting Illinois in my rearview mirror.
Putting Brye in my rearview mirror.
Maybe my parents had never made such reckless decisions, but someone in the Ryan family had to
start living. My fingers trembled as they punched in his number and I sucked in a deep breath as I
listened to the dial tone.
For a split second, I doubted myself. Not whether I should call but whether he would answer.
Whether he’d felt any of the same. Whether I was risking it all for a bad boy that wanted in my pants
or if he could really be…more. So much more.
“Hello?” His husky voice silenced everything.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you,” I whispered.
He cleared his throat. “Filly?”
“And I was watching the sunrise this morning, and I realized I wished I was watching it with
you.”
The faint sounds of movement in the background filled in for his silence, but he didn’t speak. The
weight on my chest got heavier and heavier. I pulled the phone from my ear to make sure the
connection hadn’t been lost, and the Chicago number was still on my screen, the timer still counting
up. If he wasn’t talking back, it meant he didn’t want to. I bit my lip.
And my finger hovered over the red hang up button. My other hand at the ignition.
“I only made it through the night because of you.” His voice was fresh air whooshing into the car
and brushing the fear of rejection from my heart.
“Really?”
He groaned, but it wasn’t a sultry sound.
“Are you okay?” My hand flew to my mouth and I found the edge of my fingernail.
“Don’t waste your worry on me.” His voice was warm and low as he avoided the question. “Are
you still leaving today?”
I bit my nail again. “I wanted to see you again.”
“Fuck, Filly,” he drew out the curse then his heavy silence pressed on my chest. One, two, three,
four, five… I counted his breaths on the other end of the line. And just when I convinced myself that
Brye wasn’t really interested, that his confession and last night meant nothing, that his dark heart
didn’t have room for me, he asked, “Where can I meet you?”
Something inside me welled up and threatened to burst. “Know anything near The Art Institute?”
“I have just the place.”

My hand ached from how hard I held the pencil, sketching, shading. I’d known I’d have to wait for
him, but it was its own special brand of agony. The questions swirled in my head. Of course the ones
about my treachery and deception but also the ones about Brye. They all boiled down to, was he
worth it?
Honestly, he was a blip in time, a shadow on the sidewalk playing against my fingertips and
footsteps, but he felt like a tangible eternity. I couldn’t say unequivocally that he was supposed to be
mine but… He felt like the first time I saw my mom complete a sculpture.
He felt like home.
And when I looked down, my detailed drawing was of his lips. A space I’d certainly taken the
liberty of inhabiting last night. A landscape I wanted to explore again.
“In real life, they’d be pressed to yours.”
My head snapped up and the fresh breeze that seemed to accompany Brye sucked into my lungs.
He looked better than yesterday, today in a fitted t-shirt that threatened to split across his shoulders
and chest. Worn denim wrapped his muscled thighs tightly and ended piled at his ankle, showing off
flip-flops. Glimpsing his bare feet seemed intimate somehow and my stomach backflipped.
“Hi.” I bit my lip and smiled. “That obvious that I can’t shake you?”
“Wishful thinking.” He smiled his devious smile then started to sit down on the coffee shop couch
beside me.
 I almost screeched.
His body moved rough and rigid. His pain was obvious in the way he carried himself, in the way
he almost crumpled. I shot up and reached for him, but when I grabbed him, he winced. My hands
instantly balled back on themselves and my shoulders shot up to my ears.
“I’m sorry,” I gasped.
“Sit down, Filly,” he said smoothly.
I couldn’t help but listen; the man bewitched my body and I was without a choice. I balled my
hands between my thighs and twiddled on the fray of my jean shorts while my eyes swept to the tile of
the floor, following the design. His thumb came to my bottom lip, the one I hadn’t realized I’d
trapped, and pulled it free. The rough pad of his finger skated across my skin.
“I don’t need your pity.” Something smoldered in his voice. “I need your lips.”
He slid his hand behind my neck and pulled me toward him. With that, I fell. Both literally and
figuratively. My hands shot to either side of his muscled thighs as I tumbled forward, I tried to stop
myself—both literally and figuratively—but he was pulling me under. I craved the man completely, I
didn’t even mind if I drowned.
Once or twice Brye winced or grunted, but he didn’t stop kissing me. He moved closer as his lips
obliterated mine, as his tongue swept up and swallowed the pieces. My hands stayed balled into the
cushions even as my chest pressed closer. His made up for it, clawing at my skin, desperate to know
every inch, to reach deeper.
Without warning, he pulled back. I almost fell into his chest, but my locked arms saved me. When
I looked up his eyes were hooded and his chest heaved beneath the paper-thin cotton of his shirt.
“Hi.” He smiled, his beautiful, real smile, the one that had come out when we talked about beer,
and suddenly all the reasons I’d stayed sat before me.
“Is this what it’s like to spend a morning with Brye MacCowan?” I bit my lip again and looked
him over.
“There was a very specific moment last night when you could have said yes. Then you’d know
exactly what it’s like to spend the morning with me.” His hand took the liberty of exploring the shape
of my hip and then my rib cage. His thumb skated the underside of my breast.
A distant part of my brain pictured shoving the heel of my hand up into the bridge of his nose,
knowing that’s what I should do. Instead, I let my imagination roam. The flashes of us together in a
shadowed night then bathing in sunshine and morning sheets filled my thoughts. The sculpt beneath his
tight shirt would greet me. Well, whatever was left of me after his kisses laid waste to my body. I
blushed at the mere thought of him.
“Well, that look is anything but innocent.” He arched his eyebrow then made a show of wetting his
bottom lip.
“I...uh...”
“Was thinking about fucking me.”
Just the word made my cheeks turn a brilliant shade of red.
“So what if I was,” I managed.
“Tell me what you’d do to me. Show me,” he challenged.
“We’re in a coffee shop.” I looked around, wide-eyed at the people paying us absolutely no mind.
“I’m fine with voyeurism,” he said reading my mind. “Tell me how you’d let me fuck you over
croissants.” He waved nonchalantly around the room.
“Sounds messy.” I blew out a deep breath.
“If that’s your only complaint…” He let his fingertips grazed the curve of my chest then slid down
until they played with the edge of my jean shorts. The feather-light whisper of the denim tails made
me shiver until he shoved beneath the fabric curled his hand into my ass.
“Fuck,” I whispered as I pinned myself back to the couch and away from him.
He didn’t lessen his grip as he laughed, low and husky against my neck. I had to press my knees
together. He slid his hand along my skin moving from the back of my hip to the front. And then kept
going. His fingertips brushed just beside my sex, his rough hands catching on the fine cotton of my
thong.
“What do you want?” I screeched as I shot up. “Coffee? Tea? Water? What else do they have
here?” My head spun side to side, searching for an answer to my question. To any question. His slight
smirk was most definitely of the self-satisfied variety.
I turned without his order, without any answer at all save the whomp of my heart against my chest.
He made me feel caged, not just because of my frantic heartbeats prying at ribs, but as if the very
presence of him held me captive.
“Iced vanilla latte,” I ordered when I reached the counter.
I shoved one hand through my hair and flipped my long locks to the side, deepening my part, as I
pulled out my debit card with my other.
“He seems like fun,” the girl behind the counter said, eyeing Brye’s build where he had draped his
arms out along the couch.
“Or trouble.” I gulped in spite of myself.
I turned and rolled my neck side to side as I determined to get my wits about me and speak to him
as if he was a normal human. I’d liked those moments last night.
We’d walked past so many art pieces last night in the park. I should have been on edge walking
the dark streets with a dark man, but his voice mellowed me. His prowess itself protected me. And
the way he watched me as the faces glowed at Crown Fountain was… The world twinkled as if it
was alight with fireflies, but it was him. Just that look. Those moments were why I was here, after all,
to see if he was worth it or if I’d played up the magic of it all.
I blew out a deep breath, grabbed my waiting coffee and turned back to him, catching his wince as
he adjusted on the couch. I wanted to ask him about it, about the ache and the darkness, but I didn’t
want to drag us from the bright yellow of the morning and crisp coffee shop white.
“Do you paint, Brye?” I asked as I plopped into the chair across from him, trying to lighten the
mood.
He eyed me then the space between us. He seemed to consider the furniture, the distance—or
perhaps his words—with great care but then he finally answered, “No.”
“Oh, Brye, why not?” I could picture him, his big beautiful body arched over a canvas, letting
some of his complexity seep out. I got swept up in the picture. “I can see you standing at an easel,
your eyes all narrow the way they get, your face intense and critical as you figure out the lighting,” I
barreled into my fantasy. “These hands,” I set my coffee down and scooped one up from his thigh in a
simple, swift movement. “Would look beautiful wrapped around a palette with colors splashed all
over.”
“That’s rather vivid.” His husky laugh would be my undoing.
“If you couldn’t get it just right, I know you’d rub your head that way you do.” I reached over and
gently ran my hand across his buzzed hair, slow as I relished the tickle of it against my hand. I didn’t
realize how close I’d pressed to him until he wetted his lips, barely an inch from mine.
“You pay awful close attention, don’t you?”
Heat bloomed across my cheeks. “A habit I picked up growing up.”
 “I don’t mind being on your mind.” He sighed and tucked an errant hair behind my ear. “But you
see an artist in this as a city of ethereal art, Filly, when I don’t create, I destroy. Any of my
masterpieces are carved in flesh and painted with hues of blood. What I do, what I am, doesn’t leave
time for things like painting.”
I sat studying him, my chest open and raw. Not because of his words but what whispered beneath
them. Brye admitting his truths was like staring at the great works. He was fragile whether he saw it
or not.
“And just what is it that you imagine you are?” I asked softly.
“I don’t imagine. I know I’m something wrong, someone demonic.”
His free hand found my body, once again greedy as it traveled skin and denim and cotton. Until he
found my face. Then his hands became hesitant, gentle, and he pulled my face toward his.
“I don’t believe you,” I murmured against his lips.
“Believe me, I’d do wicked, evil things to you.” He grazed my lip with his teeth then let his
warmth skate down my neck.
“Good Christ, I may just let you.” I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but it was true. My body was
basically screaming it, anyway.
“What a difference a day makes.” He locked his lips on the curve of my neck and his tongue found
the curve of my collarbone.
I wrapped my arms under his and gently clung to the sculpt of his back as my head rolled back in
pleasure.
“I’ve never been more proud of you, lad.” A new rough voice slid over my shoulder and reached
for my throat.
“Dad.” Brye hardened immediately and pulled away from me, doing what he could to hide the
pain I’d seen plainly color his features. I turned and followed his lethal glare.
Brye’s father was still an attractive man despite his broken body. Like his son, he moved with an
ache to his bones. Unlike Brye, his was all-consuming, like his very soul thrummed with the wound.
His eyes were dead behind the sparkle of a color and something soulless seeped out of his pores. I
shivered on the July day, recalling Brye’s words. And the bartender’s from yesterday.
And my parents…
I swallowed as I shrunk back into my chair.
“Why are you here?” Brye’s voice was the harsh snap of a whip against his father’s skin. “What
do you want?”
His answering and utterly wicked laugh seemed a dare for Brye to speak like that again. The way
he stared at me, studied each of my features and let his smile grow, peppered my skin with
goosebumps. His hatred was alive and hungry as he devoured me.
“A credit card alert,” he started. “A snare I’ve been waiting to snap for years.”
His father paid no attention to Brye, instead he looked at me. No, through me. His smile started to
pull up on his lips, making them waxen and rough where they hadn’t been before.
“Another bird-boned girl with sunshine hair and eyes the color of heartless.”
I couldn’t speak. Not with my blood turning to ice and freezing me in place. Freezing me in terror.
“Another?” Brye asked, his tone plummeting to match my insides.
“I once knew a girl like you.” He didn’t even turn toward Brye, he just kept staring into me. “I
wanted to break her, too.” His words were still laced with a chuckle that made the hairs on the back
of my neck stand on end. “I almost did.”
My body unlocked on instinct alone. I shot up knocking over my coffee as I took two steps toward
the door. Brye’s dad’s hand locked around my forearm like an iron vise and kept me rooted. His very
touch turned my stomach.
“Get your hands off her.” Brye’s voice swam behind me, muddied by the waters of fate and the
rough touch I knew wanted to hold me under.
His father pulled me in, his eyes met mine again, and hellfire burned inside him. I felt the heat of it
on my face. “It’s funny how fate is cyclical. Your parents slipped through my fingers, but you won’t.”
He squeezed tighter.
“Get off me,” I whimpered as I tried to yank my arm from him.
“You know her parents?” Brye spoke over top of me.
He let out a wicked laugh that had the patrons of the coffee shop looking over and likely feeling
the same shiver that rattled my spine.
“Oh m’boy, you don’t even know what kind of a prize you’ve won.” He snapped my body, turning
me so that I landed with my back flush to his front. Brye’s shoulders heaved and his nostrils flared as
his father pressed his open hand below my bellybutton to hold me still. “Allow me to introduce the
daughter of Cole Ryan and Elle Laroux.”
I needed an explanation. Right. Fucking. Now.
Seeing my father’s hand on Filly churned a rage so brilliantly crimson, so depthless and unending,
inside me. Hearing him say she was a Ryan stilled me. The war between both sides threatened to split
me in two.
“How do you know my parents?”
Parents.
Her voice quivered, real fear making it shake. The way she cowered in on herself made her seem
even smaller and naive then normal. But any defense of her, any consolation stuck in my throat.
My jaw clenched as my eyes scanned from Filly Ryan to my father and back again. If this was
real, her family had almost ruined everything. Cole Ryan was notorious for his ruthlessness and his
recklessness. Elle Laroux had been the first strand cut in my father’s unraveling. They had destroyed
my father. He’d drug himself out of the shallow grave they tried to put him in. He’d built something
despite them. And he’d told me over and over again that the Ryans deserved to burn somewhere
deeper than hell for what they’d done.
But Filly...
“It’s the doe eyes, big and beautiful, round with wonder,” my dad described her features, detached
as if he was evaluating a painting, and finding it lacking. “And those dick sucking lips…Your mother
had them too. I always envied your dad when she blew him in front of us.”
Filly went sheet white. “Excuse me?” she managed. “My parents would never—”
“They did filthy things all the time. Filthy, disgusting, awful, nasty things.”
“No,” she whimpered.
“You were going to do them to my son on that couch.” His voice got low as he nuzzled almost
tenderly against her hair. Bright red flashed before my eyes, harsh and dark against the white snow.
My mouth went dry.
She was going to die. She deserved it. Maybe. Regardless it was going to kill whatever small bit
of my soul might have survived Rosalyn.
“Stop. No.” She was near tears.
“You don’t know anything about the devil your dad was, the smothering Satan your uncle could
be, and the whore your mother played between them both, do you?”
Filly tried to shrink away from my father, but he wound like a snake around her. His hands digging
farther into her flesh.
“Please let me go.” Her voice was weak as she tried to break free again. My heartbeat was
stronger than usual, pummeling my chest in time with her struggles against my dad’s ruthless grip.
“Brye,” she pleaded.
My father’s eyes found mine. The void of feeling I always found in him was usually reflected
back in me. Today it felt like I wasn’t absent, but rather everything, all at once. He arched an eyebrow
at me, probably seeing that tumult inside. His smile grew when I didn’t say anything. When I didn’t
stop him.
“Brye?” he asked, wicked laughter laying right beneath his words.
 They both waited, watching me. Filly’s chest shook and a single tear ran down her cheek. I
watched it until it dangled off her jaw then released and splattered on the exposed skin beside her
spaghetti strap. I wanted to wipe it up. I wanted to hold her. I wanted to watch her cry so very many
more of those little tears.
I turned away from them. My side made me wince, the perfectly timed reminder that Emmett had
told me this would happen. That I should have listened.
“That’s m’boy.” My father’s laughter filled the coffee shop and I glanced around to see how very
many eyes were fixed on us.
“Don’t make a scene,” I warned lowly.
“Brye,” Filly cried loud enough that my heart cracked. I had to swallow down the desire to go to
her all over again. A few people stood, but whether they knew my father or not, they stayed rooted.
“I’m proud of you son.” He didn’t hand out those words often. Almost never actually. But that
wasn’t why it sat wrong on my shoulders.
“Just take her.” The words tasted wrong and bitter in my mouth, but I said them anyway.
I looked over at her from under my eyelashes and she’d crumbled in my father’s arms. I’d tried to
tell her I was dark. That I was wrong and immoral and fucked up. I’d tried to make her listen but she
just wouldn’t. That was how we ended up here.
My heart slammed against my chest, countering with its own brand of violence. Nothing in me
wanted to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, we’d ended up here for a different reason. One that
landed squarely on my shoulders.
She’s a Ryan, I reminded myself.
My dad started to pull her out of the coffee shop. She screamed my name again, but when I didn’t
flinch, she started to fight. She jerked against him, kicked against him but he didn’t waver. She
screamed and a few people murmured about 911 but when I shot them a glare no one actually reached
for their phones.
I shoved my hands in my pockets and tried to shove my feelings down with the same force as I
watched him manhandle her flailing body on the way to the black SUV idling at the curb. As soon as
he shoved her in the door, the vehicle started shaking on its shocks. I smiled when I imagined her
clawing at his skin to draw blood or shoving the heel of her hand into his nose. I got a little hard at the
idea too.
But then they pulled away.
My heart slammed into my chest again, this time so brutal it took my breath. I clutched at my chest
only to remember how her hand had curled into my chest last night. How watching her drive away last
night had been a brand of torture all its own. Yes, she was a Ryan but she wasn’t a monster and I
damn well knew it. She was mine.
As soon as I realized, I bolted out of the coffee shop. The fresh stitches Emmett had sewn let me
know just what a terrible idea that was but I didn’t slow down. I shoved through the people on the
sidewalk, breaking into a run whenever I could. When I saw the SUV stopped at a light, I broke into a
sprint.
I didn’t know what I’d do when I got there, or what blood price I’d have to pay to have her, I just
knew I regretted letting her slip from my fingers. And I was horrified at the thought of her pretty little
corpse laying in my dining room.
Just when I was close enough to grab the door, to grab her, the light turned green and the car
pulled away. The hot metallic of the handle even brushed my fingertips. But then they were gone. I
tried to run again, but each step jolted my bones. Each step seared.
 When the car turned the final corner and disappeared out of sight, my heart panicked, fluttering in
my chest. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. Not past what I’d done anyway. Because it was me
who’d done it. I’d pursued her, seduced her. I’d craved her and caved to her. Then when it mattered
most, I stepped back and acted like none of it matter.
Hopelessness drug me down to my knees there on the sidewalk. I hunched over and buried my
head in my hands. The hollowness inside me was its own kind of awful pain. It reminded me of the
night on the lake...
“No,” I murmured to myself.
I’d turned myself to stone after that. I’d worked at it. I couldn’t feel what I’d felt for Rosalyn
about another woman. I wouldn’t.
But the vision shifted and it was Filly with her neck slit open as my father carried her across the
ice. It was her body that sunk into the water when the ice shattered around her. It was her fingertips I
felt when my lungs burned so badly I knew that the reaper was coming for me too. I saw her drift into
the darkness of the lake and of my heart and I knew.
I had tried not to feel what I felt for Roz ever again, and on a technicality, I had succeeded.
Because when it came to Filly, I felt more. I felt too much more, and I was fucking terrified.
“Stop!” I screamed at a decibel that hurt even my ears. “Get your hands off me.”
I fought with every small ounce I had. Shoving, kneeing, putting my manicure to use. Everything
my dad and uncles had ever taught me about self-defense played out in that backseat.
None of it mattered.
Brye’s father held me tight, leveraging his body to handcuff my wrists. I didn’t stop moving, I
didn’t surrender. He hooked me through the headrest of the front seat and I yanked and fought so hard
that the man seated up front shook like he was on a roller coaster.
I twisted my body just in time to see Brye beside us, his chest heaving as he reached for the door.
We were a few blocks from the coffee shop and he’d run for me. He’d come to rescue me. I fought all
the harder and screamed.
A palm crushed to my face a second later, choking off the sound. My body crashed back into
Brye’s father’s body and my arms went tight, steel biting at my wrists. He shoved his tie in my mouth
then his elbow into my chest. I sucked in at the sudden pain and almost swallowed the silk in my
mouth. It was disorienting and I automatically yanked on my wrists to free my airway.
Handcuffs clanked against the headrest then cut into me. I panicked and sucked the silk down
further. I managed to compose myself long enough to start spitting it out. After a quick sip of air, I got
the rest out.
He snatched the fabric and dove for my feet while I was still gasping for air. I couldn’t fight him
as he bound my ankles, not while I was fighting to breathe. He had my legs bound a moment later;
he’d obviously had practice. The damp fabric dug into my skin.
“You’re a monster,” I spat.
His smile turned up, but he didn’t answer me. The way it curled as it pulled up his cheeks said
plenty. And a moment later his blast of an elbow to my temple kept me from replying. Kept me from
anything at all as my whole world went black.
“What are you going to do with her?” I asked my father as he sat cleaning dirt out from under his nails
with a machete at the head of the dining room table. “Or what have you already done?” I tried to
swallow the lump in my throat.
“I haven’t decided yet.” He cleaned his last two nails before he even looked up at me. And when
he finally did, he arched an eyebrow. “You care what happens to her,” he leveled the accusation at
me.
“She’s a Ryan,” I offered up a non-answer with a shrug.
“That she is.” His gaze narrowed. “And I’d like to know why you had her and didn’t bring her to
me.”
My insides clenched and I forced myself to stay quiet long enough to think through an answer.
Each of my words were a gamble with both of our lives.
“I didn’t know,” I said smoothly, deliberately.
“Hmmmm,” he mused. “In and of itself a problem.”
“I gave her over as soon as you asked.”
“That you did.” He rose from his chair and began to walk toward me, swinging his machete as if
it were nothing but a child’s toy in his hand.
I swallowed hard. My body bore all too many scars from my father. Each doled out when he was
furious, or worse, disappointed.
“But were you going to?” He flicked the knife up to my cheek and I felt the blade against the scruff
of my cropped beard. “Emmett said you care for her.”
Emmett was asking for his own type of punishment. “I’m a MacCowan, I care for money, drugs,
sex, and power. Not her, never her.” I made sure to force ambivalence into my voice.
He flicked the machete from my skin, leaving a trail of heat along my flesh. The absence of a sting
told me that he hadn’t drawn blood. Yet.
He studied me for a second, seeing what I wasn’t sure. Then with cat-like reflexes, he spun the
machete in his hand to grip the blade rather than the handle. His entire face pinched and he became the
definition of fury as it vibrated off him in waves.
“We’ll see about that.” His voice rumbled just before he swung at me. The thick wooden handle
cracked into my temple and pain shot blinding through my brain just a moment before my whole world
went dark.
You cannot go to Chicago.
My dad’s words thumped in time with my head in the groggy darkness. I’d never thought to ask
why. They were being overprotective, dramatic. Irrational or full of prejudice even.
Monsters don’t hide under your bed. They’re out there. And sometimes in plain sight.
My parents were nothing but love and light, art and poetry. My childhood was a fairy tale. They’d
warned me but the bubble of bliss and magic they fostered never hinted that they were serious. I
didn’t believe…
But I opened my eyes to find every nightmare I’d never thought to have wrapped in a luxurious
suit where Brye’s dad straddled a backward chair beneath the single bulb hauntingly illuminating the
room. The dungeon. If his wicked look didn’t tell me how unbelievably fucked I was, the ache of my
shoulders and the bite of the thick steel cuffs digging into my wrists sure did.
I screamed as my heartbeat jackknifed.
“Well hello there.” His voice was inky black ribbon, smooth and silky where it traveled across
my skin. I involuntarily shivered. “I never introduced myself. My name is Connor.”
“What do you want from me?” I warbled as I jerked on the chain that held me fully extended, arms
overhead, bolted to the ceilings, tiptoes below, barely scraping the cold and dirty floor. Fear prickled
every hair on the back of my neck.
“To be quite frank, Ms. Ryan, I haven’t decided yet,” Connor answered as he turned his palm over
and traced the lines with his gaze, rather than my body.
I ran through any and every little thing that might get me out of this. No one knew I was here. No
one was coming. Not even the white knights from my family stories were going to save me. Unless…
“Brye!” I screamed automatically.
His father just chuckled, deep and devious, as he stood and strode toward me. He pushed hard on
my stomach, unseating my toes from the cement and sending me swinging from my singing shoulders.
I cried out wildly, the morbid howl echoing off the stark walls.
“Gods above that’s a beautiful sound.” He palmed my breast and shoved my body again, this time
sending me spinning.
Steel grit against my skin, heating it with a metallic and searing burn. My screams turned to erratic
sobs which only seemed to egg him on. He palmed my ass and spun. My breast, my ass, my breast, my
ass—over and over and over until I was knotted up on myself, my wrists tangled in steel chain that
marred my skin, that pinched my bones. My toes were at least a foot off the ground and the weight of
my body contorted my shoulders into a helpless arc.
Tears spilled down my cheeks.
“Would it kill them more to know you’re here?” He mused as his fingertips traced up the contours
of my legs. “Or to get you back in tiny little pieces?” He yanked my shorts down in one swift move
and I screamed again, tears sputtering off my lips. “I can picture your flesh carved into tiny swirls.”
“Brye, please!” He was my only hope.
“What I wouldn’t give to make them watch. Your dad, Horse. What I wouldn’t give to make them
feel what I felt.”
“I don’t know what they did,” I screamed between sobs. “I don’t know. I don’t know…” The
words dripped off my lips churning with the salt of my tears.
“Maybe, I should show you.” He cocked back and plowed his fist into my jaw.
“Ahhh.” My pain made the syllables ragged, the tense of my face made me almost swallow it.
Connor stood back as his blow sent me spinning back the way I came. My toes found the cement
again, but my ankles wobbled and rolled, leaving the weight of my body to wrench on my shoulders.
I let the tears pour down my face, unashamed. They soaked into the sheer fabric of my tank top
and turned it transparent where it stuck to my chest.
“Maybe I’ll make you mine.” He leaned in and kissed the cotton-covered dampened skin of my
breast.
My body automatically reacted, shaking wildly as I scrambled away the only way I knew how.
But my screams fell on deaf ears as he let his mouth travel through the valley of my chest to my other
peaked nipple. I kept jerking and wobbling, my sobs as wild as my frantic movements.
The world was tunneling around me. I was hyperventilating. Pain seared through my veins. But I
kept fighting. Against Connor, against the chains that bound me, against this fate. A fate that my parents
had sealed even when they’d tried so hard to save me.
A fate that I had brought down on myself by tasting Chicago, chasing Brye. Brye, my beautiful
darkness that I’d wanted nothing more than to kiss.
I tried to cry his name even as his father tongued my chest. Even as I sobbed. But all I managed
was a whisper-thin plea.
“Please, Brye.”

He didn’t come. Not as his father fondled my breasts or stripped me bare, not as he abandoned me to
hang on my wrenched shoulders. Not as I sat in the dark and cried until I couldn’t breathe with only a
cold, slight breeze kissing my naked skin.
My stomach rumbled loud enough that it echoed in the room, but I couldn’t make myself care. I
was numb. Inside and out. And I stayed that way for the full day that I hung there. All my parent’s
words, all my missteps were playing on a loop in my head. Fury at them for not explaining themselves
crept up from my empty stomach only to be extinguished by my exasperation with myself.
I hadn’t listened.
I hadn’t listened at all. And to top it off, I’d lied. They weren’t coming for me any more than Brye
was.
The tears started again for the hundredth time in that godforsaken basement. Their slow drip was
the only count of time.
I was in hell. No, some purgatory worse than hell where I waited. Waited to live, waited to die.
Waited to decide which I even wanted.

Eventually I slept. Though perhaps surrendered to the pain and darkness was a better description. I
was lost. Even anchored to the ceiling, I was adrift.
Until big hands wrapped around my waist and lifted me. The scream split my throat before I even
opened my eyes. The arms disappeared and I dropped, and it twisted my shriek into a pained wail
until a hand crushed over my mouth.
I opened my eyes to find ice blue pleading with me.
My cry cut off. Brye’s face had taken a beating since I last saw him, a welt and bruises peppering
the fine cut of his features, but he was still beautiful. He still stirred something deep inside me even
here, even now.
“Are you okay?” He barely breathed.
“Are you?” I pulled on my brutalized wrists wanting nothing more than to cradle his battered
cheeks.
His laughed low and quiet as his arms wove back around me and lifted. He leaned into me for the
slightest of moments and my legs automatically wrapped up and around his hips.
“What did he do to you?” He nestled into my skin.
It was too much. His arrival, his tenderness, it split something inside me and the tears were back,
slick against his cheek.
“Shhhhh, Filly. Shhhhh.” He tried to soothe me as one hand held me firmly to his body and the
other went to work on my wrists. When he freed my arm, I tried to hold him but couldn’t. The fatigue
and warp of the muscles wouldn’t let me. I fell back, wrenching on my shoulder and wrist still
attached to the shackles.
“Shit,” he swore as he scrambled to catch me.
He pulled me in close, his head twisting to rest against my chest. His lungs filled up once and then
held it, his back wide and taut beneath me. A single finger tapped on my thigh, echoing the beat of my
heart as I realized he was listening to every single shudder inside me.
“Brye.” His name slipped from my lips.
“You never answered me. Are you okay?” he asked as he unlatched my other wrist.
“No. You trapped me, then abandoned me. He chained me up. He touched me.” Fury mixed with
my sobs for a truly unholy accusation.
“I didn’t trap you. I didn’t even know who you were.” He was being uncharacteristically gentle
with me.
“And if you had?”
“That isn’t his decision to make,” Connor’s bone-chilling voice echoed through the concrete
room, through my very bones.
“Fuck you,” I swore at him with all the hate in my heart. “Fuck both of you.” I snarled at Brye as I
twisted, coming nose to nose with him where he held me.
“Maybe you will,” Conner added with a smirk; Brye’s fingertips dug into me. “Bring her upstairs,
Brye. To the dining room.”
I shoved against his chest and when he didn’t budge, I added kicks and claws and cries. Anything
to get me out of any singular part of this prison. But Brye weathered every single bit of my storm as if
he had been made to do so. He carried me up each step out of the basement, slow, steady and sturdy.
He set me down on perfectly polished hardwood floor just in front of the most ornate stained-
glass window I had ever seen, designed from Celtic knots and crosses. I looked up to find the most
brilliant light filtering through. The cross shone brilliantly and for the briefest moment, I felt like
something divine might be looking over me.
“Knowing you and knowing what I do now,” Brye murmured behind me, so low I wasn’t even
sure I heard him until I turned to watch his lips move, “I would have let you go. I would have made
things right.”
“And now?”
 He shrugged. And though the look was dejected, hopeless even, I didn’t give a damn. He was
toying with my fate—my life—and all he could do was shrug.
There were no more words. Not a single one in the English, French or Spanish dictionary was
appropriate. He wasn’t even worthy of another fuck you because right now he wasn’t worth my
breath. Just my unending disgust and fury.
So as he reached for my hand like he could ply me with tender gestures, I cocked my head back,
collected what I could from my bone-dry throat and hacked a loogie on the side of Brye MacCowan’s
asshole face.
My fists balled at my sides and every muscle in my body tensed. Had she been anyone else,
absolutely anyone else I would have backhanded her hard enough to make her bleed. I held a deep
breath in my chest until the pressure was volcanic. I counted to ten. Then twenty. Then I reached up
and wiped her spit from my cheek.
She crossed her arms across her chest. Her head snapped down as if she just realized she was
naked. Her eyes bugged and her hands shot to cover herself.
I smiled. Her discomfort was delightful. Her fear tasted delicious. And that body...
I reached toward her. Part of me wanted to piss her off as badly as she had me. Part of me finally
wanted to feel the skin I yearned for. She shot back, crashing into the corner and jostling a massive,
morbid canvas. I smirked as I looked from the artwork to her body and back again.
“Brye,” my father called, the warning thick in his voice.
I jerked my head toward the door. When she didn’t budge I made a sweeping gesture toward the
door.
“I can make you.” I arched my eyebrows.
She straightened up and stutter-stepped forward.
“After you.” I couldn’t stop my smile.
Filly stopped right in front of me and looked me over from head to toe. The hair on the back of my
neck stood on end when disdain so plain and clear colored her features. The apology was on the tip
of my tongue without me ever really having formulated it.
“Get in here,” my father shouted.
We both did as we were told this time, leaving all the unsaid things behind us in the hallway.
“Please sit down, Ms. Ryan.” Dad gestured toward a chair and I moved to pull it out for her.
She folded in on herself before looking around the room. I knew she saw a beautifully ornate and
classic dining room with deep, dark mahogany furnishings and silver candelabras reaching for the
crystal chandelier. I wondered if she noticed that the carvings were flowers intermixed with
destroyed human bodies. Or that the chandelier had a golden rope hanging from it fashioned into a
hangman’s noose.
“Sit. Down,” he said each word so sharply she followed automatically.
I pushed in her chair then moved away to my traditional seat, opposite my father. I settled in
casually, leaning onto my hand where I propped it on the armrest, my ankle notched on my knee; the
pose let me angle just enough that I could watch her every move. She stared dead ahead with wide
and unblinking doe eyes. Her arms wrapped tighter around her chest as she crossed her legs, still
trying to hide her flesh.
“Where is your father?” mine asked.
She didn’t even acknowledge that he’d spoken, she just swallowed.
“Your mother?” His words got a little grittier.
This time she bit her lip and rounded in on herself a little tighter.
“Horse?”
I tried to catch her eye if only to tell her to answer the questions. That this would be all the less
painful if she did.
“Is this your way of telling me, you’d prefer to die?” His voice was so cold that she shivered.
But she still said nothing.
He shifted in his seat and set his hands on the table. In a simple movement, he slid them wide. Just
the way he moved was predatory. He seemed larger than life there too. Or perhaps death since that’s
what he was—the reaper himself. His fingers flexed and I felt the coil inside him wind up inside me
too. All that anger was about to unload on Filly if she didn’t play along.
“Answer him, Filly.” I jerked my chin toward my father.
She finally showed a little life, turning toward me and narrowing her gaze.
“No,” she said simply.
“If I am dark, then he is the void behind the black itself. Tell him where they are. Paris? Mexico?”
Her whole body changed when I used our dinner conversation against her. She straightened up and
her hands reached to clutch the table, hard enough to turn her knuckles white. The skitter of her chair
cut the silence in the room as she rose the slightest bit. I smiled as her breasts swayed.
“How dare you.” Her voice had a venom that impressed even me. “That was private.”
“You told a complete stranger sensitive information. Your fault, not mine.” I licked my lips more
to collect the want pooling there as I stared unabashedly at her chest.
“Fuck you.” She dropped back into her chair and covered herself up.
“Here’s hoping.”
I looked to my father still wearing the satisfied smirk from winning my exchange with Filly. He
was waiting to meet my gaze. I met it only to feel the full weight of something wicked fall on me.
“What?” I asked, feeling defensiveness flare in my chest.
“You knew this and you didn’t tell me?” If his voice before had been cold, it was frozen now.
“I didn’t know who she was.” I uncrossed my legs and leaned forward to challenge him.
“She’s been hanging in the basement for two days!” he shouted and banged his fists as an
exclamation mark. His chair fell backward as he shot up.
I cringed back and Filly’s hands flew to cover up her face.
“Do you think that I’m someone to be trifled with? Do you think this is a game?”
I shook my head, feeling my heartbeat pick up pace. “Never.”
“Do you think I am someone to take lightly?” He banged his hands on the table again. Filly shied
away completely, but I stood, doing what I could to match his size, his fury.
“Have I ever taken you lightly?”
All too swiftly he pulled a gun from his chest holder and pointed it straight at Filly. My mouth
went bone dry immediately and it was my turn to try and dig my fingers into the table.
“Tell me where they are.” He didn’t yell this time, instead he enunciated each word, his tone as if
he was bored.
Blood red on pure white. I could see it again as I felt her life slipping through my fingers. My
mind raced for anything that would please him. Anything that would move that fucking gun. I played
back every word she’d said to me. This was the first time that I wasn’t trying to capture that feeling
between us, trying to hear her voice. I was searching…
“Mexico,” I spat out.
She’d been on a road trip. I’d ordered that damn Charger dumped into the lake the first night that
she’d been locked up. She couldn’t have come from France.
“Where in Mexico?” He swung the gun at me.
“I don’t know.” I swallowed as I recounted the two times he’d shot me before. The feel of the
bullet tearing into me and the searing pain that came with.
“Where in Mexico.” He asked Filly this time making sure she was watching before he switched
hands and cocked the pistol still pointed at my chest.
He wouldn’t, would he?
As if in answer he pulled the trigger. I closed my eyes and thought of Filly, of that kiss rather than
everything that followed, and waited for the boom and then the pain. Or death. For even a blip I
wondered if it would hurt. And if Filly would find me when she came.
The groan behind me interrupted my thoughts. I opened my eyes and turned. One of his mid-level
enforcers slid down the wall behind me leaving blood streaking in its place.
“In case you weren’t aware of the severity of your situation.” He walked over to Filly and sat on
the edge of the table next to her. With nothing more than a jerk of his chin, the two other men in the
room slid from their silent posts to drag the body from the room. “Your parents did this,” he said
softly. “They killed without mercy.” He stroked the gun down her breastbone then along the underside
of her breast. “They fucked anything. Anytime. Including each other. You father has been inside your
uncle, over and over and over.”
“You’re a liar,” Filly spat as she reached up and pushed her tears aside.
“No, baby monster.” He sighed. “I think it’s time for a story.”
Oh God. Oh, holy mother of God. What have I gotten into? What will it cost me?
The screaming wouldn’t cease in my head. Brye had come for me and my heart had soared only
for it crash dive into the floor.
Murder. I’d watched someone die. And it wasn’t even that monumental. One minute he was alive,
the next he just wasn’t. He wasn’t anything. He didn’t even exist, save the deep red that streaked the
wall behind Brye. It was a grotesque painting across opulent wallpaper and it made me feel as if I
both knew more and so much less about life.
I had no shield against those wicked things. No family. No history. Not if what he said was true. I
didn’t even have the luxury of a t-shirt. I almost surrendered to the hurt. My hearing went fuzzy and my
heart slowed. Maybe I’d just stop existing. But then the whomp whomp of Connor’s voice entered my
fading periphery. Whatever he said made Brye lift his chin as he shrugged out of his suit jacket.
“You lied to me.” Connor’s voice became a little sharper.
“I did no such thing,” he countered as he started unbuttoning the small abalone buttons of his crisp
dress shirt.
“And yet you are accepting punishment without contest.”
I blew out a deep breath I hadn’t known I was holding when Connor tucked his gun away. Brye
simply nodded as he pulled the tales of his shirt from his waistband.
“What if I do care for her?” Brye asked and despite everything, there were butterflies in my
stomach. Connor growled in response. “What if I want to keep her as bait?” he countered. Both
questions sounded the same, no waver or falter or change in his voice. They were equal on his moral
teeter-totter.
“She’s going to learn what she is either way.” Connor moved to the mahogany china cabinet in the
far corner and pulled it open.
I only caught a small glimpse, but there were guns, knives, and hooks hanging from the top. Long-
handled metal rods lined one wall and the rest was hidden from view. He grabbed something from
that side and slid it onto the table.
“Wha…what is that?” I barely got the words out when Brye drew my attention. Bile rose in my
throat when he twisted, shrugged out of his shirt and revealed his stunning but broken back to me.
His thick and muscled back was ripped and full scars. Angry hash marks crisscrossed over dips
and valleys of serious strength. Small, welted knots were peppered in between. At some point, he had
been shredded. It was ugly. The definition of art. Of truth. But what really took my breath away was
the massive tattoo that started at his spine between his shoulder blades and arced all the way down
into the chaos of his low back. The most amazing, intricate wings cover his upper back then unfurled
with grace and divinity until the scars met the feathers, giving them the appearance of being tattered
and torn. They were wings that wouldn’t be able to fly despite once being glorious. They made him
all the more beautiful.
“You’ll take it? No matter what I give?” Connor asked.
He only answered with a curt nod before bending over the dining room table.
 Brye’s actions made goosebumps spread across my flesh, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t know
what he was taking and I was pretty sure he deserved it. I mean, he had… well, the list was too long
to compile. But then again, to me he was… He’d tried to… God, I couldn’t make myself finish those
thoughts. Not when my insides were all mussed up. Not when the mere sight of that back, of those
wings, threatened to make me want to comfort him.
Connor made sure my questions evaporated when he fisted into my hair. I screamed as he drug
me, legs wheeling around the table to where Brye was. He dropped me to my knees, and the bang
against the hardwood floor jarred my bones. A moment later, a leather-wrapped stick landed in my
lap, the many long tails of leather wrapping down around my bare knees with a soft kiss. I reached for
it and the world fell away.
It was a whip, mean in every way an inanimate object could be. The weight was heavier than I
anticipated but my small hand wrapped fully around the handle. It melded to my hand. The tails
themselves were over a foot long with small knots tied in intervals down each line.
“What the fuck?”
“Stand up,” Connor commanded. “Bring it with you.”
“No.”
Connor gripped my hair much the same as he had before and used his power over me to yank me
to standing.
“I won’t.” I wouldn’t ruin my heart the way they had—the way they all had apparently.
“It’s okay, Filly,” Brye said softly as he unbuckled his belt and slid it out of his belt loops.
I tried to keep my eyes in my head as he shuffled his trousers down a hair, exposing the upper
curve of his ass, framed by delicious dimples. He leaned over the table, seemingly so casual, so at
ease. My fingers were drawn to him the same way they usually were to marble work, desperate to
know the contours, to feel the softness of the stone. He was artwork, tragic and brilliant and beautiful.
He jumped when my skin skated across his. Then he sagged into his shoulders, drawing his wings
together and shivering beneath my touch.
“I wanted to know what that would feel like from the first moment that I met you,” he whispered
and it was my turn to shudder.
“So touching,” Connor mocked us both as he shoved the whip back in my hand.
He walked away from me and reached for Brye’s belt. As he circled the table, he pulled a little
bit of the belt back through the buckle, making a loop. Brye stretched out automatically and his father
looped the leather around his hands and pulled. His skin puckered above and below as Connor
pulled. Brye dropped suddenly, flattening to the table as Connor crouched to tie him to a leg.
The realization of what was happening backhanded me. That it was not the first or even second
time swung back and threatened to level me.
“You did this to him?” I shrieked. “You’re a monster.”
“I’m a monster?” Connor asked, accusation in his voice. “I’m a monster? Let me tell you about the
monster that made me.”
I backed away, but Connor rounded the table, grasped my shoulders and shoved me back toward
Brye. I stood behind his wide back that tapered into toned hips and Connor lifted up the whip and let
it land softly on Brye’s skin. Brye flinched then settled again, his head falling to the wood beneath
him.
“Your turn, Ms. Ryan.”
“I won’t do it.” I pulled the leather from Brye’s tanned flesh.
“He lied to me, Ms. Ryan,” Connor’s voice ticked up.
 He’d kept my secrets. He said he’d tried.
“He didn’t,” I offered weakly.
“Yes, he did. He kept things from me!” Connor screamed so close to me, my ear began to ring but
then he softened immediately. “You should feel my pain. You should understand. You know who lied
to you? Your whore mother that had all of Chicago up in arms.”
“My mother is not a whore,” I growled and Connor answered by sliding his hand down the plane
of my stomach down to my… I shot back only to run into the hard of his body.
“Perhaps your fucked up satanic father who killed for sport?” He kept one hand resting between
my thighs while he reached for his gun with the other. Cold steel pressed against my temple. I choked
on my protest.
“Or maybe his longtime lover, Horse?” A smile filtered into his voice as he nudged his erection
against my ass. “If you didn’t have your father’s raging eyes, I’d wonder who your father even was.”
“How dare you!” My temper welled up and bubbled over, my voice pinging off the crystal
chandelier above us, my fingers dug into the leather of the whip as I wiggled against his depraved
grip.
“There’s that signature Ryan savagery,” he said softly as he nuzzled against my ear.
“My parents, my uncle… They’re none of those things.” The tears were coming back, punctuating
to my sentences.
“Whip Brye and I’ll tell you everything.” He pressed a kiss to the curve of my jaw.
“No. I…” My insides were breaking. Everything I’d known was crumbling. Because even if my
heart raged against it, maybe my head had always known there was more to their story…
“I’ll tell you all the ways they lied to you. I’ll tell you who they really are.”
My heart resisted him fervently. Perhaps I came from monsters, because the fury inside me was
monstrous and hellfire bubbled in my veins. That he would goad me into abusing his son made me
unforgiving.
“You want to know why they lied, don’t you?” he purred against my skin. “They could have saved
you from this, from me, if only they’d told you who they really were.”
He crooked his finger inside me and that awful touch made me break.
I brought the whip down on Brye’s back and he grunted. Angry red rose up amongst scars that had
already been there.
“Oh my God.” I dropped the whip onto his battered skin. “Brye, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t, Filly…” His muffled voice trailed off.
“Pick that up.” Connor kicked the whip. “Listen to the truths of your family. Learn the
consequences of defying me.”
“No.” Tears, hot and wild stung my cheeks.
“Do it, Filly,” Brye said softly from between his outstretched arms. “Do it, or it’ll get worse.”
“Smart boy. Should have used that brain beforehand. Perhaps then I’d be whipping her.”
“Do it, Filly,” Brye repeated and the way he adjusted himself, I realized he was steeling himself.
My whole body quivered as I reached out to pick up the whip. Once I held it, it hung at my side,
shaking just the same as I did.
“Once upon a time,” Connor started, “Cole Ryan was the right-hand enforcer of Mickey Maloney,
a demonic brute of a man that thrived on drugs and sex and slavery.”
He lifted his eyebrows waiting for me to lay leather to flesh as I thought about my daddy. The man
who joined my garden tea parties and taught me about fairies. The man who described how the stars
sparkled as he watched them not in the heavens, but in my eyes. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to hear
Connor’s words—I was morbidly curious about it—I just didn’t want it to be true. At all. It wasn’t
that I hated each word. It was that they existed in the first place. That it was my truth made my skin
crawl.
“Filly…” My name was a warning on Brye’s lips.
“I don’t want to,” I whimpered.
“But you’re going to.” Connor cocked the gun against my head and I knew the sound from all those
nights shooting at cans and cactuses in the desert with my dad and Horse. It had seemed so innocent
but now…
“Now!” Connor’s rage manifested in spittle on my cheek and claw marks across my stomach.
“Filly,” Brye whispered. My Brye. The one that liked art and beer and kissing at midnight. The
one that I had stayed for.
The salt of my ever-present tears hurt against the chill of my cheeks. My bones ached and fought
me every single inch as I lifted and brought the whip down half-heartedly on Brye’s back. He barely
moved.
“This time with feeling.” Connor pushed the gun harder against my skull.
“Please…” Brye’s word was left hanging in the room just before I slashed it with the brutal
cattails of the whip.
This time he groaned through gritted teeth and jerked against the leather of his belt. His father’s
empty laugh paired with the ringing in my ears.
“Again, Filly,” he demanded.
My leaden arm lifted and came down again, my eyes blurring behind the tears. And then Connor
MacCowan began to talk.
I was seven the first time my dad beat me. He’d been out of the hospital for a few weeks and I’d
walked in on him swallowing pain pills. When I startled him, Oxycodone skittered from the opaque
orange pill bottle and rained down on the floor with small plinks. He turned to find me with my
shoulders up around my ears and eyes wide.
A moment later his hand, complete with family crest ring, crashed into my cheek. His foot into my
ribs barely a breath later. I crashed to the floor, tears springing to the corner of my eyes as I rolled
over and looked up at my father.
It was the first time his look lost feeling, the first time I stared at my father and nothing stared
back. What do you know? I feel better. His words had become the mantra that he lived by. The pain
of others—mine particularly—seemed to soothe him.
I’d learned to fight him when I got older, stronger. He’d shot me. The hole in my thigh and
shoulders served a lesson not to go against him again but rather feel what he felt. And obliterating
someone usually felt so good.
But today... Filly always had been and always would be different.
“Mickey Maloney was the former snake of this city. When your dad cut off his head, I was more
than happy to take over. But this story starts much further back. Back when it was just your dad and
Horse, back when they made themselves kings in an unholy empire.”
I swallowed and blew out a deep breath, steeling myself against what was to come.
“Whip him once for each of them,” my father commanded. “For Cole, Elle, and Horse.”
“Just do it, Filly,” I reassured her. It was the only comfort I could offer. The only salvation too.
She did and this time with less coaxing. Her strength wasn’t my father’s, her lashes might not even
break skin. I could endure this. I would. For her.
As soon as the leather slid off my back and I stilled against the wood of the dining room table, my
father picked his story back up. He painted the picture of men just as vile, just as soulless as him with
deft and sturdy brush strokes, creating a likeness that could only be made by viewing the subject in
person.
This was real. All of it.
And the pain it was causing Filly was more palpable than my own.
Her tears turned to sobs after one particular blow to my back that crossed into the still healing
skin of my lower back. The heat of fresh blood seeped across my skin. When he forced her to hit me
again, the blood splattered on the floor like a Jackson Polluck and I imagined her face looked the
same, a mess of red splotches and tear-stained tracks.
She had to be breathtaking.
The way my father spoke about her family was breaking her. He’d recounted murder after murder
of Cole Ryan’s, of him watching from the shadows. He’d detailed how Horse could be shaped
beneath Cole’s hands into anything he desired. And he desired Horse, mixed with any manner of
woman in between.
I was the worst kind of bastard for sporting a semi when he recounted the hedonistic, voyeurism
that was their reality. My only justification was that this was a world of warped and wrong creatures
where nothing really made sense.
He made her whip me all along. Leather bit at my skin, the knots stinging like bees, but she never
got up to full strength.
Until he started talking about her mom. About how she had crash landed in the world of
wrongness. About Filly’s grandmother’s murder and how it seemed to be an act of fate, drawing her
into the darkness she’d escaped. But then my father had tricked her mother. He’d drugged her. Then
single-handedly pulled her into the depths of hell. He’d personally handed her to Mickey Maloney.
I had to fight the bile in my throat. And when Filly hit me, really hit me for the first time, splitting
my skin, the pain surprised me but her anger didn’t.
My dad kept talking. So many fucked up things, so many dirty, debasing, disgusting things. Sexual
things, murderous things. A litany to the Seven Deadly Sins. He told Filly how he’d watched Horse
fuck her mom, side by side with Cole. He told Filly about her mother murdering to save her father.
Each time she flayed me I was a confused mix of rage and sorrow and lust until Filly collapsed
behind me. She had doled out close to a hundred lashes and suffered twice as many stories.
My father kept going, spitting words at her piled body. He described how her father had been
beaten within an inch of his life, how he’d begged for death, how he’d begged his love to save herself
and damn him. How her mom had swung and pulled the trigger, how she’d saved Horse, but that none
of it had mattered. None of it had mattered at all.
“Shut up,” she screamed, her words wild, seething sobs. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
Her forehead brushed the soft wool of my trousers as she pressed against my calf. I wanted to rip
the leather off, I wanted to split the table in two if only to hold her.
“Stand up. I haven’t even told you how your father beat me within an inch of my life.” Her body
pulled away from mine and her accompanying, blood-curdling screams told me that my dad was man-
handling her again.
I yanked at the leather as her scream threatened to split my skeleton from my skin. The table
shifted beneath me, tilting up before the weight of it crashed it down. My tether didn’t waver and I
roared louder than even when she’d offered blows.
“Don’t you fucking hurt her.”
“Don’t hurt her? Don’t hurt the blood of the man that spilled mine? Cole Ryan beat me to the
ground with fists and rage. Show me fists and rage, Filly.”
Thumps and thuds on the floor behind me shoved and shot at the edges of my heart. I wanted to get
to her. I wanted to make him stop. Make this fucked up story stop.
“Hit him, Filly. Hit him the way your father hit me. Make him hate you the way I hate the vermin,
devil wretch that is Cole Ryan.” The handle of the whip scraped across the wood floor one more
time.
I took a deep, steadying breath as my mind focused on one fact. Bad things come in three. Luck,
death, mother nature’s grandest catastrophes. And tonight, I knew as certain as John Wilkes Booth,
Lee Harvey Oswald or Mark David Chapman this third time would be different.
“Hit him.” My father’s quiet words were pointed and barbed with venom. “Hit him like that
belligerent murderer that birthed you. That barbarian that left me in pieces on the floor of Fulton
Market Kitchen. That beast that would have killed me, would have left Brye fatherless in this world,
if only he’d surrendered that last little bit of humanity. That little bit that fools you into thinking he’s
anything but Satan.”
I heard Filly’s deep, pounding breath first. It was wild, wet with tears, and was the perfect
crescendo to her ragged cry. That wail was the only warning I had before the whip broke across my
skin. The sting was a flash of lightning my answering scream, thunder. The heat bloomed across my
back like a summer storm just swelling. My blood pooled beneath the skin like swollen clouds ready
to burst.
The damn that had held Filly’s goodness, her innocence, broke. Hate flooded into the room; I
knew by the taste of it. I fed off it. Every moment between us before this was foreplay—even the pain
had been pleasurable. But this, the grand finale, was everything that fate required of a moment
between a Ryan and a MacCowan.
For a few excruciating minutes, I forgot everything but the raw hate and the pure pain. The heat
and malice of it all. With one particularly low lash, I surrendered to the hate. To the dark. To myself
and my family name. I yanked on my trapped wrists again. Only this time not to hold her but to hurt
her. The fury that my father had bred into me welled up and the only thing I wanted was retribution. I
wanted my hand around her neck as I pummeled her to the floor and fed her back her blows tenfold.
“Brye.” Filly’s tortured voice barely thinned the red haze tinging my vision.
Her hands were on me the next heartbeat, causing blood to rush into my ears and amplify my
heartbeat.
“Don’t,” I spat and her hands jerked away.
My father’s laugh filled the empty space between us, as hollow as the space she’s just split inside
me. I was trying to patch it up with the knowledge that she’d suffered worse than me, but in that
moment, I just couldn’t.
“I’m so sorry. Are you okay?” Her voice quivered.
I didn’t answer. I still couldn’t without cutting my teeth on her. My father’s footfalls punctuated
his laughter as he circled the table and untied me. I moved to rub my wrists and my back screamed in
agony, loud enough that I flattened back to the tabletop. I took another deep breath and steeled myself
against the tsunami of pain.
Emmett’s hand silently appeared at my side, waiting patiently. I hadn’t realized he was witness to
this nightmare unfolding, but I was grateful for it. He could remind me later the price I’d paid to have
a heart. I shook my head and managed to get my aching hands back beneath me. The throb of my back
doubled as I pushed up to standing. Emmett faded into the baroque wallpaper as I turned.
But I paid him no attention, I was focused on the beautiful bitch twisting nervously on the leather
of the handle behind me. She was the daughter of death and destruction. She’d made me bleed and
tears prick the corners of my eyes. She was my enemy. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to make her pay.
She was already a wreck. Her cheeks were the streaked mess I’d envisioned, her hair the ruddy,
tangled compliment. Every one of her breaths were too big for her small body. She was fear and
terror personified and I liked it.
I squared my shoulders and made my look match my father’s.
“I knew that signature Ryan violence simmered in your veins,” my father observed, still detached.
“Just another twisted monster.” He shoved Filly and her tiny body crashed down to my feet. The whip
blanketed my toes and I didn’t flinch.
“Na…no.” Her voice quaked and I smiled.
Pale perfect skin and teardrop breasts with perfectly rosy nipples shook in time with her nervous
body.
“I don’t care what you do with her, Brye, just keep her alive long enough to lure those demons
here.” My father waved the entire evening off with a brush of his hand as he returned to his seat at the
head of the table and rung a small silver bell. “Don’t fucking lie to me again,” he threatened as an
afterward. “I’ll kill you outright if it’s about a Ryan. I don’t care that you’re my heir.”
 I nodded my assent briskly.
“Good.” He sighed. “May I offer you a glass of wine with your dinner, son?”
Those words, this table and the idea of rolling on ecstasy with Filly’s gorgeous ravaged body
beneath me made me lick my lips. A hunger cruel and gluttonous that I’d never known moved my
hands, one to her hair and one to my fly. I stroked myself twice between the frame of my zipper as I
fisted into her sunshine golden hair and pulled.
“I think I’ll start with dessert.”
He laughed and clapped his hands behind me just as a server brought his dinner to the table. I paid
no attention to the plate they set down for me. The pure dark beast that Filly herself had unlocked with
her own hate wouldn’t let me.
I did grab the wine he’d set down and slugged it back just before I drug her up to trembling knees
and held her as I pulled my cock from my briefs. I fell an inch from her lips then waited expectantly,
ice in my veins. She tried to fold in on herself, small sobs shook her shoulders, but I pulled to
straighten her out. Tears tracked down her cheeks and her hands shook as she reached for my hips.
Her fingertips curled into me, around and into my bloodied back, at the same time she tentatively
swallowed half of me.
“Do what Ryan women do best,” I urged her, letting all the menace I’d built up inside me go and
grapple with my words.
Her cries shook her shoulders, but her delicate fingers found me. Her mouth sheathed around me,
her tongue cradled me. She was soft and wet and despite everything, welcoming. I nudged farther in,
testing how far she’d let me go. Filly didn’t stop me, but her fingertips curled into my back.
Pleasure and pain ripped through me.
I prayed for more pain as I shoved in completely, feeling her breath brush beneath my bellybutton.
She gagged and tried to pull back. I used my grip to keep her in place. I even rocked my hips against
her face. A strangled sob tried to escape her throat where I wasn’t filling it. She shifted, trying to push
my hips back but she caught the bright red of my blood coating her hands and screeched again. This
time her eyes went wide with terror.
Her throat was wide and her hands out of my way so I hammered. Over and over and over. I fed
her my hardness and she swallowed. Me and her tears. Her hands found a perch on my thighs and I
shuddered. Her lips closed around me, the velvet of her mouth caressing every inch. She felt so.
Fucking. Good.
I threw back my head, letting my body surrender to the way she worked on me. With each thrust I
tunneled into the darkness my father had put me in and lost my way back to myself.
“Shit,” I swore through gritted teeth.
Here in her mouth, taking advantage of her, I felt like a king, a cruel and vindictive king. And I
was enjoying it. Enjoying her. I’d let my father’s son take over. I’d hurt her, and after that fucking
story that had obliterated her…
But I didn’t care. Not about her, not about her feelings. Not even about the wild, whipping
darkness that was lashing at my heart as it took over.
When I was younger, we went to New York. It was one of only three trips we made to the states in
twenty-one years. My mom and I walked hand in hand through every gallery and museum we could
find. My dad walked behind us, a shepherd with a smile on his face.
We saw an exhibit by Nancy Rubins made of old and decaying playground equipment. Her
sculptures were these massive, floating, free-form shapes. I remember thinking they were whimsical,
childhood items floating up like freed balloons drifting on the wind.
My mind went empty and all I could think of was that exhibit. Those sculptures. They weren’t
lightweight, they weren’t suspended above gravity. They represented a childhood, a life blown apart.
An explosion of youth and hope and goodness.
Like my life.
It was all a lie.
Everything I’d known had been dissected tonight. My family looked different in fragments. The
rust was apparent, the broken pieces too. Those sculptures were beat up, bedraggled, not repurposed.
They were broken and living the only life they could. My family was broken. It was wrong.
We were entirely fucked up.
I should have wanted to scream and yell and surrender to the fury racing through me. Or at least to
sob the tears knotted in my throat. Instead, I did nothing. I was nothing. Connor MacCowan deadened
something inside me with his words and my body had gone numb as a result. My heart… Well,
halfway through taking my hurt out on Brye I realized it was gone. These assholes had stolen it from
me. And what was worse, I was too weak to take it back. Or even worse, I didn’t want to.
As I cut and gnawed and gashed and fought, as I wrecked and ravaged and ruined, it felt good—
no, better than good. Each lash set me free from the pain for a moment. In the most depraved kind of
way. The darkness of an anger so consuming was easier to fall into than the light of forgiveness in the
middle of Hell. So I surrendered. To the pain, to the hurt, the anger. To the wicked inside of me.
And then to Brye.
He looked at me with hate and expectation in his eyes when he slid his dick out of his fly. After
the stories they’d told me, it was no wonder. This was normal to them. This was normal to my
parents. I should have fought tooth and nail but the fight had slipped away and I was left feeling that
this was my life, my legacy. Whether I wanted it or not, this was the girl I was supposed to be. I was
supposed to be filled with hate and a thirst for depravity. I was supposed to thirst for this. Paint and
pretty things never felt so…wrong. So with a blank mind and empty insides I did what was expected
of me.
I became the epitome of the monster they wanted me to be.
At first, I wanted nothing more than the moment to be over. Not freedom, not a rewind—I couldn’t
think that far. All I wanted was an end. Not mine. Or maybe that’s what I craved above all else.
But then my body betrayed me. My hands moved up higher, not because I wanted them to, not
because I even thought about it, but because it was right on a primal level. My throat relaxed and I
drunk in the heady smell of Brye mixed with sex. The slick of his blood, dripping from his back
coated my hands. It matched what was between my thighs.
His ragged cry spliced through my fucked up haze, there was a hint of agony where I hadn’t heard
it before. My eyes flicked up. Any hint of the man I knew was gone and something primal and crude
was clawing its way up through his chest. Somehow, in some sick and twisted way, that beast spoke
to the one inside of me that was turned on and I groaned with him in my mouth.
Without warning Brye pulled back, his hand still fisted in my hair. He tilted my head back and the
man above me had changed once again. He’d come unhinged, his mouth gaping open like mine, his
chest heaving harder than my ragged breaths. A sexual groan slipped from his lips a moment before
heat shot onto my chest.
Cum splattered across my breasts and each bit of heat lit up something inside me. I hated myself
for it. His hand softened from the fist clenching my hair to skate down to brush my cheek. I reached up
and shoved it aside.
“Bravo.” Connor clapped from where he still ate his dinner. I glanced at him only long enough to
see food and oil dripping down his chin.
Shivers rolled down my spine.
“You liked it,” he said as he shook the last little bit of himself on me.
I refused to admit that fully to myself, let alone him.
“What? No fuck you?”
I thought about wiping the cum from my chest and slapping him with my disgusting hand. But the
second I went to wipe his ick from my skin, I noticed the blood. I remembered the heat of it on my
hands, but I hadn’t thought about how gruesome that would make them.
Red. Bright brilliant red. It coated my palms and dappled my wrists. When I looked down, faint
pink mingled with cum on my chest in my desperate finger tracks. I heaved and had to gag it back.
“Does it make you sick because it’s blood or because you like it?” Brye asked as he bent down
and pushed his face close to mine. His beautiful, monstrous face.
This time, blood be damned, I did reach out and slap him.
His eyes lit with something wild as he adjusted his jaw. There was a small prick of life, maybe
even pride in my chest, when I saw the outline of my bloody hand on his cheek.
“Did you just slap me?” His voice was a new brand of wicked.
“Come down here and I’ll do it again,” I challenged.
“If I come down there, I’m going to fuck you into oblivion just because I can.”
“I’ll kill you if you do.”
He threw his head back in laughter, cold and emotionless, that made me cower back toward the
chair behind me.
“Don’t make it more tempting,” he said with a smirk.
“You think I’m joking?”
“No.” He reached out and grabbed me by my shoulders and lifted me. “But I’ve never deserved it
more. Never craved it like today.”
Something shifted when he said it. The demon I’d been dancing with disappeared for just a
moment. Sadness lurked beneath. There was a quiet and earnest honesty to his confession just like the
one that had made me spit at him earlier. He had no right to say things like that. He had no heart to
mean them.
Or maybe, just maybe, he was the chaos I’d noticed the first morning. All the facets I’d seen
wrapped up and whirring in one package. For a second I pitied him.
But then he started pulling me out of the dining room. My feet flopped and my ankle rolled. He
caught me but kept pulling.
“What are you doing? Where are you taking me?” I tried to yank my arm from his.
“You heard my father.” He shrugged. “I’m keeping you alive for now. It’ll be easiest in my
bedroom.”
“Like hell I’m going anywhere near your bedroom.” I ripped my arm from his hand with enough
momentum that I crashed back into the wall.
“I will keep you safe.” He said it so vehemently that I knew there was more than just his father’s
command behind it.
I didn’t give a damn.
“Then throw me in that godforsaken basement.” I pointed wildly at the stairs I knew led back to
that dungeon. “I’d rather be caged like the monster that I am than play house with the likes of you.”
He shrugged, but there was a battered hurt behind his eyes.
“Fine.”

