Page 57 of Twisted Ruck

"I don'talwayswant blood spilled." He grabbed my wrist and pulled my hand down to his chest.

"Who are you and what have you done with my brother?" I asked. "Because the one I know would write a book about a hundred ways to make someone bleed while killing them slowly."

"One hundred and one," he said. "I could probably come up with a series of books, if I'm honest. But you care about these guys and you don't want them to kill each other, right? And you're my sister, so I want what you want. If you don't want them spilling each other's blood, they better not."

"If you're about to say you'll spill their blood if they spill each other's blood, I'm not sure it works that way." I sat back against him again.

This whole conversation was starting to make my head spin, like we were going around in circles. Threats of violence to prevent threats of violence. Blood after blood.

We were definitelynotnormal people.

"I have other methods," he said. "I've been working on how to cause pain without breaking the skin. It's fascinating. Youshould come down to my work room sometime. Let me show you what I've been working on."

"On the face of the planet, only you would say something like that," I said.

If I was fascinated with pain the way he was, I only had to turn up at work on any given day. There was always someone injured, or recovering from an injury.

I was definitelynotgoing to admit that one thing I liked about the job was exactly that. Seeing the guys throw themselves into the game until they were battered, bruised and sometimes with broken bones. I definitely didn't get off on that, no way.

"Only me?" he mused. "Probably not, but I like to be unique. How boring would life be if we were all the same?"

"That's what I keep trying to say," I said. "I was quite happy living my life away from all the violence. Just to be different, you know?"

"Poor Chels." He kissed my forehead. "You'll do fine. Did you know Daisy Lasalle got out for a few years? She thought she put it behind her, but look at her now. She's just about running this city. And loving every moment of it. Once she embraced her true self, she really started living."

"I'm not like her," I said.

"Aren't you?" he asked. "If you weren't, you wouldn't have brought Belinda Simmons to me. But you did. A person living a normal life would have— Actually, I don't know what they would have done. Letting someone like that ruin your life seems like a bad idea to me."

"You think?" I asked with a hint of sarcasm. I closed my eyes and sighed slowly. "I didn't know what else to do. I would have been kicked out of the Smashers if Bruce knew sooner than he did. I wouldn't have been able to finish my practical placement, much less got a job with the team. She would have destroyed everything."

"So you did what you had to do and destroyed her first," he concluded.

"I'm still not like Daze," I argued.

I didn't get a kick out of controlling people the way she seemed to. I didn't want people scared of me. At least, not consciously.

Also not something I'd admit to myself.

Although, maybe that was why I didn't mind the guys giving me the occasional roofie, or acting out a kidnapping and being rough with me. If I relinquished power to them, maybe it would stop me from going after it myself.

Possibly, deep down, I craved it a lot more than I realised.

"Do you regret bringing Belinda to me?" he asked.

I chewed my lip for a few moments before finally responding. "Not exactly. I asked her not to publish that story and she wouldn't listen. I gave her a choice. She decided screwing with my life was perfectly okay. I wish she'd done what I asked. We both could have walked away."

I couldn't bring myself to admit, even to myself, that I enjoyed the fear in her eyes. If I accepted that fact, I was one step deeper into what seemed to me like a dark, black hole. One I'd been skirting around for years, but managed to avoid falling into. Like a black hole in space, it was difficult to resist its pull. If I didn't keep trying, I could disappear inside forever. Losing myself and everything I spent so long working towards.

My brother would tell me to embrace it, but I couldn't. I'd keep fighting until I had no fight left in me.

"You really think she would have?" He squeezed my shoulders. "People like her are always looking for an angle. If it wasn't that article, on that day, it would have been another. It might have been something with even bigger fallout. And it might have come at a time when you were too late to stop it. Like you said, you gave her a choice and she made it. Peopledon't always make good choices. That other dancer, what was her name? Ivy? She also made choices. So did Bruce Fergus. Every single day I get out of bed and I have to make choices and live with them. That was exactly what they did. But their choices killed them instead. It's not your fault they had bad intentions and bad reasoning. All we can do is our best in life and look out for the people we love."

"You're right," I said slowly.

"I'm your big brother, I'm always right," he said with a laugh. "It's my job. Autopsies, torture and wisdom. Huh, I should get that on a T-shirt."

"And one that says ‘I kill people and I know things,’" I said dryly.

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