Page 16
Chapter Sixteen
Sutton
I turned my head, my heart in my throat, as a breeze swished through the trees that encircled the clearing in front of Tynan’s cabin.
To him who is in fear, everything rustles. Sophocles whispered in the back of my mind, and I let out a groan of frustration.
Two days was a long time to spend on edge. Waiting. Afraid. I flitted around the cabin, watching over Tynan while he slept—recovered. Unable to really sleep myself. The first night after the attack, I picked out a few books from his shelf that looked well-read; they were all writings of ancient philosophers. Stoic and broody and wise, just like Tynan.
When he was awake yesterday, I avoided conversation. I avoided the confrontation—the anger he must have for me. An anger that was justified. It wasn’t too hard. The meds he was on made him sleep a lot, and when he was awake yesterday, there was a revolving door of visitors to the cabin. First, his friends Harm, Rhys, and Dare stopped in, the four of them showing a kind of “us-against-the-world” camaraderie I’d only ever experienced with Mara. Then, Dr. Nilsen came by.
I paid close attention there. How he checked the wound. What he put on it. He explained what to look for if something was infected and then showed me how to replace the bandage on the wound, informing me that he had to go into the city for another case tomorrow, and I’d have to handle this task. My heart thumped so loud it was almost impossible to hear his instruction over the idea that tomorrow— today— the hands on Tynan’s chest would be mine.
Creed had called as Dr. Nilsen was leaving. The apartment in the city was empty; Mara and whomever had been holding her there were gone. It was a blow, but not unexpected. Thankfully, Creed wasn’t deterred. He seemed like the kind of man who wouldn’t be deterred by a hurricane headed straight for him, and I appreciated that.
And later after that, Rob’s returned with dinner for the three of us. Pizza and a strained conversation about Carson and Shazad and heroin distribution. For most of it, I sat quietly and listened like a fly on the wall.
A fly who’d caused all this destruction. A fly who was furious at herself for putting people—the few people she cared about—in danger.
I was never one to run, but fighting was no longer an option. Fighting after what he’d done for me—risked for me—was impossible when he lay wounded because of me. Because I’d lied to him.
The grass flattened like fallen soldiers where I’d paced the same path, the overcast sky mocking the cloudiness of my situation. There was a storm coming, and I welcomed the release of energy, feeling my own bottled up with nowhere to go.
I struggled to wrap my head around the fact that my best friend had disappeared on her own quest for vigilante justice. Mara had never been the one to jump into danger or the first to throw a punch in a fight; that had been all me. But after I was gone…now, the restless tone in her letters seemed a little clearer. The urge to want to fight back like I had. Still, knowing the depth of danger she’d put herself in…the pure evil of these men Tynan was sure were involved…and how I’d only made it worse.
I tensed and my neck cramped, and I sucked in a breath of pain. Dammit.
Tynan almost died because of me. Mara could be dead because of me. Too many times over the last two days, it felt so hard to breathe, as though my lungs were collapsing in on themselves under the weight on my chest.
Never in my entire twenty-one years had someone stepped into the ring for me. Never had someone taken up my sword in a fight. Never, until Tynan.
I turned my wrist, no longer able to look at my tattoo without hearing his strained low rasp. My little wasp. My chest tightened so hard, air pushed through my lips in a small cry, my eyes burning with tears I still hadn’t been able to shed. From fear. From regret. From anger.
Hearing Tynan on the other side of the door fighting for me. Hurting for me. Helplessness choked the life from me, and I don’t think I took a full breath until I made it through that door. Until I barged in just in time to see him choose my life over his. And then when that life began to bleed out of him… God, he was so stupid to try to protect me.
Before this, it was easy to pretend it wasn’t real. That Tynan, like my father, was just one more hero who would disappear when I needed him most. But he hadn’t. He’d cared for me even when it cost him. When it cost him pleasure. When it cost him pain. When it almost cost him his life.
I couldn’t ignore that anymore. I couldn’t pretend it was a lie. And I couldn’t pretend I didn’t desperately want it— want him.
I spun when I heard the crash, my bare feet instantly crunching over the dried grass to get back inside.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, seeing Tynan standing at the counter, a black mug shattered on the kitchen floor.
“Getting a cup of coffee.”
“You should’ve asked me. I would’ve gotten it for you,” I scolded and went to the mess, collecting the broken ceramic pieces onto a towel.
I thought he’d move, but he didn’t. Instead, he stood over me, shirtless and wearing dark gray sweatpants.
After two days, I’d hoped his naked chest would be less of an attraction, but the novelty of it still hadn’t dulled. A good chunk of it was still bandaged—that was why he preferred to forgo a shirt in the first place; it made checking and changing the bandage easier.
“Like you should’ve told me the truth about Kang the first time I asked about him?”