I was a skeleton. Nothing more, nothing less. I had seen the bones of great creatures on display in
each of the great museums, whole but hollow. Like me.
Without a choice, I played the role of a Ryan. I hated it. I hated that it was easy. That more than
anything told me it was true. All of it. And the truth hurt like hell. The truth about Brye too.
Another singular tear fell down my cheek and I did what I could to reel it back in. The man who’d
hung me back in this room didn’t deserve a single one of them.
“Do you like soup?” The man who had hovered near Brye stepped into my view holding a piping
hot bowl in front of him.
I eyed him like he was a snake that might bite.
“It’s tomato.” He offered me a spoon.
The scent hit me hard. It was more than tomato, it had roasted red peppers and the heat of chili
peppers. It was home. If my mom had served it the only difference would have been tortilla strips and
cotija cheese.
More tears came unbidden to my cheeks and I tried to wipe them on my outstretched arms.
“I’m Emmett,” he offered me a small smile. “And I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
I tried to shake his concern away. He smiled reassuringly and offered up a spoonful of soup. I
eyed him and the soup, unsure whether the delicious scent was worth it.
“You okay?” he asked softly and for one small moment, I saw a friend in him. I saw hope.
“Are you asking about my insides or my outsides?”
“Hummmm,” he mused as he looked me over. “I was going to say inside but...” He reached for
me, his hand trailing down the curves of my body.
I jerked back as best I could as my hope crashed down and fear replaced it.
“You know you deserved it right?”
“No one deserves this,” I yelled at him with all the emotion I could muster.
“You’re a Ryan. A Ryan that back-talked a MacCowan. You deserved worse.” He offered up a
spoonful of soup again. I couldn’t swallow his words, but I ached for some sort of sustenance besides
hate. “Sorry but it’s the truth.”
He smiled a small smile and reached a spoonful up to my lips. I had to shove my head forward to
reach and it pinched my shoulder joints.
“Hawt!” I said with a mouthful of soup as I belatedly tried to blow on it where it scorched my
tongue.
“Hang around here long enough and you’re bound to get burned.”
I swallowed. “It reminds me of my mom’s.”
He held up another spoonful and a tiny bit splashed onto my chest. His big hands moved to my
skin and the pad of his thumb brushed the soup away. My nipple peaked beneath his touch and for a
split second, he was transfixed.
“Why are you down here.” Fear prickled the back of my neck when his eyes didn’t leave my body.
I’d been touched by father and son, was he here to make some fucked up Trinity.
But then he shook his head and his look along with my observation vanished into the dark of the
basement.
“To give you a warning,” he said as he offered up another bite.
“I think it’s a little late for that.” I yanked on the chains hanging above my head as a reminder just
before I bent down for more soup.
“This one’s about Brye.”
I didn’t answer. His name still sounded like nails on a chalkboard to me. He did wait for a reply,
he didn’t seem to want one. He just ladled up more soup and held it for me. When he spoke again, he
was just as casual as he has been before.
“If you’re not careful, you’re going to ruin him.” He scooped up another bite, but I didn’t bend for
it. I was going to ruin him? My body froze in disbelief. “And if you do,” Emmett continued offering
the soup up to me again. “I’m going to ruin you.”
I rolled over and tried to open my eyes. They wouldn’t cooperate. Nothing in my body would. I felt
like I’d been hit by a fucking train. I felt the sunlight warm my face, but otherwise I was consumed
with achy pain and the dull thump of fresh wounds on my back.
What the fuck did I get into last night? I asked myself without a real answer. I remembered
having drinks with my father. I remembered the bitter taste of the drugged up wine. But everything
else...
When I finally managed to pry my eyelids open gore greeted me. I shot upright in bed and looked
around at the blood that had stained my sheets in wild, violent patterns. My first thought was that
someone had died here last night, but then I looked down.
I remembered the drinks. And then going down to the basement to collect Filly. She’d been so
broken....
“Oh holy fuck,” I swore and became a tornado of bloody sheets and blankets as I remembered
what came next..
I’d ruined her. Her makeup, her hair and so much more. She’d dulled, her sunshine fading into a
haze. She was beautiful but broken. And I was the one that broke her. It had made her hang all the
more limply from the chains in the basement I’d shackled her to.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I swore under my breath as I sprinted down the stairs and pivoted toward the
basement, using the banister to help me slide through the corner.
I hadn’t meant to leave her down there. I hadn’t meant to string her up at all. But the things she
said, the very essence of her was kindling for my temper. And fiery passion in my veins. She’d liked
blowing me last night—her body did anyways. The sheen on her thighs and the way her fingers curled
into me were undeniable proof. But she’d fought me. She’d slapped me. And she’d told me in no
uncertain terms that she’d rather be strung up naked than in my bed.
“Fuck,” I swore again when I envisioned her naked and waiting downstairs for me. The throb in
my head wasn’t the only one in my body anymore.
I all but ran down the stairs to her only to stop the second I reached the concrete. She was more
destroyed than I imagined. Dirt smudged her skin head to toe—well anywhere that blood hadn’t left
small pink finger tracks. Her hair was stringy and shooting off in every different direction with some
of those same pink highlights. The crusted white tracks of my cum still covered her chest. Her
innocence had been stripped and she was everything hedonistic, everything debased.
I wanted to eat her whole.
But I slowed myself and recounted everything I could about last night. About the story that my
father had told, about the way it tore her to shreds.
“Are you okay?” I asked automatically.
She startled and jerked on the chain trying to turn away from me.
“It’s just me.” I walked into her line of sight and held up my hands in surrender. The tear tracks
that cross crossed her face almost drew my own. “It’s just me,” I repeated softer, sweeter. “And I’m
here to say I’m sorry.”
The word just popped out. The shape and taste of it felt foreign in my mouth, but when she sagged
with relief after I said it, I knew I’d never take it back.
“Can I take you down.”
She nodded where her head hung between her arms. I walked over to her and wrapped my hands
up and around her to the latches. I was about to click them open when she sagged into my chest. She
shook a little.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I folded around her as I spoke and nuzzled against her as I hugged
tightly. The simple gesture was just as odd as the apology, but I meant them both. “I let my temper and
the drugs get the best of me.” I ran my nose along the curve of her ear. “I’m paying for it today.”
“The drugs?” She sniffled.
“Among other things.” I tried to smile at her but couldn’t quite make my body comply. “Don’t
drink the wine. It’s all laced.” I held her for a heartbeat more then reached back up for the cuffs. “And
don’t trust anyone. Not even me.”
She looked up finally and managed a small smile, even if it didn’t reach her eyes. The heavy click
of the steel was the only sound besides my thundering heart.
“I can carry you.”
“I can walk.” She shoved away.
Her baby deer body all too quickly folded in on itself and her small knees crashed to the concrete.
A ragged howl shook her body and I squeezed my eyes shut against the sound. I wordlessly reached
down for her hips, pulling her back to standing and helping to steady her.
The curve of her ass fit perfectly against my hips. I groaned and tightened my grip on her.
“Got it?”
She nodded, took two steps then fumbled again. I darted for her, catching her just before she
careened back to the floor. I didn’t ask her this time, I just scooped her up and cradled her to my
chest. My whole body protested, pain shot through my back, but the pain she’d been through... I blew
out a deep breath and step by slow step carried her to my room.
When I set her down, she looked around. Her head swiveled from side to side as she took in the
frames stacked floor to ceiling, tight to each other that made a wallpaper all their own. The masters
that we had fallen for together were reflected back and something twittered in my chest. Wonder
replaced her hurt for a second before she schooled it.
Then she turned the same evaluating gaze on me.
“I…I might hate you.”
“That’s fair.” My heart hit against my chest. “For a minute, I hated you too.”
“Did I hurt you?” She crooked her finger toward my still bloody back.
“Yes. But then again, so did I.”
She straightened her shoulders. “I don’t know that I’m sorry.”
“Fair.”
I wanted to reach out and touch her, to smooth the hair out of her face or run the pad of my thumb
across the beautiful bottom lip that I craved. I wanted to comfort her and for my touch to mean
something. She eyed me, skeptical but silent.
“Oh, come on,” I tried to lighten the heavy between us. “It wasn’t all bad last night.”
“What?” she snapped.
“I saw you get turned on. I felt you find your own rhythm.” I smiled at what I could find of the
memory. “You suck dick almost as well as you kissed me the first night. Even then you wanted it.”
“Excuse me?” Fire lit up behind her eyes. “Are you saying I enjoyed what happened yesterday?
That because I kissed you, I wanted you to stick your dick in my mouth?”
 I had to hold back the purr. “I’m saying that you knew damn well what was going to happen in that
moment and you didn’t fight it.”
“That’s how people justify rape.”
That four letter word stung as it slapped across my cheekbone.
“I would not rape you,” I enunciated each word.
“What do you call yesterday?”
My temper welled in my chest and bubbled over. I shoved my arms on either side of her, backing
her flat against the frames behind her. Each of us jostled them with our own wild thump. My face was
inches from hers and the smell of sex, of me, still clung to her.
“I call it keeping you alive.” I narrowed my gaze and pressed into her space a small bit more.
“Don’t you dare put that on me. Any of it.”
“My father is a goddamned monster. You don’t know what he would have done.”
“From where I sit, so are you.” She swallowed. “So am I.”

She had shown her teeth and seen her claws and hated both. That first day I’d been convinced that the
darkness called to her, that it even attracted her. Now it was everything that repulsed her.
I reached for the nearest wine bottle and threw it, relishing the boom of it breaking against the
wall, the tinkle as it rained down and the splash of the wine inside it as it fell to the floor. Stupid
fucking wine. If I hadn’t started drinking I wouldn’t have decimated the line of attraction and
repulsion between us.
“Don’t let her get to you,” Emmett said from behind me as I leaned over the sink and let my
shoulders roll with the heave of my chest.
“I wrecked her yesterday,” I said by way of an explanation through gritted teeth.
“Who cares.” He came to lean next to me on the sink “You’ll wreck someone else tomorrow.”
I looked up inside to see him shrug. There was something soulless behind Emmett’s eyes and
lately, it had been growing.
“Stay away from her.” The warning was more of a compulsion than anything.
“Already spoke my piece.”
“What?” I stood to my full height and looked down at where he leaned on the counter. “What did
you do?”
“Look, Brye, you’re not mad that you’re a monster. You’re not mad that you fucked her mouth.
You’re mad that she’s not. You’re mad that it bothers her.”
“I’m mad that you talked to her,” I seethed. “Did you touch her?”
He didn’t even have the decency to answer. He just looked down and started to clean the dirt from
under his nails. It was answer enough for me.
“I will punish you for that.”
He flinched, but he knew better than to turn or walk out. I let one fist fly and then another, one for
talking to her, one for touching. I saw red around him. Fury that he was interfering, that he might
convince her... of what I didn’t know, but damned if I wanted him to have anything to do with my girl.
My fist crunched into his jaw then I slammed into his stomach. He doubled over with barely more
than a sound. His silence set off screams inside me. I was the prince and he was a nobody. He should
respect me. He should yield to me.
The challenge formed before I even realized. I was going to make him cry. One of his tears for
each of hers.
 It was a barely conscious decision to knee him then slam my elbow into his exposed kidneys. He
crashed to his knees. Had I had shoes on I would have angled to break his ribs. Instead, I shoved my
heel into his bent neck. Finally, a haggard yelp slipped from his squished neck.
“Do you yield?”
He mumbled pathetic sounds.
“Do you yield?” I asked again. I took a deep breath as my shoulders heaved and my chest puffed
up.
“Stop, Brye,” he bellowed as he flattened to the floor.
I kicked him once for good measure and he folded in on himself, rolling to his side. I folded on
either side of him, sitting on his chest and pinning him to the herringbone wood floor beneath.
“She’s mine to keep. Mine to keep alive.”
“Yes, but when it’s time for her to die, will she yield or will you?”
One fell blow to the head was all it took for his head to rock like a small doll to the side. His face
went lax as blood pooled beneath his turned face. I smiled at my handy work as I stood and padded
back to my bedroom. I studied the patterns on my hands and for once didn’t compare them to Pollock
or the modern works I’d most recently seen. Instead, I wondered what it would look like if it were
hers. If it were Filly’s lifeblood lost forever as it leaked onto the floor.
As much as I’d needed some space from her before, I needed her back now. I rounded the corner
to find Filly with her arms wrapped tight around herself, trying to shield or hold herself together, I
couldn’t tell which. She looked so small standing in front of my wall studying a print that was longer
than it was wide. I knew which it was without looking too hard. Amongst the Van Gogh and Monet
and Manet, in between Rembrandt and Vermeer was Guernica by Picasso.
“Is this your world?” she asked, her voice low and rough. “Is it mine?”
“It was an anti-war protest piece in the late 30s,” I answered as I stepped toward her.
“I know what it is. Guernica depicts suffering on a global scale.” Her small fingers reached out
and followed the line of a broken body at the bottom of the recreation. “That’s not what I asked.”
“Do I live in chaos and terror?” I paused. “Yes.”
“It was theirs too, wasn’t it?”
I knew she was asking about her parents and I remembered how thoroughly she’d been dismantled
in the past forty-eight hours.
“I don’t know if I love them or hate them for keeping this from me,” she continued, her arm reeling
back in and her fingertips digging into her flesh. “I don’t know if I’m terrified or relieved that they
can’t find me.”
“I’m relieved.”
She shot me daggers from over her shoulder then reached up for the painting just one more time.
Her fingertips followed the line of a crushed human then made the same shape across her chest. With
dainty little steps, she retreated from the wall to the corner of my bed furthest from me. Her delicate
body arched as she slumped onto the sheets.
“If Picasso painted me, I’d be in pieces too, trampled to bits,” she whispered.
“That first day,” I started with a deep breath, wanting nothing more than to put her back together.
“You told me that you love art because it was ugly. This is ugly, and yesterday you were ugly.” Her
eyes met mine with a fierceness that I recognized, but this time I wasn’t going to fight her. I was going
to feed her. “And, Filly, for the record, I find you beautiful that way.”
I was a tilt-a-whirl spinning in one direction only to fling back the other way. My parents loved me.
My parents lied to me. My parents who fucked and fought and killed. Brye had just looked at me with
those pure and innocent artists eyes. Brye who defiled me.
The artwork on the walls was my only touch point. I could find missing pieces of me in Girl with
the Pearl Earring or The Night Watch. The Persistence of Memory seemed to call loudly to me.
Probably because I was dripping across the landscapes I’d thought I’d known and puddling on the
floor.
Which way was up?
How did I hold my shape anymore?
Why in the fuck did I wonder if Brye could help me keep it together?
I hated him. Or wanted to hate him. I hated what I’d seen, I hated what he’d done, but not him. He
spoke of darkness, but there was light too. It was all mangled up and ugly. But I’d always been a
sucker for a tragically beautiful and truthfully ugly piece of work…
“I lost it last night, but I’m finding my balance again. Come with me.” Brye reached out for me.
I swallowed as I watched his steady hand. If my parents could be both wonderful and wicked,
could he? Did I even want to give him the chance?
“I can pick you up and dump you in the bath, ya know,” he said as he stretched his hand farther.
With a heavy sigh, I grabbed it. He was right, and if there was anything that I wanted right now, it
was some semblance of choice. And a hot shower.
He pulled me into his bathroom which was just as opulent as his bedroom. The marble surfaces
and filigreed silver mirrors complimented the deep, dark luscious wood from his bedroom. Where the
bedroom was art print on top of art print all in an immaculate boy’s club setting, this room was clean
and crisp. There was one single sculpture that hung along the back wall of the massive bath, above a
huge tub.
I knew the artist immediately and gasped. The steel was too familiar. The style of the flame
coming to life despite being metal. Only one set of tiny hands, crisscrossed by burn marks could have
made it.
“Where did you get that?”
“My dad had it shoved in the basement. He never said how he acquired it.”
“It’s my mom’s.”
I pushed past Brye and all but hurdled the tub wall to stand closer. There were violent images
hidden in the flames—racehorses, guns, money—that seemed to both fuel and smother the way her
sacred heart sculpture burned. I understood the truth of it so deep that it crashed into me and leveled
me into the tub.
“I’m not going to see her again,” I murmured against my knees.
Brye wordlessly started the water, shielding me from the cold despite being numb all over again.
The rushing water from the faucet was the only reply. When warm water crept up around me, Brye
slid a wash rag into the water and reached for my chest. I shot back and slapped at his hand, sending
water splashing in every which way.
“I’m going to take care of you,” he said, his voice leaving no room for question.
“I don’t need your brand of care,” I sneered.
“Yes, you do,” he said sharply. “None of us—none of them—made it through this alone.”
Through this. I sighed. Did I believe I could make it through this? Did I know if I wanted to? I
slid back into the tub, resigned to the pain of everything still crashing through me in unrelenting
waves. Resigned to Brye.
He washed me gently, only scrubbing where his cum had struck across my chest. His hands roved
over my breasts and then beneath the water and below my belly button, but he didn’t take advantage.
Each dip and groove of his shirtless torso moved as he worked on me. The longer he did, the more the
hate and hurt and confusion melted and my body followed my brain.
I focused on the body flexing over top of me. He still sported crusted on blood and big purple
bruises, both crisscrossing his roped torso. If I was honest, it was drool-worthy. He was drool-
worthy. When he wasn’t being Satan himself. And even then…
“Do you want me to wash your hair?” His voice was as warm as the water holding to me.
I’d look up into his questioning eyes and saw him for what he was in that moment. A man who put
me before himself. Who cleaned my filth before he tended to his own wounds. He didn’t have a heart,
but maybe, just maybe, he had something inside of him worth wanting.
“Be gentle.” I matched his tone.
“Lean forward,” he commanded and I wrapped around my knees again, this time with honey
flowing through my veins.
“Shit, sorry.” He swore when he poured water over my long, matted locks and it ended up in my
face too.
A singular giggle of mine bubbled up on its own. “Not exactly like the movies, is it?”
“Nothing about us is.”
I tensed at the mention of us.
“I can stop if you want, Filly.”
“No, maybe just don’t say anything.”
“I can do that too.”
His big, strong fingers went to work on my hair, bumbling as he washed, rubbing more than
massaging. But something about it felt good. Right even.
“You wanna wash it out?” he asked as he dunked his hands in the water and sat back onto his
heels.
“Sure.” I managed a small but real smile for him.
I plunged back into the water and blew out a deep breath. My arms didn’t feel as hurt or heavy as
they reached back and waved in my hair. When my chest tightened from lack of oxygen, I didn’t think
about sucking in the bath water and ending it. There was a spark inside me that needed air. That
needed life.
When I sat up, Brye sat facing away from me, his brutalized back on display. It was worse than
the battering I’d imagined. His skin was splayed wide, blood crusted in wild streaks and rivers. I
yelped.
“You okay?” He twisted and scanned me up and down, worry crinkling his brow. “Here.” He
blew out a deep breath then stood and handed me a towel.
I unwound and wrapped myself up while he bent to drain the tub. My fingers reached out, drawn
to the lashes I’d given him. They were agony captured and entombed. His detailed wings where they
rested across his back were hope rendered pure. Without thinking, I touched them, running my finger
along the art, in awe of all that it said about the artist, about the canvas, and about me.
He shuddered.
“I didn’t want you.” His confession was low and this time it was he who didn’t meet my eyes.
“And not because you were a Ryan, or because you weren’t good enough, or beautiful enough, but
because you were too much. The only time I’ve ever had someone that was anything more…” he
searched for his words. “You were too good, too beautiful to end up like that.”
I nodded even though he wouldn’t turn to look.
“Do not make me explain it again.” His words were sharp but not like before, not cruel and
heartless. I reached after him, but he walked away too fast, leaving nothing but a soft cotton t-shirt in
his place.
I liked the soft side that came out with Filly. I remembered the man that had found her in the museum
and I remembered Roz. I wanted to be him.
I fucking hated him too.
She hadn’t noticed Emmett’s blood washing from my hands as I started the bath, and I wasn’t sure
if it was a good or a bad thing. If she was going to let me near, she was going to let me near dammit.
Both sides. I sat looking at Guernica wondering just who was being trampled beneath the hooves of
their circumstances.
“I used your toothbrush.” Her voice pulled me from the Picasso and to her legs.
Her mile-long legs. Filly may have been short, but she was all legs that made perfect soft lines
beneath my oversized shirt. She fisted the seam of the cotton and fidgeted with her foot behind her.
Her long hair was piled on top of her head and flopped to the side as she watched me.
“You’re trying to figure out what you see in that contorted mess,” she said so matter of fact.
“I’m trying to figure out what I see period.”
“And?” She turned toward me, her eyes begging me to answer from a very deep and real place
inside her.
“Death and destruction are the obvious answers, right?”
“But?” She wanted more from me and for the first time in a really long time, I wanted it from me
too. But I was out of practice and didn’t quite know how to string together the right words. She
sighed.
“You don’t always have to see what’s right in front of you. You don’t always have to see dark.”
“What else do you see in this.” I gestured to the painting that held little else besides tears and
torment.
“Hope,” she answered and I cocked my head back. She smiled her new, tentative and untrusting
smile. “I see Picasso’s hope that his voice would be heard. That things could change and that there
was light somewhere in the dark.”
I sucked in a deep breath and held it. I didn’t know why but those words…
“I used to have the same feeling when I looked at you,” she said with a heavy sigh.
She turned from me, but the blush of her admission still lit the back of her neck on fire. I
understood her temptation to brush fingertips across art, I wanted to outline that bloom of crimson. I
stood staring at her skin for far too long. She was as bewitching as a piece of art with deep layers and
multiple meanings. Something to devour until I understood the meaning of things.
“And now?”
Her body twisted the slightest bit and her eyes flitted up to find mine for only a split second but
then dropped back to the carpet.
“I’m trying to figure out what I see too.” Her words cut through me.
“You can’t just say things like that to me,” I lashed out.
“Just like you can’t murder, maim and rape?” she challenged me with a quirk of her eyebrow.
“I’ve come to learn that can’t is a relative term. Specially around here Brye.”
“Filly—”
 “No.” Her eyes slipped back to mine and her uncertain smile came back. “I’m done fighting with
you. At least for tonight.” She sighed. “Speaking of tonight…Do I go back downstairs?”
“Only if you want to.”
A shiver wracked her little body and she wrapped her hands around herself in response.
“Just sleep in my bed. It’s no big deal.” But picturing her in my bed suddenly became a very big
deal. Her skin against the soft silk of my sheets. Her blonde hair fanned out on my pillow. Her body
fitting against mine.
Shit. I had to slyly rearrange my hardening dick.
“And you?” she asked.
“It’s big enough for two. Well, three if you wanna get technical about it.” I couldn’t help myself or
the smirk that tugged at my cheek.
“You’re disgusting.” She huffed then stomped around to the far side of the bed.
My sheets had been cleaned and replaced, the stacks of pillows had been arranged just so by one
of the household staff. Filly threw back the covers and yanked the pillows down from the headboard.
One by one she used them to construct the great pillow wall of China between the two sides of my
bed. I couldn’t help but laugh, a real, loud laugh that reached down below my stomach and shook my
shoulders.
When I caught my breath, Filly was frozen her hands still clutching a pillow meant for
construction. She was watching me and her eyes danced along with my ribs.
“Oh Filly” —laughter was still thick on my words— “as if that would stop me.”
“If you’re going to force me, I’d rather just go back to the basement,” she snapped, but it lacked
the sting from before.
“I won’t touch you again until you beg.” I crossed my heart then held up three fingers in a pledge.
“Fine.” She huffed again and rolled her eyes as she slid into her adopted side of my bed. I
managed to hide my smirk when I noticed that she hadn’t stolen mine.
“I’m gonna go take a shower. I’ll make sure it’s a cold one.”

