Page 8 of Brazen Defiance (Brazen Boys #4)
Clara
T he pain in the room is palpable and I don’t want to be here in it, drowning.
My soul aches while everyone falls apart around me.
Trips’ blood drips onto the floor, RJ pinning him, fury that I didn’t know he could feel writ large across his face.
Walker is staring at the ring like it’s poison, his silence telling.
And Jansen. Jansen looks like his universe has been stolen from him.
I know the feeling. It’s so huge in my chest that I might explode from the pressure of it. Because my universe has been stolen too.
I squeeze his hands, and he grips them so tight my still-cold bones ache.
“I don’t know how to fix this, not yet,” I say to no one in particular. I close my eyes, unable, or maybe unwilling, to see them so broken. “He caught us. He’s cornered us. He’s got us wrapped up in strings tight enough to be garrotes.”
The scuffle beside me must end because when I next open my eyes, RJ’s sitting on the coffee table, his face grim while Trips slumps against the entertainment center, not wiping the blood from his face, instead letting it dribble onto his light blue sweater, black splotches forming where it lands.
RJ stares at me, the intensity overwhelming in a way I haven’t felt since the beginning, since we were strangers, his hands shaking. “Clara, what do you need?”
I need this to not be my reality. I need the men around me to not be bleeding, physically or metaphorically. I need to rewind time, maybe to that moment in the hotel room in Chicago, where things weren’t perfect, anything but, but they were a hell of a lot better than the moment I’m stuck in now.
The weight of their gazes has me closing my eyes. “If I knew, I’d do it.”
Trips curses, and I flick my eyes open, my fear alive even when the rest of me feels dead. Hollowed out. He’s staring at his phone with barely restrained fury, his knuckles white around it.
“What?” RJ snaps, his anger still high, pointed, rightly I suppose, at the man bleeding on the floor.
“One week,” he chokes out. “Father’s giving us one week to adjust to our new reality. Fuck. Sunday dinner is now a standing reservation at that damn house.”
Everything aches, from my heart to my toes. I nod, not knowing what else to do, and Trips lumbers to his feet, his fists tight. But he doesn’t storm upstairs, and the others notice.
“I think I’m going for a run,” he announces, the words barely intelligible, forced out through clenched teeth.
He turns, stomping upstairs, and the others turn to me. But I can’t explain. Not right now. “Buddy rule,” I say instead.
RJ lets out a sigh that’s closer to a growl. “I can’t. Not with him. Not right now.”
Walker snaps the lid to the ring box shut. “I’m not a runner.”
Jansen tugs on my hands, and I meet his green gaze, the shadows I’ve caught a time or two fully covering them. “Beautiful, I don’t want to leave you right now.”
I try to smile, but I can tell I’m failing. “I don’t want that either. But even with all this, Bryce is still out for blood.”
“Might be what the resident asshole deserves,” RJ grumbles.
Our eyes meet, and his shoulders slump just a little.
“I’ll go,” Jansen says, squeezing my hands in his. “Running might help. But please, I need to be close afterwards.”
Bending down, I press a kiss to his lips—soft, gentle. “Of course.”
When he leaves the room to get changed, I feel as if I’m a puppet with its strings cut, my limbs heavy and no longer under my control.
RJ notices, scooping me into his arms and carrying me back to my room, Walker trailing us both.
“Do you need anything to eat?” he asks as we pass through the kitchen.
“Probably, but I don’t think I could chew right now.”
Instead of stopping for food, they help me out of my stupidly expensive casual clothes and into RJ’s t-shirt—which I don’t want to let go of once I have my nose burrowed into it. Then the three of us pile into my bed.
Walker combs my hair out with his fingers, then pulls me tight against him, RJ’s intense eyes searching my face for comfort and finding none. I’ve got none to give. Instead, I tug him closer so I can hide against his chest, his skin warm and his citrus scent soothing.
“Talk now or later?” Walker asks, his breath shifting the hair around my ears.
“Later. I need to process. Recover. Something.”
It might be two in the afternoon, but when sleep finds me, I don’t fight it. And when I wake up to full dark with three bodies surrounding me, all I know is that I’m going to fix this. To save this.
Because a future without all of them isn’t one worth living.