Page 19 of If You Go
“Oh no, how come?” she asks, and I think she means it. Does she just not think about consequences like this, or is it just mewho has these types of fears. I just stare at her, blinking slowly, as if we didn’t just get through explaining to her what is going on.
“What if Gavin is watching her? Or tracking her? You saw what he did to the shop. Heard what he did to the car. Her coming here will lead him right to our door, putting a target on more than just Surry, but you, me, Corver, and Joshua also. You cannot be serious.”
“Well then let’s go to my place? I am okay with him targeting it. I need to move anyways.”
I roll my eyes at her, honestly shocked she didn’t think about this. All we have talked about the last several days is who did this, how bad they are. You would think with Corver’s obsession she would see how serious this was.
Juniper places her empty cup under the ice machine in the fridge, the cubes dinging against the inside as they tumble down into it. “Do you really think he would follow her here? Target us?” She yells over the ice machine.
I watch as she finishes, then moves from the fridge to the counter, grabbing the Malibu and pouring two shots of in it. “Yes, I do. It’s why he targeted the tattoo shop. She is there so often it was somewhere she enjoyed being, obviously.”
“Aww, you really think she loved being at the shop?” She finishes her drink off by filling it the rest of the way with Pepsi, turning to look at me with a softness in her eyes before looking back at her cup and topping it with a maraschino cherry, all with a happy, almost dreamy, smile on her face. I don’t understand the drink, but it’s her guts, not mine.
I snort a laugh. As if Surry loving the shop is the top of our worries.
All of a sudden, heavy footsteps sound beside me, and Corver walks in, he still looks like he hasn’t slept. Ever. “There are people coming up the elevator, Brenden.”
“Okay. June, you’re up. They are your friends. I am going to take a shower. I may or may not come back out.” I peel myself from the couch and begin trudging to my bedroom.
She pouts at me, but makes her way toward the door to greet her friends. I pass Joshua in the hallway on the way to my bedroom.
“Hazel and all of them are coming over.” I say.
“That’s a bad fucking idea,” he looks at me with raised eyebrows, as if I am the one who thought to invite them.
“I know it is, but they’re already here. See to it that you keep an eye, and that Corver turns up all the security, please. I am going to take a shower.”
“Oh, come on, old man. Come hang out with us. They’re already here, so you might as well hang out. You never do anything fun.” He punches me in the arm, then looks toward June. I catch him staring at her ass.
“I’m good, have fun.” I wink at him and continue on my way toward my room. My room is the first door on the right, so that way I am closest to the door. I prefer it this way. I am also right across from the guest bathroom, which means I can keep an ear on everything as well. Not that we have any visitors outside of June.
The hallway stretched out in front of me, long and bare, the kind of empty that spoke more of indifference than design. No pictures, no art, not even a clock. Just white paint over drywall, scuffed here and there from boots or moving gear. A bachelor’s stretch of wall, really.
We’d never bothered to fill it with anything—too busy building other people’s towers and tearing down other people’s demons. The silence of it made every footstep echo sharper than it should, and for a second, I caught myself staring at the blank space, thinking maybe we should hang something there. Thenagain, we never really cared. The place wasn’t about being lived in—it was about being secure.
I walk into my room and shut the door. The video of Gavin keeps replaying in my mind. I am not really sure what to do. What the next move is. I texted Michael, our lead foreman for the construction company, the day after the shop blew up and let him know he will be running the show for the rest of the week at minimum, informing him it is locked down, no strangers in the compound, no new clients.
I walk into my closet and strip off all my clothes before walking through my closet to the bathroom and turn the shower on. While it begins to get warm, I look at myself in the mirror.
Tattoos stretch over me like armor plates, black and grey winding into each other, stories inked deep into my skin. They look good under the light—menacing, deliberate—but all I see is what came before.
I wasn’t always this.
Back in high school, I was tall but not filled out—six foot and maybe a buck fifty, lanky as hell, invisible. Easy target. The scrawny kid everyone thought was safe to shove around. Nobody said my name unless it was followed by a laugh. Nobody thought I’d ever be more than a shadow.
Then I grew up and started to try and get my life figured out. That was easy until Mom died. And the shadow turned into fire.
That’s when Slater Construction started. Out in the open, it was a way to build something real. A roof we could all stand under. We worked ourselves to the bone—Corver at nineteen was already running the books, having taught himself code and fraud systems on a shitty laptop when we were teens. Josh and I hauled lumber, hammered nails, did the grunt jobs no one wanted. We clawed our way up from remodels and drywall patches to skyscrapers and city contracts.
And behind that shiny mask? I hunted men like the one who took our mom. Predators. Wife-beaters. The kind of men who smiled at church and signed contracts by day, then left bruises blood behind closed doors. I didn’t do it for the thrill or for money—we already had more than enough of that. I did it because someone had to. Because justice, as the world saw it, never came fast enough for people like us.
I carried the weight of every woman I couldn’t save, every cry that came too late. Sometimes, I’d see it flicker behind my smile—the cost of being the kind of man who plays savior and executioner in the same breath. My hands were steady when they shouldn’t have been. My eyes stayed soft, even when the work hardened the rest of me. And maybe that’s what scared me most. How easily I could be both—the protector and the storm that burned everything unsafe out of our path.
The reflection in the mirror now is that of a man—six-six, three hundred pounds, built from fury and survival. I box. I fight. I choke men out until their lights go dark, then I walk away and sleep fine. Because I know the world’s lighter without them in it. My body’s not just muscle. It’s purpose. Every scar and inked line is a ledger of what we’ve done, what we’ve built.
The mirror fogs as I step into the shower, water hammering down on me. For a long minute, I just stand there, letting it batter my shoulders, letting the pain of the last few days wash down the drain. The heat loosens the knots in my back but not the ones in my chest. Gavin’s face is still there, grinning. The sound of his laugh still drills into me. The sound of Natasha’s scream carved into my bones.
Shampoo. Rinse. Routine movements that give my hands something to do when my head won’t shut off. I add the conditioner and then close my eyes, pressing my palms against the tile, forehead leaning into the steam. I add face wash to my hands and begin to scrub my face and beard until my skin feels abit raw. I think about Natasha—Corver’s face when he saw her in that video. The rage there. The helplessness.