I tried hard not to think about Filly in my bed while I was in the shower. My semi didn’t make it easy.
She was right there. I could take her. I’d done it before. And I’d make it so damn good that she would
beg. I had to shake my head again and clear away that fog.
For once in my damned life, I’d honor someone the way they deserved.
After I showered and cleaned up my back, I stepped back into my bedroom. Only a soft warm
light was left on. It wrapped her in a golden glow. Her breaths were deep and sweet, her body
pressed against the pillow wall. For a moment, I thought about slipping into the pillow’s place.
“Don’t fucking do it,” I snarled at myself under my breath.
I flopped onto my side of the bed and she murmured when I jostled her. The sound was soft and
yearning, intimate even. I shoved my hands under my ass and started to count the frames on the wall,
over and over and over again.
I was on the edge of consciousness when I heard it, soft at first. “Brye,” she moaned my name and
my balls tightened.
“Filly.” I pushed the corner of a pillow out of the way and peeked at her.
In the faint light of the city filtering in, I could tell she was fast asleep. Fast asleep and calling my
name.
“I need you, Brye.” Her sleep-filled voice was muffled, but I could still make out each of her
words. “Please.”
“Oh hell no.” My words from earlier were being used against me—she was begging me.
“Brye…” She gasped and shoved her hips up.
The savage beast inside me roared with want. I tried to tame it. I really, really did.
“Touch me, Brye. Take me.”
Right and wrong flew off the bed right beside the pillows that had separated us and my body
replaced them. Each curve I’d seen, each contour I’d traced were there for me to hold, and damn did
I. My thick legs wrapped around hers and pulled them back, my hand wrapped up and found hers.
“Touch me.” She pulled my hand and placed it on her hip. I smirked at her insistence.
I slipped out of her grip and moved forward all on my own. Her skin was butter soft now that I
got the time to explore it. Velvet in the best way.
Filly rolled back the slightest bit and tugged at her shirt. Everything south of her chest shone in the
pale city light when she rolled onto her back and groaned. My hand naturally slid to the apex of her
thighs. The only question that remained was how far would I go? What would I take?
She was begging…
“What are you doing?” She tensed in my arms.
“Exactly what you asked.” My fingers hovered against her skin. “Touch me, Brye. Take me,” I
mimicked her breathy plea.
“I didn’t—”
“You did.” I let my fingertip brush against her.
I moved ever so slowly as I traced the skin just above her sex. The skin that she left bare and was
so sensitive that her hips thrust up just at the sway of my fingers. I buried my head in the crook of her
shoulder and moved lower.
“I was dreaming about you,” she admitted lowly.
And she was wet. The slick of sex was almost sloppy between her thighs, encouraging me to
stroke against her most sensitive bits. I slid against her clit only to find her hips rolling against my
hand in a movement more perfect than her mouth along my shaft. My dick twitched hard against her
ass.
“Do you want this? Are you begging me now?”
Her hips kept up a slow rock on my hand, but I made sure I didn’t move.
“The you in my dreams…” Her voice trailed off with a soft moan.
“I’m not him.” I could taste the sadness in my voice.
“Do you think you can be?” She rolled her hips again.
The word stuck in my throat. The answer was no. I knew it just as sure as I knew my name. I
wasn’t going to grow up and be a decent guy for her. I couldn’t. Not now. I’d lost my heart so there
was literally no way to give it to her.
But she kept moving her hips and it was twisting on every inch below my bellybutton. The only
thing I could do in return was take every inch of her. I didn’t answer, but she didn’t make me.
I slid my pointer finger into her and crooked it up. It was my turn to groan as her tight pussy
hugged around me. I held still for a moment feeling the heat of her. She was tighter than I expected and
her body twitched just because I was inside her. When I swiveled my finger around…
My name dripped from her lips.
“Holy shit,” I swore again when she bucked wildly, grinding herself onto my hand.
I slid a second finger into her and tried to slow her desperate body. She tried to thrust again, but I
spread my fingers wide and pressed into the front of her. She gasped as she froze, back arched almost
exorcist style off the bed. I leaned up on my elbow to get a better look at her.
Orgasm was written plain on her face. Her mouth had dropped into an O and her breathing ticked
up. I used my free fingers to swipe at the fabric of her shirt, roving over her breasts as I pivoted at the
elbow. Her nipples rose up as soon as cool air kissed them.
My mouth watered. And a moment later, I bent down. The tip of my tongue skated across the suede
leather softness that was her nipple. I purred as I closed my lips around her and sucked. She groaned
and her hips rolled, coaxing my hand to move in time with the gentle laps of my tongue.
“Brye,” she cried out so loudly I twisted toward my own siren song, her nipple still trapped
between my lips.
She was beautiful in her vulnerability, her face contorted, her body rigid. There was something
pure and precious about her. And as I watched, I couldn’t help but feel that I’d taken advantage of her
defenselessness. I was used to being a force of devastation but not in this way. Not under the ruse of
giving when I was really taking. Not under the ruse of being a dream guy.
I was a nightmare.
My hand slowed as I questioned not only what I was doing but why. Why had I let her think I was
worthy?
Her wild howl broke through the raucous in my head and the relative silence of the night, her body
shook. I sat back and watched her tremble, feeling the chatter of her body in my bones. Feeling that
orgasm lock me up tight every bit as much as it unhinged her. She slowly sagged back into my
mattress, her ragged breathing the only sign that she’d been at my mercy a moment before. She
hummed, content, then turned to curl into my body.
“Oh my God, Brye.”
“God is not my biggest fan,” I answered softly.
Brye was silent beside me. As my heart slowed and stopped ping-ponging off my rib cage, I realized
just how silent. And that he had been for the most part even as he fingered me.
I had been dreaming of him, of the perfect version of him when I woke to find him wrapped
around me. I should have punched him or kicked him in the steel pipe of a dick he was pressing into
me. Or slapped him. Or spit in his face. But if I was being honest with myself, I wanted affection.
And I craved it from him.
I had no right to, he’d earned nothing from me. But there were those honest moments. Those
glimpses of the man that had bewitched me with his dark magic. His dark magic that I had craved. He
spoke to me on an elemental level and for the briefest moment, I surrendered to that.
And thank God.
That orgasm had me seeing colors. Brilliant gold, glistening emerald, pure ice blue. I was
Dorothy leaving Kansas and finding Oz, seeing in technicolor for the first time. Color reminded me of
all the good in the world and it brightened my heavy heart. I couldn’t help but purr as I stretched and
flexed my Jell-O limbs around him.
He didn’t even move.
“Brye?”
He turned toward me and I had to crane my neck where I laid to see his face. His face that was
riddled with darkness and crinkled with frown lines.
“I can return the favor,” I offered even though the idea of living up to him—to that—made me
tense.
As soon as I started sliding my hand down his body, he captured my wrist. “No,” he said sharply,
but then he softened it with a kiss to my palm.
“What do you mean no?”
But before he answered, insecurity flared in my chest. This world of sex wasn’t something that I
knew—hell, sex was barely something that I knew. I tried to pull away, but he just used his grip to
yank me back into his body.
“I owed you,” he said, but there was another layer to his voice. “Tit,” he brushed my nipple. “For
tat.” He pressed his cock into my hip.
I wanted to ask him what he wasn’t saying. I wanted to know the shape of what was between us.
But then I realized the question he hadn’t answered before. I rode the high of his fingers without
realizing the fall I’d suffer from his truth.
“What did that just mean to you?” I couldn’t help but ask; I was the girl with the shimmer and
color behind her eyes, blinding her to the darkness incarnate beside her.
“Filly,” he started softly but couldn’t answer. Instead he reached down and wound his fingers in
with mine. “Maybe just don’t say anything?”
Him using my words from earlier could have sounded like a high-handed shush, but there was
something rich and sweet and eternally sorrowful about them. And my heart cracked a little further
when he took our interlaced hands and rested them on top of his chest.
I’d dreamt more about Brye. About his technicolor touches. And his consuming kisses. When the sun
warmed my eyelids enough that they fluttered open and I found my hand still in his, that was what I
regretted about last night. I hadn’t gotten to kiss him again.
“Mmmm.” I turned on my side and pulled his hand to my lips. I let my lips brush his knuckles.
He nestled against his pillow and a slight smile plied his lips. I studied his chiseled chest in the
morning light. My free fingers reached up as they liked to and ran along the contour of his perfect
pecs. A hint of shadowed scruff clung to his chin, just a tiny bit shorter than his actual hair. Sunshine
painted him a halo.
That was how I would paint him. With his darkness dissolving, with my hope that it could, on
display.
I realized with a soft chuckle that I’d decided to paint him three or four different ways in the few
days I’d met him.
“Better than the basement?” he asked with a husky, sleep-laced voice.
“You’re a jerk.” I smiled.
“You don’t really think that.”
“I do.”
He used his long legs to tangle up with mine and those beefcake arms to reel me in completely.
“You don’t. You told me so.” He leaned in close. Too close. His nose learning the curve of my
face. “You destroyed that pillow wall then begged me.”
“You destroyed that pillow wall.” I shoved my pointer finger into his chest letting my smile
spread and the brightness he’d given me last night shine.
“And does that make me a jerk?”
I studied him noticing that sleep still hung on his sharp features and softened them. His eyes met
mine—the eyes of an inquisitive artist—but the sadness that had haunted our few words last night still
lingered beneath his eyes.
“You told me about that painting, After the Bath, Woman Drying her Nape, that first night. I
should have treated you more carefully in the tub last night.”
“What?”
“I should be gentle with you.”
“What if I don’t want gentle, Brye? What if I want you?” My body bent toward his all on its own,
pressing my breasts against his chest and notching my hips against his. I let my hand slide between us,
lower, and lower. “I’ll tell you what I want.” Everything that had happened between us urged me to
do it. To say the words.
“You couldn’t say it with a straight face before.” A little bit of light flashed behind his eyes.
“I can tell you that I want your hands on me. That I want your…” I swallowed on the word dick
then felt it press against my thigh and resolved to do it.
“Say it.” He smirked and slid on top of me. “Tell me you want my dick.” He dropped his face to
mine and shifted so his cock was notched between the valley of my thighs. If he hadn’t been wearing
clothes, he would have been close enough to tease me.
I pressed my thighs together on instinct. When I trapped him, he groaned and the ghost of his lips
traced mine.
A deep but subtle cough followed by a few small knocks froze both our bodies. “Am I
interrupting?” Emmett’s voice was more acidic than I remembered from the basement and my blood
went cold.
Brye snarled as he rolled onto his back away from me and glowered at the doorframe. My eyes
drank in the contours of Brye’s body before they lifted to the door.
“Oh my God,” I gasped as I shot up, clinging sheets to my chest.
Emmett’s face was misshapen and peppered with scrapes and bruises. The way he held himself
spoke of pain, but he tried to straighten himself when he noticed my gaze.
“What did you want, Emmett?” Brye’s voice was barbed and ready to splice open Emmett’s skin.
“You father has requested your presence downstairs. Twenty minutes.” He folded his arms across
his barrel chest and widened his stance only to heave a little.
“Thank you.” Brye waved him off, but Emmett didn’t budge.
“Bring her.”
“Fuck you.”
A shiver rolled up my spine and I cuddled into the sheet I was holding that much more.
“Messenger,” he said by way of an excuse as he narrowed his gaze and turned.
“Don’t they usually get shot?” The corner of Brye’s smirk pulled up and Emmett’s shoulders
seemed to tense the slightest bit.
“Are you going to hurt him?” I asked, my voice trembling at the thought of more bloodshed.
“Already did.” Brye didn’t turn, and the shadow that had lapped at his skin had returned.
I drew my knees up and cradled my chin in the valley between them. His flesh rippled and rolled
in front of me as I stared into space and I thought about fallen angels. About wings too broken to soar.
It wasn’t until ice blue filled my gaze completely did I snap back. Even then I swam in the color for a
moment, studying the white that laid down in small stripes next to varying shades of blue was
somehow frosty and pure all at once.
“This is the life we lead, Filly,” he said softly.
“I’m so sorry for it.”
And I was. Down into my bones. That anyone slept with murder and breathed in hurt, picked at the
edges of my being.
“Don’t be.”
“Haven’t you ever wondered who you could have been?” I couldn’t help myself.
“No.” He reached out and tucked my hair behind my ear. “Not until you got here.”
Brye stood and snatched something Emmett had brought up before turning for the bathroom. He
was gone before he noticed that he’d stolen my breath away. My chest tightened and my fingers
pressed into my shins. The man from the museum was back and toying with my heart.
I stood, snatching covers to shield me, and followed Brye into the bathroom. He shoved his boxer
briefs down and treated me to the most perfect sculpt of horseshoe-shaped flesh I’d ever seen. His
long, muscled torso gave way to a scrumptious ass as if he’d been carved. The whipping scars had to
mar his flesh, or he would have been too perfect. His wings were breathtaking and nothing less.
He bent with a wince and lowered himself into the tub with a louder, more violent curse. I got the
tiniest glimpse of his manhood as he folded in on himself and almost swore myself.
Brye wasn’t an angel. He was a god. He just hadn’t decided whether to rule over Heaven or Hell.
“I’d ask you to join Filly, but…” His voice trailed off as he swirled his hands and small little
cubes clanked against the porcelain.
“Is that ice? Why?”
“Easiest way to heal.”
“Can I…?” I gestured limply like I might hold him, like I might heal him.
“Help me?” he scoffed, stiff with cold. “I don’t deserve it.”
“Maybe this time you do.”
The floral dress looked perfect on Filly. Not because it was particularly fancy or the fabric luxe, but
because she was wearing it. And mixed with her golden hair, I could picture laying in a field with no
other cares besides the sun on my face and the smell of summer wafting through the tall wildflowers.
She’d be there.
I wouldn’t deserve her.
Because no matter what goodness she brought out in me, it was uncomfortable, pulling at my skin
like the fresh bandages she’d placed on my back with a delicate touch. Something had shifted between
us overnight. She’d found some modicum of forgiveness. I’d doled out some twisted version of
affection. The ship we were on was still sinking just as bad as the Titanic, but for a moment, we’d
plugged up two little holes with bubble gum.
“Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to,” I warned as I adjusted the button of my suit jacket. “And
remember being bait is a hell of a lot better than being dead.”
I glared at her awaiting a response. When she bit her lip, my teeth felt her flesh below them, my
tongue could imagine her taste. I wanted more of her, even if I stole it from her like last night. Even if
my father handed it out.
“I don’t want to hear more about my family,” she murmured, folding her hands in on themselves.
“I don’t want to forgive them any more than I want to forgive you.”
My brow creased and I nodded once, unable to swim through the murky water that put us in.
Instead, I simply gestured for her to follow behind me. My heart rattled in my ribs, my breath choked
in my throat as my footsteps clapped on each stair. I’d faced him so many times but this time…
“Brye, my monster, my boy,” my dad called from his seat at the head of the table.
I studied him as I walked in. He seemed calm and cool as he templed his fingers over the top of
his fine porcelain coffee cup. The limp smile that hung on his face was his most terrifying, the one that
I could never quite decipher.
“You wanted to see us.” I crossed my arms on my chest and schooled my face into a completely
disinterested mask.
“Tell me about her.” He cocked his head, waiting, then reached down to pop a single grape into
his mouth.
“I’d rather not.”
“I’m going to find out.” He took a sip of coffee and flipped the newspaper page in front of him.
“Like hell.”
He didn’t look up. “I’m having the boys over for dinner.”
“Always enjoy a dinner party.” I shrugged even though my chest twinged. The idea of fucking
another woman with Filly upstairs…
“I expect her to be there.”
“What?”
No.
She stepped closer and I felt her fingers clutch into my suit jacket.
“You heard me. I want her to watch.” The corners of his wicked smile seemed to curl in on
themselves.
“She’s not a toy. We can’t break her.”
“That’s exactly what she is.” He stood and strode to us. I didn’t flinch when he stepped behind
me. In my periphery, I saw him curl his hand and brush his knuckles along her collarbone. “Think of
what good ole papa Ryan will do when his girl is raped, ravaged and bleeding on camera.”
She tugged on my suit jacket, but I stayed stock still. The card game we’d been playing had been
Go Fish and she was what I was after. Somewhere along the line, the rules had changed, the ante had
been upped and now bluffing was more important than ever. My father palmed her breast and an
infinite and savage roar deafened behind my ears.
“I want to be the one that does it when the time comes.” The green beast inside me wouldn’t have
it any other way.
“Perhaps.”
“What am I waiting for then?” I asked, uncaring, unfeeling.
Filly’s hands fell from my jacket.
“The right moment.” He shrugged and returned the way he’d come, folding into his chair with
jerky movements. The twitch he got in his left eye and the set of his jaw told me how his body ached
today. How heads would roll.
He picked back up the paper and reached for his coffee cup, sipping as if this was as natural
breathing in and out. In and out. I turned to leave.
“I have a present for you Filly.” My dad spoke from behind his paper.
The loud clunk of something small but substantial accompanied the plastic tinkle of a few smaller
items hit the table just beside us courtesy of some underling. I knew what he’d laid out before I
turned. I took a deep breath and reached for her just as she gasped. She stepped past me with a
trembling lip and twinkle already shining in the corners of her eyes.
That painting would have been entitled The Loss of Hope and I saw the colors so vivid, felt the
raw emotion as much as any of the masters. “Filly,” I breathed.
“That’s my phone.” Her voice wavered in time with her bottom lip.
“And your passport and your credit cards,” my dad added matter of fact. “Destroyed.”
I didn’t say a word, but she let me keep my arm around her stomach as her knees wavered.
“I can’t call them. They can’t find me. I couldn’t go…” Her pained whisper was harder on my
heart than I cared to admit.
“I told you not to speak unless you’re spoken to,” I grit through clenched teeth.
“Would you really want to hear from them? Those filthy fucks that lied to you? I bet they’d keep
lying to you.” She sagged farther, a dead weight on my arm full of tears and troubles. “They’re going
to fight to get you back, I’ll make sure of it. You won’t want them to. You won’t want anything but
death. I’ll make sure of that as well.”
My heart stopped. Flat. It physically hurt, like something had slipped from inside and the gaping
hole was a whipping wind tunnel.
“Are we finished? I have shit to do today, particularly if I have to be home in time for supper.” I
forced myself to say the words. They were as hollow as my chest.
He waved me off and I pulled her into me as I swept her broken things off the table. She was
almost as weightless as them as I pulled her out of the room. Her feet worked for a minute, but then
they bumbled on themselves. I took more of her weight in my forearm until she sobbed hard enough to
make me lose balance.
“Hey,” I said softly as I balanced us against the nearest wall.
 Sunshine fell across her face and turned her hair golden as gentle sobs shook her chest.
“Hey,” I repeated. “Where’s the girl that slapped me and spit in my face? You’re stronger than
this.” I leaned against her, hoping the weight of my body would keep her falling to pieces. My lips
brushed her hair.
“How much is one person supposed to take?”
“You’re a Ryan.” I still couldn’t shake the snarl voice when I said it. “And if I know anything, that
means you can take a whole helluva lot more than this.”
“Don’t say that name,” she cried out amidst her tears. “I don’t want to be a Ryan if this is what it
brings down. If this is what it means.”
“A rose by any other name is just as sweet.” I offered her a halfhearted smile as I quoted
Shakespeare that hit a little too close to home. “And a Ryan by any other name is still persistence
personified, a pestilence to this family.”
“I don’t want to be those things. I don’t want to be a rose or sweet or a plague. I don’t want to be
vengeful.”
I thought about vengeance and the way it colored my life. Rosalyn’s death had given me my first
real taste. Filly was force feeding me my second. I thought about the way I would use vengeance to
paint her freedom in blood.
“I wouldn’t change my vengeance for anything in the world. And I sure as fuck wouldn’t wipe out
yours,” I said softly as I leaned my forehead to hers.
She shook with her small tears against me but still managed, “Why?”
“It’s only the things born of true and passionate love that can flip to wicked and unrelenting hate.”
I sighed and reached one hand up to cup her cheek. “If I wasn’t merciless, I wouldn’t know your
grace.”

She was all I could think about as I sat in the back of the SUV boring holes in the back of Emmett’s
head as he rode shotgun. He was breathing with a slight wheeze that I was both proud and pissed at. It
reminded me of yesterday. Of what I’d found. Picturing his eyes on Filly, his hands too, was driving
me mad. The things he’d said to her...
I was the only one allowed to touch her. To taste her.
Except she was coming to dinner.
Every fiber in my body revolted to the idea. I would have been lying if I said I didn’t like these
dinner parties. The escape and the warm, waiting women were gifts of the deviant variety. They were
gifts I was happy to accept but Filly...
She was good and innocent. She was pure and sweet.
And she was coming to dinner.
I shifted, narrowing my gaze, and my gun pressed into my side where it was holstered. My body
was restless without her. My soul… well, my soul rode an edge between submission and fury.
Someone deserved my anger.
Emmett’s sins had me debating pulling my gun and pressing it to his head. A breathy laugh slipped
from my lips. I could blow him away, some of my troubles with him. It wouldn’t be nearly as difficult
today as it would have a few days ago.
It would soothe the ache that had lodged itself inside me.
The car slowed beside the curb and I eyed the Italian bakery beside me. I let my loose smile hang
on my lips as I stepped out of the car. The wind whipped my suit jacket back for a brief moment. If
anyone was watching, they caught a glimpse of what I was packing before I casually buttoned my
jacket and walked toward the front door.
Emmett’s steps were the shadow behind mine until I waved him off at the door.
“Brye?”
I didn’t dignify him with an answer. I didn’t have to.
The bell above the door rang, the only sound in the room until a voice called from the back.
Whoever was back there didn’t remember that it was collection day. I kind of liked the idea.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I murmured.
A few soft footfalls preceded a quiet man whose eyes were soft and timid like a rabbit. I wanted
to slit its throat.
“Mr. MacCallum.” His voice choked when his feet stopped short.
“The payment,” I said without pretense.
“I told your father I would have it in two days.”
I didn’t answer him. Instead, I eyeballed where his fingers laid on the counter. The groove of the
metal of the deli counter shone beneath his fingers where they wrapped around the Formica. My smirk
quirked up.
With lightning speed, I reached for the swinging counter and slammed it down. I felt the crunch of
his bones a moment before his agonized howl filled the space. With another smirk I leaned on it, the
countertop splintering flesh and cracking bones that I felt with a vibration as much as I heard with a
blood-curdling scream.
Emmett whipped in, his gun drawn and I simply quirked my eyebrow at him.
“Sorry, sir.”
“It’s all right,” I said as I smiled and shifted more of my weight onto the counter and heard more
snaps. More screams.
“I’ll get the money,” he screamed. “I’ll pull it out of the register.”
He reached for the cash as his other hand fluttered where it was trapped. Blood dripped from his
hand and landed in small splotches on the tile.
“Here,” he screamed.
I cocked my head as I studied him. He shook wildly as he held the fibrous bills out for me and his
saucer eyes begged me to take it. Take it and leave him in the pieces he had left.
“Thanks,” I said with an easy shrug.
I snatched the money and turned on my heel, signaling for Emmett to follow. As soon as the SUV’s
door shut tight behind me, I leaned forward, close enough to rustle the longer ends of his hair. “You’re
next Emmett.”
The sound of his body breaking beneath my boot sent a shiver of thrill up my spine.
“What the fuck has gotten into you?” he snapped as he shot back against the door.
“A little bit of the devil it would seem.”
A tear would fall down my cheek every now and again as if I had no control of them. I unwound from
the ball I’d been clenched in but found myself unsure what to do with myself so I slumped back down.
I was angry with my family. Well, anger was an understatement. Whatever I was, it simmered in
my heart with a fair amount of hurt. I was lost for what I’d say to my mom or dad or Horse but the fact
that I didn’t have the choice…
Another tear dripped down my cheek.
I shoved the hot salt from my skin and nestled into the leather back of Brye’s bedroom chair. His
father said I was free to roam about, but the fear of his father was an effective prison all on its own.
Art was the only thing that saved me. My constant companion, my heart’s retreat. Brye’s walls
were covered floor to ceiling in amazing paintings, canvas and frames of all sizes. The Degas on the
wall closest to me was delicate and fragile. Beautiful and intricate. The sweet soft sounds of the
ballet I could envision accompanying the painting soothed me.
Them and the idea of Brye.
Well sort of.
He was a monster and a bastard. He’d hurt me. He’d taken advantage of me. But he’d protected
me too. And given me that orgasm. He’d suffered at my hand. He’d held me too.
I hated parts of him. I loved parts of him. The parts that didn’t seem to waver beside me, the parts
that seemed to cocoon around me. The parts that hung Degas on the wall.
Every bit of him had me confused.
“Are you okay?” An unfamiliar female voice startled me.
I whipped around and curled over the leather armrest to find a tall woman with chocolate hair
eyeing me from Brye’s doorway. She was dressed in fine clothing as Brye and Emmett usually
seemed to be, linen trousers and a silk blouse unbuttoned so low, I could make out the detail on her
lace bra. The red of her lipstick put the crimson in nearby paintings to shame.
“Did Connor rip out your tongue?” She arched an eyebrow as her faint Irish accent punctuated my
thoughts again.
“Nah…No.”
“Well, then you’re doing something right.” She walked in, her heels making crisp clacks on the
floor, as she helped herself to Brye’s scotch. “I’m Deirdre.” She extended her hand as she gulped
amber liquid. I watched her long neck ripple then roll as she set the glass aside and eyed me.
“I’m Filly. Filly Ryan.”
She flinched when I said my last name and the confusion cracked my chest again. I didn’t want
that reaction from strangers. I didn’t want my name to mean anything. Or if it did... There was a small
part of me tucked in the deepest spot of my heart that wanted to make good on the name.
“And just what do they plan on doing with you?” she asked as she touched up the edges of her
lipstick.
“They haven’t quite decided yet.”
“Waiting to live, waiting to die.” She crossed her arms and studied me, something in her voice
spoke of understanding.
“And you?” I asked tentatively.
“Already dead inside,” she shrugged exposing her collarbone. “Have to be to do what I do.”
“Which is?”
“I’m a whore,” she answered bluntly and without shame. “I let them fill my holes, hoping it’ll
keep them from riddling my body with a different kind altogether.” She stepped closer to me and
while I hadn’t seen it, she seemed to have unbuttoned her shirt farther.
“Would you leave if you could? Would you help me?”
“You don’t leave a MacCowan, not alive anyway.”
“That’s not what I said.” I mustered up my strength and sat up, hoping to feel a little less small.
Hoping she’d feed off it. “I asked if you would.”
“Maybe once upon a time when the darkness didn’t feel good. When I had a conscience and this
was a cage I was trapped in. But now...” she mused as a long finger traveled down her neck and she
did unbutton another button. “Now I like feeling Connor inside me. I like his wicked games. I like
Brye taking out his hurt on me.”
I growled at the mention of Brye as I pressed back away from her, as much as I could anyway, and
the chair rocked the slightest bit beneath me. My jaw set tight and my eyes narrowed. Her rich laugh
answered, everything honey and seductive. Deirdre followed, leaning over me. The view between her
round breasts and down her taut stomach made me close my eyes as I turned away.
“You love him. You love Brye MacCowan.” There was laughter in her voice but hurt too. I
cocked my head as if it would help me study her. Help me see her insides. “I was trapped by someone
I love. If you want my advice, if you want to survive, turn that love into hate. Then feed it lust.” She
smiled as she reached up and notched her long fingers on either side of my chin. “Surrender to the
feral thing inside you.”
“Don’t touch me,” I swatted her hand.
“Who’s going to stop me?” She slid in closer, her eyes downcast beneath feather lashes, zeroed
on my lips. “Brye?” She laughed.
“Maybe,” I answered letting a little bit of the hope he’d planted inside me bloom.
She laughed louder, darker. “Let me tell you, little girl, Brye won’t feed you to the wolves, he’s
the first one that will feed on you.” Like a cobra, she attacked, her hand a snake that wrapped around
my throat and squeezed. “And I certainly hope he’s a bit more gentle with you than he is with me.”
The panic that accompanied her squeeze waved through me a moment before I started clawing at
her hand. I threw my body back and when that didn’t work, forward. Anything to get her to let go. The
more I moved, the tighter my chest became, a balloon about to burst. Pink tinged dots clouded the
darkening edges of my vision as my wild claws became sluggish tentacles.
When my leaden limbs fell with a thump to the chair, her laugher swam in and out of earshot. “You
think love is a possibility in this world and you’re so unbelievably wrong. He’ll eat you whole. You
can’t take a quarter of it.”
She let me go with a thrust. My chair shook again as I tried to suck in air through my bruised
throat. Each gasp was ragged and painful, dragging in breath after breath was all I could focus on.
Even as her wicked heels clacked right back out of Brye’s room.
“Brye.” His name was a whimper on my lips.
Once again, he didn’t come.
I was left to reach for an ice cube housed near his scotch on my own and rub it gingerly over the
bruised handprint that now covered my throat. I backed away from the open door, doing what I could
to swallow the emotion. It wasn’t that I was afraid to cry—I was afraid of everything here and
unashamed—but this time it hurt. Bad. Her words... the things she said about Brye...
“What do I do, Mom?” I whispered once I slipped into the bathroom, hoping her sculpture was
some sort of conduit.
The tub was empty so I slid into it, hiding behind the high walls, and stared up at the steel. I’d
always thought my mom’s work was whimsical, based on fairy tales, but here was this piece—this
life—that was anything but. They were both unyielding but sad. Her sculpture was a heart, complete
in shape but broken all the same.
It was poetic. It was ugly. It was truth. Just like my family. My life. There was a symmetry to me
being bruised in the bathtub of my enemy basking in the admissions of my parents’ wrongdoings. But
from where I was sitting, the perspective was distorted. Wrong. I shifted from time to time, trying to
change that view. Trying to find the one where they were my parents good and light, not liars dark and
devious.
I simply ended up with an achy ass to match my bruised throat.
“Filly?”
Brye called to me and the deep honey sound filled my ribs and pressed on my heart. I started to
pull myself up to go to him, but my neck ached and throbbed. A pathetic yelp was all I managed as I
crashed back to the slope of porcelain.
“Filly?” he called again, just before he rounded into the bathroom.
His eyes found mine a moment later and something twinkled behind them but then they dropped
and a snarl seemed to build from deep inside his belly.
“What. Happened?” The beast he could become punctuated each word.
“Please…”
“Please what, Filly? Please don’t?” His anger was a living, breathing being in the room with us.
I flinched back even as my heart shot straight up. It was so protective. A claim on me in tone
alone, a threat to anyone who challenged. I shivered. I’d been broken, furious, fearful, all because of
him and I hated it. I hated it all but when he roared like that…
“Deirdre,” I said softly.
“I’ll fucking kill her.” He spun about ready to bolt.
Loneliness reached up and grabbed me equally as hard. “Please,” I begged again.
“She deserves to be punished.” He scoffed. “She’s probably fucking waiting for it.”
“Please don’t leave me,” I said so quietly I wasn’t sure he heard.
His body stopped as if it had hit a wall. His eyes darted back and forth, a signal his brain was
still running out of the room.
“You want me to stay?” he asked with disbelief.
I nodded as I started to play with my hands.
“Not because you don’t want me to go after her?” He turned back toward me.
“Because this world only makes sense when you’re here. Because I guess that means I missed
you.” I couldn’t meet his eyes when I said it. I didn’t want to see the wolf waiting to feed on my
feelings.
But I caught his slight, deft movement as he undid the button of his suit jacket then slid it off and
tossed it on the counter. His eyes coaxed mine to his as he loosened his collar first then unbuttoned his
sleeves and rolled them up.
“Make room,” he said as he jerked his chin.
I slid forward as he stepped in and slid down, his long legs wrapping around me then his arms
followed suit. I nestled in.
“How can you miss me?”
“You don’t make it easy.” I breathed in his warm, fresh scent that reminded me of home in a way
not even paper cranes could. “But I do.”
He blew out a deep breath and wrapped around me all the more tight. He was silent for a little
while, his lips tucked into the curve of my neck but not pressing against the fresh pain.
“If things were different, I’d live in this moment forever,” he confessed as he brushed his lips
against my skin.
“Why can’t we?” I murmured.
His chest rumbled against my back. “We have to go to dinner.”
Everything was so fucked up. So unbelievably fucked up. Holding Filly was perfect, and I was not.
There was a sliver of hope for her full forgiveness, but that was because she didn’t know what would
happen next. Or the list of similar offenses that rolled out into the hall, through the foyer and down the
front steps.
And then there was Deirdre.
I would have choked her out if I didn’t think that she’d get off on it. She’d touched Filly. That
alone made my blood boil. But it was the fact that Filly was fading that made my skin itch with the
want of vindication. The spark behind her eyes barely registered anymore. And after last night, it
should have been brighter. More beautiful.
I tried to shove down what that meant as I clung to Filly as we sat silently in the tub. Instead, I
focused on the tiny details of her. The many shades of blonde in her hair and the way that white
seemed to weave in and make a halo fitting for her. The chocolate of her freckles melted into the
cream of her skin. I could have drunk her up.
Then I glanced up to the sculpture hanging above us. Her mom’s art had spoken to me since I
found it buried in the basement. A dark heart that still burned. That was what beat in my chest and
someone else understood. Someone who gave me Filly. And Filly was quickly becoming everything,
including my greatest weakness.
I couldn’t be weak. There was no place for it in this world.
She could rise up to meet me. I’d seen it in glimpses. But after last night, I didn’t want her to. I
didn’t want her to lose the things that made her special. I certainly didn’t want her to lose them to me.
“We have to get ready.” My words were rough and I had to clear my throat as I started moving
behind her. “I’m going to give you a pill before we go okay?” I asked as I stepped out of the tub and
started sifting through the medicine cabinet.
“Why?” The edge of fear sharpened her voice.
I sighed. This wasn’t going to be easy. Nothing was going to make it better. Except maybe that
Oxycodone.
“This is going to hurt.” I gestured to my neck, but it was so much deeper. With any luck, she’d ride
that little bit of euphoria and mellow the fuck out.
Hell, I considered popping one.
“At dinner?” She had climbed out of the tub and stood close as I shook one out.
How did I explain what was about to happen? What dinner meant? I didn’t think mentioning we
ate sushi off Deirdre’s naked body until my father fucked her with a sake bottle last time was a good
way to start.
“My father doesn’t throw conventional dinner parties.” I blew out a deep breath. “This is a game
theme, complete with hunting dogs.” I sneered on the last word.
“What does that matter?”
I swallowed the anxiety balled in my throat. I could force her. With a single bellow, I’d even have
help. But I glanced back at the bathtub and held onto that moment. And last night in bed. This morning
she’d almost kissed me again despite everything…
 And I was going to fuck it all to hell again.
Show seemed better than tell so I walked into my bedroom, leaving her holding those small white
pills. I pulled open one drawer. The shame of having done this before—a few times—had never hit
me until now. Until I had to explain it to her. The leather and chain was heavier in my hand than
before.
I stood behind her and twisted her toward the mirror. With her eyes fixed on my every move, I
pushed her hair to the side and slid the stiff leather collar into place. My fingers quivered as I reached
up to fasten the metal buckle.
She yelped.
I didn’t stop. Instead, I adjusted the band and let the chain leash fall between her cleavage,
pressing the silk of her dress flat to her skin, highlighting the shape of her perfect breasts. The rise
and fall of her chest picked up, shaking the metal where it hung.
My dick twitched against the soft fabric of my suit trousers. Her hint of fear made me even harder.
I reached up for her strap and her eyes met mine in the reflection. She knew. Her big, wide, naive
sea glass eyes, knew what I was about to do. And she could have protested—for now anyway. She
could have slapped me again or kneed me in the crotch. But she didn’t. Ever so slowly, I slid her
straps down. Her creamy skin was more inviting than the field of flowers I’d been imagining earlier,
inspired by her dress. Her pert rose nipples were better than the first buds of spring. Every inch of
her was so taut but somehow stayed soft. The shape and sway of her hips was mouthwatering, and her
legs…
“They’re going to see?” Her voice cracked.
“Yes.”
“I’m the hunting dog.” She folded in on herself.
“Yes.”
“Please don’t make me.”
“It’s not my choice,” I said softly. “And even if it was, I don’t think I’d fight this.” I stroked my
fingers down the valley of her body beside where the leash rested.
Tears sprung up in the corners of her eyes, the twinkle coming back to brighten up the beauty of
her face. “Fuck you,” she spat.
“Maybe one of these days,” I answered as I pushed her pill-cradling palm toward her mouth and
helped her kill a little of the pain the only way I knew how.
What the actual fuck?
The pain had been constant. Each breath, each swallow. And then it just wasn’t. The leather was
tight against my throat, but the most appropriate word was secure. And for a moment that’s what I felt.
Safe. And wanted. When Brye’s eyes widened and his nostrils flared as he undressed me, I wanted
him too.
But now I didn’t know what I wanted. I barely knew who I was.
I wasn’t high. Or I didn’t think I was. Not like they showed in the movies or wrote about in books.
The paintings didn’t come to life and I wasn’t on my own personal rocket ship. I was just Jell-O. And
though anxiety and fear were floating just above me, they were out of reach.
“Did you drug me?” I asked both mystified and giggly.
Brye’s deep, husky chuckle rumbled my bones.
“Yeah, I did.” He adjusted his tie and my fingers ached to replace his, but they simply melted off
my hands instead. “Tonight’s gonna go a whole lot better if you can’t feel a thing.”
That same sorrowful chaos that had attracted me to him held me rapt again. Whoa. I couldn’t tell
if I’d said the word or not. I couldn’t tell if my lips were still there or not. Did pudding have lips?
“I don’t think I can put this off anymore.” He sighed and I watched a whole world deflate. “Let’s
go.”
He reached out for me and I sent the message to stand and reach for him to my body. Again, and
again, and again. Nothing happened.
“Whoa,” I said wide-eyed as I giggled until even that seemed like an effort.
“Shit,” Brye swore under his breath. “Too much.”
“You’re too much. Your dad is too much. This is too much,” I said as I loopdeelooped and my
head rolled along the leather back of the chair.
“Come on,” he said as his big arms notched behind my knees and my shoulders then lifted.
I should have been shying into him, shielding my naked flesh. I should have been watching out for
what came next. Instead, I was wondering if his suit was soft or scratchy against my skin; I couldn’t
tell.
He carried me down the stairs and my skeleton broke apart and snapped back together with each
step. The metal chain drug beside with an ominous scrape that should have sent shivers down my
spine. My spine that had been replaced by an accordion.
“Filly,” he said both sharp and soft as he set me on my tiptoes. When I almost folded he shoved
me back against the wall behind us. I gasped. “Filly,” he repeated. “You have got to get your shit
together.”
I knew his words were important. I knew what was about to happen was going to weigh a million
pounds and shove my tired soul to the floor but… But this drug. And my brain.
And Brye.
I wanted this version of him. He’d crawled into a bathtub and held me. That must mean he wanted
to protect me, to wipe the pain away. He was ruthless but not with me. Or at least the drugs convinced
that was true.
My body hadn’t really been mine for fifteen minutes—or was it three hours? Time warped like
this and now I was leaning toward Brye without any real thought about it. His soft lips were the
pillow I wanted to crash into and sleep for a million years on. I kept staring at them, envisioning
clouds and feathers and harps and all sorts of ludicrous things. When my lips actually pressed to his,
it surprised us both. Me because my body had decided it needed to find heaven here in the midst of
hell and him because…well, that list was too long for me to recount without use of my fingers. Or
feeling in my toes.
He looked up, his fingers squeezed into the crooks of my elbows as the rest of him shuffled closer.
The weight of him helped my body keep its shape while the gentle brush of his tongue against the
seam of my lips threatened to melt me completely.
“Brye,” I breathed as my mouth opened for him.
His answering growl before he took advantage, struck squarely between my thighs.
This. This was what had consumed me and erased my rational thoughts. Kissing him was better
than that solo orgasm. It was what I craved but couldn’t convince myself was worth taking. But
whatever the fuck he’d given me had taken that part of my thought process away and I could sip his
particular brand of ambrosia again. And freely. My tongue found his and twisted around, relearning
the shape and strength of him. The taste that was indescribable yet something that made me ravenous.
He grabbed at my hips and pulled them to his as I deepened my kiss. Exploring his lips, breathing
his breath, craving more. Craving the lead pipe pressing against the hollow of my stomach.
Goosebumps traveled my naked skin even as held me closer. Kissed me harder.
All too soon he pulled away.
I sighed as I surrendered to the jelly of my body and sagged into him.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he repeated as he gathered up my limp body and tried to get me to hold
myself up. “Filly, are you okay?”
“You take my breath away.” A part of me knew they were stupid, giddy words. A part of me didn’t
care.
He brushed his thumb down my cheek then let the pad move across my lips. “You say that now…”
His face darkened and his jaw clenched, everything that I’d wanted to kiss, to consume,
evaporated. His hand moved from his steady hold to the chain I’d forgotten dropped between my
breasts. He grabbed it then rolled the coil around his hand until the metal went taut and the leather
pulled on my neck.
The whisper of pain was back, but it hid behind the fog. When he stepped away from my body, I
folded until I hung from his makeshift noose. I tried to choke out his name but couldn’t. His eyes
swam just for a second but then he unwound the chain once and I crashed completely to my knees. I
had to bite back a cry despite the drugs.
It would have fallen on deaf ears. My Brye was gone and the man in his place pulled me into the
dining room on my hands and knees like the thing he’d turned me into. Each floorboard grit against
my skin as I dragged myself toward the table where my life had changed. Where deep inside me, I
knew it was about to change again.
He pulled out a chair and slid into it as he pulled me up to his side.
“Sit up,” he commanded and when I couldn’t quite manage, he hooked under my arms and pulled
me upright, propping me against the ornately carved leg of his chair.
When my eyes finally rolled up, Connor MacCallum was looking me dead in the eyes. He sat at
the head of the table opposite of Brye, his hands templed in front of him as he watched us. His cold
gaze made every hair on my body stand on end. He waited until I swallowed the lump in my throat
and blinked to let his wicked gaze rove down.
Disgust and hatred flickered in my stomach, but I still couldn’t feel the full weight of anything.
When my eyes fell from Connors, I became infinitely grateful that my world was hazy, that I was
detached.
Six men sat around the table, three on each side stretched between Brye and Connor. Each had a
woman, a pet, collared and seated beside them. Those women sat backs straight, chests out and
relaxed faces, all similar because of their downcast eyes. All of them sported small brands
somewhere visible only because of their nudity. I absentmindedly considered how badly they hurt and
whether the ones on inner thighs hurt more or less. Connor had two girls, one of which was Deirdre
who looked like a cat that had eaten a canary.
She was the only one unbranded.
“Well now that we’re all here,” Connor began with a wave of his hand. “Dinner can be served.”
Two nude male servers started bringing in dishes, setting one in front of Connor, then Brye before
moving down the table in some predetermined order. I watched, still glad to be numb and distant, as
the men seated fondled the servers or turned their pets toward hardening erections. Both servers were
fine specimens, and I couldn’t turn away when one of the girls took him into her mouth after a simple
yank on her leash.
His ass clenched and thighs went rigid as she pulled him into her mouth. The plate in his hand
wobbled and his eyes fluttered closed. I was transfixed as he arched into her with an unbridled groan.
He managed to get the plate down to the table before fisting his hands into her hair and pushing into
her mouth until her nose touched the whisper of hair trailing from his belly button to cock. She took it
for a moment but then her throat rolled wildly. She fidgeted and her hands balled. He didn’t flinch.
Only when she jerked wildly and shoved on his thighs thirty seconds later did he pull out with a deep
and husky chuckle.
“I love appetizers,” Connor exclaimed with his own laugh from the head of the table.
I gasped. Or wanted to, but my jaw just melted. What had I just seen? What would I see for the
rest of the evening? I couldn’t piece it together. Nor could I piece together why I liked it. And I did
like it, or my body did. I was slick between my thighs.
Brye for his part stayed still, barely sparing a glance for anything but his plate. When the naked
and utterly aroused servers placed a goblet of wine on the floor in front of my knees, he offered them
one deadpanned look before snatching it up. The server himself offered me a far longer, far hungrier
look.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Brye warned.
The naked man with the donkey dick smiled and let his hand trace up my arm as he stood. I shoved
myself harder—well what little bit of harder I could manage—into the chair keeping me upright.
“Tsk, tsk, Brye,” Connor’s voice cut above the general lull of debauched conversation. “I think
she’d be delightful to watch.”
“I’d rather watch someone a little more devious. Someone that might actually pique my appetite.”
He slugged back the glass of wine he’d stolen from me in a singular gulp. Another arrived at my
knees. Brye took it. “Maybe Deirdre?” He arched an eyebrow and she answered him with a crooked
smile.
“Deirdre will get her fill. It’s our new little pet I’m worried about.”
Connor playfully pouted and a shiver involuntarily shook me. I slipped from my perch against the
leg of his chair and started careening forward. A moment later, the collar at my throat went tight and
made me gag. Brye’s hand brushed the skin of my neck and goosebumps spread across my naked flesh
as he pulled me back to seated. I couldn’t help but gag and cough when the pressure on my throat
subsided.
“She must be parched, Brye.”
A third glass of wine arrived at my knees and this time I almost reached out to take it. When Brye
swatted my hands away, I remembered that he’d told me it was drugged. My mouth fell open again
despite the scratch of my throat when he gulped that glass down too.
“Give her the drink, Brye.” Any jest in Connor’s voice was gone.
“No.”
“Now, Brye.” The skitter of a chair and crisp clicks of dress shoes seemed to echo through the
room as Connor prowled toward me. I couldn’t hide from him. I still couldn’t move on my own. I
looked up at Brye. His profile was fierce and carved from stone, putting his strong nose and sharp
jaw on display as the muscles in his neck feathered.
“I will not ask again.”
Connor grabbed the goblet from Brye’s hand then fisted into my hair. He yanked my head back and
my shoulder fell from its perch, my body becoming his to control.
“She’s already on something?” He laughed. “Now not only will she be powerless to stop what’s
next, she’ll actually want it.”
He waited until my mouth lolled open and then started pouring. The acid of red wine burnt my
throat as Connor poured the full goblet. It was automatic to swallow. I was desperate to breathe, not
to choke, and I couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t move.
Wine splashed to the corners of my mouth and down across my cheeks. The small rivers cascaded
from my chin down onto my chest. Across my stomach and between my thighs. But most of it went
down my throat. It was bitter and made me want to spit but my body wouldn’t even do that.
“That’s better.” He finished pouring and set the glass down.
His long fingers traced the trails that crossed my face as he studied me. He crouched down, still
holding me by my head, half-cocked. I had to look down across the planes of my cheeks to watch him.
Watch him devour me. His eyes were like small teeth nibbling at my flesh, taking their fill.
Then his hands became greedy. They traveled the tracks worn in wine. When his hands left my
skin, he pressed his fingertips into his mouth and pulled my lolling head closer.
“Mmmm, delicious.”
“You said I’d get to do it,” Brye said, his voice soft but downright lethal and dripping with
vengeance.
“I said perhaps.” Connor traced the last of the wine where it disappeared between my thighs.
Then lower. I gasped when his fingers flicked my clit then slipped inside of me.
A lethal growl was the only warning I got before Connor’s hands were gone and my body
careened down. My reflexes were slow, but my arms were finally working well enough that I could
push myself up. Sort of.
And what I saw almost stopped my heart.
Well, fuck me this is not the way I thought this would go.
I thought about all the ways this had gone left while I held the serrated steak knife to my father’s
throat where his hands still lingered too close to Filly. Every man around the table had stood, two
toppled their chairs, one stepped closer, while the rest just watched with detached interest.
I’d meant to be nothing but icy calm and cool collected rage, but then she fucking kissed me. Filly
had wanted to kiss me, and from the way she watched my lips, the way she clung to me, and the dose
I’d given her, she’d made her body do it.
She’d been chipping away at my harshness since I met her. She’d done her fair share of building it
back up too, but with that kiss… It was the worst moment possible to go soft. And soft I was except
for the raging hard-on that came with her willing affection after everything.
I’d had to choke her just to see something—anything—replace love in her eyes. The hate that had
filled them by the time I propped her limp body next to me in the dining room was its own kind of
armor. Too bad dad had found the chinks.
“You think I won’t?” I asked through gritted teeth as I pressed the tip into his flesh far enough for a
teardrop of blood to swell and slip down to stain his white shirt.
“I think I’d like to see you try.” He stretched his neck and my blade slipped in deeper, flesh
cutting like butter.
“Brye,” Emmett’s voice was just behind me, holding both warmth and warning.
“We’re all just savages. Bloodthirsty fucking savages. This was inevitable.”
My father smiled. “That it was and that we are m’boy.” He lifted his hand to rub my shaved head
and my lip curled farther. But then he moved into the wound I’d inflicted. With a single finger, he
traced the blood dripping down his throat much like he had the wine that had wine down Filly. He
pressed the bloody fingers into his lips and purred.
We stared at each other for a moment that stretched and warped with the weight of a thousand
things. Things like the knowledge that one day, one of us would kill the other. That even as father and
son, we could not really coexist. Not really. I would take up his reign or be buried by it. It was that or
be responsible for a blood feud and chaos. And all for a world where Filly couldn’t exist. Ryan or
not.
He knew today wasn’t that day before I did.
I dropped the knife to the floor and to me it seemed to crash like a boulder. It was one of the few
times he stood up silent and walked away. Only when he sat back down and eyed me, did I reach
down and help Filly back to kneeling.
The way her wide eyes fixed on me and her mouth stayed thin, her chest rising and falling fast, I
knew the oxy was wearing off. My little show had only prolonged the evening. And likely earned me
a punishment.
So I sat back, stone-faced. My father held his goblet up in cheers. As his friends, thugs and fellow
demons settled in, they lifted their glasses too.
“To blood,” he toasted. “To yours.” He lifted his glass to the men between us. “To mine,” he
sneered and shot me an eyebrow. “And to spilling that of those who betray you.” He eyed me then
dropped his gaze to Filly then guzzled the wine in his glass.
I stared at my father without flinching as I slugged the disgusting tasting wine, wondering who
would be the first to fall once the ecstasy kicked in.

