It probably would’ve been better to bring her to the cottage, but I don’t know how this turns out. If it’s anything like everything else in my life, it’ll go to hell, and I want one place to go where all the memories are good. Like a time capsule of something I can never have. That time in the cottage when Brooke looked at me like I was worth something.
She’s wary. “What do I want to ask?”
I go to the bureau and grab a bottle of Macallan. The good shit—older than she is. I pour two glasses. I hand one to her. “Drink.”
“What is it?”
“Scotch.”
“It’s…kind of early.” The sentence tilts up at the end. Almost a question.
I lower my voice. “Drink it.”
She takes a tiny sip. Miserably, I throw mine back. I need it more than she ever will. I pour another. There’s no amount of liquor that can make me hurt her.
“They’re going to be wondering what happened to me,” she says. “They’ll be looking for me.”
“No doubt.” I tip my head at her glass. “Finish it.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“You should,” I say softly.
Wariness shines in her eyes. Finally.
I should feel relieved that she’s starting to get what’s happening, but I just feel a deep, nauseating dread. I’ve had to do a lot of bad things in my life, but I’ve never felt this level of reluctance. Anytime we needed to kill someone, torture someone for information, I would do it. Even when you know that the guy’s a scumbag, it chips off a piece of your soul. I did it so the other guys in my crew wouldn’t have to, because I don’t really have a soul. At least I thought I didn’t. Now there’s Brooke standing in front of me, looking so strong and so vulnerable that I want to kneel at her feet.
“Why do I have to drink it?” she asks.
“Because that’s how this is going to go.”
She peers into the glass. “What if I don’t want to?”
“You want to.”
She raises her gaze to me. The trust still there kills me. “Okay,” she says. God, that trust. I’d take a haughty sneer a million times before this last dying glimmer of trust. Keeping her eyes on me, she swallows it down, then gives me back the glass.
“Good girl.” I pour another.
“I think you should take me back,” she says.
“I will. As soon as you tell me who Keeper is.”
Chapter 27
Brooke
There’s a feeling when lights are flashing in your face. When people you barely know call out your name like you’re best friends. Where it starts to feel like a dream. It makes things easier to handle. Going through a party with a cool half-smile on my lips.
It’s the same thing I do now, when I realize why Stone has come for me, why he brought me here.
“What makes you think I know anything?” My voice comes out weirdly calm. There’s a panic inside me. A full-scale Big Bang explosion, ending everything that came before. On the outside I must look the same, but on the inside everything has changed.
“Because you told me yourself,” he says, nearly growling. “I called him Keeper, but you called him Innkeeper.”
Fear whooshes in my ears. “When?”
“When you were fuck-drunk.”
I flinch at the harshness of his words. At least I know how much I revealed to him. When we were in that cottage, when he touched me. How had I let something so important slip? But I was so impossibly relaxed. I learned early on to never let down my guard, with anyone. Not for the cameras or the society mavens. Not even for my mother. But the one time I slip, it could ruin everything.
“I never used the name Innkeeper,” he says. “That told me you know the man. And it’s not a fucking surprise, is it? Not in the circles that you run in.”
I swallow past the dryness in my mouth.
The cabin was beautiful but rustic. Raw. He used that to seduce me. This hotel room with its old-world grandeur and strange intimacy? He’ll use this to hurt me. Make me tell.
I wrap my arms around myself.
Daddy came to every ballet recital. He worked late every day to afford my private school tuition. We might not have a normal happy family, but it’s mine.
Stone will protect his crew, even if they did something wrong. That’s the way I have to protect my father. He deserves justice, nothing more. Not revenge.
“He’s somebody to you. That’s why you’re keeping it from me. Family or friend. One of your girlfriends’ daddies.” He gives me a hard look. “Maybe even yours.”
I try not to react, but some things I can’t control, like the way my heart bangs against my ribs. There’s movement on my face, like a flinch. But it feels far away, like my muscles belong to someone else.
“You should just tell me,” he says simply. “You’re going to, in the end.”
The threat is ten times worse because of the calm way he delivers it. If he were beating his chest, it would seem like an exaggeration. But I know the calm, cold reality here. He’s going to hurt me. “Why? Because you’ll make me?”
He watches my face, seeing everything, saying nothing.
I stand my ground, senses humming from his nearness. Or maybe that’s the scotch. “I can’t.”
Still he says nothing.
I swallow. Stone can’t trust anyone, but I can. I trust Detective Rivera. I trust the system, even knowing it failed Stone. I trust my father, even if I shouldn’t. “I won’t.”
Threat runs thick in the air between us. “I’m not fooling around, Brooke.”
“You don’t want to hurt me.” I gaze into his eyes, looking for the man who couldn’t drown me. The man who carved that tiny bird. The one who made up a fairy tale about a rivet.
“No, I don’t want to hurt you.” His tone is soft, but there’s darkness underneath—the darkness of hundreds of hopeless nights. “But I do lots of things l don’t want to do.”
He does those things for the men in his crew. For the boys who were down there in the basement with him. For the ones who might be held now. That’s part of why I respect him, why I love him, but there’s also something broken in it. The way he acts like killing people doesn’t matter. Like it doesn’t break his heart again and again.
My pulse races. “I don’t know anything—not for sure.” It’s the last words that change everything for the worst. The confession I didn’t mean to make. He knows I have something specific. Even his gaze is colder. More resigned. Like he knows this is going to get messy.
Fear arrows through me. Instinct takes over. I whirl around. I bolt past the bathroom, to the door, fling it open.
A large hand smashes it back closed.
I turn around, shoulder blades flush against the door. He stands in front of me, half caging me, dark stubble gleaming under high-cut cheekbones. The door is hard on my back, but my knees are jelly. “Please.”
He shakes his head. “We’ve been on this collision course for two years, me and this Keeper. Longer. There’s only one way out—my bullet in his brain.”
Fear threatens to overwhelm me, but I force it back. I force myself to focus on the handsome, furious face in front of me. “Think about it, Stone. You once said you can’t have a regular life like other people, but you can. You can start now with this one step, seeing that justice is done instead of poisoning your soul with more violence.”