Slamming the fridge door, he spins around to look at me. “Did one of them die?”
“I don’t know! And how could you wish that on anyone?”
“They’re trouble. Everyone knows it, especially you since you were up close and personal with them for weeks. But do you hear that sound?” he asks, putting his hand up to his ear.
“Hear what?” I ask, bracing my hands on my hips.
“Silence. No motorcycles revving. It’s peaceful again in our neighborhood.”
“They will be back, Rian. I bet they’re plotting against you right now, you idiot! They won’t go away that easily.”
“So, where are they? Who are they plotting with?” he asks, grabbing an apple from my fruit bowl and taking a bite out of it.
“I-I don’t know.”
“Bullshit,” he says between bites. “Are you seriously going to lie to your own brother to protect those dirty sons of bitches?”
“I’m not lying,” I tell him through gritted teeth. “And you have no idea what I’ve done for you and Cormac!”
“Oh, please, Maeve,” he says with a roll of his eyes. “Don’t act like you were some kind of saint before the night you stepped into that bar.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I snap at him. “It’s hard to be a saint when our father auctioned off my virginity to the highest bidder when I was sixteen!”
Rian freezes with his half-eaten apple halfway to his mouth. “No, he didn’t.”
“Really? You think I would lie about something like that?”
“He was a hardass, sure, but he wouldn’t go that far…”
“He would and he did!” I shout at him. “There’s a reason why he wouldn’t let me date in high school. He made ten grand on my first time. Stood right outside the door of one of the hotel rooms down the street and listened, timing him! He gave him one hour to take my virginity.”
Shaking his head, he says, “I don’t believe that. You were daddy’s little girl. If anything, he was overprotective of you to keep you safe.”
I scoff because he’s so fucking naïve. “Dad took the payment in cash and then listened, but did nothing when I was screaming for the man to stop. He had to have heard me sobbing when he didn’t.” Tears fill my eyes, and I try and hold them back. They didn’t help me then, and they won’t do anything to change what happened now. “The first man to undress me, to-to touch me, was some stranger! Our father took my innocence from me that night. So yeah, after that, sleeping around with whomever didn’t really seem like a big deal.”
Rian opens his mouth and then closes it before finally he says, “If that happened, I’m sorry.”
“It did happen!” I scream at him. And the anger is what has the tears racing down both of my cheeks.
“Then I’m sorry, dammit! What else do you want me to say? Dad’s dead, so I can’t kick his ass for it. Why didn’t you tell me when it happened?”
“Because you were only ten,” I remind him. “You didn’t even know what sex was yet.”
“Oh,” he mutters.
“And I don’t want your pity. That’s not why I told you now,” I explain. “I just want you to be different from him. Don’t become an evil asshole that finds joy in shooting people and hurting them, okay? That’s why I’ve slept with all of the Knights, to help you!”
“I didn’t ask you to do all that,” is his response. “I would never ask you to whore yourself out.”
“No, you didn’t ask me to whore myself out,” I agree with a sigh, ready to drop the entire conversation. He doesn’t get it, and I can’t tell him that Cormac is going to find a way to push him out because of our deal.
Swiping away the dampness from my cheeks with my fingers, I say, “Could you please leave now, or are you going to stay and eat the rest of my food?”
“Not like you don’t have plenty of cash to buy more groceries,” Rian responds, still pissed that I have access to my trust fund dad left but he won’t until he’s twenty-one and more responsible, if that day ever comes. If it’s up to me, he’ll at least live to see his twenty-first birthday, and many more after.
“Right, like a few hundred thousand can make up for the hell he put me through,” I mutter before going over to my purse. I pull out all of the cash from my wallet and then take it to him. “Here.”
“Thanks, sis,” he says as he accepts and pockets the money. “Let me know if you hear any updates about the Knights.”
“Yeah, sure,” I say, even though I know I won’t as I show him out the door.
It was one thing to try and help Cormac to save my brother, but I won’t keep doing it if it means other people get hurt or killed.
There’s enough guilt on my shoulders that three men were shot. And I’ll have to live with that blame for the rest of my life. I don’t think I could handle the burden of anyone’s death on my conscience, not even to save Rian.
Maybe it was crazy for me to think I could save him at all.
Wirth
“Fuck,” I mutter aloud when I see a man come strolling out of Maeve’s apartment. Wouldn’t you know it, the fellow looks like he has reddish-brown hair, although it’s hard to tell from this far away.
I had been sitting on my bike on the other side of the complex watching through my binoculars for almost two hours when the fucker showed up.
It felt stupid when I first got here, spying on a woman who has been nothing but amazing to me and the other