She reached out, tentatively at first. Her small fingertips hovered above Deirdre’s collarbone where
they faced each other, kneeling on the table, their naked bodies revealed only when the light strobed.
A slow, deep, bone-chattering bass filtered through the music he’d put on. I was so damn high that I
could only hold onto the wood beneath me and stroke my thumbs along the fine grain of my chair. I
would have cursed myself for my high if I could have functioned at all.
“Choke her,” my father egged Filly on just beside her ear.
We’d been rolling on ecstasy for about an hour when he’d flipped the lights and placed the girls at
center stage. Deep dark red pulsing club lights replaced our civilized chandelier and turned the world
inside out. I was turned inside out.
“It’s okay little one,” Deirdre cooed at Filly as she offered her body over to her.
Filly reached her small hand out and sized it up against Deirdre’s throat. Her fingers curled in on
themselves.
“I said choke her.” My father pounded his hands on the table on either side of Filly.
Fear shocked some life into her features before they fell back into the haze she’d been in from the
wine. She balled her fists and covered her chest. Deirdre reached out and tenderly brushed them
aside then let her palm press against Filly’s heart.
If I had a soul, I would have sold it to be her hand.
“Her heart is hammering,” Deirdre let her hand slide down Filly’s body, grazing her skin then
reaching for the leash left hanging.
She used it like a reel and pulled Filly forward. Each little bit, Deirdre wrapped the chain around
her fist and when she was close enough, Deirdre shoved her free one into Filly’s hair. My heartbeat
was the one hammering now, hard enough that it was going to split my chest.
When Deirdre leaned in and kissed her, my world exploded into fireworks.
I groaned and the erection I was sporting hurt where it was trapped both beneath my trousers and
the edge of the table. I reached down to stroke myself; Filly was on display.
As soon as Deirdre’s lips locked on Filly’s, she bucked. Deirdre rose up and tried to leverage her
body, but Filly reached up. Her hand locked around Deirdre’s throat just as my father wanted and she
squeezed. Deirdre purred against Filly’s mouth then kept up her kisses. Her fingers flexed roughly just
before she bit down on Deirdre’s lip. The howl that Deirdre let loose was wild and wanton; I
shuddered. I knew it was wrong but them together... And the drugs...
The next few things happened so fast I would have had a hard time processing them sober.
Deirdre reached between Filly’s legs and let her head roll back as if offering her throat up to Filly.
Filly’s hand shifted just enough that her nails dug in. Deirdre gasped then replied with a stroke
between Filly’s legs, her pleasured sounds mingled with the men of the room making for a hedonistic
symphony.
But then Filly’s free hand came out of nowhere and decked Deirdre. A left hook to her high,
rouged cheekbone. My drug-addled ass felt the crunch in my face.
Deirdre’s head snapped back and she fell off the fold of her knees. It yanked Filly’s leash and she
flew similarly, both naked bodies tangled on their side. I pushed up to standing and shouted at them,
but I was drowned out by the wicked cheer of the other men in the room.
 I knew I needed to help Filly, but I didn’t know how. My body wasn’t doing what I wanted, my
brain was stirred up. I wanted to tear tooth and nail to get to her. I’d scoop her up and run far the fuck
away from here. But the second I touched something, I needed to explore the texture of it. It would
absorb me and the lines of what was happening in front of me blurred and snapped back into focus.
Filly was clawing at Deirdre when my vision barreled back. My father was cheering them on, his
head bent almost between them, his spittle wetting their cheeks as they tussled. The lights still
flashed. Darkness. Red. Darkness. White. Darkness. Red. My stomach woozed. I reached for them
though—for her.
“Dessert,” my father commanded over the music and moaning. My vision flashed again and when
I shook off the haze, chocolate was being poured over both of them.
Deirdre arched her body up to relish in the sweet. Filly took advantage and climbed onto Deirdre.
The difference between the two of them was night and day. Deirdre’s hips bucked up and she threw
her head back as she lapped at the splashes of chocolate that made it near her lips.
Filly fought. Both of her hands wrapped around Deirdre’s throat. She squeezed until Deirdre’s
body went a little frantic.
“Stop,” my father said coolly. “Stop!” he bellowed over the bass.
When she didn’t, I knew what was coming next. I made my body start moving beforehand, but I
wasn’t fast enough.
My father backhanded Filly so hard that she released the grip on Deirdre’s neck and she reached
up to cover her cheek. Bright red mingled with the chocolate smeared on her chest. I wanted to taste
it. But before I could, my father took Filly’s leash and yanked. Like a little rag doll, she tumbled off
the table, hitting a chair on the way.
I darted for her, but my hand slid along Deirdre on the way.
The slick of her skin and the artwork my touch made in the chocolate coating her stole my
attention. I gasped as I reached for her with both hands and let them swirl on her body. I should have
stopped. I mean I wanted to.
Filly was there. Filly was hurt.
Get it together. Get it together. Get it together.
But I couldn’t. The wine I’d slammed to save her was my undoing.
“Brye,” Deirdre moaned, dragging me from my barely formed internal debate. “Your fingers are
pulsing in time with my heart.” Each word dripped with pleasure.
My jaw went slack when I felt it too. The black swirls and handprints covering her skin thumped
the same as my heart, her heart, the bass, my fingers… fuck, even the room.
I climbed onto the table where she was splayed out and pressed myself to her. Our heartbeats
rocked all of existence as I sat still on top of her, fully clothed. I didn’t need to undress, I could feel
each inch of her with wool between us. Her hands traveled up my back, moving beneath my suit
jacket and each digit was alive and wild, independent as it moved along my body.
Fuck off was on the tip of my tongue but I wanted to keep touching her. Needed to. The X made
me. My body started rolling against hers as if it was as natural as a heartbeat or an expanding rib
cage. Our fingers wove together, and I extended them overhead only to find my father staring with a
wicked curl on his lips.
Somewhere in the faint recesses of my mind, I knew I should stop. There was a good reason. I had
just known it. But what was it? God, I wanted to stop, but…
The art.
Being pressed to Deirdre had made the most amazing print. The chocolate had twisted up and
risen on certain spots, leaving a zebra-like effect that I found almost as bewitching as the feel of her
skin itself. I studied it in the changing light, felt the whomp of the ecstasy add to the effect, and I
wanted to touch it.
My fingers gravitated toward the swell of her breast, not because it was her breast but because
the pattern was so intriguing there. I followed the outline of the dark chocolate and studied the flecks
still stuck to her skin. Her nipple peaked beneath my touch, adding new landscape to the artwork
she’d become.
I flicked it.
She bent off the table so wildly, that the chocolate spilled again, making new patterns to tempt me.
My fingers reached for her again. I smeared it this time, watching the paint change shapes as she
moaned. Over and over, I pushed and pulled and flicked, letting her body respond, all the while
watching how the design wrapped up with the music with the mood, held me captive.
But then her voice changed. And the way her body moved beneath mine too. Her shriek was
rolling like a boil and her body followed suit. She was having an orgasm. A soul-shaking one by the
looks of it.
I looked down at my hands like they were monsters or aliens from another planet. One minute I’d
been looking at art and the next…
Deirdre moaned and it mixed perfectly in all the wrong ways with my father’s laugh. Both of them
were punctuated by a steady bass beat of the electronic heart filling the room. But somehow mine was
gone.
“Well I think that was a grand finale if ever I saw one,” my father clapped. “Tonight, I feasted.
Tonight, I’m pleased.”
He glanced once down to the far corner of the room and I remembered. All of it. All of her.
I wobbled as I slid off the table and stumbled on the discarded chair. I crashed to the floor, inches
from her. I looked up to find her doe eyes narrowed, her lip split and bleeding. The X told me to
reach out and feel the soft butter of her skin. The kernel of myself I was trying to hold on to said don’t
you touch her at all. She’d had wine, and that meant drugs, but the girl in front of me wasn’t high.
I’d dragged her so damn low.
The room emptied slowly but, eventually it was just Filly balled in the corner beside the dining
room table where things seemed to fall completely apart. The music still thumped in that hypnotic
way and the lights were still tuned to it. Above it all, I felt her and the lump in my throat that made it
hard to speak.
“I hate you,” she whispered. “Just when I think I’ve forgiven you, or that I’ve found the good in
you, you do…” Her tears poured down her cheeks until she had to hide her face in her delicate hands.
“You do that!” she sobbed, her muffled voice breaking out above the shit in the room.
“I’m not a good guy. I never was,” I whispered.
“You were. For a moment you were.” Her face was red with the tears, the anger. “You were a boy
with soft and sweet lips, who spoke about art as if he felt something. Who spoke to me as if the world
was something he wanted to know. As if I was something he wanted to know.” Her voice was
ratcheting up, every bit of her was coming more alive with the raw disappointment inside her that was
turning into hatred. “But then you do this.”
She clawed at the back of her neck for long enough that I wanted to reach for the buckle of the
collar myself, but at the last minute, she got it, freeing the leather just to throw it at me.
“Fuck you for being both.” She stood and looked down on me with so much disdain my stomach
churned. “I hate you for being both.”
 Those words broke down the wall between her and I. The one that I’d been keeping in place for
myself more than anything.
“That makes two of us.”
I knew two things for sure. One, I believed in soulmates. Unequivocally. Two, they didn’t matter in
the least.
Brye MacCowan was mine. I saw him earlier today in the man that crawled into the bathtub with
me. I even glimpsed him in the depthless well of those blue eyes across the floor from me. Each time
he was that man, my insides felt like kindling ready to catch fire.
But then he’d be this, and I didn’t want this.
I didn’t care what he could be anymore, or about the glimpses that I caught. Fuck him and the
horse he rode in on. Especially when he stood and started leading me back toward his bedroom.
“Let go of me.”
“No.”
I tried to rip my arm away from him, but he was too strong. “That’s your favorite word isn’t it?” I
was starting and I didn’t much feel like stopping. “Does human life mean anything to you? No. Do you
care about anything? No. Anyone? No. Is there anything in that chest besides a cold, dead, heart? No.”
I spewed.
“I did all that for you,” he roared back, finally rising to fight me from his shame.
“You drugged me, put me on a table, let people touch me, then fingered a whore for me?” I raised
my free hand to my chest in mock appreciation. “Do me a favor and don’t do anything for me ever
again.” I cocked my hand back and let it fly, feeling the sting of my palm as it acquainted itself with
the sculpt of his face. The sound was as satisfying as the sting that shot up my forearm. I backhanded
him almost as quickly.
He didn’t say a word he just clung to his cheek for a moment and worked his jaw out like he was
chewing bubble gum. I didn’t move besides the fire flaring my nostrils and the too shallow breaths
shaking my chest.
“What would you have had me do?” he asked, his voice back to low and menacing. “Kill him?”
The thought made me sick. If anyone deserved to die it was Connor MacCowan but pretending I
was worthy of judging was just fucked up. But then again, so was Brye.
“You’re your father’s son.”
The volcanic eruption backlit his stark blue eyes a moment before the violence burst from inside
him and came roaring at me. He grabbed my upper arms on both sides and squeezed so hard that I
thought I might snap. I screamed and thrashed against him as he started backing toward the stairs. As
soon as I could harness the pain and regain control of myself, I sent my knee to his groin.
He howled and dropped me. I wobbled for a moment as he doubled over, but once my feet were
under me, I ran. Or started to. His hand was around my calf a moment later with such authority that my
momentum halted outright. I smashed into the floor, chin first and felt the hot metallic of blood split
from my tongue to match what already came from my lip.
My tears were back, more a reaction to the searing pain than to the realization that he was a worse
monster than I believed.
“Let go of me,” I wailed as I kicked at him.
 “Never.”
It was so protective, so possessive that the tendril of soulmate still wrapped around my heart
paused. But only long enough for him to grab me like a caveman, throw me over his shoulder and
head back for the stairs. I grabbed on to the railing.
“I will not go back to that room of painted lies with you.”
“It’s that or the basement.”
“I’ll take the basement.”
He pivoted on his heel and pressed my legs into his chocolate coated chest. I thought about
kneeing him again just out of spite. Instead, I went silently.
When he carried me into that cold basement and set me down, shivers wracked my spine simply
because the concrete was frigid, but I leveled my gaze at him and raised my arms overhead to the
shackles.
“This is what you want?” he asked.
“This is the furthest thing from what I want.” I stretched higher. “Except for maybe you.”
He pressed his body to mine and for a split second, I remembered what it had been like to kiss
him before we somersaulted into shitsville. My body wanted to move toward his, to bow toward him
and let him graze my hips and gaze on my chest. My traitorous asshole body that had gotten all sorts of
wet over the things I’d seen today. Over Deirdre’s touch.
I had to make a conscious effort not to flinch or groan as he drug his fingers up along my body
from the sides of my ribs all the way to my wrists. He cocked his head, less than an inch away from
my lips as he fiddled with the steel above my head. Our breath mingled again, that scent, that flavor
called to me, and I leaned back the slightest bit.
But then the cool steel pinched on my bones and it became hard to stand flat foot. The small click
seemed so final as he stepped back and looked at me. I couldn’t tell if he was just taking in every inch
of my body on display or seeing something deeper.
Without an answer, he turned and strode toward the steps. He paused on the last one and shot me a
look over his shoulder.
“For what it’s worth,” he started softly. “I think I would kill him for you, but I think that alone is
the reason that I’ll lose you.”

I didn’t remember sleeping the first two times I’d hung in the basement. Waver in and out of
consciousness sure, but not sleep. This time, I was about to pass out, twinging shoulders and all.
Brye had stolen the last little bit of energy from me. Between the drugs, the stolen touches and his
stupidity, I’d lost too much tonight. And if I started to think about the last week…
The tears blurred my barely opening eyes.
And I surrendered to it. To the exhaustion, the sweeping sorrow. My eyes sagged shut and the
weight on my shoulders tightened until there was nothing.
Well, nothing but the clang, clang, clang of something heavy as it echoed down the stairwell. I
opened my eyes and my lashes were crusty, making it difficult to really see. The light had shifted,
telling me I had slept, it hadn’t been restorative. The clang, clang, scrape had woken me.
“Well hello there, pet.” A deep and unfamiliar voice popped my eyes open.
Two men that looked vaguely familiar from dinner stood in front of me.
“They’re both fucking fools,” the other said as he reached out and ran his hand down my chest and
cupped my breast.
 I was disoriented, still half asleep and when my mouth opened nothing came out. One of the men’s
thumbs went in. He plied my jaw for a second and let the pad of his fingertip brush over my lips, my
tongue.
“Nice.” He pulled my mouth open as wide as it would go.
With what little bit of my foot that reached the floor I tried to shove away. The man took his hand
from my mouth and pulled my legs up. I tried to buck away from him, but he grasped my ass and held
me tighter to his body.
I’d finally found my screech, but it was interrupted with a new sound. The other man was holding
a blow torch to the shaped end of a long metal rod. The swish of a gas-fueled fire filled the room just
as my scream jammed back in my bone-dry throat.
The man holding me laughed loudly as he pressed in closer, kissing at my collarbone. He lifted
his lips to whisper, “They shouldn’t have kept you alive if they didn’t want to share.”
The bit of me the MacCowan’s had been chipping away at was about to disappear. Just like that
first night, hopelessness swept over me as thoroughly as stars blanketing the night sky. No one was
coming for me. No one would hear me scream. Unless I cried out for Brye.
Fuck him.
One man’s fingers crept around the curve of my ass, pressing toward the most intimate parts of
me. His mouth found my breast and closed around it, his teeth sharp into my nipple. Finally I found a
blood-curdling scream. And I twisted my knee to shove at his chest.
“I love it when they struggle,” he said then lapped at my skin.
“I love it when they scream.”
The man across the room shut off his torch and held the gray metal up. I knew from all the years
watching my mother, gray meant hot enough to burn. They were going to brand me. Primal fear
obliterated me. I screamed again, pleas dripping from my lips in its wake.
“Wha…wha…what are you going to do with that?” I cried.
“Hurt you,” he answered as he slid his hands between his friend and my sex.
He rubbed me twice then pulled on my flailing thigh. The man handling me stepped aside and
opened my legs farther. Both of them stared down at me and I’d never felt so stripped in my life.
“Should we claim her for the family?” One asked over top of my no, no, no.
“Should we just destroy her clit?”
Stop! Please. Please. Please.
“Not until I fuck her. Maybe her ass so it bleeds when my hips hit against it.”
“Please,” I whispered, the words barely breaking through my tears.
A single snarl preceded the loss of one set of hands on my body, leaving me to swing and crash
into the man with the brand.
“I’ll teach you to fuck with my girl.” Brye’s honey fueled rage was too welcome for my own
good.
He’d come. This time I hadn’t called, but he’d come anyway.
I fought against the man that was left, wild as a bull in the rodeo but I still saw as Brye started
swinging. He’d shaken the wilt of his body from earlier and the way his shirtless muscles moved was
fast, efficient and brutal. There was power coiled in him that unleashed thunderclaps as he leveled the
man. I froze as he bent down, lifted him, bloody face and all, and cold-cocked him. His body went
limp and the deep recesses of my mind wondered if I’d seen somebody else die.
The man holding me dropped me while Brye was still hunched over the knocked out thug. The
world started moving in slow motion as the hot poker extended toward Brye with a merciless thug
still attached. Brye’s massive back expanded with his deep seething breaths, making his tattooed
wings flutter and his barely healed wounds pucker. The man lifted the poker above his skull poised to
crash on Brye and fear for him as pure as if it were me, pummeled into me.
“BRYE!”
He spun in time to dodge the killing blow, but he wasn’t fast enough to miss the scorch of the
metal. The brand hit his sculpted chest and dug in with a sickening hiss. The smell of burning flesh
turned my stomach and I heaved adding my own throw up to the filth covering my body.
The fire was burning his chest, but figurative steam poured from his ears. He stayed steady as he
reached for the burning metal and pulled. Dark red, welted skin bubbled on his chest—and probably
across his palm—but he didn’t flinch. Not until he wrenched the poker free of my attacker’s hand and
swung.
This time it was like the world sped up as he struck the man with the poker once, twice, three
times, each to the temple. Blood spattered onto my skin from the way the man’s face split on the
second blow. Then as quickly as Brye’s counterattack began, it was over. And I knew a dead body
laid at my feet.
“Shit,” Brye swore as the brand clanged to the floor. “Fucking shit.” He spun in a circle, a wild,
vicious animal wearing perfect gray sweatpants, swearing up a storm.
My mouth hung open as I tried to comprehend what had just happened. Brye had killed for me.
Without thinking twice. Turns out I didn’t give a damn about watching a villain die. What really
bothered me was Brye swearing. He sounded hurt. Furious and hurt.
“Are you,” he sucked in a deep, clenched breath mid-sentence. “Okay?”
I almost snapped at him, but I stilled my tongue.
“I am, thanks to you,” I answered softly.
“They shouldn’t have put their hands on you.” He rubbed his hands over his face down then up
and across his buzzed head.
I didn’t know what to say. None of this should be happening came to mind, but I bit my tongue.
“They should know not to touch what’s mine.”
“Excuse me?”
“Come on, Filly. You know what you are to me. You know what you mean despite being a Ryan.
And you can be fucking pissed about it, you can be fucking pissed at me, but you know. I think you
have for a while.”
“And just what do you think I know?”
“You are hope and love and light personified. You’re everything I’ve ever wanted but nothing I’m
allowed to have.”
“Who said shit about what you’re allowed?” A defensiveness crept into my voice.
“Me!” he snapped wildly before he pulled back and blew out a deep breath and sagged into the
same chair his father had greeted me from. “I killed her.” Brye’s voice broke as he cut me off. “He
drug the knife across her throat, but it was me who killed her.”
I gasped then watched him for a moment. His body shook, but he blew out a deep breath, both our
worlds hinged on what he’d say next.
“Her name was Rosalyn and she had long dark hair and shimmering green eyes.” His head
dropped back into his hands. “She accepted this life, accepted me. She sat at that table, she did the
things that my father asked, but feeling is weakness, and I felt so much for her,” he breathed in deep,
his voice faltering again.
“I’m so sorry, Brye,” I murmured because I was.
 “I shut my heart off after her. I had to. I know what I am and I know what my life will cost the
woman that I love. I won’t allow that to happen again. I won’t allow that to happen to you.” He let out
one singular mirthless laugh. “The worst part is I was fine being black. Fine being guarded. But I
could fight you about as much as I could fight my own heartbeat. One more morning, one more date,
seemed so harmless.” A single tear shone against his cheek. “And we still ended up here. I still
signed the death warrant.”
“Will you please let me down?” I asked quietly as I brushed past all the emotion that his words
churned up.
He nodded as he stood and crossed the small space to me. The swollen, angry wound marring his
chest drew my attention. It seeped and oozed where it had all but destroyed his skin, turning it into a
warped family crest. He winced as he reached up for the shackles and I recalled the other bruises
he’d earned on my account.
He’d taken blow after blow for me. From me.
“I thought about myself for one second. One. Fucking. Second…” he didn’t finish his sentence and
just like that, the sensitive artist was back and tugging on my heartstrings. I wasn’t ready to forgive
him, and I didn’t know if I could ever love him, but when he slowly lowered my arms, rubbing on my
wrists as he moved them, despite the pain it caused him, I felt compelled to hug the broken boy in
front of me.
I hadn’t meant to tell Filly about Rosalyn. Hell, I hadn’t meant to speak to her at all, but I wasn’t
going to let anyone hurt her either.
When Filly’s cry cut through my fitful sleep, I didn’t wonder what was happening or why Emmett
had abandoned his post, I just hurdled through the house to get to her. My heart thundered in my ears
and clawed at my rib cage. I worked out daily, fought and ran here in my home and out on the streets,
but nothing could prepare me for thinking it was happening again.
Mercifully the drugs had worn off enough.
I hadn’t seen them much lately, but all too familiar blood-red stains on stark white snow spotted
my vision. Rosalyn’s gargled screams whipping on ice cold winter air replaced Filly’s and threatened
to deafen me. For a split second the darkness held the memory of my father cradling Rosalyn’s
bloodied body as he walked across the ice of the lake, the stab wound in her neck leaving a trail of
too-dark blood for me to follow.
“Thank you for saving me,” Filly whispered as she pulled back from the most innocent, tender hug
I’d ever received and hid herself from me.
Hurt colored her eyes when she pulled back and I couldn’t swallow completely as I nodded one
curt nod.
“I’d really rather not get kneed in the balls again, but I’d like you to come upstairs.”
She nodded easily as she clung to herself. I glanced around wishing there was something to cover
her or that she’d let me carry her but I deserved the fuck off she’d throw my way. Her whisper quite
tiptoes behind me were the only satisfaction I’d get out of tonight.
As soon as we walked into my room, she padded past me and into the bathroom. The rush of my
shower filled the silence I feared would stretch forever between us and I sighed as I pictured the
water cascading on her body.
I’d seen her naked so many times because of these sick games but the idea of her inviting me into
her space and sharing something intimate, being vulnerable like I just had been, made my dick twitch
even though I told myself, dream on. I reached to adjust myself only for the bubbled up burn on my
chest to scream a reminder of its presence.
I tried to check it in the bedroom mirror, but the lighting blew. Walking into the bathroom seemed
a further invasion of her space, but I couldn’t help it.
The angry welt should have drawn all my attention, but even the pain couldn’t pull my full
attention from the shape of her, opaque behind the glass. When I realized she was shaving—and with
my razor—I smiled in spite of everything. I sat staring until the water shut off. Gracelessly, I spun
toward the mirror, hoping to hide my gawk but she eyed me as she stepped out with an arched
eyebrow.
“If you get me a t-shirt, I’ll look at that for you.” She jerked her chin toward my brand.
My head bobbed on its own and I turned to grab one of my shirts as if she commanded me. The
way it would brush her thighs made me smile a tight, refined smile.
“Here.” I held out the fabric, my eyes darting between the towel that hugged her breasts and the
shirt that would cover them up.
 She pulled it over her head and I was transfixed by the small dots that bloomed beneath water
droplets from her hair, revealing her skin. When her delicate fingers touched my chest, I jumped. She
looked up from under her long eyelashes and evaluated my face. Keeping hers pinched, she returned
to her inspection. I winced.
“Am I hurting you?”
“No.” I sucked in a sharp breath when she stretched the burn. “Sort of,” I corrected.
Her hands fell away. “What should I clean it with?”
“Under the sink.” I gestured to the first aid kit that came in far too handy.
She methodically opened it and studied the items inside. When she found the burn salve, she
twisted, resting on the counter and focused on my chest. I puffed up beneath her touch even if it
cracked the wound and made me want to punch something.
“Will you tell me about her?” she asked, her entire focus on where she gently dabbed gel onto my
skin.
“I don’t really want to.”
“I didn’t ask if you wanted to, I asked if you would.”
I blew out a deep breath. If anyone in this world deserved to hear, it was Filly. Everything that
had happened between us had done so in the shadow of that night and those actions. But reliving them
wasn’t something I ever wanted to do. The flashes were enough to keep the walls up and give me
nightmares, but a full retelling…?
“My dad sent me to prep school. I still don’t know if he wanted to give me the shit he didn’t have
or if he just wanted to legitimize his money. I hated it and I got into more trouble than you can
imagine.” I smirked and found that her small smile matched. “But it gave me Rosalyn.” I tried to
remember the details of her face, but they had faded with time. “She liked the bad boy, the sex, the
drugs…all of it. I guess this shit was more fun that garden parties and charity galas.” I scoffed.
Filly listened, silent as she covered the brand on my chest.
“Her father started doing business with mine. He was a lawyer that needed favors. We obliged
until he double-crossed us. Bodies were conveniently being found when it mattered most for his legal
cases. Bodies we’d put in the ground at his request.”
I noticed Filly flinch, but now that it was coming out, I couldn’t stop it.
“My father ripped her from my bed when Emmett found out.”
“Found out what exactly?”
“That he was building a case against us. He was going to prosecute.”
She sucked in a deep breath.
“What did you do?”
“I let him take her. Hang her down there. I let him whip her and I filmed the video we sent to her
father.”
Filly turned and heaved over the sink behind her and I paused until she wordlessly turned back
with a graceless wipe of her chin.
“When her father told us she should burn in hell with the rest of us, I broke.” My eyes found the
far corner of the bathroom and lingered there. Or rather somewhere else entirely that I was trying to
find in memory. “I went to him anyway. I made a deal to save her. To have him save her.”
“And?” Filly was barely breathing.
“My father killed her when he found out what I’d done.”
The blood red splotches were back. Vivid on the snow. Seared on my heart.
“He stabbed her in the side of her neck and made a trail of bloody breadcrumbs for me to follow.
We were way out on Lake Michigan when I caught up. She tried to run when he set her down, but
she’d been bleeding for…God…I don’t know how long. I told him I’d do anything, anything, to save
her. His only answer was ‘grow the fuck up,’” I mimicked his barely-there accent and utterly blatant
hate. “I remember his self-satisfied smirk when I begged. I remember thinking he was done. He’d
done enough for one day. But he unloaded a round at her feet and the ice exploded all around her with
a soul deafening sound. She cried out as her body slid straight down into the lake.”
Filly gasped and covered her mouth as her eyes went wide. I missed her touch, even on my
wounded chest, more than I cared to admit.
“I tried to get to her, but she was weak and wearing heavy wool and winter boots. I had to choose
her or me. Most days I think I chose wrong.”
“Brye,” she breathed my name.
“I hate that you’re looking at me with pity in your eyes.” I turned from her and slunk into the
bedroom.
“I hate that I pity you,” she replied as she followed me and leaned, arms crossed against the
doorframe. “But understanding does something to my insides.”
“It shouldn’t.” I pinched my face and clenched my jaw as I turned from her. I felt her keep her
eyes glued to me.
“I told you that chaos was sorrowful. Depressing in its inconsistency. You’re never grounded,
you’re never you.” Her gaze burned, and I could picture her eyes bright even as they narrowed and
watched my every flinch, my every breath. “I wonder what kind of peace you’d know if you were.”
Her words spliced my chest worse than the brand did. Filly saw me. Through everything, the wild
brush strokes, the deep dark colors. Through the murder and the mayhem, she saw me. All of me.
I shifted a little, trying the shield those uncomfortable truths from coming out to play, looking at
her from only the corner of my eye.
“Do you want something to eat? I know you didn’t eat at dinner.”
“That wasn’t dinner, that was fucking disgusting.”
“Fine, are you hungry? I know you didn’t eat at fucking disgusting.”
She rolled her eyes, but the corners of her smirk pulled up. “Sure.”
I looked around for Emmett on my way to the kitchen but didn’t see him. He was supposed to be
down here. Watching her. When I thought about what might have happened to her if I’d been sound
asleep bile rose in my throat. I managed to make it to the sink before I heaved and acid burned my
throat.
When my knees felt sturdy again, I straightened up and found her dinner, me a bottle of wine—not
drugged. I warmed up the spaghetti and grabbed two glasses as I shifted the hot bowl from hand to
hand as I went back to my room. From the doorframe, I saw she was studying Van Gogh, Old Man in
Sorrow and when I made a soft sound, she twisted just enough to study me the same, as if the art and I
were equally intriguing.
I kind of got off on it.
“Thank you.” She took the bowl and found her comfortable spot nestled into the big leather chair
in the corner. I poured wine, handed her a glass and sat on my bed opposite to her spot in the room
where I was able to study her.
I expected Rosalyn’s memory to weigh on me, but it was Filly that filled me up—her sympathy
and her smile, thinking I was worthy of either. I realized something as she looked at me from our
respective spots. I wanted to love her—with every fiber of my being—but I needed to protect her
more. I’d been using her name to justify my actions. Rosalyn’s too.
 But Filly was different. What she meant was more, what I’d have to sacrifice was too. But the
bottom line was simple—there was no world without her in it. And I was going to keep Filly Ryan in
this world.
Forgiveness is a funny thing. Consciously I wasn’t forgiving him. Ever. A sad story and pretty words
weren’t enough to make up for all that had happened to me. But the broken boy that was so much more
tragic than I knew, who fought against me for a reason, who was rescuing me the only way he knew
how, eased the anger inside me all the same. Conscious decisions had no place in my heart.
Old Man in Sorrow hung on his wall and I knew it was because the piece was him and he was it.
The brush strokes told his story and I wanted nothing more than to rewrite it.
I was a fucking idiot.
“Have you ever been in love?” Brye asked me from where he swirled his wine, shoved up against
his headboard in shadow.
I eyed him for a moment. He didn’t deserve my secrets, my stories, but he’d been vulnerable…
“No,” I answered as I twirled the spaghetti on my fork.
“Always falling for the wrong guy?” His dark laughed pulled a wry one from me.
“All things considered, I was pretty sheltered.”
“You saw the world,” he countered.
“With neither of my parents much farther than an arm’s length.” I sighed as I saw their closeness in
a new light. “It always felt like we just belonged together. Now it feels a little bit like a lie.” I kept
twirling the half eaten bowl of spaghetti, chewing on my lip instead of the pasta.
“Just because they were being overprotective doesn’t change anything.”
“They weren’t being overprotective of me, they were keeping one eye on this life. They were
watching their own backs.”
“Filly…” he sounded almost like he was scolding me.
“After the story your dad told me about them and the way I’ve seen you live your life, I’m not
surprised either. Something wicked was always going to catch us, I just never dreamed I’d be the one
caught in the snare.”
“That’s my fault.” He leaned back and looked for absolution on the ceiling.
“Mine too.” I took another big bite.
“You got yourself locked in a basement? Twice?” The sarcasm made both of our smirks quirk up.
“Three times actually.”
I pushed my bowl to the side and I pulled my knees to my chest. “I wanted you, Brye, more than I
knew how to put into words. I could have painted it. I have a feeling that it would have looked like
my insides.”
“And now?”
A deep breath pulled on my chest, unable to lose itself from under the weight of all this. The right
answer was I hate you, but the two dead bodies and the bandages on his chest stopped me. The
memory of those first moments too. Even some after.
“Life is complicated,” I sighed.
He smiled, small and sad. There was something so tortured but so…hopeful in that look that my
heart shuddered. I stood without meaning to, and he twisted toward me. “Wine?”
 “Never again.” My eyes went wide remembering how that was where tonight started, what had
made my fingertips burn, why I had touched Deirdre. I shuddered.
“It’s just regular wine. I promise.” He took a sip. “I couldn’t handle that again tonight. I may not
be able to handle that again ever.”
I nodded, but before he could rise to fill my glass, I crossed the cold floorboards between us. I
slid on to the bed and settled against the headboard beside him then reached for the bottle. The glass
against my lips felt good. The company…
He took the bottle back and we sat side by side, drinking in silence until the bottle was almost
gone.
“So about those bodies…” I started because I honestly didn’t know what else to say. It earned me
one of those deep, delicious, honey chuckles of Brye’s. “What’ll happen to them?”
“I imagine they’ll end up at the bottom of the lake or in some fresh concrete.” He shrugged and
passed the last sip to me.
“You put bodies in concrete?”
“Well, Emmett will. When I find him.” The edge in his voice raised the hair on the back of my
neck.
“Is he missing?” I swallowed the lump in my throat.
“Not even I would have left you down there alone.” The edge from before became a blade. “I
can’t believe they tried to brand you. I have half a mind to do it to him.”
I recalled the marks I’d seen on the other girls at dinner. “Is that commonplace around here?”
He didn’t answer at first, but he started to nod. “You’re in the family or against it unless you have
that brand.”
“What does the brand mean?”
“That your ours. A possession, not a person, for us to use however we fucking please.” Disgust
was thick on his voice. “I used to like it, like that they were toys for me to play with.”
“And now?” I sucked in a deep breath and held it.
“This life looks a lot different today. Seeing it through your eyes… Seeing them almost ruin a
woman that I…” His voice trailed off and he let his head hit back against the headboard. “That I’m
trying to protect, shook me.”
“You’re doing a crap job of protecting me.” I leaned over onto his shoulder and blew out a deep
breath.
“I’m not sure when it shifted from just keeping you alive to something more.”
“I don’t know why it makes me happy to hear that.”
“Emmett said you’d ruin me.” His words were a sucker punch to my stomach. “Look at me in
bitch-ass smithereens.”
He shoved away from me and my head fell a little bit before I caught myself just in time to see
him raise the bottle in a flash before smashing it against the wall beside us. Glass shattered and
tinkled down to the floor and the last few bits of red wine dripped down the frames on the wall. The
angel wings on his back fluttered as his rib cage rolled.
“No, Brye.” I reached for him.
As soon as I grabbed him, he winced and a pained cry broke the silence in the room. The scrapes,
scares, bruises and the brand he’d suffered because of me kept me from holding him. They kept me
from screaming at him too.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine.” He pushed my hands aside then stood. The crunch of glass beneath his feet made me
cringe.
“It’s not fine,” I countered.
“I’m fucked up and broken. I can’t really protect you, I can’t really love you. I’m no good for you.
Or even to you.”
“Stop.” I darted after him doing what I could to dodge the glass. “Please.” I rounded his big body
and pressed my hands to his chest. Well, the spots that wouldn’t hurt him anyway. God, I don’t want
to hurt him again. “I know. I know what it’s like to be shattered. To not be yourself. I am so far from
feeling normal. But whatever these broken pieces of me feel, they feel it for you.”
My words stopped him cold.
“You have feelings for me?” He sounded like a small little boy. “After everything?”
“Sometimes they’re vengeful, hateful feelings but sometimes…” I sighed. “I feel everything for
you.”
He stepped toward me and slid his hands around my waist, pulling me to him.
“I feel everything for you too,” he breathed the words as he bent down, angling for my lips.
So close. Those lips that I admittedly missed so much that I ached on a primal level were a
whisper away. His body was sturdy in my hands despite the wounds, and I felt his heart speed up in
his chest. The smell that was so uniquely him and spoke of home and happiness filled my senses. If I
lifted onto my tippy toes, I would have him. I would kiss him like my whole life depended on it.
But I couldn’t.
“Brye,” I breathed his name and his eyes fluttered open as if I’d broken through a spell. “Right
now, I’m still a little stuck on hate.” I spoke softly so he’d understand. “You drugged me. You fingered
someone else in front of me. Because of you, I’ll never have my family back, and even if I’m pissed at
them, that means something.”
He swallowed tightly.
“You have to give me time.”
“I can’t give you space,” he said through a clenched jaw.
“I accept that.” I let my fingers follow the edge of the bandage I’d put on his chest. “Can you?”
His hands fell from me and his shoulders deflated. “I don’t have a choice.”
I cupped his cheek with my full palm. “I don’t think either of us ever did.”

Our truce was a jagged coastline, beautiful but deadly with dark and vivid colors that waves crashed
and beat upon. Every word, every gesture hurt or heeled down deep and made for far too violent
mood swings. He convinced me to sleep on the other side of a pillow wall just before I took
metaphorical scissors to his chest and cut out his heart with some idiotic comment. I begged him to
come back to bed if only to listen to the cadence of his breath nearby.
That’s what I focused on in the dark of his room. The city lights cast warm streetlight shadows on
the beautiful artwork surrounding me but they weren’t my touchpoint anymore. My entire world
hinged on his inhale and his exhale.
My mind raced. How had we gotten here? Oddly enough this fucked up world was starting to
make sense. Perhaps I recognized it in my genes. But Brye and I? The instant attraction had been life
altering. I just didn’t know if I liked the way I had been altered.
I turned over staring at the crisp white pillows making a barricade between us and I pulled on one
of the corners. His deep breaths on the other side weren’t enough.
Brye was soft when he was sleeping, not at all the man that had murdered in the basement. I
watched his chest rise and fall, his lips move faintly with each breath. His fist flexed where it rested
on his pillow above his head and tiny muscles rippled in its wake.
Like this, I could smile in spite of myself. Like this, he wasn’t smashing my heart or setting me up
to fall. But did that change anything?
I sighed. And my fingers with their own agenda reached out and started to study the sculpt of
Brye’s body. Since I was little, my mother had taught me not to touch the art. It will reach out and
grab you, she always said, but I always wanted to feel it.
And I wanted to feel Brye now too.
He was sculpture personified and reminded me of the chiseled marble I’d seen in both Rome and
on exhibit in the British Museum. His body was beautiful, showing musculature and veins beneath the
flush of barely tanned flesh. He had a strong jaw, rough stubble and small, pert nipples that added life
to an otherwise perfect specimen. Well besides the scars.
One shone dimly in the soft hint of light, one I hadn’t seen before. It was long healed, but it
zigzagged across his deep valley abs. My finger was too attracted, I was too attracted. I pressed to
his warm skin and followed the silky scarred tissue above his belly button as it cut down to his hip
then as it dove lower beneath his sweats. His imperfections made his body that much more enticing.
The way his dick twitched when I let my fingers drag along his waistband was almost
mouthwatering.
Brye. Fucking beautiful Brye.
My hand crawled down my body with the same unbidden intent as it did across his. He sparked
something inside of me showing me beauty and vulnerability and a warped adoration. I slid my finger
between my thighs thinking of those things and rubbed once, twice, three times then I stilled with his
rough, singular snore.
His hands had been on another woman. His heart had too. He said it was drugs, he said I was
different but…
I reached for the pillow I’d slid to the side and pushed it back between us. I turned on my side and
snuggled into the pillow beneath me even though there was still a deep ache inside me. I couldn’t
touch him, and I sure as fuck couldn’t touch myself thinking about him, but damn if I couldn’t I fall
asleep dreaming of his lips pressed to mine.
“Where were you last night?” I asked Emmett when he slid into the seat next to me.
“What do you mean?” He slid sunglasses on and shoved his hands through his hair as he checked
his smirk in my rearview mirror.
“You were supposed to be watching over, Filly,” I growled and had to hold back the urge to choke
him out.
“Deirdre wanted to play.” He shrugged and his smile spread. “I mean, Filly is your responsibility.
You were in the house. What’s the harm in bringing Dre down a peg or two after flying so high?”
“She almost got raped.” My temper was welling in my chest.
“Brye, she’s a whore.” He laughed as he threw his head back and basked in the sun that made me
sweat.
“Not Dre,” I snarled as I adjusted the neck of my crisp white shirt. “Filly.”
“Wait, what?” Emmett’s head snapped up and his face drooped. “Why? Your dad will give
everyone a ride on that bike when he has her parents where he wants them.”
“No one is going to fuck her,” I roared as I slammed my wrist up and into his throat. The force and
the angle pinned him against the window.
“Goddamnit. I knew this would happen,” he hissed as he struggled beneath me.
“That what would happen?” I thumped his head back again and he just wheezed in response.
When he turned a lighter shade of purple, I let him go. He flopped back in the car seat and gasped,
dragging raw breaths into his lungs. “Answer me,” I said cold and unfeeling as my eyes flicked down
and I started to clean the small details of my gun.
“She’s just some chick,” he started. “No, she means less than some chick. She’s not cattle meant to
be branded, she’s your enemy meant to be destroyed.” He spoke with his hands. “Instead she fucked
you up.” He shoved his finger into my chest.
“I’ll show you fucked up.” I dropped my gun and thrust my thumb into his mouth and like a fish
hook, I pulled his face down to my knee. I thrust it up from the seat just when he was low enough. His
head snapped back when my knee crashed into his nose. He started bleeding right away and I used my
grip on his lip to whip him back.
“You forget your place,” I said as I released him. “You don’t get opinions on my life. My actions.
On Filly Ryan. You follow fucking orders.”
“The orders were to keep her alive. She’s alive, isn’t she?” he said, his words muffled as he held
the bridge of his nose.
“I ordered you to watch her.” I returned my gaze to my gun, picked it up and started cleaning it.
“Semantics.”
“Can I trust you?” I spat out the words and whipped the gun up to his temple.
“What kind of horse shit is that? How many times have I had your life in my hands? How many
times have I saved it?” He twisted his bloody face toward me so that my gun sat centered on his
forehead.
“They were going to brand her!” I cocked the gun.
“Dude.” He lifted his hands and softened his voice beneath me. “Maybe I deserve a punishment,
but you’re not going to kill me. Not over a Ryan.”
I sat staring at Emmett, but I wasn’t seeing him. I was seeing her. She was so much more than a
Ryan. Today, in the backseat of my father’s car, she was the hand that stilled me. I released the cock
on my gun and tucked it back in my chest holster.
“I ought to.”
“After the way Deirdre blows a dick, I’d die a happy man.” He laughed tentatively, but it died
beneath my withering stare.
“If Filly had been hurt—”
“I got it, Brye.” He pulled his pocket square and started to clean the blood from his face.
I didn’t answer as we slid out of the car. The shift between us was noticeable. He was leaning
toward my father. Those rules, those definitions of right. Where I’d always known he would sit at my
right hand, I momentarily questioned whether I wanted to sit on the throne at all. Filly made me
question it all.
I circled the car letting my fury start simmering again. At him, sure but also at this circumstance.
At choosing between Filly and Family, between known and wrong and the unsafe of mystery. But
nothing was safe for me.
Emmett stepped away from the passenger door and walked in front of me. Just seeing him made
my vision go red. I was here in this place of division and decision because of him. Because of his
actions. His thoughtless fucking actions. In one swift move, I twisted and landed an undercut to his
kidney. He doubled over and I crashed my knee into his chest. He hit the pavement with his knees
hard.
Seeing him on the street was still oddly gratifying but not in the ways it used to be. I liked his
blood on the street. I liked that he had crumpled into nothing. I liked that I put him there. But I loved
that I’d hurt someone that had hurt Filly.
I had a choice to make now too. Help my friend back to his feet or leave my father’s enforcer in
the street. So I straightened my suit jacket as if nothing had happened. As if blood wasn’t splattered
on the street.
As if the make up of my world wasn’t sure to follow.

Emmett had the Italian boy tied to the chair beneath the swinging single light. Blood dripped from his
swollen eye and split lip as Emmett kept up with his shakedown. I watched them as I stretched my
split knuckles that had become intimately acquainted with the bones of the kid’s face.
I wanted to get this over with. We could shoot him, send a message, and all without dicking
around. That just wasn’t the MacCowan way. We had to draw this out, leave the kid begging for his
life, questioning his loyalty, then let him crawl home, see what he chose to do later. It was just another
game to my father.
My father who was home with Filly.
“Wrap this up, Emmett.”
“I’m supposed to drag it out.”
“You’re supposed to listen to me,” I sneered. “We just went over this.” I pointed at his nose.
“I’m not going against your father because you punched me.” He shrugged as if that was answer
enough.
“I can do it again.”
“I hate to interrupt but what the fuck do you want from me?” The Italian kid interrupted then spat.
 I watched with detached amusement as Emmett kicked him in the stomach. He bent down and his
lip curled up just before he growled, “We want payment in blood.” He threw his elbow as an
exclamation point on the statement.
Emmett pulled a pair of pliers from his pocket and started in on the kid’s fingers. He waited until
two of them were contorted and missing fingernails to start asking questions. They were always the
same. Who’s moving up in the ranks? Who wants to take over? Are they coming for our territory?
For us?
“Emmett, we’re done here,” I said with a sigh.
“Fuck you, Brye.”
I knew what was coming next.
“We’re protecting the family.”
The family I almost scoffed. This was a poor excuse for a family even if we did share a last name
and blood. I’d always known that, but Filly made me feel that in my bones. Did she know that she
spoke about her parents with such love that tears collected in the corners of her wide eyes? Did she
know that her heart shone outward when she did? Even if she was furious.
I could listen to her talk about their travels, her childhood, loving them, hating them unending.
After all, it was what her words brought out in her that made it special. Nothing about my father had
made me special. I’d accepted that long ago, but the feeling was fresh all over again. I found myself
wanting a family like Filly’s.
I found myself wanting it with her.
If only she could forgive me for all the fucked up shit. And her parents could look passed me
being the Montague to their Capulet. And I could somehow shake my family obligation, my family
name. I sighed. Having a future with Filly would be harder than begging forgiveness from Saint Peter
himself, but I had to try.
Right. Fucking. Now.
A scream yanked me from my thoughts as Emmett’s arms wheeled once and his foot kicked the
side of his chair, sending the kid careening to the floor with a thump recognizable for each his chair,
shoulder and head as he bounced. He cried out as his blood spattered on the floor.
My blood pressure rose in anticipation of what would come next. The blood was going to trigger
visions of Roz that would pummel me. Blood on snow, crimson staining white. They always reached
in and squeezed my chest, the panic flared my temper and things always got out of hand. I waited,
trying to steel myself from the onslaught.
The vision didn’t come.
Emmett kept up with brutal kicks. The kid wheezed. And I sat mystified as his blood made
Jackson Polluck shapes on the floor. Emmett even looked up expectantly, but my rage just didn’t filter
in.
Filly had done this. Or exercising my demons with her had. I smiled. She was the one. My one.
And I knew it in the simplicity of the moment as surely as I knew she would spit in my eye if I said
that to her.
I laughed at the thought.
“Find something amusing, Brye?” Emmett asked with a growl.
“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” I pulled my gun from my holster and leveled it at the kid whose face was
swollen shut and pulled the trigger. His body went limp against the floor.
“What the fuck was that?” Emmett spun at me, his fists and face clenched. “I was just getting
warmed up.”
 “Oh good Christ, Emmett he was barely conscious.” I rolled my eyes.
“We were supposed to send him back.” He stepped up to me and looked down his nose at me.
“Come on. I’ve got better things to do.” I jerked my chin and waved my gun toward the door.
“Like what?”
He was challenging me. Again. I thought about spinning and shoving the heel of my hand up his
nose. If I hadn’t broken it before, that sure as hell would. But then there’d be more blood. And more
blood meant more clean up. More questions. I’d have to remind him with something of startling
severity, but not now. Right now I had a different priority.
“I’ve got some paint to buy.”
This house was too quiet. Each creak of a floorboard echoed and all too many times I convinced
myself it was footsteps of one satanic ass or another coming for me. Brye’s absence hit me hard today.
He’d found my jean shorts and left me with an old Ramones t-shirt. Clean clothes—hell clothes
period with these people—made me feel more myself. Standing up on his furniture to see the art
hanging on the ostentatiously high walls was just as grounding. I laughed with an almost full heart
when I found Dogs Playing Poker tucked in the corner between Michelangelo and Magritte.
Eventually, I’d settled in with a leather-bound copy of Romeo & Juliet that I’d found. The gold
leaf was smooth beneath my fingers and the buttery leather warmed in my palms. I couldn’t help but
think about how appropriate the book was. For a second I imagined Brye saying my favorite lines.

“Amen, amen. But come what sorrow can.

It cannot countervail the exchange of joy
That one short minute gives me in her sight.
Do thou but close our hands with holy words,
Then love-devouring death do what he dare;
It is enough I may but call her mine.”

“You smile like your mother.” Connor leaned against the doorframe, his soulless eyes on me, a
smirk pulling at his waxy lips. “I used to love watching her smile at your father and knowing I could
wipe it all away.”
I snapped the book shut and clutched it to my chest as I shoved back into the chair as far as I
could. He laughed.
“I love watching you smile.” His broadened as he watched me. “I love knowing that at any time I
can wipe it from your face.”
He turned back into the hallway on a positively wicked chuckle and all the warmth I’d fought for
with small amounts of normalcy throughout the day, went right with him.

