Rogue (7 page)

Until I come to collect on behalf of the Underground.

SIX

FIVE GOING ON SIX

Melanie

Five days after Greyson . . .

“S
o, he’s out of the picture?” Pandora asks today as I organize the pricing PDF file for one of my clients.

I bury my face in my hands. For a second, I want to pretend Pandora isn’t here, breathing over the top of my head, her angry concern like a little cloud with thunderbolts over us both.

Five days.

Five long, awful days where all my hopes have dwindled to nothing, all my fantasies have gone black, all my expectations have become nil.

And here’s Pandora, worried and angry on my behalf, probably happy she gets to have a good excuse to be a bitch today.

“Yes,” I finally grit out. “He’s fucking out of the picture. I hope you’re thrilled.”

I pull my phone out just to show her how textless it is.

She looks at the barren screen, grunts, and shakes her head and drops down on her chair. “Scumbag,” she says.

“Dick.”

“Asshole.”

“Scumbag!”

“I already used that,” she points out.

“And as quickly as the bastard used
me
,” I mumble. Literally, the disappointment piles up by the hour, and a fresh wave hits me as I tuck my phone away. Never have I felt like I’ve misjudged a situation as much as I did ours—his and mine. It’s officially Friday. If the guy wanted a date, you bet your ass he’d have called before today.

I’m so hurt I can’t even understand why I’m so hurt. Maybe because I thought he was different, and he turned out to be just what Pandora said. I
hate
it when she’s right and I’m wrong.

I especially hated her being right this time, when I really wanted her to be
wrong.

Thank god she’s sitting down quietly at her desk and I’m not hearing any
I told you sos
. If she even starts, I will hit her as hard as I want to hit myself right now for being such a
fool.

“I’m so done with men,” I burst out when I find Pandora’s silence equally as annoying as the stuff I know she wants to say. “I don’t need them to be happy. I’m going to get a dog. God! I just remembered I probably can’t even afford the luxury of a little dog anymore.”

“Stop buying shoes,” she chides.

Sighing because I’m not going to explain to her I owe more than a pair of shoes, I click on my search engine and navigate to the online advertisement of my car. A picture of my Mustang stares back at me—with a bright red number on the top and a big
FOR SALE
sign. It’s all I have, and still not enough to cover what I owe. Like me. We’re both not enough.

For the first time in a week, my reality crashes down on me. Hard.

I have no more hazel eyes with adorable green flecks to make me feel hopeful and expectant. I have no more texts to look for
ward to. I have a car to sell, a debt to settle, and a whole lot of misery to deal with.

My grandma, before she passed, always said the best way to feel better was to focus on someone else and do something nice for them because you weren’t the only one with a problem.

I look at Pandora, thinking of all the times she’s been called a bitch in this very office, and I reach out and tug a strand of her onyx-colored hair, saying, “All that black hair is so drab. You should make a change too, add a pink strand to all this soot?”

“Fuck you, I hate pink.”

I roll my eyes and tell the heavens—okay, Nana, I tried!—then get back to my computer to stare at my car. Whoever dried it while Greyson dried
me
did a great job—
Brain, please focus on my Mustang.

It took me a full day to get the perfect images when the sun hit my car at just the right angle. It’s so pretty I can’t believe it’s been several days and no callers.

What if I get no callers?

The stress starts creeping up me like a big ole whale choking my windpipe when Pandora rolls around in her chair to face me. “Come on, bitch, talk to me!” she cries. “What made you think he would even be more than what you always get? He gives you a ride when your car won’t start; you go to a hotel. What do you even know about him except that he apparently fucks you stupid and now you’re not the Melanie I know? Where’s the smile, where’s the spark? You’re acting like me and I don’t like it.”

I fling my arms up high. “He said he’d be in touch . . . he came back to give me a ride home and I read more into it, which was a mistake, all right—
my
mistake. Believing him. Believing he was different or that we had some special . . . connection. God, I’m so lame, but I bet that’s no news to you.”

“Fuck him, Melanie.”

