Page 14 of The Reckoning (Oakmount Elite #7)

NINE

ARIES

I make it only feet down the hall before I lose control and smash my fist into the concrete wall. The pain barely registers in my mind as the skin splits across my knuckles.

It’s a distant, secondary feeling to the white-hot rage coursing through my veins at this moment. Seeing her naked body pressed against his chest. Fuck. The memory makes me mental, makes me want to spill blood.

She says she’s not choosing him, but it feels like she is. It looks like she is.

“Whoa,” Drew says from somewhere behind me. “Maybe don’t break your hand? We’ve got enough problems without adding more injuries to the pot.”

I round on him, all the accumulated betrayal of the past months finding a convenient target. “Shut the fuck up. You don’t get to joke. Not now. Not after everything.”

Drew’s expression shifts, warmth draining from his features until I’m looking at a stranger wearing my friend’s face. His posture straightens, shoulders squaring as he meets my gaze with cold calculation.

“I thought we would wait to hash this out, but it seems like you’re looking for a fight so maybe we will discuss it now,” he announces, his voice flat.

The sudden transformation throws me off balance. I’ve seen Drew drunk, angry, even in a few fights over the years, but never like this—clinical, detached, like he’s assessing a business risk rather than facing his supposed best friend.

No, that’s not true. I’ve seen this side of him before, when he faced down his father.

He only shows this side of himself when facing the enemy, so when did I become the enemy to him?

That only adds fuel to the raging inferno of emotions coursing through me.

It’s childish to allow my anger toward Arson and Lilian to bleed over into my issues with Drew, but I need to direct these feelings somewhere or I might explode.

“How could you not know?” I advance on him, undeterred.

“How could you not have seen the difference and done something, said something, anything?” Some tiny part in my brain wants to protest that he has Bel, and that we’d all graduated, and that we weren’t seeing each other every day anymore, but that’s just an excuse in my mind.

I don’t want excuses. I want somewhere to bury my fist. Drew doesn’t flinch, doesn’t back away. He simply watches me with those suddenly unreadable eyes.

“What do you want me to say, Aries?” He shrugs, the gesture deliberately casual. “That I’m sorry? That I made a mistake? Would that make you feel better?”

“No. It wouldn’t. I want the truth,” I growl, grabbing the front of his shirt. “I want to know how my best friend could watch me disappear and not take notice when a completely different person took over my life. I want to know why you did nothing? Why none of you seemed to notice a damn thing.”

There’s a dangerous flicker in his eyes—a reminder that beneath the easygoing frat boy exterior is someone darker, harder, more complex and misunderstood than we realize. A dark, menacing beast that’s always on the cusp of being unleashed.

“You act like your disappearance is a shock, but you left long before your brother stepped in to play your role.”

What the fuck did he just say?

I release him, stepping back as if burned.

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means”—Drew straightens his shirt with methodical precision—“that while you claim we didn’t notice your disappearance, you didn’t disappear when Arson took you.

You were gone long before that. Always hiding, refusing to hang out, or answer text messages.

There was no difference between you then and when your brother assumed your identity.

It’s like you were counting down the days until you had to join Hayes Enterprises. ”

He huffs and scrubs his hands up his face before continuing.

“Look, I’m not using that as an excuse for being a shitty friend.

I only mean that we were trying not to intrude and give you the space you seemed to want at the time.

We’d all gone through a lot the last couple of years.

It made sense to me that you might want some distance from all the drama, being the one of us that, at the time, seemed to have less of it. ”

The betrayal cuts deeper than I care to admit.

My friendship with Drew goes back to childhood—roommates, teammates, wingmen.

Years of shared history, of inside jokes and covered asses and drunken confessions at three a.m. Part of me wants to be pissed at him, at all my friends, but the other part of me knows he’s right.

I had been pulling away. Mostly, because they had first, but I wasn’t going to shit on all of their happy parades as they rode off into the sunset with their girlfriends and happy lives.

“I understand, and you’re right, I was pulling away, but I also didn’t want to rain on everyone’s happy life.”

“We’re a brotherhood, Aries. Nothing can bring us down. Now tell me what the real problem is since I know there is more going on than being pissed at me.”