Somehow the leather wouldn’t warm in my hands again as I read Romeo & Juliet in the bathtub. It
was the only place I felt safe in the whole of Chicago. Under the watchful eye of my mother and as far
away as I could be from Connor.
Every page or two my mind would wander to one of them. Connor was at the forefront, where he
was, what he was doing and if he would come back. Brye was every other breath with the same list
but a completely different type of worry. And then would come my parents who had to be beside
themselves. Were they looking for me? Did they have a hint as to where I’d really gone? When would
they stop looking? Would I know the day? Sense it in some weird way?
Would I live to find out?
The thought had always been in the back of my mind but now that Brye had told me about
Rosalyn…
A tear dripped down my cheek and stained the bible thin page, making text from behind muddle
with what I’d been reading. My life was that spot, words and words, layered without making sense. A
story distorted and wrong with no way to find The End.
More of my tears fell, turning the pages in front of me into an incoherent mess.
“Filly?” Brye’s dark and rich amber honey voice called from the next room. “Filly,” he called
again, fear edging in when I didn’t answer.
My heart sank and fluttered all at once, making my stomach somersault on top of it all.
“Filly!”
“Here,” I called as I shut the book and wiped away my tears as I stood.
He jogged around the corner, catching me step out of the tub.
“What happened?” he asked softly, his eyes melting as they looked me over head to toe, twice.
“Your dad…” I shoved my hands deep into my pockets and shrugged.
“Did he touch you? Did he hurt you?” He rushed over and reached for me. I found myself wanting
nothing more than to sag into his arms.
So I made myself stay anchored as his reached fizzled out.
“He didn’t even come all the way into the room.” My arms found their new favorite perch—
wrapped around my body and holding tight.
“He doesn’t have to,” Brye grumbled then blew out a deep breath. “Are you okay?”
I nodded, knowing that with him here, I was.
“How’s your chest?”
“Taken good care of, thanks.” He gave me a small smile. “I really do mean thanks, you could have
left me on my own on that one.”
“You took it for me.” Heat bloomed in my heart at the simple sentence. “I’m hurt, not heartless.”
“And here I’m both.” He shrugged.
The protest was on the tip of my tongue. He wasn’t a monster, not completely anyway, and the
sadness that leaked out of him when he said it affected me.
“I got you something today,” he continued as he nodded back toward his bedroom. “Hope it helps
pass the time.”
I swallowed back the urge to ask him just how long that would be as I followed him. No answer
would steady my stomach or ease my fears. But then we turned into the room and I laid eyes on it.
“Brye,” I gasped.
There was an easel, a few stretched canvases, a notebook, and paint. So much paint. Brushes
were balled in the bottom of the plastic bag scrunched beneath the easel. I swore I saw a palette
leaned up against one of the wooden legs.
“This is all for me?” I stepped toward it in awe.
“I don’t know a lot about the supplies, but the girl at the store helped me.”
I reached out for the canvas but couldn’t bring myself to touch it after rubbing a warm black book
all day. My fingers hovered over top, exploring the edges of my gifts with a safe bubble between.
“It’s beautiful, Brye. This is all beautiful.”
“I know this can never be home, but maybe this can make it feel a little less fucked up.”
“Thank you,” I breathed. “Really.” I crouched down and dug into the bag, finding more goodies
than I would have guessed.
He said something about getting food and wine, but I wasn’t listening. I was transfixed. When he
walked out of the room, I simply inspected each item in my hand. The urge to paint was clawing at the
low reaches of my stomach. I could fight it, but I really didn’t want to.
I started moving things, opening tubes and adjusting. They were his lovely scotch glasses, but I
filled one up with water and stole one of his plush hand towels. I shoved the sleeves of my shirt up
and tucked it in on itself and used a spare brush to knot my long hair up in a bun then I started
painting.
All that mattered in that moment was the feeling that I would be able to create again. The way the
paint looked on the palette was the way my heart felt. Smooth, not cracked, and brilliantly bright. That
easel, those paints, they brought me one of the truest homes I’d ever known and it made me smile.
Only one thing begged to be released from the canvas in front of me. Brye. Solid and silent,
brooding as I pictured him so inclined to do, and carrying the weight of this fucked up world on his
shoulders. His body was easy to find the lines of—I knew them all and the fine details of his beautiful
tattoo. Each line, each curve came together in thick, rough brush strokes until a manly, muscled
abstract body sat hunched on the canvas in front me.
An errant hair fell into my eyes and I shoved it up, feeling the cold cream of oil paint smear
across my brow. I smiled remembering how I could see Brye with the same mark in my first fantasies.
My fantasies that felt within reach with a brush in my hand.
“Anything that makes you that happy was worth it.”
My eyes darted over top of the easel and met his, glimmering with a bit of a smile. My knees
wobbled.
“Do you want to see?” I asked as I stepped back and smiled.
He nodded before setting down two plates and coming to stand behind me. “Filly,” he gasped as
he pressed up against me.
Every inch of me was aware of the man behind me. With the living, breathing body behind me and
the deep, dark and chaotic lines in front of me, I was a goner. I didn’t want to be, but when I’d opened
those tubes of paint, I’d accidentally opened up my heart too.
“Is that…” His voice trailed off, his warm breath rustling the free wisps of my hair.
He reached out beside me, his fingers wanting to touch the way mine always yearned to. I
wrapped my hand around his wrist and pushed his fingers into the wet paint. He sucked in a deep
breath and stumbled into me, his other hand wrapping around my waist automatically.
“It’s you,” I murmured.
“How can you paint me?” His fingers dug into my hip while the others trailed through my fresh
paint.
“With broad brush strokes.”
“No, I mean…”
“I know what you mean.” I laughed a little, noticing how much I liked the effect of his finger
tracks in the paint. “I like to paint pain and suffering as much as love and life. I like the ugly.”
“Are you going to do more?”
I nodded and let him go, stepping out of his grip and swirling my brush in the highball. “I hope
you’re not mad about the glass.” I motioned toward it and cast a sideways glance at him where he still
stood dumbfounded.
“You mad about the cold Thai food?” He stepped closer to the canvas.
I grabbed an egg roll in response and studied him a little more. In this light he was darker,
shadows cast across his sharp features and chilled form, but he was in awe too. And wonder lit him
up and once again the boy I’d lost my damn mind over was gawking at artwork with me.
Until he turned and gawked at me.
 Brye became something new right then. He wasn’t an asshole, he wasn’t broken. He was whole
and all the pieces made some odd sort of sense. They spoke to me.
He was mine.
“I could show you?” I offered quietly.
“How to do this?”
“I’ll eat, you change, then we’ll paint.”
His eyes lit up when I said we even though he tried to extinguish it the moment later. He pulled
back and I saw that little bit of marvel fading into shadow. The part of him that had been so open to
me was fading away.
“You said you never had, I’d like to teach you.” I drew him back the slightest bit with my
whispered wants. “Please.”
I laid my hand over his heart, opposite of the brand he’d gotten for me and the wall he’d been
constructing came crashing back down.
Can she feel my heart going apeshit under there? How can she stand to touch me? How can I stand
to refuse her?
The answer was that I couldn’t.
And honestly, I didn’t want to anymore either. I’d decided she soothed my demons, I could fight a
few for her. Starting with my own.
“I think I’d like that.”
Though not as much as I liked the way her fingers flexed into my chest. And when they skated
down, I couldn’t help the way I growled. She didn’t stop either. Her tiny fingers slid on my suit jacket
and slowly undid the three buttons. My lungs stretched with a deep breath and stayed as tight as a
rubber band. She slid her hands back up and shoved at the shoulders. The whisper of silken fabric
sliding followed by a soft thump was the only way I knew my blazer was gone. I was numb.
“You can’t paint in that.” She nodded toward the perfectly pressed button down.
I waited for a moment, praying to any heathen god that may listen that she may undo those buttons
too. But she turned from me and folded onto the floor with a snatched plate of larb in her lap. I blew
out a deep breath and prayed the tension would melt from my chest. With her a stone’s throw away, I
figured it was futile.
“Thank you for the paints.” Her voice was bright, almost a lark, reminding me of the girl that I’d
met that first day. “I can’t tell you what they mean to me. Dinner too.”
I looked over to find her shoving a stuffed piece of cabbage into her mouth as I pulled the tails of
my shirt from my belt. Her smile made it that much harder to function.
“You’re welcome,” I said as I winced getting out of my shirt.
“Want me to…” She pointed at my chest with her chopsticks.
“Kiss it and make it all better?” I hadn’t meant to joke with her, not while we were still trying to
figure out this volatile truce, this love, hate.
“Let me have some of that chili oil first.”
The way her smile brightened sliced me. I thought the chili oil in my wound might actually feel
better. Being vulnerable was uncomfortable, tight hands on my heart. And that it might bring hellfire
down on her…
But I craved it all the same.
“I’m kidding, Brye,” she teased. “Now change so we can paint.”
Playful in a Ramones t-shirt with blue lightning across her brow was going to kill me. Or her.
What I felt flared up wild.
I ripped at the buttons of my shirt feeling the fury take over. After all the shit, after how long I’d
suffered, after losing, I’d found her and there was no fucking way to keep her. Not really. I shoved at
my pants, conscious of how my belt clanged on the wood floors. I wanted to tear the boards away, the
scars on back too, and maybe my father’s throat out despite the pain it would cause my weathered
body. Then maybe…
A small laugh came from behind me, bubbly like a little stream. I spun.
“Sorry.” Filly blushed as she bit her lip. “I should be comfortable with the human form.” She
gestured up and down my body.
Bright red bloomed across her cheeks and lit her collarbone on fire as I stood bare-assed naked in
front of her. Something closer to lightning heated my veins as her doe eyes widened.
“You like what you see?” I asked and she audibly gulped.
Her mouth hung in a shocked, slack smile as her whole body turned that deep blush and
goosebumps traveled in its wake. She couldn’t answer. Or didn’t want to. I couldn’t tell. I walked
around naked regularly and fucked in front of people, but it was Filly and her silence that stripped me
bare.
I wanted to hide.
“You could be carved from marble,” she finally managed.
“Is that a good thing?”
“Though the masters never carved…that…umm…men like you.” She gestured at my crotch,
closed her eyes and turned away from me, her neck turning the color of scalded skin.
I tried to hide the smile that might splinter my cheeks if I let it go as I pulled on some gym shorts
and nothing else.
“All right, let’s do this,” Filly squeaked, and as tempting as it was to keep it up, tonight wasn’t
that night. I slid down to the floor beside her and reached for the other plate of Thai.
“Talk me through it.”
She blew out a deep breath and leaned her head back against the bed. “I can’t talk you through it.
You have to feel your way through it.”
I could think of some other things I wanted to feel my way through, but I bit my tongue.
“But what about dealing with the paint? I mean won’t I smear it?”
“Sometimes.” She shrugged. “Sometimes you want to, sometimes those are the mistakes that make
the work that much better. Sometimes you have to be patient so you don’t.” She laughed a single small
laugh. “Something tells me that’s both of our weak spot.”
“How do I make the shapes?”
“Close your eyes and picture something,” she instructed.
Her voice was so hypnotic, and this moment was so easy between us, I did exactly as I was told.
Filly was the only thing I could summon up.
“Now, don’t see it as a whole image like a photograph, but instead see it as shapes. Use the
difference in lighting to simplify it. Where is there a long line? Where is there a circle, a curve?”
She started to form in my mind—the straight line of her shin, the circles that were her wide eyes,
the curve between her ribs and her hips. The darkness that surrounded her made her shine bright and
stand out all the more vividly than she usually did.
“When you start to put that image on canvas, think about the shape first, connect them gently, then
we’ll talk about giving them life.”
A brush I’d never held painted behind my closed eyes, developing the beautiful body next to me.
“You can sketch first if you want.”
I shook my head knowing that she deserved nothing less than the technicolor I saw her in. She
went over how to hold a palette and how much paint to use, when to wet my brush and what the water
would do, but I couldn’t get my mind off of the form. The shapes moving fluidly into one body. It
reminded me of being broken until she pieced me back together.
I smiled.
“Ready?” she asked as she stood and reached out for me. I grasped on and let her do what she
could to pull me to standing. I didn’t mind one bit when the momentum made me grab her and pull her
in.
Her small paint covered fingers lingered just above my bandage and the floated around the shape.
“Remember shapes are just shapes. Mistakes are just mistakes. You can always turn them into
something abstract, something beautiful,” she whispered and my knees wobbled. She seemed to say
those things about me, not about art.
With a small twirl, she was out of my hold and I was left staring at an empty canvas. It was as
intimidating as it was exhilarating. I looked around at all the paintings I loved most and the enormity
of creating consumed me. I was putting myself out there like I never had, I was being vulnerable. I
could cock it all up and yet I still wanted to try.
The metaphor wasn’t lost on me.
There were things I wanted to say to her about it, about us, but this slight tickle in my stomach told
me, paint it.
So for the first time in my life, I stepped to the easel and did just that.

I fucked it all up. The shapes were okay, the curves wonky at best and I wasn’t sure whether it could
even pass for her, but I loved it. I loved it because it came from my fingers and was my heart shaped
into some glob on a canvas. I had created something however small in this world. I had created rather
than destroyed.
And it made Filly laugh.
She wasn’t laughing at me. In her own way, it was with me. An intimidating and ruthless savage,
with blood on his hands and sins forming his shadow, couldn’t paint. Not even a lick.
“Okay, give up the goods,” I said over top of a glass of scotch, curious as to what she’d created in
the last hour.
“It’s not my best…” she said but it wasn’t filled with sadness or frustration. “But I kinda like it.”
When she stepped aside my heart clenched. Kinda liked it was something I would say about
French fries or reading the classics. But this?
“It’s amazing,” I breathed.
She’d made my body blue with highlights of white, swirled in like an ocean. The paint was thick,
stark as it rose up from the hash marked canvas. I was bent over a barely formed bench, my back on
display. She’d carved my tattoos out with something thin, making them the splice in my skin I
sometimes felt they were. She’d hinted at the scars with layers of color, making them seem beautiful
rather than deformed.
“You see me,” I said softly.
“I do.” She reached up and cradled my chin, her thumb brushing my cheekbone. The whole world
felt like it revolved around her thumb. There was so much to say that I got choked up. Until paint
smeared wet and cold across my skin. “And I see something on your face.” She laughed.
“Oh, now you’re going to get it.” I darted after her and drug my fingers through the paint as I went.
Filly squealed as I hurtled the bench at the bottom of the bed and grabbed her. My hands on her
waist spun her little body until she puffed onto my down comforter. She struggled beneath me,
giggling, writhing and I pressed against her all the harder. Paint colored her wrists and the pure white
beneath her as she bucked her hips. I pressed against her harder.
She stopped with a heavy sigh and the down cradled her the way I wanted to. I wetted my lips and
let my eyes roam from the stray paint on her forehead to her sea glass eyes. Then to her sinful lips
where the parted, waiting. I bent down, pressing more of my weight against her. She sighed and her
eyes fluttered shut.
I tapped the tip of her nose and drug my finger down to the deep V crowning her pouty lips
leaving blue in my wake. Her fingertips found the contours of my triceps and she traced them feather
light but steady against my skin. I shuddered at the touch then bent down and got the gift of a whisper
breath from her.
She didn’t stop me or turn away, instead she arched her neck, bringing her lips even closer. I
kissed the paint I’d smeared on her skin and it stained my lips. I pressed them to the corner of her
mouth and a faint blue kiss was left in my wake.
Her eyes found mine and there was something new and different about them, some spark that
begged me. I didn’t wait to find out for what.
I kissed Filly. Hard.
My hands slid in different directions, one up to her wrists as I straightened her arms overhead and
the other down her ribs. Her body stretched and rolled with me as her lips tumbled over mine. I
hitched her knee up, and settled into her open legs, the feel of her heel digging into my thigh was the
only thing that grounded me.
Her tongue ran along the seam of my lips begging me to open. The taste of her, the smell of her
filled my senses and I opened my mouth to swallow it all. Our tongues tumbled until she sighed, slid
her hand from mine, and shoved at my shorts.
“Wait,” I gasped.
“What do you mean, wait?”
“I don’t want to rush this,” I answered with another kiss. “We tried that once and it didn’t go so
well.”
“So you want to wait?” She asked almost disbelieving.
“I just want to kiss you like I’m learning how to paint a masterpiece.”
Brye had kissed me until my lips were chapped, raw and blue paint covered not only me but the
blankets and sheets I was wrapped in. The streaks were their own artwork when I woke and reached
for him, pausing to study the cracked paint covering my palm.
I hated myself a little bit for caving. Canvas and paint shouldn’t have been enough for forgiveness.
Not even his sad story earned him a clean slate. But being vulnerable in a world that he needed to be
stone for, and showing me such deep pools of adoration when he obviously didn’t mean to, that was
something I seemed to be a sucker for.
“Morning,” he said as he reached for my hand and laced his equally blue fingers into mine.
“I don’t even get a good morning?” I laughed.
“It’s not that bad, is it?” He used his grip to turn me and press our hands into the pillow beside my
head as he smoothly slid on top of me. “I mean, I get to kiss you.”
He moved slowly, his eyes fixed on my lips as they parted and barely moved with my breath. My
heart thudded against my chest—against his. The whole world slowed and I felt every single
molecule in my body vibrating even as my chest tightened. I could have lived in that moment of
anticipation forever.
Except then I wouldn’t get to kiss him.
That was the other thing I was a sucker for. He had a pillow soft bottom lip that I liked to suck on.
His teeth always found a way to nibble on mine. We knew how to move with each other, he knew how
to steal my breath.
Brye pressed his lips to mine and the anticipation that had been twisted up in my chest unwound,
seeping through my veins like honey. His nose swept along my skin, and though his breath wasn’t the
best this early, when I breathed him in, he still smelled like home.
His hand slid up my thigh and I remembered every touch from last night—half of them I felt as his
palm rubbed over rough, stuck on paint. I’d kicked off my shorts last night, and Brye had explored
every curve and sway of my breasts, but otherwise our make-out session was pretty PG. But now his
hand was tracing the curve of my hip and sliding lower.
I pinched my legs together and tried to swallow. This time this was something heavier. We were
something heavier. If I slept with him this time, it erased everything, the hurt, the pain, the hate, the
history—as short as it may be.
Brye’s fingers pushed in between my legs and slid in the slickness between my thighs then he
crooked a single one up into me. His kisses were long and leisurely just like his strokes. I gasped and
the sound echoed in his warm, open mouth.
“Is this okay?” he asked, his voice feeding into me.
It wasn’t. Not really. Sort of. But it also felt amazing.
“I dunno,” I murmured.
“I can stop.” He was definitely not stopping.
Fuck if I knew whether I wanted him to.
“It’s…” I didn’t finish my sentence as he crooked his finger upwards and started massaging me, a
moan was all I could manage.
When I let out another incoherent sound, he locked his sinful lips back over mine and kept it for
himself.
If kissing him was good, combining it with this would make me lose my mind. My hips shoved up
into his hand, the rough of his palm rubbed on my clit. I shook my head away from his kiss, feeling
like I might suffocate if I didn’t breathe, feeling like I might explode if I didn’t shriek.
“Oh, Filly,” he groaned as he rubbed his steel erection against my thigh.
My hand fell from his sculpted body and I balled the sheets beneath my body in my hand. God, it
was the only thing that kept me earthbound.
“Please,” I begged, but I didn’t know what for.
I wanted the orgasm. I wanted Brye. But I didn’t want to lose my mind completely. Or did I? I’d
lost so much already…
“I’d give you anything if it was mine to give. Just tell me what.” He pressed his lips to my neck as
he slid a second finger into me.
It was the words that got me, not his big thick fingers that dwarfed a paint brush. I wanted to hold
back, to actively choose how I felt about him—so many of my choices had been taken—but my body
only wanted affection and release on the back of that promise.
“Brye.” His name was a whisper, a plea, but I still wasn’t sure what for.
But then the pleasure was claiming me. A buzz, a hum, all pouring thick and slow through my
veins like it was electrified molasses. My fingers hurt where they clenched the sheets, my hips
twinged where they made space for him, but there was a beautiful, golden hue behind my eyelids that
was everything good and delicious.
I whimpered, more wild gasps and lost words than porn star moans, until I could finally find the
shape of his name. When I did he pulled his hand from my trembling sex and ran a single finger coated
in me around my open mouth only to kiss me all over again.
His hand trailed from my lips with a skip and then down my neck and the cotton of my shirt. It
found its way back between my thighs, but it wasn’t tempting me this time. It was at his waistband,
pushing.
My pulse quickened and a full flush burnt my skin it’s fevered crimson. Stop was right there. No
too. But my body would do anything, be anything if only he asked. I closed my eyes and took a deep
breath. The intoxicating scent of him and us and sweat was bewildering, and just like the idiot I was, I
surrendered.
“I’m so hard it hurts,” he murmured where he was bent against my neck.
I shuddered as I felt him between my legs. The head of his cock was right there, the warmth of
skin so close familiar but new, thrilling.
“Well, it looks like I’m interrupting breakfast.” Emmett cleared his throat from a suddenly open
doorframe. “Looks delicious.”
Brye snarled and readjusted himself beneath the covers before flopping beside me. Emmett
looked like he’d been beaten to hell and back. He had a cut on his nose and two dark circles beneath
his eyes. He lifted his chin like it was his natural makeup.
“What the fuck do you want, Emmett?”
“I’m real interested in not getting my throat slit.”
“Then I’d recommend turning the fuck around.”
“Ahhhh but this family likes to watch.” He arched his eyebrow and wore a fuck-all smirk as he
tried to find my body beneath the sheets.
 “Not this,” Brye dismissed him as I tried to hide deeper under the covers.
“Two minutes,” Emmett said as he spun on his heel.
Brye waited for the footsteps to fade before he turned on his side and cradled my face, letting his
hand shove up into my hair. “Two minutes is not enough time for what I have in mind.”
“Two minutes is not enough for me to decide if I want it.”
His face darkened and his eyes darted around my face then the paint streaks surrounding us.
“After everything?”
“Everything is quite a lot don’t you think?”
“I thought…Last night?”
“Last night you showed me your heart was worth my kisses.” I sat up and pressed my lips to his
chest. “But before that…”
“Oh Filly,” he snarled at the challenge. “I’ll show you I’m worth so much more.”

I was left holding onto Brye’s promise all day like a favorite wishing stone. I caressed it, memorizing
the shape of the letters and the weight of it on his lips. I wished for him. For the small bit of home he
seemed to be becoming.
There was no way in hell I was getting my life back, the first lash of that whip tore it from me, but
there was Brye and he was something I wanted so bad that I risked my life like it was poker chips. By
some miracle, all the gambling, hadn’t cost me him.
My hands skated over the sheets, tracing the shadow of us rolling through them before I grabbed
them and stripped the bed. As much as I wanted to sink into them and the memories, we couldn’t sleep
in oil crust. I gathered the royal blue and crisp, clean white up to my chest, ready to soak them but I
couldn’t help myself when I leaned in and sucked in a deep breath that smelled of paint and us.
“You love him, don’t you?” Deirdre’s voice invaded my peace, making my shoulders tense as I
turned.
My skin crawled. She wore a simple, curve-hugging cream sweater dress that made her dark hair
and red lips reminiscent of Snow White. She was beautiful and the way her hips swayed was almost
hypnotic. I could watch her body and forget, then remember that night and a million things I had no
interest in recalling.
“What do you want?” I did what I could to hide behind the bedding.
“You first.”
“Huh?”
“You love him. Even though he hung you up to dry. Even though he fingered me…”
“Well I fingered you too,” I spat. “Sort of. Besides he was on ecstasy.”
“Awe honey,” she stepped closer and placed her hand over her heart, “It’s like the most fucked up
Romeo and Juliet ever.”
“So you think we’re both going to die over this?”
“I certainly hope not.” She held her hand out and inspected her manicure. “That would be so much
less entertaining.”
“You’re disgusting.” I threw down the sheets and my hands balled automatically.
“It’s all relative here. You should know that by now.”
“Slut,” I shot.
“Survivor,” she countered.
She circled me and I felt her eyes sweep down to the bone of me. “I was like you once, entranced
by the dark, in love with the boy beneath. I would have given my life for him. Just like you will for
Brye.”
“I didn’t say I love him.”
“You didn’t have to. You forgave him.” She stopped in front of me and stepped even closer to me.
“You didn’t?”
My words hadn’t been particularly harsh—I mean, my voice had been venomous and her story
short—but apparently they were a sucker punch. Her face contorted as she stepped back from me.
“You don’t know me.” Her voice thinned and betrayed her hurt.
“Same.” I straightened.
“And you don’t know what’s coming.” The click of dress shoes echoed down the hallway and
something flashed behind her eyes.
I prayed it was Brye but somehow knew God didn’t hear my invocation.
Before I had a chance to think through the ramifications of either MacCowan walking through the
door, Deirdre stepped back toward me. Her hand came to my throat again then slid back to the curve
of my neck and pulled me forward. My hands splayed forward but only found her curves, which I
shoved against. She didn’t falter, she didn’t waver, she just…
Kissed me.
Hard.
Her lips were more tentative than I would have guessed considering her fingers were digging into
me. She grabbed my hip just as roughly but her fingers just found their way into my belt loop and held
me tight. Her tongue swept across the seam of my lips and I tried to dart back, but she yanked me back
flat to her. Her chest, her hips, the pure woman-ness of her.
It was different than the dinner party. She wasn’t taking from me, she was tentative in everything
besides keeping me rooted.
“This is quite the afternoon surprise.” It was Connor’s strangely calm voice that that commented
from somewhere nearby, but I couldn’t tell where. Deirdre wouldn’t let me up for air, no matter how
hard I shoved.
She let her hands rove my body, every inch, but the pressure lessened anytime she crossed into
somewhere private. Her lips were taking mine over and over, but she didn’t push past. It didn’t make
sense.
Well, nothing in this godforsaken house did.
I shoved again and this time she stutter-stepped back with a wicked, hungry smile on her face.
“Mmmm, she tastes like cherries,” Deirdre purred as her whole body tensed like she might pounce.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I screamed.
“Nothing besides the ache pulsing between my thighs.” She pressed her hand lewdly between her
thighs and let it hitch up her sweater dress.
“Oh, darling, I can think a few ways to soothe that.” Connor stepped closer to me even though his
words were for her.
My whole world hung on the web of tension woven between us. Who would pull the first string?
What would happen when we were all tugged along?
“I can think of a few things Miss Ryan could do, too.”
“What do you want from me?” My throat choked on the fear.
“To kiss you. To kill you,” he said nonchalantly with his signature shoulder shrug. “Depends on
the day.”
“And today?”
 I held my breath until my chest hurt while I waited for an answer.
“Kill you,” he said simply.
Deirdre stepped back to me. “Awe, Connor don’t ruin the fun.” She reached for the hem of my
shirt and pulled it up. I tried to shove my hands at her to keep it down, but she shot me a look that
made me freeze. My arms fell to the side and she hitched it up then leaned in to lick the swell of my
breasts.
Puke clawed at my throat, but I didn’t give in. I didn’t protest. I couldn’t really explain why
besides that look in Deirdre’s eyes partnered with the words that said she’d been here before. I lifted
my chin and balled my fists at my sides and let her do whatever the hell she wanted. I only wanted it
to be over.
“Mmmmmm,” Connor purred. “That’ll do.” He reached up and tracked one particularly wet trail
across my chest. “That’ll do nicely.”
I closed my eyes and prayed for Brye. When Connor’s hand fell from my body, I cracked a single
eye to see if he was here. If he’d come to rescue me like he had from the men in the basement. I found
Deirdre’s face close to mine uninterested in my skin anymore and a moan frozen on her face.
Connor had positioned himself behind her and was thrusting into her, violent and wild. Her whole
body shook as her sounds turned from silent mouth shapes to full-blown screams. Her ass was
exposed and blanched red beneath Connor’s wicked slap. They were putting on a show between the
lounge chairs in Brye’s room.
But I couldn’t take my eyes off of hers.
There was a vacancy behind them that I hadn’t seen before. Heat lapped at them, her body a slave
to something primal, but it didn’t reach the place she had retreated to. She wasn’t like them, she didn’t
live for this and I could tell. Anyone probably could if they bothered to look. To me though, those
eyes were familiar.
They were the ones that I’d wore more than a few times around Brye.
I stopped in the kitchen to wash the blood from my hands. Filly knew I was a monster, she didn’t need
a reminder. She needed food. Maybe champagne.
Maybe I could drink it off the swell of her breasts…
I’d thought of her all day. The taste of her in the morning when she was a real person in my bed,
kissing me with morning breath while knowing all my secrets. The feel of her body responding to
mine was seared into my palms even as I choked the bastard my father had caught stealing from him.
I thought about choking her.
The million things I’d do to her played on a loop in my head. The anticipation once I got home
made my heart race and my fingers clumsy. I almost dumped her lasagna on the floor. There would be
bright red splotches on the floor, but I only considered how long cleaning them would keep me from
her.
God, I wanted to see her.
I took the stairs two at a time to reach my room.
“Filly,” I yelled. “Filly?”
“Brye?” Her delicate voice came from the bathroom and my heart sank.
I suppose it had each time I’d found her in there, but today, it hurt.
“What did he do?” I snarled as I threw the plates down on the corner of my bed and jogged into
the room.
She looked so small balled in the bathtub beneath the giant stainless steel sacred heart, but she
stood and rolled her shoulders back as she stepped out. Her long, lean legs brought her to me then
stopped her cold. Just out of reach.
“What did he do?” I repeated to the frightened little dove in front of me.
“It was Deirdre and your father,” she spat the words and her shoulders shook.
“Tell me everything.” I stepped to her whether she wanted me or not and cradled her elbows in
my hands. My thumbs rubbed along her skin and goosebumps sprung up in my wake. “What did she
say?” My heart hurdled over the words. “What did he?” I didn’t mean to shake her the slightest bit.
“Uh…” She hesitated she fidgeted in my grasp. “She tried to tell me we were alike. And that I
was doomed because I forgave you. She called us Romeo & Juliet.”
“Tragically beautiful.” I reached up and pushed my hand through her hair.
“I got the sense she was trying to warn me.” She shivered.
“About what?”
“Your father said he wanted to kill me today.” She shrugged as she tried to shake me off.
I studied her for a second before I realized why she wouldn’t fall into my arms. She wore their
touches like I wore the brand on my chest.
“Did he put his hands on you?” The way the fury rumbled in my chest was like the summer storms
that rolled wild into the city, all heat and lightning.
“I think that was part of her plan...”
I closed my eyes and for a second, the woman on woman was so hot my skin flushed, but then the
anger blew back in. King Kong irate over Ann Darrow was nothing compared to me. I was about
ready to beat on my chest then tear the world brick by brick. But I pulled her into me instead.
Filly’s arms wrapped up around my back as she balled her fists into me and buried her face in my
chest. Each small press of her hands, and shift of her head against me, hurt. My cuts and bruises
hadn’t healed—not even remotely—but it was the way she clung to me that really killed. Like she may
not stay afloat otherwise. I’d let her hold me like that forever.
“I’m sorry she touched you. I’m so sorry.” I turned and breathed in her warm scent and pressed
my lips to her shock of sunshine hair.
“She really did seem to think she was helping. Not that licking my breasts is helping...” she joked,
but there was a weight to her words.
“Is it wrong to say that’s hot?” I laughed.
“Yes, you jackass.”
“I can kiss away the memory.” I shoved my other hand up into her hair and cradled her head,
bringing her lips up to meet mine.
“That won’t erase what your dad said.” Her lips brushed mine as she said the words that burned
my insides.
I took a breath and held it, hoping that it would stretch the metal band straining my chest like a
vise. She wiped her face on my chest then blew out a deep breath. All too smoothly she stepped out of
my arms and plopped down on the bed. With her long fingers, she picked at the burnt cheese edges of
her pasta.
“He would have killed me today.” She pulled the top layer of pasta off and started picking it
apart. “I saw it in his eyes. If Deirdre hadn’t turned him on...”
“Fuck.”
He was out for blood. Her blood. The pressure in my chest built slowly at first, almost
unnoticeable until it was racing through me, threatening to explode in my veins. Losing her—even the
thought of losing her—wasn’t something I could suffer. Her life on a scale was something I couldn’t
find the weight to balance. There wasn’t anything valuable enough. Not even my own.
I loved her. It was as simple as that. All the moments she’d weathered and the light she’d still
shone were things I tumbled for. The way she kissed and fought and fucked. Or the way I guessed she
would anyway. They were entrancing, a magic I was sure was made just for me.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I repeated.
Keeping her was selfish. Before, I’d blamed my father, Cole Ryan, circumstance and fate for
putting her beside me but never the one who deserved it. As she scooped up a small bit of sauce and
sucked on her finger with her wide sea glass eyes on me, I admitted it to myself.
Me.
I was the one who had gotten Rosalyn killed and now I was the weight tied to Filly’s toes. I
should have let her go. I should have found a way.
Now I would.
“Filly…” I started.
“You don’t have to say anything, Brye.” She waved her hand and pulled apart another piece of
pasta, chewing on the bubbled cheese. “I’m just going to pray tomorrow is a different day.” I saw
how hard it was for her to swallow the food and the idea.
No. I thought vehemently. Not again.
“I’ll paint my feelings. Some abstracts.” She twisted and reached out for her canvas, her fingers
hovering the way they did, hypnotic as they traced something that only she could see. “I know you like
the Impressionists, Brye, and there are a million Renaissance paintings in here, but I think you’d like
the way abstract feels.”
I nodded because I didn’t know what else to do. Each time she picked at her food, or her voice
fluttered in the room, another brick fell back into place. I had to build the wall back up and keep what
I bled for back behind it.
For her.
A bullshit plan started forming in my mind. Each little detail hit hard and heavy. She was going to
leave me. I was going to give her the means to do it. My broken heart be damned.

I shot off one singular text to seal my fate before my salvation and damnation called out.
“Brye?”
“Down here,” I answered as I slid my phone in my pocket and looked up.
The silver sequins danced across Filly’s toned thighs as she came down the steps and for a single
moment, the world stopped and highlighted that beautiful swatch of her skin. I would remember the
rich pale of her skin, the freckles here and there, all revealed by the sway of the fabric. I would
remember the way she made me feel—just a boy watching the most beautiful girl—with a walloping
heart and heat washing into my stomach.
“Do I look all right?” she asked as she stepped toward me, her smoky makeup and artfully pinned
hair bewitching me in a different but equally wonderful, awful bone shaking way.
“Yes,” I breathed. “Better than all right.”
“I’d say you clean up nice, but you wear a suit most days.” She smoothed my lapels then
sharpened my shoulders. “I honestly prefer you in a t-shirt and jeans.”
“I prefer you naked.” I fingered the edge of the fabric I’d borrowed from Deirdre’s closet. She
shivered and stepped back from me and folded in on herself. “Too soon?”
She rubbed her hands up and down on her arms and flashed me a weak smile. “They did a number
this afternoon.” She shrugged.
“Sorry.” I reached for her hand and she let me take it then pull her toward the front door.
“Just the club, Brye.” My father’s voice emanated from the shadows at the top of the stairs. “I’ll
be watching.” Two of his goons accompanied by Deirdre stepped out and I pulled Filly to me.
“She’s not coming. No fucking way,” I roared.
“She wants to,” he said nonchalantly. “And since she didn’t get her fill this afternoon, I thought I’d
let her try this evening.”
“Fuck you.”
My thumb rubbed on the back of Filly’s hand as I pulled her in close.
“We’ll see where the night leads.” He brushed me off with the wave of his hand.
“See ya there.” Deirdre drug her finger first across my chest then Filly’s. I grabbed her hand as
soon as it touched Filly and squeezed until her bones protested. “Ooooo foreplay. Tonight’s going to
be interesting.”
I dropped her hand and let her sashay out the front door after the men who’d be watching us.
“Forget about them.” I pulled Filly in tighter even though she didn’t need me to warm her
shoulders against the summer heat. My body was made to blanket hers and I naturally slid around her
shoulders. I swept the street as soon as we were on it and found only the three people that left the
house with us.
“Cool car.” A little light sparked behind Filly’s eyes as her tentative fingertips reached for the
contours in front of her.
 “That’s not a car, it’s a ‘67 Mustang Convertible.” I laughed as I held the door for her.
“Boys with their toys.” She rolled her eyes as she stepped in.
“Girls and their paintbrushes.” I bent down and brushed my thumb along her vivid red lips.
The tinge of twilight made it hard to see the blush on her cheeks, but I knew it was there. It was a
reassuring bit of rosy warmth before my own personal long cold night. I missed her as soon as I
stopped touching her, even if it was just to circle the hood. When I got into the driver’s seat, I revved
the engine and pulled out from our drive. Filly giggled into the wind and tossed her head back and her
hands up.
“I shouldn’t have done my hair.” She pulled in her arms and looked over.
When my eyes met hers, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I was glad—it would hide the shock
of color as best as possible. It would help her disappear into the night. So I just smiled, revved my
engine and watched the small wisps framing her face whip in the warm night air.
A date! I shouldn’t have been excited, but there I was pressing my hand to my wild heart where it hit
my chest in time with the bass playing deep in the steel jungle of downtown Chicago.
The man I caught glimpses of in the strobe lights was different once again. The broken boy was
gone, the monster had retreated back beneath the bed, leaving someone new beside me. He seemed
content if maybe a little sad tonight and I found myself enjoying cheering him up. I had since we
abandoned the lasagna on his bed and went out.
“Body shot?” I asked as I bent over his shoulder and slid my hand down his chest with a big,
bright smile on my face.
“Off your body?” He rubbed his hand up my arm and palmed my shoulder, playing with the
spaghetti strap of my liquid silver dress.
I pivoted in front of him and held up the tequila. He reached for it, but I pulled back and slid the
shot glass into the swell of my cleavage. His wicked smirk spread slowly like honey across his face
as he wordlessly leaned down. A soft, silky kiss whispered on my breast just before he mouthed the
glass and drug me to him. He tipped the shot back as he pulled me onto his lap as I watched the
defined muscles of his neck and jaw.
He kept a firm hand on my hip as he pulled the shot glass out.
“I’d like to take one from here, but…” His hand roved up my inner thigh and I squirmed, giggling
as I shoved his hand away.
“Maybe someday.”
His eyes flickered with something I couldn’t place, but then he smiled.
“Come on,” I said as I slid off his lap and pulled him up with me, leaving his watchdogs behind.
Deirdre had disappeared ages ago.
He drug his feet as I wove through the crowd to get to the dance floor. I turned to face him and he
was so intently focused on me, I blushed. I shied away from him but his hands found the last hint of
skin on my thigh before my sequined hem and he used that sensitive hold to keep me close.
Even here he was an odd sense of home.
I thought about pressing up on tiptoe to say something, but I couldn’t shout those words over the
music. Not the first time. He needed to hear me when I said I forgave him.
For the time being, my body was the only thing I could use to explain. I pressed it to him and let it
glide with the hypnotic rhythm of the music. He barely moved his body but his hands roamed over me,
studying every inch, every move. His eyes were hooded and the deep shadows of the dance floor hid
his icy blue eyes from me, but I could feel that he was hungry.
It was like that first night.
The music slowed and the strobe stopped, giving way to a rich blue light that swept over the
floor, alternating shadow with the color of midnight. Brye turned me and pulled my hips up against
him, his hands wove along my arms and he laced his hands into both of mine. He folded around us and
each inch of his body pressed to mine. His lips were just to the side of my head, close enough to
whisper, but he just kissed me, mussing my hair.
 Then he started to dance.
His body rolled against mine, making me move as he did, smooth and sultry, in a rhythm that was
just ours. The music faded out, indistinct behind us except for the boom of the bass surrounding us.
The world consisted of his breath on my skin, his heart hitting my rib cage. I closed my eyes and
rolled back against his chest, pulling him tighter.
Brye’s lips moved down my neck in time with the distant, driving beat. His hand moved ours up.
When he kissed the curve of my shoulder and hooked his thumb into the deep neck of my dress and
pulled it lower, I shivered and surrendered even further.
“God, you’re perfect.” His voice was the incarnation of my goosebumps.
“So far from it,” I said as we danced, unconcerned with how much of my body was on display.
“No, Filly.” He kissed my neck roughly and leaned away to let him. “You don’t understand.” He
dropped his full hand into the neck of my dress and palmed my breast. “Perfect for me.”
I coaxed him to squeeze.
He groaned and ran his nose up my neck and then along the curve of my ear. The roll of his hips
changed and I couldn’t help myself when I moaned. The sound was swallowed by the music and for a
moment I was sad he didn’t know what he did to me.
But then he used his grip to turn me. His lips found mine as his hands and hips pulled me back into
the intimate rhythm. I slid out of his grip and wrapped my arms around his neck, keeping his lips to
mine as I slid on either side of his thigh.
We were dry humping. There was no other way to say it. And I wanted it. The friction, the heat,
the feel of his body against mine. Not to mention the pressure that had built in the pit of my stomach.
I kissed him harder and pressed my tongue against his lips begging for entry. He gave it to me and
tangled with me tenfold.
His stiffness pressed hard into my hip and his hand slid underneath the fabric of my dress and
cupped my ass. He kissed me harder as he dug his fingertips into me, too close to my thong to be
anything but a sign of what was to come.
I could stop him again. I told myself I could even as my head rolled back and I gave him access to
my jaw. My neck. His fingers clenched my skin, he nibbled on my bottom lip. I could keep this PG,
well PG-13, and keep what little bit of choice I had for myself.
But he kept kissing me.
And his kisses were so good.
They turned the world gold and sharpened the deep neon of the lights all at once. There was no
darkness, only glitter and sweeping rainbow. It was breathtaking.
Just like every move of his hands, every sweep of his tongue. Each crept closer to that sweet spot.
His fingers were awfully close to where they’d been last night and I wanted to know if he could make
the world tie-dye all over again but in public. His kisses were a little more difficult, they were hitting
a spot a bit higher, a spot I was trying hard to keep from him.
When he purred into my mouth and I went weak-kneed, I knew just how awful I was doing at both.
My fingers dug into his back and he growled all over again.
“I have to take you outside.”
I closed my eyes and nodded. It was all I could manage.
We were a tangle of limbs and rushed heartbeats as he pushed me backward. All too soon we
were swallowed by the real shadow of a dark hallway. He pressed my body to the wall then his
muscled body to mine. There was both a safety and abandon with the weight of him on me. I kissed
him hard, still tasting the hint of tequila and me on his lips.
 “I need you,” I murmured without thinking.
“Oh baby, I know what you need.” Something was different in his voice, but I was too flustered to
tell what.
Our bodies bumped down the hall until my body was pressed against the crash bar of an exit door.
The small of my back and the nothing small about him, pressed us out into the alley. The dim street
light warmed the alley until the cool of the bricks chilled my bare back.
He kissed me and kissed me and kissed me again. My lips were sore and raw, but I didn’t stop, I
couldn’t. Not even when the two men stepped out discreetly into the alley to keep watch on us. I was
left gasping the moment he let me come up for air.
Brye pressed in close, his lips on my ear. “What I’m about to tell you is going to freak you out,”
he murmured before kissing me again. “I need you to listen.”
I tensed in his arms, but he kissed me again, and let his nose trace along my skin in that seductive
way he had, breathing me in as if I was better than air itself. I melted a little and when he felt it, he
continued.
“I need you to be loud with me, moan, cry out…I need you to say my name, scream it if you feel
so inclined.” He kissed me on the corner of my mouth.
“I…” My voice trailed off.
He pressed his lips to me again and my hands followed the line of his suit jacket, hesitant but
hungry to take it off.
“I’m not going to fuck you. I want to, but I’m not going to. You’ll still be loud, right?”
I cocked my head in question and my brow furrowed.
“I know this doesn’t make sense, but I need you to trust me.” His hand came to my shoulder and
gently pushed me backward in the alley.
“I don’t know how to make those noises.” I blushed and turned away from him a tiny bit.
“Let it out, Filly. Everything you’ve ever felt for me, my body.” He pressed harder, urging me
behind a dumpster. “Show me one last time what this could have been.”
My eyes whipped up and I almost questioned him, but he lifted the pad of his thumb to trace my
lips and I stilled. I surrendered to him.
“Make the noise,” he commanded softly.
So I did. Even though my heart wasn’t in it. He pulled out his cell phone and with barely more
than a glance down, started recording my ridiculous Harry Met Sally vocals. When he killed the
recording and started playing it, he pressed a finger to my lips and my sounds cut off. Well, the ones I
was making anyhow. My recorded ones played too loudly too close to my ear.
The goons that had followed us out into the alley were full of husky chuckles, but it was the slow
and steady click of Brye’s fingers on the touchscreen of his phone that drew my attention. Eventually,
he found the right screen and I was close enough to read what he must have written earlier in his notes
section.

I’m doing this for you. It’s what I should have done from the beginning.

Run. Don’t look back. Not now. Not ever.

Go to Hawthorne Racecourse.

Hide.
 Someone you trust will be there soon.

What? I almost yelled it at him, but he pushed his finger back against my lips. My eyes snapped to
his and all the ice in them had melted. A sorrowful smile hung loosely on his lips. His lips that
silently mouthed Please. He was doing this so I could leave. So I could be free. It was a head start
and the only one I’d likely get.
Fear squeezed on my heart—for him, for me, and at what shape the world would take if we were
apart—but then again so did truth. I wasn’t choosing myself over us, I was choosing life over death.
And Brye was choosing me, choosing this, over his family.
He was giving me back my right to choose anything at all.
In that moment he became the man I’d always wanted him to be. All his pieces fell into my hands
and he felt real and heavy and whole. He felt like mine. But now that I had them, I couldn’t keep them.
His heart—his sacrifice—deserved more than that.
I had my choice back and I knew the one I had to make. But in that moment, I wanted nothing more
than to spend my choice on the one thing that had really come to matter.
I wanted to choose him.
I saw it glint in her eyes. The protest. The reluctance. She froze and it made my heart go a little
apeshit.
For a split second, I contemplated going with her and getting out of this. Whether it was worth it
and if I even could. When the answer was no you can’t, not if you want her to have a head start, not if
you want her safe, the same sorrow-filled resignation colored my face that did hers.
I twisted us so she was completely hidden behind the dumpster and from the view of my dad’s
men. Taking one last, loving, longing look at her, I tucked the hair I’d been responsible for mussing up
behind her ear and jerked my chin down into the dark of the alley. Filly closed her eyes and leaned
into my palm, letting out one soul-shuddering sigh before her eyes opened and determination replaced
all the things she held for me hidden behind that beautiful smile. I recognized her fight from the times
she spat at me, the times she kicked and punched and fought with me and I smiled. She would get
through this. She would live. And that was worth it.
Go, I mouthed. I thought about adding three other words too, but I just managed a halfhearted
smile instead. Pain seized in my chest when she finally did.
She was the bright spot. And whether I had twenty-four hours or twenty-four years left on this
planet, she would stay that way. Shimmering silver and sunshine blonde disappearing down the alley
without a single look back but staying in my heart all the same.
When she disappeared around the corner, the world lost its sharp edges and all of its color
drained out, but it was right again. I was on steady, steeled footing. There would be no vivid blood
spatter on snow unless I was doing the battering.
If you love something, set it free…
I sucked in a deep breath, accepting the consequences both good and bad of that universal truth. I
couldn’t regret losing her even if it hurt. I swallowed the sting and so much of my pride as I sent the
text message I’d typed out in the club and kept hidden on my phone.
The message that was likely my death sentence.
My father would rip me to shreds for this. For all of it. But I knew she was worth it. She’d shown
me that I hadn’t ripped out my heart and shattered my soul when Rosalyn died after all. My heart had
gone into hiding, waiting for a savior. My soul...well the missing pieces had been scattered to the
wind that ran through her restless fingers. She’d picked them up and kept them safe for me.
The sound on my phone cut off, leaving the alley empty except for the echoes of my breath, heavy
and hard. The air stuck in my lungs. I had meant to play it out longer, but I’d been lost in my thoughts
and let the recording run out.
“Finished without a bang.” One of the goons behind me spoke up.
“Never known him not to please a woman.”
I stayed frozen listening to their shit for a few heartbeats more, knowing full well it was all I had.
I pictured the look on her face when she’d pushed that shot down between her breasts. She’d been so
happy, hope had danced in her eyes. It was something I hadn’t seen much of but something I’d become
addicted to.
Shoes shuffling on the small gravel and grit of the street made my body tense. I had a few deep
breaths to say a prayer to whatever power in the universe that might still listen to a dark, fallen angel
like me.
“What’s happening?”
“Brye?”
The moment their footsteps froze I clenched my fists.
“Where in the fuck is she?”
“You tricked us?”
I wheeled on the first one and my fist crunched into his face before he realized. He stumbled into
the wall, holding his jaw. The other one cheap shot my kidneys then wrapped his arms around me. I
crashed my heel into his instep and he bellowed but didn’t let go. The other asshole recovered and
barreled at us both. We crashed backward and the man behind me broke my fall except for where my
head snapped back and split against the concrete.
There was the familiar warmth that came with blood seeping from my skin. It was something I’d
felt enough to know that the throb alternated with the crack of pain would be achy and make me
woozy, both of which I couldn’t be right now.
I sucked in a deep breath and kicked with all my might. The guy catapulted off me and chattered
into the dumpster behind us. I threw my elbow back into the gut behind me. He let go just long enough
for me to shove up and reel through the alley before the onslaught began again.
Punches landed like polka dots on my body and did what I could to land the same wild jabs back.
I kicked and scratch and fought with the abandon of a dead man. Eventually their assault and the
thump and thwack against the walls and the dumpster all felt the same. I was numb except for the
familiar feeling of blood.
It wasn’t just coming from the back of my head anymore but the re-opened wounds on my back
and the fresh brand on my chest. I was warm and amped up, but both had me teetering on the edge. I
was going to fade out and surrender to them. To death. Nothing burned that hot without disintegrating
completely.
They came at me again and again and I felt myself so much closer to the edge. When one finally
had the time to pull a weapon on me the world wobbled. It was the ghost of Filly’s hands that
steadied me.
I grabbed his wrist and pulled it toward me, cementing the barrel of the gun to the seeping blood
of my chest. Without hesitating, I swung my arm up from beneath us with every ounce of superhuman
strength I had left. I crashed into his elbow and felt the fibrous snap a second before I heard it. His
bones were headed in the wrong direction and his girlish screech said how very far out of place I’d
set them.
There was a glimpse of golden sunshine in that moment—or at least I thought that was what I saw
before I realized the color came from the high beams of a car—and it was enough to cling to. To run
toward. It was only seconds before a bullet whizzed by, no doubt intended for my shoulder or thigh so
my father could plan something infinitely worse.
I ran faster.
All too soon the whomp from lost blood blared in my ears and chopped at my gate. I couldn’t
keep this up, not even for her. I turned a corner and found the wide open of a city park. There were a
few trees, some baseball diamonds, and an elegant garden just on the opposite side of a hip high
metal fence. I used my grip between the spiked points to help hurdle up and over, landing with a soft
thump as I rolled onto the manicured green grass.
I stared up at the pinkish hue of the cloud cover above the city wishing that I could have seen the
stars. Or sunrise. Something to remind me that real color and wonder still existed in the world.
Instead, the constant whomp, whomp, whomp kept me company until the world muddied and
everything went black.
I couldn’t look back as I hurried down the alley or hailed the cab. I couldn’t look back and see Brye
because every ounce of confidence I had would waver. I would go back to him. I wanted to. With
every little bit of my being.
Even when I stood outside of a cab, after spending the money Brye had pushed into the hidden
pocket of my dress, looking up at the empty grandstand of the track, I wanted to look back. To go
back. I had a feeling I wouldn’t like what I found.
The thought choked me up, tears clouding my vision of the haunting building in front of me. Fear
and hurt mixed up with my gratitude. This was supposed to be my rescue from some unknown hero
but, with Brye behind me, it felt wrong. Warped. The racetrack was no castle, and Brye was no white
knight and I didn’t really deserve to be rescued. But then again, I’d never wanted the fairy tale.
I wanted a bad boy, a villain, and when I got him, he was so much more, so beautiful and tragic
and complex that he’d altered who and what I was. I tried to shove him aside along with the tears
falling down my cheek. I squared my shoulders against the haunting building and did the only thing left
to do—follow his instructions. The instructions he’d likely paid the highest price for.
I hid.
And to honor him and smooth the terror inside me, each time I got comfortable enough to feel my
eyelids sag, I moved again. If the neon bar signs weren’t buzzing in the background, I would have
figured the place was abandoned. The stains on the carpets and the chips in the fiberglass seats
looked as worn as I felt.
When a booming echo shook the very foundation of the building, I gasped as I flattened to the bar I
was hiding behind. There were very deliberate, clipping footfalls—at least two sets—but whoever
they belonged to was silent as the grave.
Brye would have called out. I knew it. But deep down I also knew he wasn’t coming for me. And
that I needed to move my ass.
I slid my heels off and held them in my hand as I crawled out from behind the bar and toward the
wall of glass windows with the view of the track. There was a brightly illuminated EXIT sign a little
way down and to the left. Though it was in the direction of the footsteps, I didn’t think I had a choice.
My knees hurt with each sharp fiber of the gritty carpet. When a tall, white column blocked me
from view, I rose on my rickety legs. Pins and needles poked at every inch of me as I stretched and I
had to bite my lip as I pressed against the column, feeling the cracks of the plaster beneath my
fingertips.
I steadied myself with a few deep breaths. I thought about my mom, my dad, Uncle Horse and
Conrad, too. There were so many things I wished I’d said to them, so many secrets I wished we’d
unearthed. I thought about Brye. About the ugly miraculous gift he turned out to be.
It was his strength that pushed me toward that door, fast as the wind. I crashed into it, feeling the
crunch of my body and the hiss of the men behind me. The concrete steps ripped and pulled at the
pads of my feet until I slid between the white rails of the track. The soft dirt puffed up around me,
staining my ankles and calves with the dry dust that had been baking in the hot summer sun.
 When I reached the second rail and sprinted through the infield, I focused on the dilapidated
stables past the track. There were at least a dozen, and there would be so many stalls inside. I ran
until I burst into one, the dirt more rough with straw strewn about but neither stopped me.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught not one or two shadows crossing the field behind me but
four. Three hulking ones with a tiny one sandwiched in between. I yanked on a far stall door and slid
in. I cowered in the close corner, tucked underneath a feed cage. And I waited. With a hand over my
nose and mouth, using everything at my disposal to dampen any sound that came from me.
The footsteps drew closer, now separate and menacing. Tears pooled in the corners of my eyes
and the whole world went a little blurry. This was real fear, the kind that changed the shape of my
skeleton and tore at my soul.
I was going to die. I knew it.
Those moments with Brye and Connor had been scary, but I knew I had a shield. Now I was out in
the open, alone and unprotected, with reality raining down on me.
I was going to die without saying and doing and painting and loving…
“Filly,” a voice rasped. A voice I knew better than my own.
I shot up, my insides careening just as wildly as my wobbly legs. I cracked my shoulder on the
feed cage and stumbled into the wooden gate, but there on the other side, the most beautiful blue eyes
I’d ever seen were waiting.
My words choked in my throat. On the happiness, on the terror, on the past and the present. On
fate itself, but I managed a single, small whisper.
“Mom?”

