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Arms crossed, she nods, and remorse rises within my chest. I see it, now. See the resemblance to the same face I see in my nightmares and every time I close my eyes. The same face that calls me to step into the flames every time I’m on a call with my volunteer firefighter squad.
“Yes. Lucas Reyes was my brother.”
Something shatters inside me; it's like glass breaking within my soul. The pain is sharp, visceral, a deep ache in my chest that feels like it’s cutting my insides to shreds.
"Yes, I see it. Lucas Reyes." Each word is a stone, heavy with reality. I can see him now, clear as the day it happened. Lucas Reyes, with his life leaking out of him, his eyes wide with shock and disbelief; Lucas Reyes, a man who came to me with good intentions, with honesty and hope in his eyes and his voice, who had a plan to end a club war and fight the drugs that were flooding his neighborhood; a man who got nothing for his good intentions except a hole in his fucking head. "I shot him. In the head."
In that moment, I’m not in this dirty living room where the floor’s a mess and the walls are lined with soundproofing foam. I’m back in that concrete lot, with blood all around me, with members of my former MC dead on the ground alongside Lucas Reyes and several of his club brothers, too.
It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.
“You admit it. You fucking killed my brother, you piece of shit.”
She clenches her fists and hammers me as tears overcome her. She pummels my face, my stomach, even my throat while she cries.
I topple backwards in my chair, hit the ground with my head, and manage a gurgling gasp of air before Alexandra towers above me and throws several more punches. Pain floods through me as she hits me with everything she’s got.
But as much as she tries to hurt me, it’s nothing compared to the guilt that I carry inside. Guilt for killing Lucas Reyes, for betraying his trust and destroying any chance he had of a better life. For snuffing out all the potential he had. I knew the second I shook his hand that he was someone with the heart and the strength to make his club and community a better place.
“You fucking killed him. You killed him.”
Those words come over and over, each one accompanying a punch or a kick that makes my head snap, my bones bruise, my flesh break and bleed. Pain and anticipation flood me, fill me, make me feel so fucking alive that it’s like my skeleton wants to rip its way out of my skin.
She’s going to kill me now.
And she deserves to.
Just as I deserve to die.
Then she stops.
Sudden.
She grabs my chair, and, grunting, hauls it upright. There’s a confused look on her face. “Why are you smiling?”
“Because, as much as you hate me, you and I agree on something, Alexandra: I deserve to die. And I want you to be the one to kill me.”
Chapter Six
Alexandra
“You want me to kill you?”
My tongue clicks against the roof of my mouth and my jaw slams shut. I did not expect this. Do not even want to hear it. What I want to hear is groveling, begging, tearful cries for mercy before I finally torture and kill him.
Now that he’s asking for it instead of fighting it, it’s harder to keep my fists closed.
Instead, they drop to my sides, and I stare back at him, confused.
He nods. The corners of his lips might even be in a smile.
“Yes. I want you to kill me.”
“Why?”
“Does it matter? I murdered your brother. Hell, I’ve killed more than just him. You’d be doing the world a fucking favor by spilling my brains on your living room floor. So do it already.”
There’s a noise outside. A thump. Probably a neighbor, maybe a rat; this isn’t the best of neighborhoods, which is the entire reason I chose to live here — my neighbors in this god forsaken craphole of an apartment building mind their own business. I know that once I kill Dixon, none of them will ask questions about the noises they might’ve heard, and none of them will talk to the police. That kind of security is worth the fact that I often carry some sort of weapon — mace, a knife, and one time a hatchet, and I felt really cool while doing it — in my hand when coming home late from work.