“I already did. Now let’s stop talking about him. Let’s order me a T-shirt online that says
I RULE, MEN SUCK
. I need to raise my bar higher. I need to really make them prove themselves before I give them a chance. Let’s go see Brooke today.”

Brooke’s baby was born premature in New York over a month ago, but since her fighter husband is currently off-season, they’re living in Seattle while they plan a small church wedding.

Pandora grabs her backpack as we get ready to leave for the day. “Have you noticed the way daddy holds the baby? It’s like the baby’s head is half the size of Remy’s biceps,” she says.

God. I hope I can take seeing the way Remington Tate looks and smiles with his dimples and his loving blue eyes at Brooke.

“By the way, I asked Kyle to go with me to the wedding. I just want to put those lesbian rumors to rest, you know?” she tells me on the elevator.

“Really?” I ask, suddenly feeling abysmal. “Great. I’ll be a third wheel then.”

SEVEN

MARKED FOR A LIFETIME

Greyson

I
t’s always the same dream.

Never varies.

Always the same number of men.

It’s always 4:12 p.m.

I’ve been dropped off by the bus.

A line of cars is in our driveway.

My mother’s words ring clear as a bell in my head: One day he will find us, Greyson. He will want to take you from me.

I won’t let him,
I’d promised.

But right then I know, he’d found us. The father I didn’t know. The one my mother didn’t want me to end up like.

I pull the strap of my backpack from my shoulder and hold it with my fist, ready to knock someone out with a hundred pounds of homework and textbooks.

Ten men stand in my living room. Only one is seated, and I know it’s him when the blood in my body starts rushing faster. It’s just blood, but my entire being recognizes him even though I’ve never seen him before. He doesn’t have my eyes, but I have his eyebrows, sleek and long and almost in a perennial frown. I have
his lean nose, his dark looks. He sees me, and a parade of mixed emotions marches across his face, more emotion than I allow him to see in my own expression. He gasps, “God.”

I see my mother then. She’s also seated in one of the single chairs, her honeyed hair in a tangle, her ankles bound, her arms pulled tight behind her. She’s trembling, gagged with a red bandanna, and trying to talk to me, words that get muffled by the cloth.

“What are you doing to her? Let her go!”

“Lana,” my father says, ignoring me, his attention now slowly turned on my mother. “Lana, Lana, how
could you
?” He looks at her, his eyes filled with tears. But for every tear my father sheds, my mother sheds a dozen, trails of them.

“Let her
go
,” I say again, lifting my backpack, preparing to launch it at him.

“Set that down . . . we will.” My first mistake was listening to him. I lower my backpack. My father kneels before me and holds out a black weapon, then lowers his voice so that only I can hear. “See this? This is an SSG with a suppressor, so nobody will hear it. It’s got no safety—ready for use. Shoot one of these men, any man, and I will spare your mother.”

She’s crying hard, shaking her head, but a slimy, bald man behind her forces her neck still. I step away from my backpack. It’s close to me, close enough to kick like a soccer ball. I play, and I can send it flying across the room. But to who? What if I hit my mother?

I inspect the weapon and wonder how many bullets it has, not enough for all these men but for the one holding her, yes. I take it, confused that my hand doesn’t shake. It’s heavy and there’s no fear, only the need to free my mother.

I look at the one holding her neck still.

Her eyes crying.

One day he’ll find us Greyson . . .

I aim farthest away from her to the largest body part of the man that I can.

I fire.

A clean dark hole appears in his forehead. The man drops.

My mother screams inside her gag, and cries more hysterically, kicking both her tied legs in the air.

My father takes the gun from my hand with a look of wonder and he pats my head.

More men pull my mother up to her feet and drag her down to the garage staircase.

“What are you doing? Where are you taking her?” I grab my pack and swing it at one man. Another comes and grabs me, squeezes my arms as he talks and spits in my ear, “Son, son, listen to me, they made a deal, she lost you. She lost you!”

