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Rachel

I tried.

I really tried to slip back into the routine with Dante. But there was an edge to all our interactions now.

I couldn’t get over him hiding Ben here.

Knowing he had been here for the past two weeks.

I’d been in the office area of that garage.

He’ll have heard my voice, maybe even seen me as I passed by the doors leading to the workroom.

I’d walked past numerous times. I had drawn hopscotch on the floor with Bee outside. And all the while, he was in there.

I understood he was trying to protect me, but I wasn’t a child. He had never known the Rachel that was abused. He knew me as I was now, and I had never given him the impression that I wasn’t more than capable of handling myself.

All our conversations were stilted now. We went from arguing all day, every day, to making polite chit-chat about the weather. Even Bee had commented saying we were acting weird, and she didn’t want to be around us anymore discussing the miles of the wind speed.

Even our sex life had taken a nose-dive, to the point where in the week since I had killed Ben, Dante hadn’t even bothered to come to my room.

He was holding back on me, just as much as I was holding back on him. But since neither of us spoke about it, nothing was getting resolved, and the distance between us was growing wider with every passing day.

“Penny for them?”

I looked up with a start and gave Macbeth a small smile as he sat down next to me. He had been friendlier since Ben-gate, which was something else I found suspicious.

I was living in a state of paranoia, constantly thinking the worst of people.

“Do people still carry pennies?” I asked Macbeth.

“If you find one on the floor, you should carry it with you all day.”

“What?”

“You know the saying: Find a penny, pick it up…”

“With my luck, the penny will be covered in nuclear dust, and I’ll die a painful death.”

“The phrase is “All day long, you’ll have good luck”, not all life. Don’t be greedy,” he nudged me with his shoulder. “What’s on your mind?”

“Do you actually care?”

“Mild curiosity at best,” he said, grinning at me. I couldn’t help but grin back.

“At least you’re honest. Unlike your brother.”

“If I had a hundred guesses, I would never have guessed it was Dante on your mind,” he muttered sarcastically.

“Is it that obvious?”

“That the pair of you are miserable as sin? Yes. It’s annoying, actually. I’m all for annoying Dante, but not in this mood. I don’t have a death wish. So if you two could patch things up, I can resume my brotherly duties.”

“Isn’t it the younger brother that’s supposed to be the annoying one?”

“You’re telling me Dante isn’t annoying?”

“Ha! Touche.”

“Besides, he stole my role. I don’t see why I can’t steal his.”

“Would you have liked to have been a leader?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him as I considered his position in the club.

It had never really occurred to me that he might be bothered by Dante taking over what should have been his.

Macbeth just seemed to roll with the punches, nothing ever bothering him.

“It would have been nice to have been considered.”

“Why did Dante come before you?”

“I guess Dante proved himself more than I did. But maybe they underestimated me. No-one ever really knows what someone is capable of.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, a weird feeling shooting through me at the dark look that flashed in his eyes.

“Well, look at you, for example. Before you dyed your hair, I’d have pegged you for a dumb blonde that didn’t know the difference between her left and right. Now, you’re one more murder away from being a serial killer.”

“Call me that again, and you’ll be the third.”

“Keep talking like that, Rachel. It’s like nectar to my dick.”

I burst out laughing. “You and your brother are more alike than you think.”

“Hey,” he scowled. “Don’t compare me to him. I’d never betray the ones I’m supposed to love.”

“Who has Dante betrayed?”

He looked at me like I was thick. “You.”

“Me?!”

“Look, I didn’t want to be the one to tell you this, but…” He bit down on his lower lip, looking nervous. He scanned the area and shuffled closer to me, lowering his voice as he spoke. “Why do you think Dante didn’t kill Ben?”

“He said he was gathering info.”

“But why do you think he didn’t kill him? Ignore what Dante said. What do you think?”

“I… I don’t know,” I sighed. “A part of me wished he had.”

“Ask yourself another question: How long does it take to gather info? Think about it, Rachel. You told Dante about Alex and Ben, and he managed to track down where the club was, infiltrate it, and kidnap Ben within a few days. We live in the age of technology. It doesn’t take two weeks to get the names of Ben’s friends. ”

“What are you saying?”