I sucked in a breath, his question catching me off guard. It shouldn’t have. I knew this had to come sooner or later.
“I was going to handle it.”
Tynan’s gaze held me hostage, the pain and anger buried in their depths flaying me open like the sharpest knife peeling away my armor. He seemed even larger above me when he was angry.
“How? By making yourself a target?” His hand flexed by his side, and goose bumps skittered over my skin, recalling how that palm had landed on my ass and how those fingers had been inside me.
“Yes. Exactly.” I jutted my chin out. “Legal prey.”
“Goddammit, Sutton.” He grabbed my shoulders and hauled me upright. I could tell when it pulled on his wound, but he didn’t stop. Not until his hands moved to frame my face, holding it hostage under the heat of his stare. “They came to kill you,” he croaked, and I felt his body tremble, all the way down to the tips of his fingers on my cheeks.
“And they almost killed you,” I charged right back, feeling my anger mirror his when I recalled those final moments. The blood. The ashen pallor of his face. I tried to turn my head away, afraid of the way all my insides wanted to barrel straight into his strength and warmth and protection. “This was never your problem. Never your fight. What do you want from me?—”
“To trust me,” he said, his voice gravelly and rough. “All I’ve done, I’ve done to help you—to protect you. Why couldn’t you trust me with the truth?” His voice broke at the end, fracturing under the weight of his torment.
Three days ago, I would’ve fought his hold. Resisted. Yanked out of his grasp. But not today.
Today, even though he was angry, even if he hated me, I never wanted him to let me go.
“Because I don’t know how,” I told him with a vulnerable kind of anger in my tone. “Because no one who should’ve been there for me—who promised to protect me—ever was. Not when I was bullied. Not when Dad died. Not when Mom lost her shit. Not when?—”
My throat seized at the last thought. Like my body’s own self-defense wouldn’t let me say the words.
Tynan pulled me closer. His massive hands seemed to swallow my face as he drew me to him. “Not when what, Sutton?” he rasped.
My lips parted, but no words came out.
“Dammit, Sutton,” he swore, the heat of his breath skating over my cheeks and lips. “I’m standing here begging you—fucking bleeding for you to trust me.”
Tynan’s face inched down toward mine. His breaths got shorter. Rougher. Or maybe those were mine. The closer he got, the harder it was to pull away, like a different kind of gravitational force existed between him and me.
The tightness around my chest seemed to crack with each breath. “I’m sorry,” I murmured, my mouth so close to his.
Suddenly, all of the distance between us the last few days had detonated into this moment. A demand for vulnerability. A demand for intimacy.
“Tell me, Sutton. Please.” His groan made me shiver.
Tynan was angry with me, but not as much as he wanted to kiss me. And I was afraid of the weakness I had for him, but not as much as I wanted to kiss him back.
“You can trust me,” he murmured. Begged .
I could—I should. I wanted to.
“You’re bleeding,” I hissed, the dark splotch forming on his bandage catching my eye. I pulled back so quickly, I had to use the counter to steady myself. “I need to check your stitches.” My eyes flicked to the bed, charging him to move.
He stood rooted for a long second, one that made my adrenaline start to spike, but then he complied, climbing back onto the bed with a grunt.
“Lay back,” I said, not because he wasn’t already moving in that direction but because I wanted to be the one in control of the conversation.
I winced once he was reclined, seeing the saturation of the stain.
“If you popped a stitch…”
“I didn’t.”
How could he know that?
I forced out an exhale and began to peel the tape from his side. His skin was fire underneath my fingertips. Firm where it rested over his solid abdomen. The muscles I felt weren’t new muscles; they weren’t strength grown in the safety of a small room with heavy weight, but muscles split and stretched, battered and bruised, strengthened from years surviving the brutality of war. Every fiber was honed from a memory, every inch of skin a map of barely-survived danger, and soon, the scar on his side would add a fresh record to the tome of his valor.
I wasn’t sure whose exhale was deeper when the bandage finally released. Sure enough, there were no pulled stitches, just some blood oozing from the puckered edge of the seam closest to the front of his chest.
I peeled open a package of fresh gauze and dabbed it with some alcohol. He didn’t even flinch when I wiped it over his skin to clean the area before pressing new gauze to stem the bleeding.
“Sutton…” His deep voice broke my concentration.
My eyes flicked up, finding the dark storms churning in his.
“I’m sorry,” he rumbled, and my breath caught.
“What?” The word rushed out on a bewildered exhale. It made no sense. He made no sense. “What are you sorry for? I’m the one who should be sorry—who is sorry. This is my fault. This—” I drew my hand back, watching and waiting to see if his wound would continue to bleed. “This is all my fault.”