I almost laugh. “There’s a lot going on, so much I can’t seem to wrap my head around it.”

“Explain.”

“Well, my evil fucking twin brother is taking everything from me, including Lilian.”

Drew’s expression doesn’t change, but there’s a subtle shift in his eyes—a flicker of what might be sympathy, I’m not sure.

But before I get the chance to see it fully, it disappears, buried beneath cold professionalism.

“Technically, you can’t take something that was never yours.

If you wanted her, then you should’ve claimed her. ”

This motherfucker is about to get punched in the face.

“Are you kidding me? Of all the fucking people who know me, and my family, that’s the last answer I would expect to come out of your mouth.”

He sighs, and my anger and frustration only seem to mount. I could really use a voice of reason right now, not another reminder of why I should say fuck it and go beat the shit out of him. “If she chooses him, what can you do? What other choice is there then to let her be happy?”

“She didn’t choose him. She didn’t choose either of us. In fact, I don’t even know how I feel, or what we are.”

“Then you can’t be mad at him for claiming her when you’re still confused about what you might or might not be.

” What he’s saying is logical, but I don’t care.

I’ve wanted Lilian for so long that now it feels like she’s already mine, and I don’t know how to handle it because it’s not just an emotional attachment. It’s a physical need, a possession.

“What if the roles were reversed? What if this was Bel? What would you do then?”

The darkness in his eyes hardens. “Even when I was confused about what Bel and I might or might not be, I still ensured that she belonged to me. There was no way in hell I was going to let her slip through my fingers and into someone else’s hands.”

He could’ve just called me a piece of shit.

“That wasn’t an option for me.” I shake my head angrily. “I was trying to protect her, trying to stop her from being used as a pawn on the Hayes chessboard.”

“Okay, so what’s stopping you from making her yours now?”

What is stopping me?

Arson. Myself. A thousand and one excuses.

The growing danger she faces by being associated with us.

There are a lot more fucking reasons for me not to make her mine than there are to claim her.

I peer around the warehouse’s common area.

Is this the life I want for her? Going from warehouse to warehouse?

Dodging danger left and right. No, I don’t.

The new warehouse is sparse—with a few mismatched chairs, a table covered in surveillance equipment, and a coffee maker Drew scrounged from somewhere. It all feels surreal, like I’ve stepped into someone else’s nightmare.

“There are a lot more reasons to let her be with him than there are for her to be with me.”

“You’re only saying that because you’re afraid of those feelings, but I know you’ll figure it out. All that matters is that we got her out of the enemy’s hands, and she’s safe.”

“Yeah.” I flex my bleeding hand, focusing on the sting. “Got her out just in time for my brother to fuck her.”

The crudeness of my own words surprises me. I’m not usually so raw. Guess that’s what captivity does to you. It strips away the layers of polish and social conditioning. The man who emerged from that concrete cell is harder and sharper at the edges.

More like Arson than I want to admit.

I think back to the way she looked at me when I walked into that room.

The memory is crystal clear—Lilian, bruised and bound to a chair, eyes widening when I appeared in the doorway.

The spark of hope in her expression and the way she said my name.

The way the men holding her didn’t seem surprised to see me.

“She looked relieved,” I say, mostly to myself.

“When I walked into that room where they were holding her. It seemed like she’d been waiting for me specifically.

Like it was all a setup.” I continue, the pieces clicking into place.

“They wanted me there, and not Arson. They seemed...pleased when they realized it was me and not him.”

Drew frowns, moving closer. “Yeah, I remember that asshole saying something to that effect. What does it mean? They obviously have some kind of plan on top of whatever you two, or you fucking three, are doing here.”

“I don’t know what it means. I have nothing to do with them.”

Drew’s expression shifts to concern. “Did you tell Arson about this?”

“Haven’t had the chance, what with walking in on him screwing the woman I—” I cut myself off, the word catching in my throat.

The woman I what? Love? Care about? Want?

I can’t even admit it to myself, let alone say it out loud. Whatever I feel for Lilian is too complicated, too entangled with family expectations and personal desires to be easily defined. Now with Arson in the picture, it’s even messier.