He sighed heavily, a pained look on his face.

“I like you, Rachel, but you don’t belong here.

You might think you’re tainted and corrupt, but you don’t know the half of it.

How do you think we got this village? An entire abandoned village waiting for us to move in to?

Yeah, right. I know that’s the story Dante likes to tell, but that’s not what happened.

A lot of blood was shed to take over here, and there are a lot of angry souls haunting these grounds.

Dante is a clever man. If he wants something, he gets it, just like our grandad got these grounds.

Dante learnt from the best. Maybe I’m wrong, though.

Maybe Dante wanted to play the hero. Maybe he was waiting for the right time to show you what your big, strong hero had done for you. ”

I stayed silent, mulling over his words.

“Did you know Dante plans to expand?”

“Sorry?” I frowned, confused at the change of topic.

“He wants to expand.”

“I assumed that was a possibility.”

“You’re not listening to me, Rachel.”

“Well, stop speaking in fucking riddles, then!”

“What did I just say? Dante learnt from the best. There wasn’t an abandoned village. There was a village that was stolen. And, flash forward to present day, now there’s a club up for the taking, with a leadership vacuum taking place.”

“You think Dante wants the club?”

“Are you kidding me? Having a branch of the Devil’s Disciples being in the heart of Leeds?

Why wouldn’t he? Not every member is built for this type of communal living,” he said, gesturing to the grounds ahead of us.

“There are some nasty bastards in this club. Bastards that shouldn’t be around families.

And there’s a nasty club in Leeds, ripe for the taking. ”

“You think that’s why he didn’t kill Ben?”

“Do you?”

“He beat him half to death. If he was hoping to befriend him, he went the wrong way about it.”

“Or, he was torturing him to wear him down, forcing Ben to sign over everything to him.”

My head shot up and scanned Macbeth’s face. “Do you really believe that?”

He shrugged. “It sounds like Dante; I’m not going to lie. It also explains why he kept you in the dark about it.”

“If he expanded to that club, he’d have to tell me, eventually.”

“Ben doesn’t have the same club Alex had.

He took the contacts, the girls, the followers, and moved to a new location.

Would you really have known if he covered his tracks well enough?

Besides, even if you did, he could have easily twisted it to say he was making something good out of a place that held so much evil. ”

I opened my mouth and then paused. That did sound like Dante. He had said similar to me, about not letting the horrors of my past control me and turn it into something I enjoyed.

“What do I know?” Macbeth sighed, looking sadder than ever. “I’m just the discarded first-born. It’s not like Dante confides in me.”

He got up to leave, and I snatched at his elbow. “Do you really believe everything you’ve just said?”

“I gave you that gun for a reason, Rachel, and that was before I knew about Ben. I was just as much in the dark as you were, but I saw something like this coming. There’s evil in Dante, and I didn’t want you unprotected.

So yes, I’ve never been more sure of anything.

And if you’ve got any common sense, you’ll take yourself far away from here, out of harm’s way.

There’s a war coming, and with members like Ben’s friends’ part of the equation, do you want to be around when the first bomb goes off? ”

He patted my hand, and I let go of him, feeling completely shellshocked.

Had I been completely idiotic?

I mentally ran through all the interactions I had ever had with Dante, seeing a different side of the story.

The man had kidnapped me, burnt my mother’s house down, tied me up, starved me, slapped me, spat on me.

He had beaten a man in front of me, abandoned me at the hospital, hidden my abuser just a few houses away from me…

The more I thought of our time together, the more the rose-tinted glasses fell off, and the more I realised I might be in way more danger than I thought.

I tried to remember Jenna’s conversation about not trusting Macbeth.

But she had never given me a reason, other than Macbeth seemed calculating.

Could he be calculating because he saw more than the club narrative?

Could his position as the spare, whilst Dante reined as heir, give him a unique perspective?

Jenna was an old lady. She only had Shark’s perspective, and he was as close to Dante as Vienna and Hacksaw.

He was going to push out Dante’s version of events.

I had no idea what to fucking think anymore. I didn’t trust Macbeth, but I didn’t completely trust Dante, either. There were three sides to every story: your side, their side, and the truth. And I needed to find out what the fucking truth was.