“No,” he insisted, like guilt was a knife still buried in his chest. “I never should’ve left that night after…”
My heart thudded wildly. My ass still tingled from the strikes of his palm, and that feeling made my core clench, knowing the kind of pleasure that pain brought me. I moved my hand, my fingers starting to trace the perimeter of his wound for no purpose other than to be just a little closer to him. Than to convince myself that he was still warm and breathing and real…and that he wasn’t ordering me to stop.
Maybe because to do that meant to admit there was something in the touch that was killing us both.
“It wouldn’t have changed anything. I’d already set the dominos in motion.” I swallowed over the lump in my throat.
He made a low noise of dissent, the vibration working its way through my hand and up my arm. Still, I didn’t stop touching him. I couldn’t. He was like a lifeline. A mooring. A tether to the safety of shore from a storm I thought I’d never leave.
“Dammit, Sutton, you had to shoot someone—kill someone—because of me,” he growled angrily.
My fingertips stilled, the drum of his pulse fast and heavy under his thick layers of muscle. I sucked in a breath, realizing this was the root of his suffering. Beneath the anger and frustration, he was ravaged by the thought that I’d taken a life.
He’d almost died because of me— for me— and he was sorry because I hadn’t let him take another blow? Because I’d killed to protect him when he’d done the same for me?
“So what? I put myself in that position, and I put you in that position. You killed two people because of me,” I said with a slight scoff, my mind in a tug of war between the present and the past.
He let out a breath that was laden with guilt as I laid the new bandage over his wound and began to tape it down. Every rub of my fingers made him tense as though it were the punishing lash of a whip.
“It’s not the same.”
I inhaled sharply, my gaze jerking up to his. “How is it not the same? Because you’re a man? Because you’re older?”
“Sutton,” he growled and grabbed my wrist, hauling my hand high; my wasp tattoo now stood sentry between our locked gazes. “It’s not the same because I’ve killed before.”
My jaw went slack, the truth like a landmine I hadn’t seen coming before I stepped directly onto it.
He made himself guilty because he thought I was innocent.
But that wasn’t the thought that made the ground open up underneath me. No, it was the idea that if he knew the truth about me, he wouldn’t look at me—want to take care of me—the way he did now.
And I was a fool—a weak, aching fool for not wanting that to change.
A loud knock fractured the thick tension insulating us.
“Knock knock,” Rob called and opened the door just as Tynan released my wrist.
“Everything okay?” she immediately asked, looking between Tynan and me. Creed followed in behind her but kept his expression blank.
“Yeah,” I croaked and then quickly elaborated to try to dispel the ragged nature of my voice. “Tynan tried to get his own coffee this morning, and there were some casualties. Some bleeding. A broken mug,” I rambled, returning to the sink in the kitchen and washing my hands like I was scrubbing the heat from my cheeks at the same time.
“I got a message from Mara this morning.”
I shut off the water and spun, my heart beating all the way up in my throat. “You did?”
Rob came to the counter and held out her phone; Tynan and I reached for it at the same time, our fingers colliding with a spark of electricity. Tynan pulled back first, and I tried not to linger on the sudden chill I felt.
I stared at the screen, the words taking an extra second to come into focus.
30th. 8:30. 176 Bolton St. WASP.
“That’s two weeks from now,” I blurted out and immediately followed with, “Why did she write ‘wasp’ at the end?”
“A signature of sorts, so I know it’s her,” Rob explained. “If someone found this phone and got through the encryption to send a message to throw me off, they wouldn’t know to include the tag at the end, and that’s how I’d know it wasn’t truly from Mara.”
It didn’t completely calm me, but it did take the edge off the worry that this message was a decoy. A trap.
“What’s that address?”
“Warehouse belonging to a known Wah Ching shell company,” Rob replied, her eyes flicking between us.
“So, the Triad is involved in this.” I murmured aloud, mentally tracing through everything we knew.
Yes, Kang was involved. He was handing out the invites for the cam site and brought Mara to the White Pearl, but his involvement didn’t mean that the Wah Ching was part of this arrangement.
“Why would they be involved? Kang isn’t even one of theirs,” Tynan muttered.
It didn’t make sense. Kang was loosely tied to the gang—an uninitiated member—which meant if this was Kang’s side venture, the Wah Ching wouldn’t step in to back him. But if the Wah Ching was involved at a higher level, neither would they rope in an uninitiated member to this degree.
“We’re missing something.”
“Maybe hired help?” Creed offered. “If Carson is running a trafficking scheme from this site, he would need people to facilitate the kidnapping and sale. Hired muscle.”
“Would the Wah Ching do that?” I looked to Tynan.
“For the right price, I’m sure they’d do anything.”
“Plus, we don’t know if Carson has dealt with the gang in the past. He might have connections there he’s relying on, or maybe he’s providing them with some kind of cut from the sales.”
There was a beat of silence.
“Did you get Mara’s location with the message?” I asked, though it was no surprise when she shook her head no, running her thumb along the inside of the chain around her neck.