“She’d never lose me.
Mother!
 ” I grab a knife from his belt and stick it into his eye, twisting. He releases me with a howl and a spurt of red blood, and I go running down the stairs as I hear a car start.

My father catches me. Slaps me. Then cocks the gun at me. He smiles when I go still.

“Greyson, my son, even your instincts made you stop. You know this just killed a man. You’re not going to die. If you die, you can’t save her. Can you?”

My whole body is paralyzed. He smiles sweetly at me and hugs me, keeping the gun against my temple.

“I knew you were my son. I told your mother, it wasn’t nice to keep you from me. Thirteen years, Greyson. Thirteen years looking for you. She insisted you weren’t my son. I told her if you proved to have my blood in you, you were coming with your father, where you belong.” He eases back and studies me with pride. “I gave you a choice to shoot a man.”

He looks up the staircase, where I know there is a motionless body. A body that won’t move again because of me.

“You killed him. Bullet straight to the head. You’re my son, every inch of my son; you will be powerful and feared.”

His voice chills me. I don’t feel anything when we go upstairs and I see the dead man, no remorse, nothing. I want to kill more, kill everyone who hurt my mother. “Where is she?” I ask, my voice odd. I killed something else with that man. Me.

“She will be taken somewhere else. Because real men are not raised by women, you hear me? My son will not be raised by a woman. Not without his father. No, you will be like me.”

I look at the car pulling out of the garage, driving my mother away. The look in her eyes when I shot that man. A cold panic like I’ve never felt spikes and spreads through me. I want my mother to explain to me what I did, why it was wrong, why it was wrong when it was all for her. Why she’s being taken away. My face is suddenly wet, and I get another slap, this one shooting me across the room and against the wall.

“None of that, boy!
None of it.
Now see that man?” My father points at the man covering his eye where I stabbed him, blood staining his shirt, his jeans. “He’s your uncle, Greyson. Uncle Eric. He’s my brother, he’s our family.
We
are your family. Apologize for what you did. If you’re good and I’m happy with you, I will let you see your mother. She will be kept alive only for you. She was family too, and I take care of my family—but she shouldn’t have betrayed me. She should never, ever, have taken you.”

It took me very little time to realize how this family worked. Very little time to realize that my father used only his newest men for these antics. The guy I killed, standing like some mannequin behind my mother, had been working for him for three days when my father whispered the dare in my ear, all the time expecting and hoping I’d prove myself Slater enough to make my first kill.

Many nightmares later, I supposed my mother had been trying to tell me not to shoot. If I hadn’t been so determined to defend her, if I’d proved to be weak, she’d be with me. I’d be left in school, thought unfit to be a part of this family. But I played my father’s game and instead of saving her, I doomed us both for the rest of our lives. I showed him I was thirteen and yes . . . I would kill, even him, for my mother.

I was good. I trained. I sucked back every emotion in me. I became nothing. Zero. And left when the promises and promises that I could see her turned out to be nothing but empty words . . . I followed every lead, and found nothing. A whole big world, and all these skills, and I still don’t know where she is.

A noise in my bedroom filters into my dreamlike state. I awaken instantly, and move by instinct, reaching under my pillow for my knife. Lightning fast, I flip around and send it flying, slamming it within a grazing hair from my intruder’s face, against the door.

“Zero?” a stunned voice says in the dark.

I’ve got my gun cocked and aimed before Harley finishes my name. Then I sigh. “Never do that again.” I shove up to my feet and flick on the lamp.

I turn back to my list. I’m anxious to get this over with. So many names. So many. I can’t even stand looking at her name, there, next to number five. “Your father wants to see you. He wants to know how the situation is going.”

My father has the oddest hours. We’re still off-season. Everyone is sleeping. The meds and the morphine they give him make him sleep all day, and wake only for small periods during the night. I grab the list and shove my legs into my slacks while Harley waits for me.

He grins. “You’ll enjoy that one.”

“Excuse me?”

“Number five?” he presses. “Your finger . . . it’s on number five.”

I drag my finger away and my heart starts pounding with the sudden urge to choke him as I fold the page into a tight little roll.