Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 120186 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120186 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
I’m unnerved but at the same time relieved. Almost like I have a guardian angel.
Would he kill for me?
The thought chills me to the bone, but I can’t shake it. It weighs on me as I get in the car. Fuck going anywhere else now. I’ve had enough for one morning.
Did he kill Jackson? Or maybe he had someone else do it, like one of the people who cleaned up last night, since there was no way he could have done it all by himself in that short a time span. Nor did he have a speck of blood on him that I saw. Maybe he wasn’t alone when he showed up at the house. I know I’m grasping at straws and losing my mind. Exhaustion and terror and the memory of having the life choked out of me are wearing me down.
Pretty soon, there won’t be any of me left.
Chapter 21
Kade
Itake the long way home.
No good reason for it. Just not ready to walk through that door yet. The land’s all frost and brown scrub on either side of the road, and I keep my eyes on it and my hands on the wheel and try not to think about the fact that I spent the past few hours babysitting Allie. Or what I almost did in broad daylight when that asshole Joseph walked up to her.
I didn’t set out this morning to watch her all day. I was there, she was there, and then I couldn’t leave. Told myself it was about keeping an eye on her. Everything that’s happened lately, that’s not even a lie. But she got out of her car, and I sat there with the engine idling for another forty minutes. At some point, I ran out of ways to call it anything other than what it was.
She looked up from across the street, and I sank back in the seat. It didn’t matter because she fucking saw me. She always sees me.
I’m still chewing on that when I pull up to the house and find my brothers’ vehicles scattered around the property. Full house.
I haven’t laid eyes on Calder since last night—since we both said things that put hard lines between us—and seeing all three of them here already tells me exactly how his morning went. He got to them first. Rounded them up, laid out his side of it, and made sure the numbers were in his favor before I walked in.
I follow their voices inside and find the study.
My boots slow in the doorway.
Calder’s behind Roman’s desk. Settled in like he’s been there for years, papers spread in front of him, working through them like it’s nothing. Maybe it is nothing to him. I never gave much thought to what Calder was waiting for while Roman was alive. What any of us were.
But seeing him in that chair does something to me I don’t have a clean word for.
It’s not that I wanted it. God knows I don’t want that desk or anything it stands for. It’s not about that. It’s more like—Roman’s actually gone. The order of things has shifted. And I thought I wanted that, thought I’d wanted it for years, but standing here looking at proof of it sits wrong in my gut all the same. The desk. The chair. A man settling into a dead man’s space.
Even if the dead man had it coming.
Sawyer’s got both palms on the surface mid-sentence when I walk in. Levi’s over at the drink cart, and when he spots me, he pours a second glass without a word.
Never a good sign.
Three of them. One room. I do the math fast, and I don’t like what it adds up to. I’ve walked into worse ambushes, but that doesn’t mean I can’t see this one for what it is.
“What the hell are you all doing in here?” I ask.
Calder and Sawyer both startle. We never came in here willingly before. Roman saw to that. “Where the hell did you come from?” Calder says, hand going to his chest.
“Answer the question.”
He leans back—in Roman’s chair— and looks at me like he’s already three moves ahead, and I’m still figuring out the board. “It has a desk. I needed a desk.”
“We should throw everything in this room out. All of it.”
“You’re welcome to that.” He says it like he means it. Maybe he does. “Right now, I have work to do.”
I make myself walk in. The room’s got a weight to it that has nothing to do with furniture. I know every corner of it. The window where Roman used to make you stand while he sat with his back to the light so you couldn’t read his face. The way the walls swallow sound. A faint cigarette smell lingers in the air, and I don’t know if it’ll ever leave.