Relief hit me like a wave and pummeled me back down to the floor. Sobs shook me before I even
fully processed what was happening.
They were here and that was all the deepest base of me needed to know.
“Shhhhh, Filly Bean,” my dad murmured in my ear as he wrapped his strong body around me. I’d
taken for granted the haven his hugs could be. I knew that now.
“Are you okay?” My mom was right on the other side of me, pressing her flutter kisses to every
inch of my head.
I couldn’t do anything but choke on the emotion. Comfort. Solace. Gratitude. Anger. And a longing
so deep and so desperate I couldn’t describe the depths. They were here. The whole rat pack of
bastard-ass liars that I loved dearly was here. And Brye was not.
My dad picked me up and kept me cradled to his chest and stepped out of the stall. My sobs shook
us both.
“What did they do to you?” Uncle Horse asked as he pushed my hair behind my ear. I jerked away
from him, feeling the ghost of Brye with the intimate movement. “Did they hurt you?”
“Did they hurt me?” I shot him a look. “Of course they hurt me. And touched me and tried to kill
me.” I sniveled and shoved at my dad’s chest. “But they didn’t lie to me.” I pushed against him again
and this time he placed me on my tiptoes.
“We didn’t—”
“I know you didn’t.” I coolly crossed my arms and lifted my chin. Tears still puddled in the corner
of my eyes. “You’ve been lying to me my entire life. You made me think I was safe and the world was
good. I would have been different. I wouldn’t have come here…” I choked on the thought as much as I
did the sob swelling up in my throat.
 “If you’d just done as you were told—”
“No,” I spat, cutting off my dad. “Don’t even.”
“Filly Bean…” Uncle Horse tried to soothe me too.
“I thought it was a silly rule, some place you’d rather I didn’t see.” I stepped back from all of
them. “Why? Why did you lie to me? Did you think I’d love you less?” I took a breath and stared them
down in the barely-there light. “Did you think I wouldn’t see the good in you? I could have forgiven it
all—the drugs, the murder, even the sex with each other,” I gagged, “if only it had come from you.”
“Who did it come from?” My dad’s voice was as dark as the shadow he’d retreated into. It was
the voice of a cold-blooded killer.
“That’s all you care about right now?” I swallowed back bile.
“Filly Bean, it’s such a complicated story to tell…” My mom started.
“It started when we were eleven,” Uncle Horse added.
“Who told you these things?” My dad’s voice still had a roil and seethe that scared me.
“Filly,” Uncle Conrad started with a sigh. “I remember the moment I found out. Far more often
then I should. Finding out what came before made me sick.” He was the one that stepped away from
the small horseshoe of my family and set his big hands on my shoulders. “But then I looked deeper
and saw what made up their hearts. Of anyone I know, you see beneath, Filly. You see everything.”
As he plied me with honesty, I thought again of Brye. Of how I’d seen him tonight. A sexy man
who was more tempting than blank canvas and ice cream, who was sacrificing for me, who had
protected me, who had felt like so much more. I had seen so much more than met the eye.
“I know. Even furious I knew. But I deserved to know what came before me. I deserved the
chance to see what was deeper.” Why hadn’t they trusted me? “The way he told me almost broke me.”
My words similarly crumbled.
“Who was it?” My dad tried to soften his voice, but I knew the sound and shape of true
ruthlessness now.
I swallowed the jagged pill that was every emotion churning in my stomach. “It was Connor
MacCowan.” I looked my dad dead in the eye when I said it.
“I’ll kill him. I should have killed him.” The way his words squeezed through gritted teeth,
menacing and dark, I believed him.
And I couldn’t bring myself to protest. I wanted Connor dead. Not because of the things he’d said
to me, or even because his foul hands had run across my body—though those things helped—but
because of all he’d done to Brye.
Brye, my lost forever, Brye… The tears pricked at the corners of my eyes again.
“Cole,” my mom darted past me and pulled on my dad. “Not now, not like this.” She handled him,
unafraid.
In a world full of killers and questions with no answers, my mom was still my mom. Her
shoulders back, her warmth spilling out just because it had to. My dad was being overly protective.
Horse and Conrad were playing peacemaker, taking their cues from my parents. They were the same.
But that didn’t change that they had lied. And that it was me that had changed.
I cleared my throat and felt the family ice filter into my veins just before I spoke.
“I don’t care what you do to Connor, Dad, but his son is mine.”
“Call 911, I think he’s dead.” A nondescript voice was pulling me from myself and back into the faint
pinks and gold of sunrise.
“It’s always the joggers that find the body,” another said. “What do you say to 911?”
I groaned and pressed up to sitting. The first thing I noticed was the flat pale of the day, the
soundless way a day without Filly greeted me. But then the shrieks of the two women crouched
nearby pierced through that deafening silence.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I snapped. “Don’t call the cops.” God knew there were enough dirty ones on
that payroll that I’d be dead in a matter of minutes. “I’ll take care of myself. I always have,” I added
as an afterthought.
I patted around for my cell phone and flipped to the only number I could trust. At first, it rang and
rang but at the last moment…
“Hello?” It wasn’t the voice I was expecting.
“Where’s Emmett?”
“I don’t want to know.”
“I need him.”
“I’ll help you.”
“I can’t trust you,” I snapped.
“But you know you can kill me.”
My stomach knotted. In my current state, I didn’t know if I could. But if Emmet even questioned
me like he’d been doing...
“Fine, meet me at Hawthorne. One hour.”
The line went dead and I knew that was the only guarantee I’d get.

There were small bare footprints in the dirt of the far side of the track, headed toward the stable. Four
sets followed and it made my heart ricochet off my chest.
I followed them into the stables until they disappeared then I leaned against the stall and slid
down the wood. My head rolled back and I blew out a deep and heavy breath. She was gone, just like
she was meant to be. I sat next to the last ghostly shadow of hers, grateful that her parents had been
close after I’d pushed Filly’s impounded Charger into the lake.
“Good Christ you look terrible,” Deirdre said from the open doorway.
“It’s been a rough week or two.” I didn’t bother opening my eyes.
“I hear love is a battlefield.”
I smirked in spite of this shit storm. She reached her hand out and I took it, letting her pull me up
to my feet.
“You really do look like hell.”
“I feel like it too.”
I glanced down and the amount of blood that spotted the white shirt I was wearing. It was nothing
compared to the shredded destruction I was becoming inside. Where was she? Was she safe? Did she
miss me? Could I see her again? Had I really done the right thing? The questions were spinning a lot
like my head. The first aide that I needed was becoming something far more complex.
Deirdre and I walked side by side toward the bathrooms at the back of the track and my eyes
scanned the stables where I’d sinned far too frequently. Did setting Filly free here erase any of the
wrongdoing? Did it mop up any of the blood I’d spilled? I couldn’t stop myself from recalling each
spatter, each murder as Deirdre held my blazer and I stripped off my shirt then tried to wash the rust
color stains out.
I looked over to my odd companion and noticed how different she looked this morning. Something
heavy sat on the line of her face. Her face that was pointed away from me, giving me privacy despite
the times we’d been together.
“Why are you here?” I asked as I shook the water from my hands and leaned on the porcelain
basin.
“I have a soft spot for lost little girls in love,” she answered with a sorrowful smirk.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I stood to my full height and puffed up my chest where my arms
crossed it.
“She loves you.” Deirdre looked like she was going to reach out and slap me. “Filly loves you
and maybe I finally decided that was worth fighting for.”
“But why?”
“Why did you?” she countered then turned away from me, effectively ending the conversation.
I watched her as I wrung out my shirt. I didn’t want to trust her motives, but here in this small tack
room, she didn’t seem to be a predator. She didn’t seem to be hiding. She perched against a nearby
saddle and tucked my jacket into her chest. She seemed smaller than I remembered.
She turned under my scrutiny and leveled her gaze at me. There was no wall behind her eyes, just
an earnestness that I felt compelled to trust.
“What now?” she asked.
“I have to find a way out of town. Get as far away from here as possible.” I dropped my gaze to
my hands and snapped my shirt open. It wasn’t much better. “Maybe Canada.” I started to look around
for an alternate.
I skipped down the stairs and out into the straw walkway. I felt Deirdre’s rage follow me down
the stairs before I heard her stomp after me.
“You’re not going to go to her?” she shrieked.
I shot her a deathly glare over top of the chest I started digging in. “No,” I said sharply.
“Why in the fuck not?” she shrieked as she lunged at me. She shoved at my chest and I wheeled
back. “Why in the hell wouldn’t you?”
I didn’t even acknowledge her, I just kept digging for a shirt that didn’t draw the attention of
bloodstained tie-dye. She didn’t understand. She was selfish just like me, well like I’d been.
“Come the fuck on, Brye. She loves you, you love her.”
“That’s not all that matters,” I snapped as I found a dusty black t-shirt and shook it before pulling
it over my head. It was a little too tight, but I swung my arms and flexed to stretch it out.
“It’s the only thing that matters,” she spat as she shoved my jacket against my chest and started to
walk out.
“Deirdre, stop,” I called out. “Deirdre.” I ran after her and slid in the loose dirt as I got in front of
her. “Stop. I have my reasons, you know I do.”
“What are they?” She crossed her arms and looked down her nose at me.
“Death is my shadow, my constant companion and I won’t make her live in the dark. She deserves
better than that.” I took my jacket and shoved it in a trash can a little harder than necessary. “She
deserves better than me.”
“And?” She didn’t flinch.
“You know what kind of hell I’m about to face. What will rain down on me.”
Everything about Deirdre’s demeanor made the questions run rampant through my head again. Was
she my light in the dark? Could she face the storm? I’d decided no for her. I’d decided no because she
was worth so much more.
“And?”
“Look, Deirdre, I don’t even know where she is.” I sighed and started to walk backward out of
the barn. “Are you going to help me or not?”
She stayed put, arms crossed, chin high. I rolled my eyes and turned around, wondering why I’d
ever let myself think she could be helpful.
“I do,” she called after me and I froze. “I know where she is.”
My heart went as still as the rest of me.
“I went to the club last night to help her. She asked me once before and I laughed in her face. I
wasn’t going to do it again.”
“You were going to help her leave?” Even with Filly gone, anger swelled up inside me.
“I saw your father’s eyes...” She trailed off, knowing that was enough of an explanation. “I wasn’t
going to let her die.”
“Why?” I asked, disbelieving.
“I have my reasons.”
“And what happened? What stopped you?” I searched her face, her eyes, her body for any hint that
she was screwing with me.
“You,” she said simply. “You love her. And I just got this feeling you were going to beat me to the
punch.”
“So...?”
“So, I waited out front in a cab. I watched her leave.”
She should have sucker punched me. It would have felt better. And I probably would have been
able to keep breathing.
“You...” I couldn’t get the words out.
“Followed her,” she finished.
My mouth went dry and my hands hurt from how tight they were balled at my side. Filly was
within reach. I could have her back. God did I want her. My body already seemed to be moving
toward her. It was my brain that kept reminding me of all the reasons this was bad. And wrong. And
cruel.
And the only thing I really wanted.
I peered into the darkness just beyond the hotel and I swore I saw someone there, tall and lanky like a
cat. My family scuttled me in so fast that I didn’t get to look a second time. I let out a deep breath, but
it wasn’t relief, it was exhaustion. Exasperation even.
They made me feel like a child and I just wasn’t anymore. I’d never meant to grow up, never
planned on it anyways. This trip was supposed to be about spreading wings, but now, with them wide
open and surviving a little damage, they felt unfurled but clipped. I listened to them speak to the desk
clerk, my mom and Conrad all golden charm despite the clerk’s bubble gum smacking apathy. Their
words turned into a monotonous whomp in the background. People seemed to move in slow motion as
my whole world started to suck back into the size of a pin drop.
My stomach roiled.
“Come on, Filly Bean.” My dad grabbed my shoulder and pulled me toward the elevator.
“Stop.” I ducked out from under his arm and rolled away. “And don’t call me Filly Bean.”
“Excuse me?” My dad stepped back and looked at me like I was a puzzle he’d put together once
but couldn’t quite solve now.
“I’m not a kid.”
“You’ll always be my kid.”
I rolled my eyes and shoved my hands on my hips as I planted myself in the lobby.
“Look, Filly, I know this has been hard but…”
“You don’t know anything,” I snapped.
“I know that we love the Kardashians because family drama is juicer than a T-bone, but may I
suggest we have this discussion somewhere a bit more private.” Uncle Conrad arched his eyebrow
and made a sweeping gesture toward the open elevator.
I squared my shoulders and walked beside my dad, cool, calm and collected. He seemed to stomp
the slightest bit.
“Sweetheart, we’ve all been here—”
“I know.” I turned toward my mom as I cut her off. “They told me in such exquisite detail.”
My mom closed her eyes and tilted her head back, swallowing a huge lump in her throat. My dad
couldn’t look at me. I had to suck in a deep breath through my nose, let it fill my ribs and swell my
insides before I pushed all the toxic crap back out.
When the elevator dinged, I felt it in my teeth.
I sucked in another deep breath as I followed my parents dutifully out of the elevator even though I
had to bite my cheek as I did. When the door at the end of the hallway beep-beeped and flashed green,
we filed in. I hung back and leaned against the door as it closed, trying to wade through the crushing
wave of emotion that seemed to keep coming. Over and over and over again.
“You and me,” Uncle Horse murmured from nearby.
I opened my eyes to find him watching me as he leaned up against the wall right next to me. His
big feet were perpendicular to mine, dwarfing the pointy toes of my stilettos. He had always been the
one I ran to. The one that seemed to feel as much as I did and often all at once. His barely-there
serene smile eased the storm inside me.
He jerked his chin and I nodded. I followed him through the perfect suite, trying not to think of
how the decadently carved wood furnishings reminded me of a bedroom that now seemed a million
miles away and man that had slipped through my fingers. Only the click of a bedroom door shutting
behind me snapped me out of it.
“Let me have it.” He flexed his fingers then as he sagged onto the dresser against the bedroom
wall.
“I don’t want to let you have it. I don’t want to let anyone have it.”
“So why are you giving them a hard time?”
“It wasn’t easy there.” I swallowed as I thought back to the basement, the blood, the dinner party.
“What did they do?”
“You don’t wanna know,” I said with a shrug.
“You’d be surprised.” Horse smiled when I looked up and there was a glint of mischief in his
eyes. I recognized it from the once or twice I’d been okay with the dirtier side of that life.
“How’d you make it through?”
“I don’t even know where to start.” I walked past him and plopped onto the bed, pulling the
comforter up and over my shoulders.
“You can start by telling me about the boy.” He only shifted on the dresser to face me rather than
sit sideways.
There was a dull ache in my chest at the mere suggestion of Brye. It wasn’t the dagger I expected,
more like a spoon pressing its dull edge against the exposed muscle of my heart.
“What makes you think there’s a boy?”
“Because I know that look. It’s the look you get when someone else changes what’s inside of
you.”
I sighed. He was right, just like always. He saw the truth written on my heart just like I saw the
gradient of every sun-kissed shadow on the concrete.
“On the outside, he looks like a monster,” I started then felt the words stall out in my throat.
My uncle came to sit next to me.
“But?”
“But on the inside, I think he’s an artist. I think he paints with the same brush strokes as me.” I
smiled when I thought about the portrait he’d painted of me with his haphazard strokes and distorted
proportions.
“That’s how you made it out.” He didn’t question, he was sure. “Did he treat you right?”
“What’s the definition of right? It wasn’t hearts and flowers if that’s what you’re asking.” I rolled
my eyes.
“You know that’s what you deserve, right?”
“Who’s to say what I deserve? What do any of us…?”
He sighed then let the sound hang in the thick silence between us.
“It’s not what you think,” he said softly.
“Please tell me how money laundering, murder, and mayhem is anything but.”
He closed his eyes and his whole face contorted.
“Every book starts with a single sentence. It’s a simple combination of letters, nothing fancy, no
indication of where it’ll end up, but it’s a start.”
“Fucking my mom is nothing fancy?”
“Watch your mouth.” His tone made goosebumps crawl up my neck. “Your mom made me a better
man. Your dad too.”
“You still lied.”
“You deserved the fairy tale.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“That people can change? That they can meet someone that makes them want to be a better version
of themselves? That even horror stories have happy endings if you read far enough?” He narrowed his
gaze. “I should think so.”
I laid back on the bed and turned away from him. The sculpture I’d first thought of when their
world was laid bare came back to mind. The pieces of my life were still wild, free spinning things,
blown up and out to the wind.
“One day I woke up and realized all these little sentences added up to a story I hadn’t written. I’d
been aimlessly flipping the pages, my eyes darting across each one, but I wasn’t really the author. I
wasn’t even reading,” Horse continued.
“I didn’t write any of this,” I grumped from beneath the covers.
“But would you change it?”
I studied the nondescript pattern on the comforter in front of me. It’s waves and weaves in blush
colors made more sense than what was in my head. If none of this had come to pass, I’d be blissfully
ignorant, living a life of easy fantasy. But then the rogue, the scoundrel, the prince—the man that was
all three—would have never come into my heart.
Life was complicated.
“I have no reason to, but I miss him,” I murmured.
“I’ve missed my fair share of people over the years, Filly. Ones I literally have no right to miss.”
He sighed. “But right or not, I do.”
“How do you go back to before?” I asked still studying the microfiber beneath me. “Before the
pain and the lies and the…whatever he was.”
“You don’t,” he said softly. “It just becomes part of you.”
“And if it consumes you?”
Because Brye would. Undoubtedly. Or at least I feared he would be the specter behind every
single brush stroke, the shadow cast by every bright sunrise.
“We won’t let it,” he said with finality.
The idea of this experience not staying stuck to my skin, of the horrors being swept under the rug,
of Brye fading to memory, translucent as a wisp, was even more terrifying. I clutched the comforter
beneath my cheek and scooted back enough to press myself to my uncle’s thigh.
“What if that’s scarier than all the rest of it combined?” I asked.
“Love is.”
“I didn’t say I loved him.” My knuckles turned white as I clutched the bed beneath me, trying to
hold still amidst the storm brewing inside me.
His big ole paw patted my thigh beneath the thick comforter.
“Filly Bean, you didn’t have to.”
“She’s here?” I asked as I looked up at the hotel.
“Saw her walk in last night.” Deirdre leaned against the wall next to me, her hair whipping in the
darkening sky. “She’s with her family.” Her voice held a warning.
I couldn’t help the mirthless laugh that rumbled my chest like the thunder building in the sky. She
was there. Right fucking there. But the wall of my enemy seemed more impenetrable than the steel of
the building itself.
“What was I thinking?”
“That you love her. That nothing else matters.” Deirdre said it so vehemently my laugh cut off and
I looked over at her.
She wanted me to walk into that hotel. She wanted me to knock on the door of my sworn enemy.
And she wanted me to do it with a bouquet of roses in my hand. She knew who the Ryan’s were, how
polluted that bad blood was. Not even a girl cheering for love could be that naive. Unless...
“You never answered. Why does any of this matter to you?” I twisted to lean against the wall so I
could watch her. Evaluate her.
“It just does.” She spun out onto the sidewalk and started pacing. Something about the way her
eyes darted to the front door then down the street made blood rush through my veins.
“Not good enough,” I snarled.
“None of your fucking business then.” She gestured wildly and I reached out to capture her wrist.
“Bullshit.” I grabbed her fingers and bent them back.
“Ouch, Brye! You’re hurting me.”
“Broken fingers are the least of your worries if I find out you’re lying to me. Did you do this for
my father?” I shouted.
She scampered in the direction I was twisting her hand as I threatened to crush it. Deirdre spun
once, twice then tried to shove at me. My face scrunched up when she caught the edge of my brand,
but I didn’t let go.
“I told you, for Filly!” she screamed and I tossed her aside. She winced when she caught herself
against the wall.
“Why would you do anything for Filly?” I followed her and caged her in, an arm braced on either
side of her.
“Well, it’s really more for me,” she said softly as she massaged my wrist and her cheeks flushed
crimson.
“Huh?” I dropped one of my arms.
“Do you think I wanted this? Any of it?” She shook her hand out as she slid down the wall to sit
on the sidewalk. “All I ever wanted was what you two have,” she whispered, becoming small. “The
man that got me in, he seemed like that at first. All sugar cookies and champagne. But then he brought
me to a dinner party, just like you brought her, and it became this spiral…”
I pictured the night of our family meal, how she’d gleefully drunk the bitter wine. How she took
glass after glass.
“I cried every time it wasn’t him for the first six months. It’s a fine line between pleasure and
pain, tears and orgasm. Men hear what they want when they’re balls deep inside you.”
“I was one of those men.” I folded up to sit on the concrete beside her.
“Yeah, but you were just as broken as I was. We were almost comforting.” She smiled, but it
didn’t reach her eyes as she pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. “Seeing you with
Filly brought back those first few months when it was good. When I had hope.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“To who? You as you grieved and grappled with the good and evil of your soul? To your dad?”
The way she said his name was explanation enough.
“To the boy who brought you in.” I turned to watch her and it was a shadow of her own making
that covered up her face.
“I did. But his heart went black when I wasn’t watching,” she said softly. “His priorities shifted.
The family became everything. He thirsted for power, not love. I forgave him of so much... that was
what finally broke me. That I’d forgiven him those sins. Sins that should have never been forgiven.”
She rested her chin on her knees.
“It sounds like you’re speaking about me.”
“You lost your way, not the good inside. That’s what I saw last night. That’s why I followed her
and that’s why you have to fucking fight for her. For all the girls that pinned their hopes and dreams on
someone who doused them.”
I sucked in a heavy breath, tasting in the fresh air blowing in with the storm. The hint of rain was
on the wind and a few became wet freckles on my cheeks. The weight of what I was really facing
hung on my shoulders.
“I’m sorry, Deirdre. For my part in it anyway.”
“I’m sorry for how I treated you.” She looked over at me from under her eyelashes. “And for
touching her.”
“We could do this all day.” I chuckled as the warm rain spattered a little harder.
“Is it wrong that I enjoy the confessional?”
“Not at all.” She stood when the droplets picked up and wound her hair up in a bun before she
started to slink back into the shadows. “He’s disowned you. It’s official. We’re supposed to kill you
on sight.”
I nodded, not expecting anything less.
“Thank you.”
“It was nothing.” She shrugged.
“It’s not nothing. He could kill you too.”
“Can’t kill what’s already dead inside.” She shrugged.
“You’re not,” I countered. “Or at least I don’t think you are.”
Her smile didn’t reach her eyes in the bright white of a street lamp but mine did. I meant it. The
silence we shared held the shape of gratitude and the weight of hope. Even my hope for her.
“Deirdre, out of curiosity who was the boy?” For some reason I just needed to know.
“What?” Her eyes went wide.
“Who was the boy from the story?”
She took a deep breath and when she let it out, lightning flashed across the night sky. Lit the way
she was, I realized sorrow and gray acceptance had always colored her features. Whatever love
she’d had, it had betrayed her. It should have made her soar, but instead, she fought to survive. She
managed a rueful smile when she finally answered.
“I’m surprised Emmett never told you.”
The rain pelted my chest as I sat against the far wall of the hotel far longer than I intended, lost in
thought. We were all so detached from the way we ruined lives. The darkness seemed like our only
companion, but in reality, it was the blind we hid behind. If only I’d come out of that hole once or
twice I might have seen Deirdre. Really seen her.
I might have saved her.
The longer I sat in the rain, the more I knew that her referred to Filly too.
I was going to walk in there and…what? Say sorry? Did I have the audacity to think that doing the
right thing in the very end made up for any of the sins I’d leveled against her?
“Fuck.” I banged my head back against the wall.
Without Deirdre’s passionate words it was hard to convince myself I should fight for Filly. She
deserved better. She deserved freedom and I was shackles. Honestly, the only reason I’d really ended
up here at all was because I had nowhere to go. Nowhere that I wasn’t a dead man walking. And she
my dying wish…
“Put your hands up. Slowly.” A deadly, frigid voice interrupted my thoughts. The barrel of a gun
pressed to my chest a heartbeat later.
I did as I was told as I squinted through the pouring rain. My hands slid up along the rough
spackle of the wall as I blinked away the raindrops.
The blonde man before me was recognizable even though I’d never seen him. My father’s stories
of a man cut from ink and anger, a man both fractured and calculating, someone haunted, someone
wicked, was standing before me, pressing a Taurus Judge to my barely healed heart.
“Why are you here?” Cole Ryan cocked his head the slightest bit when he asked.
I thought about answering in cryptic phrases and riddles but I couldn’t.
“I had to make sure she was safe.”
“You better not mean my daughter.”
“Don’t bullshit me. Is Filly here? With you?” I sighed, uninterested in a pissing match today of all
days. “Did you get my messages?”
“Don’t bullshit you?” He asked through gritted teeth, making the veins on his neck dance and his
dark tattoo ink with it. “Don’t bullshit you?” He was a formidable man like this, with ice in his veins
and murder in his heart. “Let me tell you son—”
“I am not your son, nor will I ever be. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the reason I have Satan for
a father.” I let the full burn of my venom drip and hiss on my voice. “You’re the reason that demon did
things to Filly.”
Something wild flashed behind his eyes just before he dug the barrel of his gun into my wounded
chest. I tried to hold his unwavering stare, but the way he ground on my skin pulled a wicked wince
from me and fresh blood from the wound.
“What do we have here?”
Cole Ryan used the barrel of his gun to lift the rain-soaked fabric to reveal my brand. It stung like
a bitch and cracked more times than it didn’t when I moved. But it was my family crest, distorted. I’d
known that the second I saw those idiots wielding the poker. I didn’t need to waste time looking at it.
I had no regrets, not even now as it damned me. I’d taken it for Filly.
“I know that crest.” He used the gun to trace the outline.
“I bet you fucking do.”
“I oughta kill you outright.” He snarled and stepped closer to me.
 I grabbed the barrel and pressed it hard against my chest, directly above my heart. “Do it,” I
dared. “Fucking, do it. My father sure as hell would.”
He evaluated me, distant and detached, no feeling reflected in his face, every bit the monster I’d
grown up believing him to be.
“You know you deserve it,” he bit out.
“You know I deserve it because you were in my shoes first.” I stepped toward him despite the
burn in my chest. “So do it,” I taunted again, rain pouring down and spattering from my lips.
Slight flutter footsteps were nearby, almost drowned out by the pouring rain. Cole’s eyes darted to
our visitor.
“Do it,” I murmured dark and dangerous again.
A small little gasp made me wish I could reel those words back in, but then my girl spoke and it
was with such conviction, such determination, that it made me invincible.
“Do it, Dad, and you might as well kill us both.”
Brye was beautiful there in the middle of the tempest. A gorgeous man with a wounded heart, dark
blue chaos lashing out of his make-up. I stepped in front of my father’s gun unafraid of anything but
what might happen to Brye. After all he’d done in the end, after all he’d been, I would not allow this.
My family or no, I would not stand idly by while his life was on the line.
My dad’s arm dropped immediately to his side.
“Hi, Filly.” Brye’s deep voice hit against my skin like the raindrops and his fingers whispered
against my hips like the wind accompanying the storm.
“Are you okay?” I asked, barely taking my eyes from my dad’s, barely twisting my shoulders to
see.
“I’ve been better,” he answered as his fingertips found mine and used our hands to play with the
filthy matte of my formerly beautiful dress. “But it’s good to see you.”
I squeezed his hand hoping to say the things I couldn’t right now.
“You were supposed to keep her occupied.” My dad leveled a wicked gaze over my shoulders
and I wasn’t sure if it was the tone or the soulless void behind his eyes that made me shiver.
“Cole, she’s not a child anymore.” My uncle was the reckoning beside me, standing up to the
wave of awful crashing from my father.
“So you let her run out here to see this?”
“It wasn’t as if I could stop her once she knew.” His voice got sharper and my dad’s face pinched
in response.
“You have at least a hundred pounds of muscle on my kid.”
“She’s not a kid, anymore.”
“If one more person says that about my daughter…”
They continued to argue as I chanced a glance at Brye. He wasn’t watching me anymore. Instead,
he was calm and cool as his eyes shifted from my dad to Horse and back. His hand was still wrapped
firmly inside of mine.
“Stop,” I said sharply. “Stop it right now.”
My dad and Horse went silent.
“I am not a child and I don’t even know who stole that from me.” I straightened my shoulders as I
stared into my father’s foreign eyes. “But I know you will not steal—” I was about to say him—to lay
my fight for Brye out there whatever my dad thought—when Brye dropped my hand and moved, fast
as the lightning that lit up the sky behind us.
My dad’s fist was already flying at the space Brye had occupied behind me. The answering boom
of the thunder covered my father’s unearthly bellow as Brye reached him and wrenched on his arm to
bend him toward the concrete.
“Brye!” My scream didn’t slow him as he drove his elbow into my father’s back and a knee into
his stomach a moment later.
“He was going to hurt you,” Brye snarled as my dad heaved.
“He would never,” I shrieked as they started wrestling again.
 The gun still in my father’s hand glinted in the streetlamp. I shuffled forward twice, sure that if I
put myself in between them, they would stop. Brye would know he had a shield, my dad would have a
reason to slow. Before I could figure out where to wedge myself, the gun went off with a deafening
boom.
My scream answered it until a big hand clapped over my mouth and the sound stopped at the wall
of skin.
“Shhhhhh,” Uncle Horse was sharp in my ear, but it was a soft, not hard. Urgent maybe, and I
shook my head in understanding.
He wordlessly let go and slipped around me. The rain seemed to drive harder, masking the sounds
of his few footsteps between us and the way he moved like a tiger on a prowl. He was able to
position himself over top of my dad where he brawled with Brye, then in another move as pointed as
lightning itself, Uncle Horse cocked back, threw his punch and leveled Brye to the ground.
“No,” I cried out.
My dad barreled over top of his body, his whole face different. Sheer panic lit up his features as
he dropped his gun and gracelessly stumbled over his feet as he ran at me. Before I was able to
collect a full breath, he had his arms around me in a bear hug, the kind that had always reassured me
that the world wasn’t falling to pieces.
I tried to shove against him, but he held tighter until I just melted into him. My tears shamed the
driving raindrops.
“Bean, I’m so sorry. So sorry,” he cooed as he shook me side to side.
“Now’s probably a good time to head back inside,” Horse warned behind me.
“Like hell I’m leaving you,” Dad called back, his voice back to warm and rich just like it usually
was.
“Daddy, don’t hurt him. Please.” My teeth chattered as my dad held me back at arm’s length.
He took my cheeks in his big hands and held me as he studied me. He cocked his head first to one
side then the other. What he finally saw, I wasn’t sure. “I won’t, Bean. I swear.”
“There were gunshots, there will be cops. What the fuck do you suggest we do with him?” Horse
asked from where he hung back the tiniest bit.
“We can’t leave him here.” Dad sighed. “I have a feeling his family is looking for him if he helped
Filly escape.”
“It’s the MacCowan way,” Horse mused.
“Please,” I cried out to both of them.
Horse’s hand blanketed my shoulder as he rubbed his thumb on my water-soaked skin. My dad
leaned in to kiss my forehead.
None of us heard the scrape of metal behind us or the cock of the discarded gun. We just heard the
boom a moment before my harrowed scream as the side of my calf ripped open and pain turned my
entire world a blistering bright white.

“I’ll kill him.” That terrifying voice of my dad’s was back on the fringes of my consciousness. I shied
away from it.
“You said you wouldn’t.” Horse was there in his easy, slow tones too.
“Please, Cole.” My mom was there and her sugar sweet is what I fluttered my eyes open to.
“Mom?”
“Baby?” The bed shifted beneath her and in an instant, she was beside me, wrapped around me.
“How are you?”
“Where’s Brye?”
“Are you okay?” She didn’t answer, instead, propping herself up and smoothing away my hair as
she stared into my face.
“What happened? Where’s Brye?”
“Are you in pain?” Her hands fluttered around me, her eyes just as manic as my insides.
“Brye!” I called out.
“He’s alive despite my better judgment.” My dad sat down next to me and took my hand. “What’s
the last thing you remember?”
Pain. Serious pain. And then a white so pure it could have been a field of pristine snow.
I looked around for the first time since their voices had roused me. Some part of me had known I
wasn’t on the dark sidewalk in the pouring rain anymore, but I hadn’t taken the time to look around. I
was nestled in bed, wearing one of Horse’s gigantic t-shirts. Coincidentally he was the only one
missing from the bedroom. Conrad was perched on the nightstand watching some sort of Real
Housewives near my feet. I wiggled my toes only to have that flash of frigid white blast though me
again.
“Ouch!” I winced.
“He shot you.” My dad’s hair-raising voice was back and this time I didn’t blame him.
“Brye?” I gulped.
“We’re calling him Regina George, right now.” Conrad flipped between channels during a
commercial. “We all feel personally victimized.”
My mom backhanded his thigh where it peeked out of his pink satin bathrobe.
“As long as we’re calling him something.” I blew out a deep breath.
He’d shot me. He’d shot me with a bullet meant for my dad and still my worry for him made
shapes on my insides.
“Filly,” my dad started as he picked up my hand and traced the bones of my fingers, “I know this
is all new to you, but I think he needs to die.”
“No!” I ripped my hand away as I shot up to sitting and backed to my headboard. My leg echoed
my pained word, but I managed not to cry out.
“Bean, we were wrong to shelter you completely from all of this, but your dad is right. Leaving
unraveled ends like this…” My mom who had saved the earthworms from our sidewalk in the Spring
rain was telling me to take Brye’s life.
I couldn’t find the words. Too many of them piled up inside me. They were monsters but then
again so was he. There were two sides to his story just like there had to be two to theirs. If I could
love them and be furious, then with Brye I could feel everything strong and wicked and wonderful all
at once too.
They all waited patiently as I swallowed the emotion thick in my throat. As I swallowed the
desire to scream.
“I want to see him,” I said softly, making sure nothing in my voice agreed or disagreed to what
they were suggesting.
“Bean, what if he hurts you?” My mom reached for my unharmed calf.
“Then it’ll make your decision all the easier.”

