Page 6 of Never Trust the Living (Battle Crows MC 7)

“Oh, no reason.” Lulu shrugged. “I guess maybe it was just a thought leftover from my psych class today. Did you know there are…”

That’s when I looked over and saw my brother at the next table over, being deathly quiet and dousing himself in the shadows. I knew I should’ve cut the conversation short with my friends. But I didn’t. And that cost them their lives.

Not that I knew it at the time.

I swallowed hard and tried to look away, but time after time, my gaze would be drawn back to him.

To him, listening to every single instance of our conversation.

Not that I was scared about him listening in to my worst fear.

He knew it well.

He’d been the one to instill that fear inside of me.

My thoughts went back to a few years ago. To when he’d given me that fear.

• • •

Two years ago

I woke to the sound of a shuffling lurch.

One second, I was lying in bed, face up, sleeping.

And the next I had a pillow over my face, and a massive body holding my arms down to my sides and my torso to the bed so I couldn’t move the pillow away.

My first inclination was to scream. Which was comical, because if I screamed, nobody would hear me.

I was living with my brother after all. The one person that could hear me was the one person that was doing the smothering.

I struggled uselessly against the pillow, knowing that this was it.

This was the time that I would die.

Oxygen started to deplete the moment the last of the scream fled from my mouth.

My struggles went from intense and immediate to lethargic from one breath to the next.

My nose hurt.

My eyes were wide open but unseeing.

A hand pressed hard over my mouth from the top of my pillow, and that’s when I realized the truth.

My brother really did kill me.

Except, sometime later, after the last of the fight left my body, I woke up.

It was morning.

There was light shining through the dirty window, and there were dust particles floating around the still air of my room.

I sat up slowly, feeling the ache in my arms and chest.

My throat felt raw, and my face hurt.

I didn’t make the smothering thing up.

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