“I’ll head into the city and take a look at the warehouse,” Creed said. “And then I’m going to get back on Carson. I still think he’s our best lead since Kang up and disappeared.” The excessively large man started to back out of the room.
“Creed.” Tynan called to him, causing him to stop and turn. “As soon as you have something…” He didn’t need to finish for Creed to hear the full instruction.
Creed dipped his chin and then excused himself from the room.
“I’ve got a few other leads to check in with. I’ll stop back later.” Robyn took her cell back and pushed it into her pocket, stopping next to Tynan and placing her hand on his shoulder. “Don’t overdo it.”
Something surged inside me at her words. Something unexpectedly protective—no, not protective. Possessive. Like he was mine to look after, not hers.
I stiffened, feeling my teeth dip through the skin of my cheek and draw blood. I looked back to Tynan, but instead of his attention being on Robyn, he was only watching me. Watching my reactions.
I balled my arms tighter over my chest, feeling more naked in that stare than if I’d been stripped down to nothing but my skin and metal and ink.
“Excuse me,” I muttered and practically chased after Robyn to catch up, Tynan’s thunderous stare following me until it couldn’t.
I reached the hallway just as the older brother—Harmon—arrived to check on Tynan. I murmured a greeting to him as he headed in the direction that I’d fled and then called out, “Robyn.”
She stopped and faced me, pain lancing her hard expression. “I’m sorry about Mara.” Her composure fractured even further, like a split in a beam of wood. “If I’d known—had any idea that this involved Carson or Shazad…I never would’ve gotten her involved.”
“I know.” As angry as I was that Mara had willingly gotten involved in such a dangerous scheme, it wasn’t Robyn’s fault. At least not more than it was mine.
“This is my fight, and I’ll…” She trailed off, biting her lip and shaking her head like the anger inside her was too much for words. “I’ll get her back.”
“We’ll get her back,” I corrected firmly.
A shadow of a smile tugged at her lips, her eyes holding mine as she’d stayed quiet for an extra second. There were many times over the last three days that I’d felt Robyn sizing me up, but this was the first time she gave any indication of what she was thinking.
“She admired you,” Robyn said, her eyes holding mine. “Mara.”
“For what? Being the poster child of felonious female rage?” I scoffed, not wanting admiration. Especially for asking for something we both knew would send Tynan over the edge.
She took my shoulder in her hand. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Shoulder other people’s choices as if they were your own.”
I gritted my teeth. “Mara wasn’t like me—isn’t like me.” A wasp. A scorpion. “I was always more of a monster.”
Her voice lowered. “No history labels David as the monster for killing Goliath.”
I sucked in a breath. She knew. I wasn’t used to people knowing—not people outside of juvie. And I definitely wasn’t used to telling people. To tell someone was like handing them a loaded gun. Vulnerability wasn’t someone knowing my weakness; vulnerability was someone knowing what I was capable of.
And that was exactly the fear that paralyzed me earlier at Tynan’s bedside. The fear that to alleviate his guilt, I’d have to be more vulnerable than I’d ever been before.
“No history puts David in jail for it either,” I murmured.
Her head cocked, and she gave me a half smile. “Sometimes, there’s a price for personal justice.” As she spoke, her hand left my shoulder and went to the chain around her neck. “And there are few people brave enough to pay it.”
“What was the price for yours?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
She dropped the chain, and for a second, I wondered if the necklace was more like a noose hanging around her neck.
“I’m still paying,” was all she would say for herself before changing the subject. “Was there something else you wanted to ask?”
“Are you going into town?”
“Yeah, what do you need?”
“Can you pick me up a few things from the grocery store?”
“Yeah, sure. Do you want to come with me?” she countered.
And leave the garage?
I should go. Get out. Leave this tension-filled bubble even if it was for just an hour. I should leave?—
“No,” I heard myself answer. “I’m going to clean Tynan’s bike. I really did a number on it driving here the other day, and I think there’s some blood on the seat…”
All true things. None were the reason I was staying.
“Okay.” It was only her eyes that smiled at me. “Text me.”
“Yeah.”
“Also, you’re welcome to anything in my cabin—including the bed.”
I made a conscious effort to not read into the offer. Yes, I’d been staying in Tynan’s cabin and attempting to sleep in his bed, but only so I could keep an eye on him and make sure he was okay. If he spiked a fever or was in pain or needed something, I needed to be there. But the window for those scenarios was closing rapidly, and after this morning, I was afraid the only thing he needed from me now was the truth.
“Thank you.” My throat tightened.
“Oh, and Sutton?” She stopped and looked over her shoulder. “Don’t make Tynan pay too much. He’s the best of us.”
I stiffened, refusing to justify her assumption with my response.
He was the best…and it was the most frustrating thing about him.