My mom notched herself under my shoulder as we walked down the hall. Brye had grazed me for the
most part, but there was a spot in my calve that screamed a little bit louder than the rest. I could walk
myself, but it was a nice to have to have the support. Physically and metaphorically.
“Filly—” my mom started with that motherly and utterly worried tone.
“Mom, please. Don’t tell me that I shouldn’t do this or that I don’t know what it’s like. I just lived
weeks of it. It may not be a lifetime, but I get it.” I adjusted on her shoulder, thinking about
abandoning her grasp but not really wanting to.
“That’s not what I was going to say.” She sighed. “I was going to say I’m sorry.”
I stopped and pulled her up short. “What?”
“I’m sorry we didn’t tell you something. There was no way—is no way—to talk about it all.” She
glanced at my dad then down at the floor. “But we should have said something so you’d know it was
real. And scary. We tried so hard to keep anything bad from ever finding you, we didn’t think—”
“I’m grateful for the way you raised me, Mom,” I interrupted softly. “Please don’t ever think I
wish that had been different.” And I knew in that moment it was true. I wouldn’t change it—I
wouldn’t change anything about my life, my past, my present. It was the secret that had hurt. “This life,
your life, blindsided me. I didn’t think there was anything hidden between us and here I find an entire
world.”
“Can you ever forgive us?”
“Yes,” I answered unequivocally.
She didn’t hesitate as she pulled me into a hug, strong and fearless like my mom had always been.
Like she’d been when she got her scars… My dad bent and kissed the crown of my head, wrapping
around the both of us. My dad who had always chosen love…
They had to understand the complexity of this all. Of the intimate relationship between bad and
good, ugly and beautiful. They lived the duality day in and day out. This was something they couldn’t
question.
I gathered up my strength and straightened my shoulders between them and I schooled my voice.
This wasn’t a fight, but this wasn’t a request either. It wasn’t even an ultimatum. It just was.
“And if I forgive Brye, you both will too.”
My blood had stopped dripping from what was likely a broken nose and started crusting on my upper
lip. It was starting to itch where it flaked against my scruff. I ran through a list of comments that
would get Horse to hit me again.
Fuck knows I deserved it.
I’d been aiming at her dad, hoping to blow his knee to bits just because he was a cocky piece of
shit, and instead I’d hit her. My heart hurt so badly, the beat down I’d provoked actually felt good.
“I drugged her and made her touch another girl,” I said the words with a mirthless laugh knowing
just what they would do to her uncle.
Sure enough, Horse rose from his perch on the dresser and walked with calm, calculated steps to
where he had me bound to a desk chair. He was every bit of brawn and muscle and mayhem as my
father’s stories made him out to be. It made the crunch of his fist into my body that much more
gratifying.
Horse laid one of his huge hands on each of my wrists as though he expected them to go
somewhere despite being tied brutally tight with the clothesline from two different showers then bent
to look me straight in the eye.
“You think I don’t know what game you’re playing?” he snarled within an inch of my face. “I’ve
carried the weight of so many wrongs on these shoulders, don’t think I don’t know you’re looking for
redemption the only way you know how.”
I wished that the blood was still thick in my mouth from where my cheek had ripped open on my
teeth with one of his hooks. If it was, I could spit in his face.
“If you’re so hard up for a fight, I’ll oblige, but if you think for one minute my fist pummeling your
face will erase what you did—”
“Maybe you just don’t hit hard enough,” I cut him off then found the sharpest words I could find,
ones that mimicked the way his cut into me. “She’s tight, and oh so responsive. Whimpered when
anyone touched her.”
He growled something primal as he stepped back. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to bite,
that the feeling of fear and pain for Filly was going to be the only thing resonating in my chest, but
then Horse tensed and flexed. Before I realized what was coming his giant boot crash into my chest so
hard I couldn’t breathe.
There was a moment of air whooshing beside me, but I couldn’t steal any of it into my lungs. The
burn of my chest complimented the crash of my body and crack of my head onto the floor behind me.
“Don’t talk about Filly like that,” Horse said simply against the roar and rush of blood and pain in
my ears.
I sucked in deep breaths as I tried to focus in on the ceiling. Spackle gave way to the crown
molding of the room and it made me think of that night in the dining room with Filly. I was a monster
for stealing from her. I was an even bigger asshole for exploiting it now. If I was honest, I wanted to
keep my memories for myself, tucked into my pocket to unfold for a rainy day. She had murmured my
name even when I’d done nothing to deserve it.
The violent and savage tears balled in my throat and put pressure on my ribs, my heart. Of all the
pain I’d doled out, the only thing that made my soul ache was Filly.
“You know I think she loves you?”
“Shut up,” I snapped. I couldn’t think about her goodness any more than I already had.
“And I get it. Her dad was like you, I was like you, it makes sense she’d find a soul like that, that
she’d see through the other shit.” Horse kept speaking from somewhere over top of my knees,
probably leaning against the dresser as he had been.
“Shut the fuck up,” I warned louder this time.
“You don’t become worthy like this.”
“I don’t become worthy at all.” My emotion broke loose—the hurt, the fury, the pain, the tears—
and I sounded every bit as tortured as he was.
“You’re right, you don’t become. You already are.” Filly’s voice blew into the room like a cool
breeze. “What did you do to him?” Anger strangled her voice the next moment and my heart beat a
little faster.
She gave a damn. After everything, she gave an ever-loving damn about me.
“Nothing he didn’t ask for,” Horse answered simply.
“Get out,” she commanded.
“No fucking way, Bean.”
“We’ll be just down the hall Filly,” Cole interjected. “Remember what we said though. Loose
ends…”
I knew the warning in his voice without him finishing his sentence. It was the same one I’d give.
“I will, Dad. I promise.”
“We’re just going to leave her in here?” Horse asked, incredulous.
“Yes,” a woman’s voice answered and the way it was a dove song just like Filly’s, I guessed Elle
Laroux was here too. “She’s not a child anymore. She knows what’s at stake.”
There were no more words, just footsteps and some things likely unspoken until the hotel door
clicked into place. Still the silence remained, only punctuated by Filly’s deep, practiced breaths. The
quiet stretched out and went thick between us, a new weight on my chest, more painful than the last
because I didn’t know what she would fucking say.
“Is what he said true?” She broke the tension with her quiet question. I wanted to bask in the
sound before it got loud or mean or accusatory. When I didn’t answer, she asked again, and this time
her voice wavered.
“Yes.” I had to choke out the answer.
“Why? Why would you ask for this?”
I swore I heard tears warble on her voice and it cracked what little was left inside me.
“I hurt you,” I answered without thinking it through, without calculating what my honesty would
cost me, and for maybe the first time in my life.
“I’m going to be okay,” she murmured.
“I don’t care, Filly. I don’t care if you’re perfectly fine a second later, I hurt you and I deserve that
back ten-fold.”
“You tried to shoot my dad.”
“Old habits die hard.”
All I wanted was to see her, to know that I could come back from this. She didn’t have to forgive
me now. Maybe ever. But she had to redeem me the way only she could.
“You’re the one that sent me here. You’re the one that wanted me safe,” she countered with a deep
and weepy breath. “With them. Why come back if you just wanted to hurt us?”
 I felt the words bubble up in me, all my truths, all my fears. I could choke them down, shove them
back behind the wall I’d so perfectly formed, or I could let her break them down for good.
“I’m a man with a death warrant, I didn’t think about you. I thought about me. And how my last
wish on this godforsaken planet was to see you. Make sure you were safe.”
There was silence and all my inadequacies flared, desperate to swallow me up. But then the soft
pad of her footsteps came closer. They were a little hitched but still soft and delicate.
“I’m safe,” she murmured as she crossed her legs and sat down beside me.
God, she was beautiful. Sunshine wrapped in a giant t-shirt. I wished it was mine and that I could
reach out and touch her soft skin. Her hair was tossed up and her makeup had smeared, but I liked this
version better than any other I’d seen before. She seemed real.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Was I really your last wish?” She reached forward and brushed against my skin.
“Always will be,” I gasped as I nuzzled into her hand.
She reached for my wrist then, unafraid of what I was, what I’d become, coated in blood and
hatred. Her delicate fingers worked on the shower wire cutting into my skin. She was so concentrated
threading the wire in and out then in and out again. The pinch subsided slightly, but I wasn’t free to
hold her. And that’s what hurt most of all. She worked more diligently at my wrists and ankles but
couldn’t get me free. Her furious howl filled the room when she gave up and just yanked.
“Why won’t it budge?” she screeched as she pulled hard on the wire and it wouldn’t give.
My insides warmed just at the idea that she wanted me. Well, wanted me free anyways.
“Filly, it’s okay. Take a breath,” I urged and her eyes met mine, warm sea glass on the sand of
some perfect beach. I melted back into the chair, the carpet and wished it was her.
She managed to get me loose and all I wanted was to reach for her. But like she knew, she stood
and disappeared, leaving my hands as empty as my soul. I pulled myself back inward and then up to
sitting, my feet landing on the back of the chair, my ankles a little too sore to push it away.
Filly reappeared in the room with a hand towel. She walked toward me fearlessly and held up the
warm white rag before touching my skin. I nodded once and she crouched beside me. Only a faint
wince colored her features before concern took over.
Her steady hand came to my face and ever so gently she started to wash the blood from my face. I
winced automatically.
“Did I hurt you?” she asked.
“Not you. Never you,” I answered as I placed my face back against her hand. The warm towel
was was both rough and reassuring against my skin as it turned first pink then red. She cleared the
caked on blood from my lip then my nose. My chin then my cheek. All the while she scooted closer to
me..
“Is it too much to ask that I just hold you?” I asked when she was almost pressed against me.
“Brye,” she gasped as her warm towel fell away.
“All I want is to touch you again, Filly. Let me?”
She stared me down, her wide gaze scraping at mine, her fingers wringing at the towel. Hurting
her had changed everything. This moment between us, well the last few actually, rebuilt me a little bit
different. They rebuilt me with hope.
“I thought seeing you was my dying wish, but it’s not enough. With you, nothing is enough.” I
poured my heart out knowing there was nothing left for me to lose. There was nothing left for me to
win either. They were just the words I needed her to hear.
“How can you say that?” Her eyes watered with so much emotion. “You don’t even know me, not
really.”
“I know how strong you are.” I reached up and pushed her loose hair behind her ear. “I know how
beautiful you are. How you paint with your whole soul.”
“Those are reasons to like someone, Brye, not make them your dying wish.” She nestled into my
hand still resting at her cheek.
“Nothing and no one has ever made me feel like you do.”
“We” —she gestured between the both of us— “haven’t been easy.”
“I know.” I took a deep breath and raised my other hand to her opposite cheek, my thumb traced
her bottom lip without thinking. “But I wouldn’t change a thing. I would take the beatings, keep the
brand, and I will take the bullet because I’m taking them for you.”
The broken boy was gone. His insides weren’t the turmoil of the painting. He wasn’t the oil slick
where good and wicked met. The man in front of me was strong and resolute. He was everything
beautiful I’d ever wanted Brye to be.
My hands trembled as I traded the towel for his body. His thighs, muscled and strong where I
slowly slid along the contours of him. His breath hitched and he tightened his hold on me but didn’t
pull me.
“That time I hurt you,” I said.
“The only thing that hurts is if you don’t touch me,” he answered through gritted teeth just before
ehe smiled.
I made myself keep going, my hands innocently exploring until I reached the hem of his shirt. I
pulled back a little watching my hand quake as I thought through my actions.
If I lifted that soft fabric, it was forgiveness. For everything. It was admitting that I felt
inexplicably the same and my soul recognized his despite the barriers we’d both worked so hard to
put up between us.
If I lifted it, I’d be exploring a body that might well become a corpse.
The way that singular thought split apart my insides urged me forward. I was giving my body, my
heart, my soul what it wanted, what it may never get again. And I was going to pray like hell that
mixing us together, could change his fate.
I started lifting again revealing the beautiful but battered and bruised skin that had made my mouth
water since the first time I laid eyes on it.
“Filly,” he barely breathed my name, “this isn’t what I meant. I…” His eyes searched mine but
couldn’t find an anchor point.
“I know,” I answered. “But I wouldn’t change a thing either, because it all brought me to you.”
Something softened behind his eyes as he pulled me in for a sweet kiss, one where his lips truly
tasted the shape of mine. His fingers flexed the slightest bit into me, and his body bowed forward to
find mine. I felt each split of his lip and massaged them with tender presses and pulls. He did the
same to the one I wore. My body shuffled toward his wanting to feel the way each inch pressed
against mine. And my fingers kept peeling at his tee.
When his hands left my face so that I could pull his shirt free, a whimper slipped from my lips.
“Do you trust me?” he asked with a voice both ravenous and slightly scared.
I didn’t have a lot of reasons to, but the one I did, made me bite my lip and shake my head. He
smiled shyly as a reply then moved away from me. I couldn’t help that my frown fell into place.
“I’ll kiss that away, promise.” A positively delicious crooked smile pulled on his cheek as he
stood to loom over me.
As soon as I cracked a matching grin, he bent down and grabbed me. He cried out and it ripped at
my heart; I almost slid back off him.
“Don’t ask me again, Filly. The only thing that hurts is my hard-on.”
I giggled despite the pain. Despite the up close view of the wounds and marred skin on his back,
the scars that I moved to press my lips to. Brye snarled then shuddered beneath my lips. He all but
threw me onto the bed and my heartbeat ticked up in anticipation of something savage, something
wild. But that wasn’t what shone behind his eyes as he looked down on me.
“I’m going to worship you tonight. I’m going to pray at the only altar that may give me peace in
this life or the next.”
It was my turn to shudder.
Still standing in full view at the foot of the bed, Brye reached for the button of his trousers. I
swallowed the lump in my throat and closed my eyes as I tried to still my racing heart. When I heard
the zipper of his fly stop halfway down, I coaxed my eyes open. He smiled as if he’d been waiting for
me then unzipped his pants and let them fall to his ankles.
Black boxer briefs wrapped around his hips leaving little to the imagination. Somehow seeing
him before didn’t matter, not now that we were carefully giving and taking something more than just
flesh. I had to close my eyes again to drag in a steady breath. The butterflies inside my stomach just
wouldn’t let me.
Again he waited in the vibrating silence between us. When I opened my eyes again, he pushed his
briefs to the ground. I couldn’t help but groan.
Every muscle, every angle of Brye was perfect. Big and strong and power incarnate. The bruises
and scars, even the blood still dried at his wrists made him even more delicious. That this beast
wanted to slow down and stay sweet with me made my toes curl. He was beautiful and this time he
was mine.
“Brye,” I groaned again, stretching out the syllables of his name, a match to the way I moved my
limbs.
He prowled onto the bed but stopped short, reaching for my ankle. I winced as it stretched my torn
skin and he closed his eyes and took a steadying breath. He kept them closed as his fingers move
deftly along my shin and his kisses followed.
I expected him to speak, to say some sort of sorry, but it was the way he kissed me, near the
wound, full and hard, taking my breath away and leaving me with goosebumps that said everything.
He kept his delicate hold on my ankle as his kisses traveled higher.
And higher and higher.
A wild blush flamed across my skin and my hands left the sheets behind to cover up my face as it
blotched with the heat. When he settled between my thighs, he brushed his nose against my clit and I
jerked. But then he waited and I could feel nothing but the subtle puff of his breath and the radiant heat
from his cheeks. The idea that he was staring at my most intimate bits boiled the blood beneath my
hands. The fact that he was just waiting made me split my fingers apart and peek down my body at
him anyways.
Brye wasn’t staring. Not between my thighs anyway. He was looking up at me, waiting. The brush
strokes behind his eyes were breathtaking, I could see canvas, how I’d paint them, and that they’d
destroy me each time I chanced a look at them. My hands slid from my face and back down to my
sides. He collected them in each of his big ones, twining our fingers together and giving me a soft
squeeze where he held them at either side of my hips.
And then he went to work.
Color strummed through me in time with his tongue lapping at my sex. Brilliant yellow tinged with
white and gold, even a hint of sunrise pink, making my world awash with new and bright and
beautiful.
This was what I’d seen that morning on the hood of my car. This was why I’d stayed.
 My hips bucked up and he growled, the sound echoing inside me. I gasped as he used his thumbs
to push me back to the bed while keeping his grip on my fingers. He started rubbing tender circles on
my hips as his tongue mimicked them on my clit.
Goosebumps that seemed tinged blue broke across my skin, making me feel a cooling breeze. It
was the only reason I could let him keep going. His tongue folding around me, fondling inside. He
made circles and circles and circles until my jaw hurt from the wild gasping breaths I couldn’t stop.
Then he pushed inside me and let his tongue roll in long, leisurely laps. He was the waves of the
world unending inside me.
“Brye,” I whimpered as my body started to quake.
I was close. So close. And I didn’t know if I wanted to dissolve into color complete or slow the
world from spinning. I wanted the release, but I also wanted all of him. Needed all of him.
“Ahhhhhhh.” I jerked against him and threw my head back into the mattress. He was unrelenting,
ratcheting up my need for him with every flick, every stroke. He was going to destroy any semblance
of my control, any choice I had, any sense of self.
“Brye, please,” I gasped as I dug my fingernails into his hands where I held them.
“I will earn my absolution with your body,” he murmured then went back to work.
“You have forgiveness.” My heavy breath punctuated every word. “Just give me you.”
They were the magic words.
He stilled between my thighs and untangled his hands from mine. He sat back for a moment and in
his eyes, I saw the same sunrise chasing away the dark that had flashed behind mine. I smiled as
everything in me unwound and filled with relief.
And love.
Because I knew that’s what I felt now. As wrong or weird as it was, this man had spoken to the
deep and untouched part of me. He had stumbled on his path, but he had sacrificed too. He showed me
the world of shadow, he showed me the rest of myself. He wasn’t Prince Charming, but he was mine
and meant to be so.
What he saw on my face as I realized, I’d never know, but he prowled toward me again, moving
with such loaded restraint until his lips were level with mine. I craved his kiss with every fiber of my
body. My lips parted and I wetted my bottom one as I angled toward him.
He hung above me, cruel for the way he made my anticipation as alive and wild in my skin as my
almost-orgasm. I almost begged him, but he shifted. His big brawny forearms came down to cocoon
my head as his equally strong body pressed against the length of me. I closed my eyes and relished the
weight of him, so real and so right on me.
His nose ran up the length of mine then he twisted and brushed his lips along my cheek. He
nuzzled along the curve of my ear as my eyes fluttered shut and when he bit down on my lobe with a
soft nibble, I arched up into him with an untamed moan.
Only then did he swallow up the sound with his mouth. His kiss closed fully over mine as his
fingers wove into my hair. The stony column of his erection pressed into the flat of my stomach but it
was the way his chest pressed to mine and his heart beat against me that turned me on even more.
His kisses deepened, each a slow exploration my lips, each seeming like it was the first time he’d
done so. His tongue traced the seam of my mouth, the shape of it, but he didn’t push his tongue to
mine.
My hands slid up his and onto his back, knowing that I’d found the ink of his beautiful wings
because of the slight difference in the texture of the skin and the wonderful shudder of his massive
body. I’d stared enough times to move down from the wings to his lashed scars from memory. When
my fingers traced the outline of the ones I could reach, he broke our kiss, only long enough to
whimper. The sound itself made my body go rigid then melt with pleasure.
“I could die a happy man,” he murmured against my lips, the sound beautiful and pained.
I couldn’t acknowledge the way that hurt my heart, the way it might kill me, but I could give him
something to live for.
My hand slid from his back to his cock and I stroked. He closed his eyes and relished each of my
movements. When I pushed at his boxer briefs, he sat back enough to shove them off completely. Heat
bloomed across my cheeks and chest when I looked at him. At what was mine.
He lowered back down and my wild heart felt soothed just by his presence. His lips found mine
again in a kiss never ending, but it wasn’t enough. Nothing ever would be. So I finally reached
between us and slid him into the slickness he’d done so much to draw from me.
“Losing you would kill me.” My hands roved back to his scars, raised and rugged and wonderful
beneath my fingertips. “Loving you might too.”
Her words. Her beautiful dove-song words. I wanted to live in them and revolt against them. I wanted
to learn the meaning in her heart and the shape of her mind as she said them. And as I hovered so
close to her, to finally taking her the way I wanted, as a man I could be proud of, I hesitated.
I wanted to keep her safe from either ending.
I dropped her lips and my head fell to the side of hers, the pain of what I might still cost her too
heavy for me to bear. She twisted her lips to my ear, and much like I had, run her sweet skin down the
curve of my ear.
“And what a way to go.” Her warm breath accompanied he soul-sweet words.
My heart thundered at the thought. That she’d seen the dark and death and destruction, heard the
truth of it all, and chose that path anyways. Someone so perfect and pure wanted my brand of
devotion and granted me dispensation.
“You’ve showed me the world, Brye. You showed me love.” She used her slight weight to push
against me. “Let me show you.”
I knew what she was saying, and I was so torn. I didn’t want to take that next step and seal our
fate, but I needed to know what her brand of milk and honey might taste like. The desires warred
inside of me. It was one thing to have her then die for her. When she made it sound like she’d stand
beside me against the rapture…
“Let me show you,” she repeated, pushing hard on my body until I gave.
Gently Filly turned me and slid her slight thighs onto either side of my hips, missing every bruise
she could. She didn’t slide onto me just yet, instead pressing my dick to my stomach and into the slick
of her sex. She rocked those devilish little hips once, twice, three times and my hands automatically
reached for them.
Her small hands wrapped around one of my wrists and pulled it from her skin and up to her lips.
She pressed a kiss that spoke of adoration and apology where it was angry red and caked with blood
from Horse’s bonds. When her lips pulled away, she reached for my other arm and pulled it similarly
to her lips. I shuddered and she simply pressed them together and kissed the wary bones of my wrists
then guided them both to the hem of the oversized shirt she still wore.
I didn’t bite.
As if she expected it, her fingers traced up my arms to my back and danced with the top feathers
of my tattoo that seemed to rustle in her breeze. I could feel the way I would soar with her, the way
her delicate touch would push me higher. But then she let her hands wander back up my shoulders and
down the contours of my chest to land on the brand.
“I don’t think I’d mind being marked with one of these.” She traced the scabbed edges of my
wound.
“Filly—”
“No, I mean it. I’d be proud of any part of me that is yours.”
I shivered.
“This man, the one that broke himself down and built himself back up for me…”
She took my hands and made me grip the fabric of her shirt again. And this time I sat up with her
still heavy on my hips and pulled the last bit of her clothes off. I sucked in a deep breath from the pain
of the sudden movement and because something perfect and pristine sat in front of me.
I’d seen her naked, I’d lusted over her, but this was different. This was willing and right. This
was her giving herself to me with such beautiful words they made even her perfect little body pale in
comparison.
“I think you give me too much credit,” I said softly as I gingerly lowered my body back to the bed,
my eyes locked on her.
“Then you don’t see what I see,” she answered with a shy smile as she leaned down. Her sunshine
blonde hair created this curtain that hid us from the outside world. Her big eyes sparkled despite
being a little hooded, and those plump lips that had originally bewitched me, formed the perfect kiss,
just before she leaned forward pressed them to the tip of my nose.
I couldn’t help but laugh low and husky.
“There you are,” she murmured in my ear just before she pressed a kiss just to the side of my jaw.
The answering purr in my chest vibrated against her. She worked her kisses along my jaw,
nibbling in the thick scruff as she explored my skin. My hands found the curve of her shoulders and
pressed her chest hard against mine. My fingers wandered where her wings would be and the soft,
velvet of her skin almost convinced me they were real.
She was the angel who’d saved me, who’d damned me after all.
I was lost to the feel of her, to her unrelenting kisses, and I didn’t notice that the grind of her hips
had changed. She’d slid her body upwards and arched her back just so. I could feel the heat of her, the
slickness too. My breath caught in my throat, anticipation tightened my chest, and I felt the moment her
body pulled taut like a rubber band to match.
But then she shifted and I was notched against her slit.
The rush of blood in my body was a roar behind my ears that moved to deafening as she slid
down me. She let out a throaty groan as she took me and when she sat up and almost swallowed me
whole, she whimpered like I was too much for her.
I felt like a God.
And when she started flexing her thighs, working herself up and down on me, reveling in me, I
could have torn the heavens into bits.
I wanted to watch her. I want to see how her slight arms pushed her teardrop tits together as she
clawed into my stomach and the gentle sway of her as she did it all. But I couldn’t. I fucking couldn’t
do anything but throw my head back and groan. She felt so good. Tight and velvet and warm. She
wasn’t a perfect fit, I was too big and I felt like I might split her apart. The fact that she might let me
was the best part.
Everything about Filly was.
When her hands slipped from my body and she cried out, I managed to tip my head forward and
keep my eyes slit just enough to see her. She wore the agony of ecstasy on her face as she let her arms
slide up her body and tangle into her hair. Her eyes fluttered shut as she let her head fall back,
surrendering to the rise and fall of her body.
I watched the masterpiece above me, mouth open, gasping for air, transfixed by the sway of her
tits. She was something precious I never deserved, but now that I had her, fuck was I going to keep
her. The need to consume her, mark her as mine, and keep her that way was building in me, wound up
with an orgasm that was coming too fucking fast.
Surrendering to the beast inside, I reached for her ribs and turned her. She whined when I slipped
out, but when I bent to take her nipple into my mouth, it turned into a wild moan. I twisted her delicate
skin in my mouth then dug my teeth in.
Filly screamed and her nails dug into my sides. I growled and bit harder. She added to the tatters
of my back with sharpened claws, letting something even more primal seep out of me. I played with
her nipple just a minute more. A minute I couldn’t do anything but think of how I’d devour her whole.
Then I thrust into her roughly and without warning, relishing her cries. Her legs wrapped around
mine, twining us together but her hands fell from me as if she just couldn’t work them anymore. They
reappeared between us, covering her eyes momentarily then dragging down her neck and clawing at
her own skin. She was unraveling beneath me and I was going to relish the pieces.
I thrust into her harder, pulling out all the way before shoving back in. Her whole body shook and
I just wanted to see it again, and again, and again. Feel every inch.
“Take it Filly,” I grunted through gritted teeth.
“Anything, Brye,” she gasped back, her breathy words the punctuation to the roll of my hips.
“Everything,” I ground out as I slipped my hand between us.
I flicked her clit and she whimpered, her hands still wheeling at her throat like she was desperate
to get out of her skin. I worked on her as I pumped in and out, wanting to feel the spectacular release
she would have squeeze along my dick. Her hips bucked, urging me to pick up pace. I did with both
my thrusts and the circles I made on her clit.
Her breathing became even more labored, her cries whisper quiet but constant. Her hands stilled,
her fingers turning white where they clung just below her collarbone. The rest of her body went rigid
and her mouth fell open. Her hips shoved up and her head back. I didn’t need to know the ins and outs
of her soul to know she was going to break. I wanted every piece.
I watched as best I could through my own haze, my finger didn’t stop moving, my hips either, until
she shattered. A singular cry barely preceded her entire body melting with a few savage jerks. I
slowed my hips and stopped my circles, partially because I wanted to feel everything about that
moment, partially because I couldn’t keep myself going.
She was incredible.
I wanted to grab her hands, stretch her out and stop her from destroying the sensitive skin overtop
of her collarbone but I couldn’t bring myself to move. And when that velvet pussy of hers clenched
down on me, I lost my goddamned mind completely.
My name dripped from her lips in breathless quiet cries and her body clung to mine. Her orgasm
was every bit of her I wanted. Every bit of the body that I needed. I even felt forgiveness in that sort
of surrender.
All of it together was what pushed me toward my own release. I pumped my hips feeling the
almost sloppy slide of us then I flicked her clit again and she jerked. She clenched down on my cock
again, renewing the waves of an aftershock on me. I moved harder and faster into her, using the
combination to race to my own orgasm.
“Brye,” she cried and this time it was actual tears that accompanied my name.
I almost paused, my mind knowing that I should, but something about how devastated she looked,
about the whirling mess of emotion she was, spurred my body on. And despite whatever kind of
asshole it made me, when a tear actually spilled down her cheek, I came.
My body was a wind tunnel, everything whipping through me. Lust. Relief. Love. Fear. And
falling. God, I was falling so hard for her. Falling at her feet and into the depths of her heart. Every
muscle in my body was as taut as a bowstring, holding fast against the buffeting forces inside me and
the complete empty of everything inside.
When I finished, I was so unbelievably wrecked, I crash landed down on her. After only a few
crazy breaths, I remembered her tears and shoved myself back up, folding my arms around her head as
they were when we first started. My eyes darted back and forth across her face, watching the tears
leak from the corners of her eyes slow and steady.
“Filly…” I shifted just enough to wipe her tears away.
Her hands flew to my sides though, keeping me rooted by the spots she’s marked up earlier.
“Don’t.” Tears quivered on her words too. “Don’t leave me.”
My body melted with those words and I hugged down to her, letting every inch of our bodies
press against each other.
“Did I hurt you?” I asked against her lips.
“Just my heart.” Her body seized with a sob beneath me.
“Shhhhh.” I nuzzled into her again, feeling a contentment I’d never known before. “I will protect
your heart.”
“You’ll stay?” she asked and though I’d never heard it before, I recognized what was underneath
her question. Hope. “And not just tonight, but with me?”
And the way she asked, I knew what promise she was asking of me. Her heartbeat seemed to beg
it of me. Do. Not. Leave. Do. Not. Die.
I wanted to tell her I could make that promise, but the life I’d lead up until this moment wouldn’t
let me. I didn’t want to break the heart beneath me like that. I almost couldn’t imagine breaking mine
like that now. She had changed me. She had taught me what love looked like and how it could feel. I
wouldn’t take that lesson for granted.
“I’m afraid. I’m afraid that’s not something I can promise.”
She closed her eyes and let her arms snake around me, holding the weight of me even tighter to
her body. When she spoke, it was with a beautifully warm and content voice on the edge of sleep.
“No more fear, just fairy tales, okay?”
Holy gods, he was better in bed than anything I’d dreamed of. He had skillz with a capital Z but what
really made him amazing was what parts of him he showed to me.
I had been right, he was made of the most beautiful brush strokes.
And the way we painted together. H O L Y G O D S. Nothing in my life had been that good. Not
the first time I saw a Van Gogh or shaped steel.
But even when my world had come crashing down around me and my body disintegrated to dust, I
couldn’t lose myself completely to it. All the pleasure wasn’t enough to outweigh the pain of possibly
losing him. And I knew the way he kissed me, then hesitated, then claimed me completely, I knew he
was saying goodbye as much as he was saying hello.
That was why the tears had escaped. I couldn’t bear the thought of never having him again. Any
single bit of him.
“Fairy tales, huh? For you and me?” He drug his nose along mine again and my whole body
shuddered beneath him.
“Before you, I never wanted them but... Yes.” I smiled, blissed out as I was.
“There’s always a villain.” He wove his arms around me even though his voice was hesitant.
“There’s always a dragon to slay.”
“Well Filly Bean, he looks good and slayed,” my Uncle Conrad’s voice interrupted the glow
between us.
It was automatic to reach for a blanket, for clothes, for anything to hide from him. I couldn’t even
look to find out if he was alone or with company. Brye growled as he slipped from my body and went
to block Conrad from me. I groaned when he was gone, only remembering to grab the comforter after
the ache between my thighs ebbed.
“It makes me seem like such a creep but well done Filly. Gotta love these Chicago boys and their
utter lack of decency.”
My cheeks caught on fire and in the recess of my mind I wondered if there was anything more
embarrassing than my exceedingly gay uncle staring at my… Well, my who-the-fuck-knew-what Brye
was to me, as he stood protectively but utterly naked between us.
“It’s a good thing your dad and Horse are otherwise occupied.”
“Why are you here, Conrad?” I whined from the mattress still unable to look him in the eye. I
prayed he was still in his pink satin bathrobe because somehow that made this all seem a little less
awful.
“Well as it turns out, someone is here to see you.”
“Me?” I twisted toward him, the list of people that might know I was here was short and oh-so-
dangerous.
“No, Beef Cake here.”
“Who?” Brye crossed his arms and widened his stance infinitesimally, unconcerned with the
nudity, undeterred by what someone else might think as vulnerable.
“A ruthless killer.”
 I blanched a ghostly shade of white.
“Goes by the name Emmett. Reminds me of that delicious hulking brute in Twilight. Something to
really sink your teeth into.” He purred and I rolled my eyes even as my chest tightened.
Why was Emmett here? Why was he with my parents? Why was he anywhere near Brye? The
warning bells clanged in my head, but Brye’s bulky body relaxed.
“Can we have a moment?” he asked.
“Take two.” Conrad arched an eyebrow. “Even five if she didn’t get hers.” He winked from
behind Brye, and I didn’t even hesitate before throwing the pillow from behind me at his face.
He retreated with his wicked laugh trailing behind, leaving Brye and me alone again.
“That was a nice thirty seconds.” Brye wore a wistful smile as he came back to me.
“We could just stay here, wrapped up in each other?” Offering the prize was the only play I had,
even if I knew it was a pair up against a full house.
“I’d like nothing more.” He cocooned around me again, the weight of his body already the missing
structure to my skeleton. “But Emmett wouldn’t be here if this wasn’t important.”
“We could just let that fade away.” I swallowed the thickness in my throat. “My parents did.”
“They killed for the privilege, Filly,” he said softly as he bent to kiss the corner of my mouth. “I
will too.” He sealed his lips over mine. “I will slay your dragons.” His lips brushed mine and I
trembled beneath him, unsure if it was from the undeniably sexy words or the thought that they might
be true.
I nodded where I was pinned beneath him, despite wishing that I could stay right there forever.
Life just wouldn’t let me. Like it hadn’t let me grow up slow or fall into Brye like a sunrise fading to
the sky. This wasn’t in my cards. My fairy tale had already been told. I started to slide away from him
only for him to pin me harder.
“I love you, Filly,” he said softly, ardently. “And I will come back to this,” he gestured between
us, “to you.”
The tears broke from the corners of my eyes again and my instinct was to cover them up. Brye
caught both of my wrists before I could and drove them back to the mattress.
“I have never had anything to live for, not even Rosalyn really, but I will live for you, Filly.”
Brye kissed me hard as the exclamation point to his words. My body bowed all on its own as my
lips were scorched and seared, the brilliant heat of the sun itself ruining me.
“Be my strength today. Be my pillar.” He was asking but the way he said each sentence so simply
said he knew that was what I needed every bit as much as he did.
I nodded then he helped me from the bed. I reached for my discarded shirt but his strong hand
wrapped around mine.
“It’s not pretty, but please wear mine.” He held his shirt out for me despite the blood that tinged
the fabric across the chest. “Maybe these too.” He grabbed his boxer briefs too.
“I was covered, thank you,” I said with the only hint of sass I could muster.
“But you weren’t covered with me.” He offered both pieces of clothing again. “And you’re mine,
Filly.”
I sucked in a deep breath and nodded, taking the dark shirt and his underwear. I slid on the shirt,
disregarding his blood, then stepped into his boxers, rolling the edge until they were fitted shorts. He
likewise pulled on Horse’s shirt then stepped into his trousers commando, distracting me as he
threaded his button into the closure across his lean and sculpted hips.
He grabbed my hand before I reached for his, weaving our fingers together seamlessly. He pulled
me from the room but then I took the lead toward my parent’s. By the time we got there, I puffed up my
chest and tried to prepare for what was in front of us.
I knocked only for Conrad to pull open the door a second later. I shivered when I saw my dad and
Horse with guns drawn and pressed to Emmett’s chest. Brye squeezed my hand but stayed close to
me. I knew this bothered him, chafed his animalistic survival mode, but I couldn’t say I felt the same.
My smile grew when I thought about them leveling Emmett.
“Don’t touch him,” he snarled.
My dad pressed the barrel of his gun against Emmett’s chest. “Don’t tell me what to do.”
“Dad,” I interjected, squaring my shoulders where I stood as Brye’s shield, “we trust Brye.” I
would have stood at the gates of Heaven or Hell and said the same. And if I’d go toe to toe with Saint
Peter or Satan, my dad was almost child’s play. Almost.
I couldn’t bring myself to say that sort of faith and fight extended to Emmett. My dad eyed Brye
with a frost that I was worried would never warm. But he nodded. He accepted, all steel jaw and
stone will. Emmett, however, still watched Brye with a mix of skepticism and scoundrel.
I tried to make myself bigger, bolder where I stood in front of him.
Brye squeezed my hand.
“Why are you here?” he asked, cold and ruthless behind me.
“A few hours and you’re a Ryan not a MacCowan?”
The hair on the back of my neck rose and I felt the protectiveness tense my shoulders. Brye wasn’t
either to me, he was just mine. I wanted to snarl as much.
“I’m a man alone now and you know that.” Brye stepped out from behind me and despite my
words, my uncle’s gun swung to track him.
My heart split from my chest and followed him as he stepped away from me and toward Emmett.
“You’re going to need to find an army.” Emmett eyed each member of my family, evaluating with
the ruthless cunning of someone who was designed to kill and deciding whether or not to.
“Why?” The savage in Brye slipped back into place, and I couldn’t help but feel as if he slipped
from me.
“Your dad knows where you are.” He audibly gulped as he shoved his shoulders back. “And he’s
coming for blood.”
There’s always a dragon to slay. Filly’s words stuck with me while Emmett’s swam in my head.
My dad was coming. Evil incarnate would touch her again, and after I’d gotten her out, after I’d
set her free.
Or…
I could slay the dragon once and for all.
My father deserved to die. I hadn’t questioned that for years. But at the end of the day, he was my
father, the only warped sense of family I’d ever had. He’d introduced me to murder and mayhem,
drugs and all things deliciously sinful, but he’d also been the man in the suit that kicked the soccer
ball in the street with me. He’d given me a home, an education, a life, no matter how wrong it really
was.
“I came to help you, Brye.” Emmett shook me from my thoughts. “I came to help you end it once
and for all.”
I looked over at Filly, at her tousled hair and the bright red marks raised just above the collar of
my shirt. She was temptation as pure and enticing as original sin. I could have her, I could have a life
with her. My father’s end was my beginning.
Ours.
“Can I trust you?” It was the last question I remembered asking him and this time I was gambling
with something infinitely more valuable.
“Trust that I want him gone.” It wasn’t an answer and I was about to press him when Filly
interrupted.
“No!” Filly screamed.
My eyes locked on hers, big and begging. “Yes,” I answered despite her desperate look.
“You said you wouldn’t leave me.”
“I’m sorry, but you don’t get a say in this.” I loathed myself for being stern with her.
“Like fuck!”
“He’s right, Filly,” her dad echoed with his finite voice.
“Don’t you even start.” Her voice was squeaking up, her hands reached back for the wild marks
near her neck. I grabbed for her hands, hoping to keep them from clawing at her skin but she wrenched
them away from me and threw them up in the air. “I will not lose you!”
I blew out a deep breath and chanced a glance at her father. The ice cold bastard had a look on his
face of understanding. I didn’t know if there would ever be a moment I didn’t want to rip his head off,
I didn’t know if I’d get a chance to find out, but I knew he had my back when it came to this. When it
came to keeping Filly safe.
“Well, you can bet your ass I’m not losing you. To anything. If he can even guess where you are...”
“Brye, please.” Her voice was still harsh, but tears threatened to destroy each syllable.
I thought about fighting more with her, about making her see, but she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. The
same way that I couldn’t see walking away from it all with no resolution. She only saw risk. I only
saw reward. The sparkle of her unshed tears was fresh in the corner of her eyes. They were the
reminder of earlier, they were the seal of my fate.
 My chest constricted as I looked away from her and back to her father. I wordlessly told him what
I would do, what I would sacrifice, and he barely nodded his chin.
“Cole, please.” My words were an odd echo of hers but they were a command and he complied.
He wrapped around his daughter before she realized, pinning her back to his chest. Filly started
fighting, yelling my name amid wild roars and red-hot tears. I wanted to go to her. The urge to soothe
her, to tell her it had all been a lie, that I’d never walk away from her, built until it was almost
choking.
It was only a heartbeat later that Cole had to root completely against her flailing body, his muscles
flexed and gripped. When her furious cry turned to anguish, I couldn’t breathe. She was turning the
dark red of her angry welts and I wanted the cream of her skin back so bad it hurt, but it was the color
that made me swallow back the emotion. It had been gone a few days but the dark of blood splashed
against snow flashed before my eyes.
“You have to leave.” I looked at her uncles, skipping over them and landing on her mom. Elle was
beautiful, the warmth I loved about Filly poured out from her, but there was a hardness too. It was that
unfailing steel that I appealed to. “You have to take her far from here. She can’t come back.”
Filly screamed and it dissolved down into sobs as she sagged into the unwavering grip of her
father. Elle cocked her head sideways and studied me. She didn’t share the same sentiment and
sureness that Cole did, but I couldn’t tell what was behind her eyes in its place.
“We will.” It was Horse that finally answered me.
Cole nodded in solidarity. Elle still said nothing, but I didn’t need her too.
“Let’s go.” Emmett knocked my shoulder and I turned, my gaze sweeping the carpet rather than the
room.
He held the door open for me as Filly’s wild cry tried to hold me back. This was the last moment
to choose being with her rather than fighting for her. This was the last moment to choose selfish or
sacrifice. I looked back at her, wearing all of it on my face, praying that she’d see into me like she
always managed, praying she knew I was doing this for her, not to her. I looked back at her and
smiled the smallest sad smile before I turned away and followed Emmett out the door.

I stared out of the window as Emmett drove the streets I knew so well. Streetlights washed over me
with the usual flip and wash and my mind wandered to Paris. Filly had said they had a house there,
and I idly wondered if the streetlights felt different there. Warm maybe, rose even.
I could be there now if only…
No. I caught myself. Tonight I’d opened up the box that held my heart and let Filly have the fucked
up bits that were left. The farther I got away from her, the more I missed those scraps and how gently
she held them. The more I doubted this decision.
“You’re going to be king,” Emmett said.
“I already was,” I muttered.
“You really don’t want this?” Emmett broke into my thoughts and I sighed. “After all the years?
All the bodies and all the bloodshed? You don’t want the sacrifice to be at your altar?”
“No, Emmett.” I shot him a look as I thought back to my words to Filly in bed. She was the only
prayer I’d ever need.
“Think of the empire you’ll inherit.”
“I don’t want it. Not anymore.”
“How can you not want it?” He quirked his eyebrow. “The power, the money? The sex?”
 “I want a life.”
“Fuck a life. You should want to be immortal.”
Deirdre’s words breezed through me. He thirsted for power, not love. How thirsty was he? What
were the sins she forgave that broke her? Would they break me?
I looked over at Emmett in a new light, a darkly terrifying one.
“Is that what you told Deirdre?”
He threw his head back and laughed. “Is that what she told you?” He banged his fist on the
steering wheel. “That raunchy whore.”
“Stay in line, Emmett,” I warned.
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Brye, don’t believe everything you hear.” His eye roll was damn near audible
between us. “Did she tell you she was torn between two of us? That she couldn’t make up her damned
mind. I wanted her. Desperately. And she couldn’t figure out whether she felt the same way.”
Filly hadn’t known how she felt about me. The pain had been palpable at her indecision.
“I almost lost my damn mind.”
“How’d you change hers?”
“The MacCowan way,” he said with a shoulder shrug.
“You killed him?” There was less judgment in my voice than there should be. Perhaps the
MacCowan comment wasn’t far off. I would kill any man that took Filly.
“You know why you really don’t want to take up your father’s mantle?” he asked with a laugh.
“You’re not creative enough. You don’t think ten steps ahead. There’s a future here for you and your
little doe-eyed whore if only you were creative enough to build it.”
My hands balled in my lap at the mere mention of Filly. He didn’t know her. He couldn’t know her
goodness and her utter wrongness here amongst the ashes of a dying kingdom. When he called her a
whore I was tempted to gouge his eyeballs out and feel the fibrous pull before the bubblegum pop. If
he hadn’t been driving, I would have done it.
“Don’t. Call. Her. A. Whore.” Ice froze on each letter of each word as I said them.
“You used to like a good whore.” His voice tried to match. “Or two,” he added with a wicked
smirk.
“Things change,” I snarled.
He eyed me from the driver’s seat, evaluating me so blatantly that the vision of reaching up and
smashing his head into the steering wheel played on a loop in my head. There was something
calculating in his look. Something challenging too. I wanted to tell him that he had no right to look at
the future king of an unholy empire that way, but we both knew that wasn’t true anymore. When his
gaze finally met mine and I did what I could to show him all the ruthless hate still simmering inside of
me he shrugged.
“Seems that they do.”
My warped cry still rang in my ears. My cheeks were still steaming with heat and the wet that clung to
them. I couldn’t hold myself up and the support of my dad around me was the only reason I didn’t
crumble. Or turn around and claw his eyes out.
They had let him go.
They had let him go because they were cowards. It didn’t bother me that Brye was going to kill
his father, but we were going to let him do it alone. We could help. If any of those godforsaken stories
were true—and when I looked into the hard, unyielding edge of my family I knew they were—we had
the means to keep the man I loved safe.
I shoved at my dad’s arms with all my might and fury inside me and I must have caught him off
guard because I snapped free and crashed to the floor. The sudden assault on my knees drew the tears
back out in cascades down my cheeks.
My mom’s slight but steel arms were around me almost immediately. I collapsed into the curve of
her neck and let the fear wash over me. Because that’s why I was a wreck—the fear. I would lose
him. And just when I found him underneath those layers of mirk.
“I want you to go after him.” My mom’s voice vibrated against my ear. “Cole, did you hear me?
Go after that boy and bring him back here.”
I squeezed on her.
“No,” he said sharply.
And the force of his conviction hit me so hard, I choked on my sobs.
“Cole Ryan, you listen to me and you listen good. Filly loves that boy, that should be enough.” She
unwound from me, leaving me as a heap on the floor as she stood toe to toe with my father and
pressed her pointer finger into his chest. “But you know good and well I’m asking because he loves
her. You saw it on his face as plain as day, just like me. The fact that he’s going to lay his life down
for her…”
“Elle,” my dad warned.
“I get so sick of this bullshit. From all of you.” She whirled and pointed directly at Uncle Horse
too. “You love us? Then just love us. Include us. Filly is just as strong as I was. Conrad too. Fight
beside us, not for us.”
“Tart, we wouldn’t even know where to start,” Horse said softly.
“You two have managed to find every ounce of trouble in this godforsaken city since I met you,
probably before. It shouldn’t be too hard.”
“Mom?”
She crouched back down and cupped my face. “I’m sorry I let him walk out of the room, Bean.”
I shook my head, unable to tell her all the things still caught in my throat. I didn’t care that she
hadn’t stopped him—I wasn’t sure she could have. Though I doubted anyone could truly defy this
version of her. I loved her unending and it was because she saw me and my insides and understood.
She’d never been really bad, she’d never been really wrong, even when doing all the shit that
sounded so foul. She faced the dark and chosen light and love. She stood so strong against the waves
that kept crashing against her shore.
I wanted to be just like her.
“I’m sorry.” I pulled her into the tightest hug I could manage despite how awkward it was, her
arms crunched to my chest and still holding tight to me.
I hoped she knew that I was apologizing not just for the venom I’d spat her way but the things I’d
thought. The things I’d questioned. The way she leaned her forehead down to mine with a sullen
smile, I was thinking yes. And it fueled a fire inside me.
“We’ll figure it out—” My dad started to cave when a sharp, rushed knock at the door cut his
words short. Everyone froze.
“Who is that?” Horse asked me in a barely there voice.
I shook my head, sensing the danger as if it was second nature to me now too.
“Filly? I know you’re in there.”
I knew the woman’s voice. I wanted to rip it from her throat. With my family here, with our
ruthlessness laid bare between us, I thought I just might. My father wordlessly questioned me and I
didn’t know if I wanted to open the door or not. I didn’t know if it was Pandora’s box or not.
“Filly, you have no reason to believe me but Brye’s in trouble.”
“No shit,” I spat out without meaning to.
“It’s Emmett, Filly. It’s always been Emmett.”
And just like that, my world bottomed out. I had to fight to cling to walls around me, suddenly oh-
so-aware of the pit beneath me and how it could swallow me up. My mom was back at my side her
fingertips at my shoulder as she faced the door.
I sucked in a deep breath as I shoved to my feet and then to the door. I yanked it open without a
second thought. The guns clicking into place behind me reminded me what a serious game we were
playing, I couldn’t let her taunt me into something I might lose.
“Explain yourself,” I snarled, knowing that my family behind me was every bit as menacing as my
wicked voice.
She had morphed since the last time I saw her. The bombshell was gone and a scared girl in a
hooded sweatshirt with a black eye and bloody lip stood in front of me. That was the girl I let into our
hotel room.
“Emmett was something to me. Something special.” She swallowed and I couldn’t tell if it was
her blood or her words that tasted sour on her tongue.
“He treated you like trash.” I remembered his words, about how she was nothing more than holes
and an orgasm to him.
“It didn’t start that way. It started like you and Brye—with hope.” She smiled weakly.
“I don’t believe you.”
She rolled her eyes then lifted her hand to her lips; her hands were just as battered and bruised as
her face. Whatever had happened, Deirdre had fought like hell to get here. She flipped her bottom lip
to reveal a managed scar in a vaguely familiar shape. She glowered at me and swallowed once
before she let it flip back into place. The split on the front side had reopened and the smallest drop of
blood rolled down her chin.
“I told him I couldn’t go to the dinner parties anymore, that watching him with other people was
too much for me. We’d been happy, we’d talked about getting married.
“Rather than honor my wishes, he branded me. I was so in love with him I never told anyone he
did it. He made me a possession. A pet,” she spat out the words. “I had a choice to make. I knew
enough that I could play the part or die. Connor would have made sure of that too.”
 “He didn’t protect you?” I didn’t need to feel for her, but I did.
“He came on the scar while it was still healing.”
“Oh my God.” I arched back. “Why did you keep his secret?”
“Why wouldn’t I?” She gave me a look like I was an idiot. “Secrets are currency in this world.
We all keep them. We leverage them. You think this,” she pointed at her lip, “is what makes Emmett a
monster? After everything?” She arched her eyebrow.
“So then why are you telling me now?” I crossed my arms.
“Because he forced my hand, Filly. He twisted up those secrets and made me what I am.”
Dread knotted up in my stomach just at the way she said things. The same shadows that lapped at
Brye himself that first day, wrapped around her words.
“You know what I’m going to say,” she whispered.
“He’s going to do the same to Brye,” I finished for her.
She nodded slowly and I reached out for my mom to steady me. My dad’s calloused hand got there
first. He gave me strength as Deirdre continued.
“I went to the club last night so I could help. I made sure you were safe at the track. I brought him
here.”
Thank you was on the tip of my tongue.
“And tonight, when I was home, Emmett beat where here is out of me.”
“You told him where Filly was?” My dad stepped toward to her, menacing with his prowl and
prowess alone.
“When he laid me out, he stole my phone. He checked the GPS.” She narrowed her gaze and
stepped toe to toe with my father.
We all sat in taut silence until my mom turned on her heel, grabbing some ice for the girl whose
face had suffered for my secrets. Deirdre pressed the washcloth full of cubes to her face without
flinching.
“Why would he do it this to Brye?” I finally broke the silence with the question that nagged at my
heart.
“Power,” Horse answered for her.
“The two most powerful men in the Chicago underground are about to go up against each other,”
my dad spoke. “Blood is going to run in the streets. Every single person who’s thirsty will get to
drink.”
“Emmett is going to sit back and watch it happen.” Horse added. “God knows what he has
planned when the dust settles.”
“Brye was going to walk away last night. I don’t know what changed, but I’m guessing it has to do
with you. That’s why you have to go get him,” Deirdre broke in. “Only you can stop him.” She looked
at me then let her eyes slide around the room at each of my family members. “Only you can hide him.”
I knew what had changed. What was between us had solidified into the shape of our hearts and
bodies as they twined together in those hotel sheets.
“I’m going,” I said soft and strong to no one in particular.
“I’ll show you. I’ll help however I can.” Deirdre didn’t dare lay her hands on me, but the way she
flinched I knew she meant her solidarity.
My mom disappeared again, returning only to wordlessly hand me some fresh clothes and a pair
of high top Chucks. It was the best answer she could give. And when my dad simply started cleaning
his gun, inspecting it as if he was going to war, I knew what love looked like. It was dark and gritty
and unfaltering. It fought and fucked and there was no surrender, it was just a death at the hands of
something you wanted to die for.
And I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if it came down to it, I would die for Brye
MacCowan.
I was going to kill my father.
It was time, it was right, it was worth it, but the sentence was surreal. I was going to kill my
father.
Part of me wondered if he was redeemable—the same part that had been brought back to life by
Filly—the rest of me knew he was gone. He wouldn’t give up power, position or pussy for anything.
For anyone. It was what happened when love soured and turned into an obsession.
“What’s your plan?”
“Kill my father.” The words glitched in my throat.
“How?”
“As quickly and quietly as I can.”
“Under the seat.” He jerked his chin.
I reached to find a fucking arsenal. Just by touch I found a shoulder holster and slid two guns
against my chest. There was a knife for my boot and brass knuckles for my pocket.
“Good enough?” Emmett shot me a devious smile and I swore I saw blood dripping from his lips.
I couldn’t answer. Words like good were gone tonight. Only things like death and damnation
remained.
Emmett slid out of the car and stood silhouetted against the light shining beside my front door. He
seemed fearless, soulless like that and a shiver rolled down my spine. My soul had been found, she’d
electrified it. That alone gave me a healthy dose of fear.
For the first time, the power to give and take life made me afraid.
My back spread wide and my muscles tensed uncomfortably before I blew it out and melted
completely. I willed my lungs to breathe in Filly even in this dark place. As if she answered, the glint
of silver caught my eye, not beneath my seat but pushed forward by my toes. I reached for it despite
the nervous numbness in my fingertips.
A third gun, a Walther by the looks of it, smaller than my hand, had been discarded on the
floorboards like other people threw out food wrappers. I snatched it and shoved it into the back of my
waistband before sliding out to meet him. I closed my eyes and basked in the light, hoping that it
washed me in the same soulless bath as Emmett.
Instead I felt Filly and I smiled.
We walked up the stairs without much fanfare. The door swung open much the same. I didn’t know
what to expect but walking right in and having silence and darkness greet me, wasn’t it. I walked
carefully through the house, remembering the floorboards that creaked from my childhood.
My childhood that was about to disappear.
Anxiety prickled at my neck and I pulled a gun from my holster and swung it in front of me.
Emmett faded into the shadows behind me. There was a force pulling me forward, almost a magnet to
my father. To my fate.
Somehow I knew he was in the dining room, seated at that damned table before I stepped into the
wide doorframe that gave me a view. The room was completely dark.
“I was wondering what you’d do.” My father’s voice came from behind the black veil.
 “You can fucking destroy me, but you aren’t going to hurt her,” I said coolly. “If I have my way
you aren’t going to hurt anyone, anymore.”
He just laughed and there was just enough streetlight for me to see him temple his seemingly
disembodied fingers in front of him as he settled his elbows onto the tables.
“And who will be responsible for what follows? You?”
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t think he deserved the answer. To know that I’d become something
better than my circumstances despite every effort he made to drag me down.
“Did it ever occur to you, son, that the underworld needs a king? Without a semblance of order,
there is no one to put down the dogs. There is no one to offer Elysium or drown them in the Styx. It is
minions, hellbent on destruction, ripping at the flesh of each other until there’s nothing left.”
The visual he painted was real. The times we’d murdered someone more monstrous than us,
flashed in my mind. The small kernel of truth made me pause. I wondered would happen to the world
around me.
But then I wondered why he was just sitting.
Sitting and waiting.
“Did you want me to spare you?” I asked.
“No,” he answered with his usual shrug.
“Did you plan to kill me?” I tightened my grip on my gun.
“Yes.”
“How?”
It wasn’t even a full heartbeat after my question that a bat cracked the side of my head. Mercifully
I didn’t drop, but I staggered and crashed into the doorframe. My dad’s wicked laugh thumped in my
head along with the pain and my blood. I wanted to fall to my knees, but Filly kept me upright.
I crashed forward and got off a shot but only wood splintered in response.
“Emmett,” I snarled but only more random thumps answered.
Whoever had the bat swung it at my side and the sound of my ribs crunching was just as real as
the feel of it. I wasn’t expecting it, but this time I could react to it. I threw my arm backward and
wrapped it around the wood, using the crook of my elbow to pull him in.
My fist flew on instinct. Finding his face first with my knuckles then with my elbow back the other
way. The warmth of blood splattered on my shoulder a second before the small patter of a tooth
bouncing off my skin. I wrenched the bat out of his hold, spun it in mine and swung at the faceless man
before I had a chance to think. Before he had a chance to react. The crunch of his face only preceded
his muffled thump to the floor by a second.
“Emmett, the lights,” I yelled only for my father to start laughing again.
I used the gun in my other hand to unload in his direction.
“Much closer this time, Brye.” He was an undeniable bastard.
The floorboards beside me creaked and I swung, blowing off a shot just in time to feel lifeless
fingertips fall down along my body.
I didn’t call for Emmett again, I didn’t want them to know where I was. The sounds of some tussle
behind me implied he was otherwise engaged anyway. I tried to pinpoint where the sounds were
coming from. If I could get to him, if we could take down whoever together…
A fist flew into my back, catching my bottom rib and my kidney. He had to be wearing brass
knuckles because acid barreled through me and the pain was more an electrocution that paralyzed me
for a heartbeat or so than a punch. He used the kidney shot to his advantage, jamming the heel of his
boot into the back of my knee. I crashed to the floor. Hard. His toe caught the same aching spot his fist
had. I cried out, feeling my rib crack under the pressure.
My whole life had been like this. An unending assault, bruises and blood. Until Filly. And as I sat
crumpled over, her sea glass green eyes and sunshine hair erased the pain. Well, erased wasn’t
exactly right, but she helped me surge past it.
Lightning shot through me as I turned and grabbed his ankle and wrenched. The snap of sinew
answered me just before a howl and a thump.
“They’re going to keep coming, Brye. Until they bury you. Bury you and unearth that Ryan girl.”
I snarled, but then it stilled in my throat. He’d said girl, not family. Emmett had said he was
coming for all of them, but he hadn’t mentioned it. He’d said unearth as if he didn’t know…
What the fuck?
Subtlety wasn’t my father’s thing.
“I’m going to fuck her Brye. In a puddle of your disobedient blood.” He laughed as I swore at
him. “I’m going to write my name across her thighs and hang her back in the basement.”
The fury inside me snapped, but it didn’t send me into a rage. It silenced the questions about
Emmett and the Ryan family. It zeroed the world to one brilliant, crimson pinpoint. I took a deep
breath and the silence of a killing calm stilled the room and my nerves.
I pictured the head of the table and where he always sat opposite me. I could see the slight curve
of his shoulders. I visualized what was between us—mahogany, chandelier, candelabras—and the
line I needed to take. With one steady, deep breath, I lifted the gun, closed my eyes and pulled the
trigger.
True to form, my father started laughing, but this time it was garbled and had the hint of wind
against shutters in the background. He choked on something and wheezed a moment later and it was
my turn to smile. I knew that sound, the sound of a death rattle.
“You won’t touch her,” I said with conviction as I shoved myself to standing. “You won’t touch
any of them.”
“No.” He wheezed. “It seems…” each breath was harder and harder on him. “…I’ll have to leave
that to Emmett.”
There was one last breath and the soft rumple of fabric then…nothing. Death was swift and easy.
Killing nothing more than a crook of my finger. There was no production, no long drawn out words,
there was just the absence. I’d grown used to it—I was even grateful not to hear some deathbed
confession—but the weight still hung on me.
I sucked in a deep breath and shoved my shoulders back. I took the three long steps to the wall
and flipped on the light. My father was a heap of skin and suit at the head of the table and his thugs
framed him, all frozen.
But it was Emmett that drew my attention. Emmett who sat in a chair at the side of the table, facing
me. He had his ankle crossed on his knee, casually bouncing as he watched me. His gun rested on his
lap adding to his unruffled and casual air.
“You were never here to help, were you?” I asked.
I wasn’t the least surprised when he laughed something wicked like my dad. For the first time, I
saw him for what he was and all the things he was not.
“Nope.” He popped the P in his word. “I honestly thought it would be a little more eventful.”
“Hoped is more like it.” He shrugged.
And that was the difference. Hope. What it meant to each of us, what bits of our insides fed on it.
“I mean I went to all that trouble to find Deirdre, fuck her up, find Filly, and take you from her,
and I didn’t even get a hail of bullets. I didn’t get second-guessing or savagery. You stuck to your
word and killed your father. Bor-ing.”
He rolled his eyes and waved his gun as if the whole thing was a waste of his time.
“He was my father.” I lunged at him.
“Yes, and what a good one he was.” Emmett leveled his pistol at my chest. My chest that Filly had
been kissing an hour ago. The one that housed the heart I promised to return to her.
“I’ll kill you!”
“You won’t,” he laughed as he stood. “You won’t because she made you feel. She made you
weak.” He stepped toe to toe with me and snugged the barrel of his gun beneath my chin. “Your father
was right. These heathens need a king and you are not it. But me? There is nothing I enjoy more than
playing an unholy God.”
“So you’re going to kill me?” I asked as I thought about all the times he’d nursed my injuries, all
the times he’d been the voice of reason.
“Yes,” he answered as he leaned his forehead to mine and let a curled smile overtake his face.
“And then I’m going to kill the Ryans. And anyone else with a claim to the throne.”
“I will come back from the grave—”
“What? To watch me fuck her the way your father suggested.” He laughed. “Please, be my guest.”
I screamed at him, the full weight of my fury a roar thrust at his face. We were so close my spit
splattered at his face. I thought about tearing into him with my teeth. But then a soft touch whispered at
the small of my back where I’d stuck that last gun. I wished there was some way to grab it—it or any
of the random weapons I’d brought but not used.
Then I felt it again.
And after all the talk of ghosts, I wondered if one was really moving it when the gun slid out of
my waistband. Soft, delicate fingers traced my abs then splayed across the flat expanse of my stomach
and held me tight. I knew that exploratory touch. Her other hand grazed my opposite hip.
“I will ruin you, Emmett,” I promised, my voice low and serious.
“No, no. This time you won’t.” He shoved the barrel of his gun harder into the soft cleft beneath
my jaw, his eyes never shifting from mine.
“You’re right, Emmett.” It was Filly’s beautiful voice as it had been in bed with me—possessive,
strong and certain. “It’ll be me.”
He roared with laughter. For a split second, I was sure I was going to get shot while she was
saying her piece, knowing she wasn’t the brutal beast that we were and she’d need to exercise these
demons. But then she tensed. A heartbeat later the shot of the gun was muffled as it was absorbed by
flesh. The steel at my throat slid and his eyes went wide with panic, but otherwise he was Emmett,
solid in his wicked convictions until the end.
When he crumpled beneath me, I kicked his corpse to make sure that he was dead. I smiled when
his body stayed limp and gummy.
My smile spread even farther when I turned to find the woman that I loved.
I walked into Hell, not some Chicago mansion. My father and Horse had gone first, and they had
leveled man after man. Bodies and blood littered a foyer that held more expensive antiques than some
of the museums I’d been to. But I only focused on them for a moment.
The lights flicked on and all I could see was the dark ink of Brye’s angel wings beneath his shirt
where he stood, seething near the spot where I’d first acquainted myself with the darkest part of his
soul. I saw the man he was, the man he could be shuddering against some unseen cold.
Until Emmett stepped toward him. Emmett was the version from Deirdre’s story, wicked and it
was so blatantly obvious. Horns seemed to grow from the corners of his forehead. But Brye’s wings
responded, floating up from his skin to flap behind him in all their dark glory. I was sure I was
hallucinating but then Emmett pressed the gun to Brye’s throat and I knew they were an omen.
I crept toward him, using his broad body to shield me, and noticed the gun tucked into his pants.
Dad and Horse and I had always shot cactus in the desert and old beer cans on camping trips. It was
fun and childish at the time, survival skills in hindsight. A gift today no matter which they intended.
Because today, right now, I was going to kill for Brye.
I tiptoed behind him, taking advantage of his size and Emmett’s solitary focus. I was scared that
Brye wouldn’t know the feel of my fingertips, that he’d fight the unseen person behind him. Or worse,
that he’d think he was alone.
But his body reacted to mine, the sag of his shoulders said he knew. I snuggled to him, feeling the
solid and sturdy of his body as I pulled the gun out and pointed it toward Emmett’s torso. Outside of
his black heart, I wasn’t sure what would kill him, but I figured something angled up toward his lungs
was close enough.
They’d been speaking about me, I could tell by the fire spreading across Brye’s skin and the
unearthly growl. Emmett’s shove on Brye’s chin tensed his neck and lengthened his spine. I pressed
closer to the curve of his body and splayed my hand across his stomach, melding his body to mine.
“I will ruin you, Emmett.” There was something serious and solid in Brye’s voice.
“No, no. This time you won’t.” Wicked hung on Emmett’s words, and somehow it made my
decision easier.
“You’re right, Emmett.” I took a deep breath and felt the truth of my convictions in my bones. “It’ll
be me.”
I pulled the trigger, a soft squeeze and a barely there click before the bone-shaking boom. Emmett
crumpled to the floor in front of me, but the blood and bone wasn’t what made me shake. It was that
he was gone. Forever. All his good, all his bad, his possible retribution, and assured evil had
vanished as if it were nothing more than smoke. I had been the one to take it.
And I didn’t mind in the least.
That utter lack of regret was what made me shake. It made me a monster, just like the rest of them.
It made me want to sharpen my claws.
“A chuisle mo chroí,” Brye murmured as he his hands came to cup my cheeks. I didn’t know the
Irish words but the tenderness with which he said them was its own soothing stroke down my rigid
spine. “You came for me.”
I let the gun drop from my hand as I slid into the fold of his hug. He pulled me so tight, held me so
close that I felt his heartbeat shake my skin.
“I couldn’t let you face this alone.” I breathed in deep as I buried myself in his chest. “I couldn’t
lose you.”
“Mo chuisle,” he purred again as he bent and found my lips.
And there in the midst of violence and hate, the way he kissed me was a bloom pushing through
concrete.
I tried to get my hands free, I wanted to roam across him, to learn the contours of the body that
was mine in every way. The soul that I’d claimed in front of God and Satan and anyone else who
happened to be watching. But he held me too tight.
When the crunch of footsteps behind us broke through the blissful haze, his grip became almost
painful as he shoved me behind him.
“Just us.” My dad held up his hands in surrender.
He looked worse for the wear; each cut and bruise a signal that he’d fought for us. My uncle’s
heavy breaths next to him spoke of the same hard-won silence we stood in.
“You okay, Bean?” Horse asked as he looked at us then the body behind us and back again. I knew
he was asking about the deeper layers of my soul.
I nodded where I peeked out from beside Brye. He managed a smile as he clapped my dad on his
shoulder.
“Thank you,” Brye managed pure sincerity when he spoke to my dad and Horse.
They seemed to be heavy in the muck of the house, shaking off the blood but they both gave him a
curt nod.
“You know you choose. And right now,” my dad said in his rumbling voice.
I tried to dig my fingers into Brye’s skin, but he pulled away. And completely. His gaze swept
across the floor and his face fell into sharp and confused lines. I let mine follow.
Acid burned my throat. The blood of his father and his best friend blanketed his childhood home.
He’d know the men that littered the living room. I had too… It wasn’t the death and destruction that
made me heave but that Brye’s reality was shattered. It was leaking on the floor.
“Son,” my dad warned sharp.
“Don’t Dad—” I started.
“I’m not your son,” Brye snarled. “I’m no one’s.” He picked up a vase and slammed it against the
wall.
I watched the cascade of ceramic in various sizes as it sprinkled into the blood and dimpled the
thick of it. I knew it was foreshadowing of what was to come a simple heartbeat or two before the
crash confirmed it.
Brye fell to his knees with an echo in the starkly silent room, but it was far louder in my heart.
Just like everything else in that room, he was broken, and that alone broke me. My dad was about to
speak, but I shot him the most withering look I could manage then folded down around Brye. My
knees splashed in the blood and I felt the same slosh inside my stomach, but then the world slowed,
and my body stilled as I sagged into him.
“You’re mine,” I murmured. “My kushlay, my kree, or whatever you said earlier.” I twisted to kiss
the cap of his shoulder with all the ardor I could manage as I butchered his words.
He laughed a single and shaky laugh, but there was tenderness there. Fear and scorn too. “You
don’t even know what that means.”
 “Tell me.”
“The pulse of my heart,” he answered simply.
And there in the blood of our enemies, in the evidence that I’d become a monster savage and rude
and wild, I repeated myself, low and solemn, letting each beat of my heart bleed into my words.
“Brye, you are the pulse of my heart.”
My life was in shambles. Literally. Everything I had ever known had fallen at my feet.
I’d wanted it. I’d wanted every drop of this blood, but I hadn’t expected to feel the loss. The pain.
Maybe I’d expected my blood to join theirs on the floor. That I was here, that her hands were on me,
seemed unreal. And when she claimed me, the world dissolved.
How could she say that here, sitting in blood, when she’d seen me kill? She claimed I was what
beat inside her heart… I looked over at the beautiful girl who had sullied her soul for me and
watched her chest rise and fall in perfect rhythm with mine.
“What if this doesn’t end? What if it’s always like this?”
She shrugged and let a small smile pull at her lips. “Life doesn’t look like I expected, Brye,
sometimes it’s quite ugly. But that doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful.”
“So if I stayed?”
“I’d recommend refinishing the floors and the dining room table has to go,” she said with a shiver,
but then she recovered her warmth.
“And if I choose to leave this all behind…?”
The fear when Cole had told me to choose had been a shock to my system. I’d never had a choice.
I’d never wanted to choose. Honestly, I didn’t know who I was outside of death and mayhem. I’d
never minded that part.
Here my world had been the shades of gray, and crimson too with the deepest shade of night. With
Filly, with there was color. Infinite color. And not because she’d ask me, but because that’s what I
would give her. I wouldn’t drag her into the dark any more than I already had.
But could I actually follow through?
“I will too,” she said simply.
Her dad sucked in a deep breath and I prepared for the buffet of his hot air, but out of the corner of
my eye, I saw Horse grab his shoulder and pull him back. Then shake his finger in front of his face.
“Say those Irish words to me again and I’ll follow you anywhere.” She reached over and threaded
her fingers into mine.
“A chuisle mo chroí.” The words turned into a snarl as she leaned into the kush and hard eee of
the phrase.
I wanted to slam her down to the floor and feel the way my body matched with her. I wanted the
hot stick of everything wicked about us to soak in as I fucked her into oblivion. I wanted it because
when it was over, when she could feel her fingertips again, she’d smile at me. At everything about
me.
My hand fisted into her hair running on lust alone and drug her to me. Her fingers dug into my
hand then into my thigh. I reached for her waist and pulled her over my knee. I growled into her mouth
when her knees made that soft splash against the blood and hardwood again.
“Get your hands off my daughter.” Cole spoke in the same wild roars as me. The bastard in me
enjoyed it way too much.
I yanked her to my body, and while her kisses hesitated, her hands clutched at my chest.
“Cole…” Horse warned.
 “I’ll kill him. Even here, even now.”
I couldn’t stop. Wouldn’t. As fucked up as it was, I wanted them to see me with her. I wanted them
to know she wasn’t their little girl. She was mine. Both the brush that painted my canvas and the
masterpiece I yearned to create.
Filly rose up on, grinding her hips on mine in blissful friction. I almost moaned into her open
mouth, but then my lips were left aching, empty in the open air. I sucked in a deep breath before she
kissed my forehead.
“If my dad kills you, I don’t think I’ll fair too well a kushlay mo kree.” She butchered my
endearment again with a wide smile.
She rose and reached her hand out for me. I was going to take it—I didn’t think I could live
without that delicate touch anymore—and I was going to follow through on every promise every man
had ever made a woman since the beginning of time. I was going to be a good guy for Filly.
“Call the cleaners, don’t tell them why,” Horse broke through my thoughts, reading them almost
perfectly. “Pack a bag then we’re leaving town.”
“I’m not going with you.” I shot him a look as I steadied myself against their onslaught.
“Shamrock, you’re going to come with us because for at least two thousand miles, you’ll be
watching your backs. You need all the eyes you can get.” He added a bit softer, “She needs them.”
I wanted to roar, but it stuck in my throat as I thought it through. Putting Filly first wasn’t hard in
theory—I would tear the world apart stone by stone for her—but doing what was right by her was a
little harder. It was like a belt that didn’t have the right notches, either too tight or too lose. My teeth
screeched against each other as I ground my jaw. I kissed the back of her hand even as the muscles of
my neck feathered.
There was a weight on my chest as I left her downstairs in the muck and the mire and walked into
my room to pack that bag. It didn’t feel quite like mine anymore. My life didn’t feel like mine
anymore. Nothing before Filly had been particularly good, but I understood it. I took the beatings, the
berating, and handed out my own. It was familiar.
A life with Filly would be… There weren’t really weren’t words. Amazing. Terrifying.
Everything. Nothing I knew. I’d never known real fear until her and the very real fear of failing her on
unfamiliar ground had me reeling.
I started pacing my room, letting my fingers drag over the spines of my books, the cut of my
crystal. There were memories attached to each item, flashes of the life I’d built here in Hell. Emmett
had been a friend. Well, not really, but here in this room, his ghost was. He’d been a voice that
answered in the dark, something to prop me up, someone to heal the broken pieces. My father had
been a monster, but he’d taught me everything I knew and let me want for nothing.
Nothing but love.
“We don’t have to go, Brye.” Filly’s voice was soft behind me, not tentative or wavering, just the
sturdy and consuming hug I’d come to know my girl was. “I mean it. Fuck what my dad says. Even
what my uncle is trying to with his good intentions.”
“They’re right, Filly.” I turned to find her leaning up against my doorframe. She was so casual
with her arms crossed accentuating her beautiful chest, her long legs easy even though they were
coated in blood. “I just…” don’t know how to put this into words.
She studied me for a moment in that way Filly had, that way that cut through me and saw sorrow
and chaos and something good despite it all. Her brow crinkled and her ever-shining smile tipped
downward.
“You’re sad he’s gone.” Her words were a little choked. Her eyes went wide and though she
barely moved, I saw the way she pressed her hands into her skin to hold herself together. “Oh God, I
didn’t even think. He was your only friend. Even after everything. And I killed him.” When her breath
ticked up and her chest started to heave mine did too.
I was striding toward her before I even thought about it. “No,” I cooed into her hair as I wrapped
my body around hers. “I’m just off-kilter. What am I now? Who am I?” I offered up my greatest fear—
my only vulnerability—to her. “I love you more than words can say but will you still love whoever I
turn out to be?”
Her hands wound around me, and her fingers played with the ridges of my scars.
“Someday I’ll teach you to sculpt,” she spoke into my chest; I was starting to love that timbre of
her voice the best. The way it shook me. “You’ll learn there’s beauty in the raw clay, in the final form,
and every shape and line in between.” She pressed her lips so tenderly to my left pec. “Sometimes
you scrap it all in the end, but the way you get to dig your hands in, feel the cool of the clay and the
way it crusts and coats your hands…” Her voice trailed off as she stepped back to look up at me.
Her sea glass eyes were a color I wanted to learn to paint, the shape of her lips, something I could
imagine sculpting.
“I can’t see the future, Brye, but I can’t see a life without you either. I want the journey, whatever
it ends up being.”
Everything that had happened downstairs had reshaped me. It was the single tear falling from
down my cheek that confirmed it. But the way she looked at me, the words she spoke, they made me
grateful that they had.
I wordlessly turned from her and tried to swallow back the emotion. I would put this behind me.
I’d find my footing and I’d be a fucking better man for it. For her.
Almost nothing meant much to me in this house when I thought about it like that, so I stuffed
clothes into a bag and threw my gun in there too. I reached for the first painting I’d ever done, the one
of Filly that was really just the first reincarnation of my heart. I took one more sweeping look around
and couldn’t find anything that needed to come.
Filly sensed it and walked toward my bookshelf. She grabbed a single, heavy, leather-bound
book.
“A reminder of where we’ve been,” she said as she handed me my copy of Romeo & Juliet.
I rubbed my thumb across the supple leather and felt something bloom in my chest. Something that
was the soft pinks and yellows of sunrise. Something that held the warmth of a world unfolding new. I
was a little uncomfortable with the full feeling in between my ribs, but it was hope, and with that
hope, I understood the real meaning of love.
Fuck me if I wasn’t going to use it all to love Filly for as long as she’d have me.
“I’m going to murder him,” Brye said through gritted teeth and I noticed the telltale clench of his fists
and bunch ofhis shoulders. “One more time, you mother fucker,” he swore under his breath, “I dare
you.”
I brushed the back of his hand with my knuckles and he barely unwound his hand to hold mine. But
he did. I leaned into him and tried to swallow my smile as I looked from him to Uncle Conrad where
he was pretending to be immersed in the painting hanging in front of him. The corner of his smirk
turned up and the light in his eyes told me just how amused he was with his latest filthy limerick he’d
whispered in Brye’s ear.
“I mean how am I supposed to focus on anything but how gin would feel on my dick.”
The big brash laugh I’d been holding back cracked out, echoing off the silent halls of the gallery.
More than a few people turned to stare at me and I felt Brye puff up beside me at their disapproval. I
simply twisted into his body and laughed into the valley of his chest that was marked forever as mine.
“You think it’s funny?” He bent a little to whisper in my ear. “Because I’ll do exactly what he told
me.”
“Put vermouth on there too and shove yourself in my mouth?” I couldn’t help but tighten my grip
on him as I thought about the taste of him, the soft velvet hardness of him.
“Chroí,” he warned me with my nickname in his softly chastising, equally encouraging voice.
I made eyebrows at him and used my hold to pull him down the hall, away from Uncle Conrad,
past the eyes of so many disapproving art lovers and out into the secret garden. I heard Conrad’s
laugh drift in the background.
Brye knew the language of my want and the syllables of my desire and had me against the ivy-
covered wall behind me the moment we tasted fresh air. That single taste of crisp Paris autumn air
was all I got before he filled my senses with his all-consuming kiss. From the first moment I’d tasted
Brye he’d been the only thing I craved, his kiss the thing I was ravenous for. I was here—we were
here together—because of it.
I surrendered to the kiss of my fate as he leaned his bulky body against me, barely pressing each
of the stones behind me against my body. His tongue swept along the seam of my lips, his hands along
the curve of my hips. My body bowed forward his until he flattened his hand and shoved me back to
the stone.
He growled just before his big hands slid under my sweater dress, palmed my ass and lifted. His
hands slid down the back of my legs and coaxed my knees up around his hips. When his lips slid from
mine and explored the territory it had already claimed days, weeks, even months earlier. I leaned
back and let him kiss along my neck and then the groove of my collarbone.
I could count the number of days since we walked out of that Chicago house and hadn’t showered
each other with affection on my fingers and toes. I hadn’t taken my spot at the Art Institute in San Fran
choosing instead to show the things to Brye that he deserved to see. The world, museums, sunrises. A
family. Love.
“Tell me no now,” he snarled as he pinched my ear between his teeth and pulled.
 My big soft-hearted man was asking, testing how comfortable I was, to find out if he was treating
me right. At first, I thought it was something sexy that I wasn’t meant to deny, but all too quickly I
realized he was asking because he didn’t know. He’d admitted that he was off-kilter that bloody night
and I wasn’t sure if he’d found his balance yet. He looked to me for guidance in a world of love
where he still walked on Bambi legs.
I nodded my head letting my skin brush against the scruff of his closely cropped beard and he
knew. Just like he knew my body and the interworking of my heart.
The sly unzip of his pants made my mouth water and my heart slam against my ribs. There was
always a little fear that we were going to get caught but it had slowly turned from a reminder of his
past to pride in our future. Let them watch I thought as he pulled the lace of my thong aside and slid
into me.
I rolled my head back and moaned, rustling the vines hanging close overhead as he started to
thrust into me. Brye shifted my weight and clapped his hand over my mouth. My eyes fluttered shut
and I let loose another primal groan that broke against his skin. He breathed his answering stilted
breath against my ear.
My hands slid from his shoulders, encouraged by the way he rolled against my body and found
their way to my chest. I always tried to keep hold of him but the way he took me, reformed my insides
every time. I wanted to claw down to my heart and show him what he did to me.
“Knock that shit off, Chroí,” Brye snapped as his hand left my mouth and batted my hands from my
chest. “Claw me. Mark me.” He punctuated his words by shoving into me that much harder. My hands
flew to his shoulders. “Dig down to my insides. They’re fucking yours anyways.”
I whimpered as I dug in. He winced, but it turned into one of his deliciously haggard mewls. His
pace faltered for just a second but then he arched his chest into my hands and tipped his head back.
Had we been in our bed, he would have roared. And loud enough to rattle the stars.
The wall and vines behind me grit at my shoulders and put pressure on my low back. My hips
twinged at the width of him and the ferocity of his thrusts. My hands started to pull away from him. I
wanted to rip my heart out. I’d give it to him.
“Carve your name in my chest, Chroí. Brand me as your own,” he commanded, and the words
were my undoing.
Those flashes of the night he fought for me—killed for me—came crashing back. Being tied up.
Being touched. Being saved. That was the night he became human to me. The first night I knew the
truth about him and wanted to save him right back.
It was the emotion that pushed me over the edge.
I always saw colors with Brye, bright shimmers and iridescence. My mouth hung open as my
breathing slipped and tripped out of my lips. My head dug back into the ivy behind me while the rest
of me froze. Well, except for the way I clenched and tugged on his cock inside me.
The chill of the air shoved into my lungs and filled me up, reminding me to breathe even though
he’d stolen my breath. My bones were unhinged, my body was his to break or build. Even my heart
tuned to his thrusts as he used my body to finish.
My hands found his wings, a shape I traced in my sleep and felt almost tattooed on the pads of my
fingertips. Brye shuddered when I reached the tips and let my head fall back to the wall. I surrendered
to the thump of my body, the crash of my heart.
A strangled groan barely preceded him shoving in and stilling inside me. Every muscle, every
vein of his neck was rigid, his skin the most beautiful shade of rouge. The heat of his orgasm spread
inside me as he gasped and fell into the curve of my neck.
 The world stilled when he did. The birds and breeze stopped to watch as we caught our breath,
the traffic of Paris quieted and the only people in the city were us. I relished those moments when the
universe stopped and stared. At us. At what we’d become.
“The only thing I love more than your pussy is your heart,” Brye said with a husky chuckle as he
nudged his hips against mine.
“If you had to choose, I think you’d pick my pussy,” I answered with the same rough laugh.
He squinted a little and pretended to search the recesses of his mind. Finally he closed them and
pumped himself up into me once, twice. But then he froze and bent down to kiss the swell of my
breast over top of my heart.
“I will never choose. I will keep you safe and whole and mine,” he snarled and sent shivers down
my spine and a smile spreading across my face.
He gently unwound my legs from his hips, letting his fingertips brush along my skin for a little too
long as he pressed his chest to mine and kissed me slow and hard. His tongue slid in between my lips
as I felt his cum drip down my inner thigh. As soon as he let me up for air, I groaned.
“Tell me now.” This time it was a command with all the edge still sharp within Brye.
“Your cum is dripping down my leg and it makes me want to fuck all over again.” I was a mess.
Brye always knew how to wreck me.
“And…?”
“And I’m yours,” I murmured.
“Again.”
“I’m yours.”
“Yeah, you are.”
He smiled wide as he crouched down and inched my skirt up and kissed the brand I’d insisted on
him giving me. The one that matched his that he’d taken for me, seared in his chest. Nothing had hurt
as bad as my flesh burning except for the few minutes that I’d thought I’d lost him. He reached up for
the waist of my thong at my hips and pulled it gently down my legs.
My cheeks turned fire engine red when he looked down at the scrap of fabric that had been
between my legs.
“Conrad should tell filthy limericks more often. Got me all worked up.” He was staring at his jizz
pooled in my panties.
“Let’s not talk about Conrad right now.”
“Fair.” He laughed as he used a clean spot on my underwear to tidy up anything left between my
thighs.
When I was cleaned up, he kissed my marked skin again then smoothed my dress back over my
hips. As he stood, he shoved my panties in his pocket sending that blush roaring back across my
cheeks and chest.
“You’re beautiful right now, Filly.” Brye reached his hand out and pulled me from the ivy. Each of
the branches clung to me, pulling at the soft gray knit of my dress and the wisps of my hair. “I
wouldn’t want you any other way.” He gently turned me, and I felt his deft fingers in my hair, pulling a
twig here and there from my long locks. “But Horse may kill me if I bring you back like this.”
He and Horse had some understanding, a respect for each other even, and when the whole crew
arrived in Paris three days ago, I swore he smiled at my uncle. He had hugged my mom in one of
those all-consuming hugs as he lifted her off the floor and started a dirty poetry battle with Conrad.
He hadn’t spoken to my father.
Not outside of brisk monosyllables. I still held my breath when they walked into the same room.
And that time I’d found them toe to toe, chests heaving, I thought I might actually have to pick between
them and help hide the body of the loser.
Brye started braiding my hair and I forgot about anything except how he made me feel. He let the
loose plait fall on my shoulder then turned me back around. His hands found my cheeks and he used
them to tip my face up to his. For a split second, he kissed me, but then he bit my lip and pulled my
bottom pout with his teeth.
Then there was a subtle clearing of a throat and a pleased as punch laugh interrupting the sound of us
just before Conrad asked, “Did you do it?”
“Did you do it?” Filly asked, her whole body tense even though I had her hands cuffed to the
headboard.
“Not yet, Chroí. You’d know,” I answered as I eyed the whole scene again.
A very large part of me hated it and hated her for talking me into it. I’d cuffed Filly’s hands for
safety, but all I saw was the steel as it had dug into her wrists in the basement. I almost heaved.
But then there was the soft hiss of the metal in the small fire beside me. That had me swallowing
acid over and over.
She’d formed the brand herself, diligently working at all hours in her mother’s workshop just
across the garden. And when I’d come to take her from the forge to bed one night, she told me all
the reasons she needed me to mark her. I’d fucking fought her tooth and nail until she said the
words that haunted me.
“I need the pain to remind me that the pleasure is real.”
So I notched myself on top of her thigh and used my whole weight to press her legs open and
down to the bed. If I was going to do this—and fuck if I wasn’t the worst kind of scum for even
considering it—the sensitive skin close to the apex of her thighs, the skin that would only ever be
mine, was going to hold my mark.
“I was fucking with you, Brye.” She laughed at me and nuzzled against her outstretched arm.
“I know it’s going to hurt. I want it to hurt,” she begged. “Hurt me like this and never any other
way.”
I grabbed the long handle of the steel, closing my eyes in the hopes that it would erase the
sizzle of the heat, the delicate skin I was about to ruin. I watched as the metal faded from red hot
to soft gray and I knew this was the moment. I could turn back…
“Tell the whole world I’m yours,” she whispered and that was what did me in.
My soul had moved in with hers, everything about her was my home. And I did need the world
to know. When the world got dark and I waited in Mantua for word about my beloved, I needed to
know. So I pressed the burning hot steel to her skin and branded my soulmate so every God, even
the demons I’d been so acquainted with, knew Filly Ryan wasn’t a Ryan.
She was mine.

That was the moment I’d really proposed to her. She didn’t know it, and I hadn’t said it in so
many words, but my soul spoke to hers.
Today was a formality.
She would marry me without her parent’s permission—I trusted that now—but the colors she saw
would brighten if I asked. So I called her parents and asked them to come to Paris when I hadn’t
asked them for anything. And I wouldn’t ever again.

“You want to marry my daughter? You?” Cole Ryan sneered. “What makes you worthy?”
“The same fucking shit that made you worthy of Elle.”
“Don’t you dare talk about things you don’t know.” He stepped toward me and I rolled my
shoulders back in response.
“That goes double for you.” I cocked my head to the side and eyed him. “He would have killed
her, ya know? And not just to hurt me but to spite you. Her blood would have been on your hands,
but it’s not because I’d never let anything happen to her.” My snarl was slowly ratcheting up.
“You watch your fucking mouth, son.”
“I’m not your son.” I stepped closer.
“If you marry my daughter you might as well be.”
My bastard-ass retort was on the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed it. If. He’d said if. Not over
my dead body or a simple fuck off.
“Not such a smart ass now, are you?”
“I’m marrying her whether you’re okay with it or not.” I took a deep breath. “But this,” I
gestured between us, “means something to her.”
“Did you get her a ring?”
I nodded once, thin-lipped and serious.
“Tell me about it.”
I crossed my arms across my chest and pictured the ring I’d had made. “It’s lots of small stones
all off-set from each other.”
“Diamonds?”
“No. A piece of sea glass the color of her eyes. I found it on the beach when we first made it to
Mexico.”
He softened. I saw it in the crow’s feet at the corner of his eyes.
“I had a glass cutter cut tiny circles and polish them up. It looks like the edge of the ocean.”
His eyes flicked away, just enough that they seemed to pull on the corner of his mouth.
“You do it right, you hear me?” He pushed his finger against my chest. “I will kill you if you
don’t.”
“I’d expect nothing less.”

“Well?” Conrad asked, his voice ticking up into that only-dogs-can-hear range. “Did you?”
“Not yet,” I said as I shot him a look.
“Busy doing other its, I see.” He arched his eyebrow.
“What are you talking about, Conrad?” Filly asked as she folded into my chest.
“Well I thought you were out here doing one thing, but it turns out you were out here doing each
other. Tisk tisk. I hope there was spanking involved because you two are naughty.” He wiggled his
eyebrows and true to form, Filly’s cheeks lit on fire.
“Shut up,” she scolded half-heartedly and reached out to slap his chest.
“Well?” Conrad crossed his arms and tapped his foot on the cobblestone path of the garden.
“I might be into voyeurism but not when it comes to this,” I said as I jerked my head back toward
the side door.
“Comes to what?” Filly asked.
“Come here.” I ignored her question and pulled her over to the tree in the far corner of the garden.
I slid down the trunk and pulled her onto my lap. I nestled her back to my front and let the both of us
settle into the view.
“It’s beautiful here,” I said taking in the uniquely Parisian buildings on the other side of the dark
greenery of the garden. I could breathe here. I could enjoy the museums and the private collections
and the croissants and wine. With Filly… “I think it’s you, but Paris isn’t bad.”
 “I’ll remember the way you looked when we walk up to the Louvre for the first time forever. This
city will always exist in that moment.” She nuzzled back into me.
“Funny you should say that because that day I learned that all the masterpieces in the world pale
in comparison to you.”
“Brye…” She laughed on the edge of my name.
“It’s true. My world will forever exist in that realization.”
She twisted and pressed her lips to the corner of my mouth then rested her forehead against my
jaw.
“I’d do it all again, the blood, the bruises, the bad, if it leads me to you. To this moment.”
She reached her hands around and let her fingertips brush my skin.
“The sex is great, but the silence is better, Filly. It lets me hear my heart and how it beats for you.”
“A chuisle mo chroí,” she finally pronounced my Irish words right.
“I can’t live without you, Chroí. I won’t. I’ve seen death, I’m intimately acquainted with it, and
it’s all I’ll know if you ever leave.”
“Never, Brye. I’m yours.”
“You mean that?”
“Of course,” she breathed as she turned and slid her thighs on either side of mine, showing just the
bit of her brand.
I ran my thumb over it. “I want something a little more permanent than this,” I said softly, stroking
the scared skin.
“What’s more permanent than this?” She ducked into my line of site to ask, her eyes the color of
the sea glass that was my salvation, my freedom, my future. The sea glass that made the small gem-
like bubbles of her ring.
I pulled it from my pocket and grabbed her hand. “Marry me. Marry me because you’re the
masterpiece. Because you’re the only thing that keeps me alive. Marry me because you’re mine.” I
didn’t ask, I couldn’t take a no. “Hell, marry me because even your father gave me his permission.”
The corners of her smile turned up as I slid the ring down her left ring finger. The only one
directly connected to the heart I loved, the heart that beat in bright beautiful colors. The heart that was
mine.
“You didn’t even have to ask.”
 EXCLUSIVE BONUS SCENES
Haven’t gotten your fill of Filly and Brye? You’re in luck. Click here for access to an exclusive bonus
scene. Someone might even be wearing white…

If you follow me on social media you may have seen some of the All Twisted Up bonus scenes. These
scenes take place between A Twisted Love Story and this book, Twisted Secrets. They are glimpses
into the Ryan family’s day to day life. Some are swoony, some are downright steamy, then of course
there’s just the sweet… The only way to get all fourteen scenes is by clicking here.
 a sneak peek of PRETTY YOUNG THINGS
My next release is entitled Pretty Young Things and it’s coming Fall 2018. This contemporary take on
The Count of Monte Christo features all the things we love about the classics like lust, love,
betrayal, and vengeance. The only other thing I can tell you is that I. Just. Can’t. Wait!

*Dantè*
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. I leaned over and kissed the five freckles on Mercy’s bare back. Her
silken skin was warm in the sunlight and I nuzzled in as I studied the dots near the slope of her spine.
They were each different colors, a spectrum of chocolate etched in my memory, and placed just so in
the shape of the constellation Cassiopeia. I couldn’t help but trace the shape as she slept naked on her
stomach.
“Mmmmmm,” she purred as she tensed then melted into the mattress. Her eyes fluttered open,
staying lazy and hooded as she found mine.
“She was the most beautiful woman on earth. So beautiful, the gods placed her in the heavens for
all of eternity to see.”
Mercy smiled as she curled her hands beneath her chest and nuzzled into her pillow. “She was so
vain they put her upside down.” Sleep still hung on her beautiful soft voice.
“Zeus wouldn’t make the same mistake twice,” I murmured as I bent back down to kiss the skin I
worshipped in a way Olympus had never known.
“You make me blush.” She giggled.
“The second most beautiful thing about your skin.”
“Tey…” Want transformed my nickname into a moan and pooled in the pit of my stomach.
I gently pressed on her shoulder and turned her flat to her back. Her legs spread and I slid
between as if it was the only place I belonged. I grabbed each of her wrists and slid them from her
chest and pinned them on either side of her forehead. She twisted to one side and let her eyes close
and her smile spread just before she reached to kiss my hand where I squeezed. Her knees rubbed up
along my thighs then her legs wove around me.
My lips wandered down her breastbone and between her teardrop tits until I couldn’t arch any
further without losing the feel of her against me. I moved slowly back up her body, capturing one of
her rosebud nipples in my lips then letting the edges of my teeth nibble on her sensitive skin.
“Tey,” she groaned.
I pulled her nipple taut then let her slip from my mouth at the last minute. She gasped only for me
to swallow her sounds up with my kiss.
Her hips bucked against mine, coaxing me to move, to grind in the way that would make both our
bodies tremble. Between morning and Mercy I was hard enough it hurt, but I held back, letting the
slickness between her thighs build where her skin grazed the head of my dick. Pleasure jolted me but I
forced myself to move steady. Against her lips, against her body.
I buried my face in the crook of her neck to kiss her sensitive skin while I teased her. While I
breathed in the sweet tropics of her scent. Her trapped fingertips flexed just enough to brush my
shaggy hair where it fell into my eyes.
 “I love you,” she murmured.
“Have mercy,” I growled into her ear as I finally slid into her.
She giggled then gasped like we hadn’t done this a thousand times before, like she didn’t know the
shape and size of me. Like we hadn’t been fucking fashioned to fit together like this.
I knew her every curve, her every inch. The velvet of her skin and the depth of her eyes. The
goodness of her soul. I knew I would make her mine. With every action of my body today and all of
my words for every tomorrow. The boys didn’t believe in soulmates, but me? I knew that about her
too.
Her moan lapped at my shoulder as I pumped into her again and again and again.
“Fingers,” she begged. “Fingers and then kiss me. Kiss me till I die.”
I let her wrists go and slid my hand between us. Mercy threw her head back and bucked her hips
up into my hand, meeting my thrusts with her slender hips. I stroked her with firm fingers, creating the
friction that drove her nuts.
“I thought you wanted kisses,” I taunted her with a smokey voice as I slid my nose along her jaw.
“Aaaaggghhhh,” she cried out then tucked her chin to reach up for me.
I took her lips roughly and nibbled on the bottom on the same way I had with her nipple. Her hips
gyrated against mine, against my fingers, as I moved in and out, in and out. Her moans were warm
puffs against my skin, heating me in a way not even the sun could. The thin sheen of sweat building
between us was only salt added to this overwhelming sweet.
My tongue swept across the seam of her lips, waiting for them to open again, to moan to beg, to
call my name, so I could breathe whatever she deigned to give me.
Her soft cry echoed in my mouth and I knew that I was about to get her best. Her orgasm always
pressed her chest firmly to mine and made her knees clench on my hips. I kissed her open mouth,
desperate for the taste of her as she fell apart breath me.
When her body stilled beneath me and she sighed a bold and beautiful smile, my world went as
bright as the sunshine pouring in through my beat up blinds.
“Come on my tits.” Her smile spread, knowing what that demand did to me.
A shiver ran down my spine and fisted in my balls. I slid out of her, missing her already, and
shuffled my muscular thighs along her delicate body. I fisted on myself once, twice as she preened her
nipples into hard peaks.
“Fuck,” I swore through clenched teeth.
She reached for me and wrapped her hand around my dick, taking my place to pump. Her hand on
me, framed by her tits, I found my release all to quick and jizzed across the sun kissed skin I called
home.
Mercy bit her lip as I shot onto her chest, making my own type of constellations. And when I
sagged, my shoulders rounded and chest heaving from the effort, my weight pressed her deeper into
our bed.
“I love you,” I managed between tortured breaths.
“Have mercy,” she used my line back on me with her devious smile.
“I’m hoping I do.”
“Forever,” she said softly.
In that moment I believed her. And when she shimmied out from between my legs and threw on
one of my t-shirts without cleaning up, I believed the whole world would see it too. Today with my
pearl necklace and someday soon with the diamond I was saving up for.
“You’re gonna go out there like that?” I asked with an easy smile as I rolled onto my back and
crossed my hands behind my head.
“I think they already know.” She winked. “It’s not as if either of us are silent. Never have been,
never will be.”
She walked to her set of drawers and pulled out a bikini bottom. The cut showed off her ass and
long lean line of her legs. I would have been jealous if I didn’t know her heart was mine completely.
Her body too.
Besides the guys had all walked in on her—or us—in the three years since she adopted a space in
my bed. And then. our house.
“I’m gonna make breakfast burritos. Will you wake them up?”
She still hadn’t completely gotten over walking in on Danger passed out in the top half of a clown
costume, make up running down his face. The cocaine smattered across a mirror on his pillow and
two stark naked chicks—one of which was still holding the double sided dildo in Danger’s ass—
hadn’t helped.
“Anything for you.” I smiled.
And for the version of her in front of me, with wild tumbled hair, fresh freckles across her cheeks
and my shirt stuck to her chest, I meant it. She had me whipped. In the worst way. But then again, who
didn’t like it a little rough from time to time.
She tiptoed out of the room, leaving the door cracked. I was propped up on my pillows basking in
the afterglow, when Rousse crept by, sporting serious morning wood.
“Hey Mercy, Rousse is up. Literally,” I yelled.
“Fuck off, Dantè.” He twisted toward our room and flipped me off, managing a glare even though
he tented his gym shorts enough for an entire troop of Girl Scouts. “We don’t all have a perfect chick
—” He started to threaten me but then rolled his ankle over his size fourteen feet and the same dipped
floorboard that had caused him trouble since his parents bought the house.
I couldn’t help but laugh as I stood and reached for a pair of my boxer briefs from my pile of
clean laundry. I grabbed Rousse by the shoulders, helping him regain his footing in the hallway then
patted his back as he rolled his eyes and smiled.
“She’s making breakfast burritos.” I nodded toward the kitchen. He tucked his tip into his
waistband and turned toward the faint waft of bacon.
I turned down the hallway and dodged the few beer cans left scattered on the floor. “Diego.” I
pounded on his door. “Get the fuck up, we’re going surfing.”
Only a groan answered from the other side.
“Mercy’s making breakfast burritos.”
The slow creak of the floorboards on the other side of the door barely preceded him appearing in
a crack at the door. He wore his comforter like he was Mother Theresa and his wild chin-length curls
shot out like an insane and overgrown Chia Pet.
“Mercy’s what?” he croaked.
“Making breakfast.”
“Mmmmmmm,” he purred as his eyes lit up and he shuffled past me, blanket get-up and all.
I smiled as I caught a glimpse of both him and Rousse slide onto stools at the breakfast bar and
watch as Mercy flipped bacon and then her hair.
“Life ain’t so bad sometime, am I right?” Danger emerged and leaned up against the doorframe,
his thick arms crossing his tank.
“Life is fucking great.”
He side eyed me over his thick, plump lips then they pulled into his trademark sideways smile.
 “A promotion huh?”
“Monday,” I answered as I leaned against the wall.
“Things are going to change.”
“You mad?”
“I’m just pissed I won’t have anyone to skate with any more. You’re leaving me with Lifeguard
Barbie and Baby Bambi.”
“No one wants to grow up less than me, but…” My eyes ran up Mercy. I had reason enough to
leave the all-night ragers and hungover surf and skate kick around days behind. The money this
software company was going to offer me didn’t hurt either.
“I’m gonna miss mornings like this.” I sighed.
That same distant look pressed in behind Danger’s eyes. His smirk turned up and he glanced over
again. For a second, fear percolated inside me. Because of the unknown but also because of
something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on.
“I bet you are.” He spoke as I shivered.

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 Believe it or not, this is the hardest part of writing a book – well it’s between this and choosing a
title. I mean, how do I ever capture all the gratitude I have for people? How do I list all the names?
I’m not good with real life feeling and emotion as it is but thank you is a good place to start…
First to my husband who has never read a word of my books but who is my biggest cheerleader.
He believes wholeheartedly I’m going to be successful at this one day and for now I’m going to let
that be enough for both of us. He reminds me to be soft enough to chase dreams and to be strong
enough not to chase tequila.
To Harloe who listens to me every day. You guide my books, my characters and my career by
endlessly sharing your wealth of knowledge with me. I would literally be a nobody if you hadn’t
found me, you’ve been an untold blessing on my personal and professional life. I love you, and please
note I put you second, you put me like eighth, so I think it’s safe to say I love you more.
Oh Sarah…this book would not exist without you. I don’t know why you agreed to beta read for
me, or to be my friend – I’ve been a pain in the ass to deal with on both. Your honesty, kindness and
generous heart are things I never expected but have come to cherish. Brye and Filly will forever be
yours, you shaped them, molded them and guided them in a way I desperately needed. You shaped me,
molded me and guided me in a way I didn’t deserve. Thank you for making me live up to my potential
on this one.
Emma I hate to do this, but I have to tell people you have a heart and it is so beautiful. You are my
longest, most true friend in this book world and I’m pretty sure some sort of lost soulmate/sister or
something. You are the foundation I build my books on and I don’t even know how to write them
without you anymore. You are in every drop of ink. You are in my thoughts every single day. I’m
sending you a care package soon, I swear!
Mix, Dyllan, Karrie, and Megs you guys are the best team a girl could ask for. I know I can
message you anytime, day or night and you will all tell me I’m pretty. Well Megs will probably tell
me something disgusting and then to fuck off but that is her version of “you’re pretty” and I love it. I
love you guys. You have my back always. You stop your lives for me. The value of your friendship is
truly immeasurable.
Marley Valentine, Christine Besze, Jess Bryant, Cassandra Magnussen, Haley Jenner, Christy
Anderson, Maren Lee, JC Grant, M Andrews, BB Easton and Staci Hart, you guys ROCK. Like an
insane amount. You always help, you always guide, always support. You guys are everything the indie
book community should be. You are a kick ass group of women and I’m forcing you to be my tribe. I
have no problem saying I’m a stage five clinger, and you are all inspirations so I’m doing whatever I
can to keep you.
To my blogger, bookstagrammer, teaser making friends. I see you. I see you all taking time out of
your life and away from your families to do things for me and my book. I don’t have kids, just a full-
time job and a drinking problem, and there are not enough hours in my day. How you guys manage, I’ll
never know. I’m beyond grateful for the minutes you spend on me. Each of your reviews, each of your
photos, each of your teasers are treasures to me. Even if I stopped writing tomorrow, looking back
over that collection would feed my heart and soul until the end of time.
 And finally, my readers – last but certainly not least. Each pair of eyes that sweeps across my
pages is an invaluable gift. You may never review, you may never like a single thing on Facebook or
Instagram or Twitter or wherever ad nauseam, but that doesn’t make you any less wonderful and
important to me. I’m grateful for all those things, don’t get me wrong, but you bought my book. You
bought my book! And you read to this point!! I CANNOT THANK YOU ENOUGH!!! Reading and
writing should be pleasure, pure and simple. It is my greatest pleasure to have gotten to spend these
pages with you, you deserve nothing but my most humble and genuine thank you.

xoxo, Ace
 Books in the Twisted world

Twisted Fate (A Twisted Fairy Tale duet book 1)

Twisted Death (A Twisted Fairy Tale duet book 2)
A Twisted Love Story

Strictly Business (Mixing Business with Pleasure book 1)

Bad For Business (Mixing Business with Pleasure book 2)
Famiy Business (Mixing Business with Pleasure book 3)

Of Smoke & Cinnamon: A Christmas Story

Anthologies Author Credits

Brothel: The Magnolia Diaries

Because Beards

The complete collection is available here.

Ace Gray is a self-proclaimed troublemaker and connoisseur of both the good life and fairy tales.
After a life-long love affair with books, she undertook writing the novel she wanted to read, which
culminated in her first release STRICTLY BUSINESS. When she’s not writing, she works in craft
beer. She loves rainy days, shellac manicures, coffee shops and bourbon—all of which are bountiful
in her adopted home of Portland, OR where she runs amok with her chef husband and husky pup.

She loves stalkers so follower her anywhere and everywhere (there will obviously be booze
involved)

Ace’s Reader Group, The Ladyfaces

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