Page 12 of Seven Sons (Gypsy Brothers)

We waited for a long time to do anything more than fool around, but once we took that final step, I was his, body and soul. I loved him. He was my world.

Only, he wasn’t enough to chase away the demons. Nothing was.

For the first three years after I escaped, I was a broken shell, trying to survive, trying to forget. The scars, my constant reminder. The sound of a motorcycle. The touch of leather under my fingertips. Being in confined spaces.

I was broken, destroyed, and although he tried, Elliot couldn’t put me back together again.

The first time I tried to kill myself, I swallowed a bottle of pain pills from his grandmother’s bathroom cupboard. It didn’t work. I woke up and I was still alive.

Elliot begged me to promise I’d never do it again. I did, and then the next day, I hooked up a hose to the exhaust of his car, locked the garage, and waited for sweet release.

Of course, he found me. Cut through the garage door with an ax and saved my sorry ass.

The third time, I was so pathetically obvious that he found me in the bath before I’d even had a chance to drag the razor blade down my wrists.

After the third time, he left. Because I was darkness, and he was sinking inside that darkness, and every time he tried to pull me out, I’d hold him under with me.

I understood. His life had revolved around saving my life for three whole years, and he couldn’t save me anymore.

“I have nothing left to give you,” is what he said, before he climbed into his car and drove away.

It was only after he’d left me that I realized I had been going about things all wrong.

That it wasn’t forgiveness and forgetting that my soul truly craved.

Once I set my sights on vengeance, life made perfect sense.

But by then, it was too late for Elliot and me. Our time was up. He was already with another girl, his baby in her belly.

So I stayed in Nebraska and learned to dance, and dreamed of my revenge.

“Wait,” he says.

I stop, still staring at the door that will take me downstairs.

He sighs audibly. “I’ll do it. If you promise to tell me what you’re up to.”

I spin around, the smile on my face impossible to fight. “I told you,” I say, grinning like an idiot. “I’m going to take them out. Dornan Ross will rot in jail for life, and his sons will suffer, too.”

Eliot looks at me quizzically. “The cops have never been able to get anything to stick on Ross OR his sons. What makes you think you’re different?’

I laugh. “Well, I’m the dead girl, aren’t I? I’m going to find that tape he made of me, and send it to every single TV station in the country. They’ll have no choice but to charge him with my murder.”

Elliot nods, and a slow, sweet smile spreads across his

face. He takes the three steps across his apartment to reach me and pulls me into a bear hug so tight, I can barely breathe.

“I missed you,” he says, his arms pressed tight around me.

I think of how we were strangers once, pulled together by circumstance and a burning will to survive. How, even though we haven’t laid eyes on each other in so long, Elliot is the one person on this planet who truly understands me and my past.

“Missed you too,” I murmur sadly, wishing it didn’t have to be like this, but knowing without a shadow of a doubt that it does.

Seven

Four and a half hours later, I’m running to the address Dornan gave me. Of course, I don’t need to look at the card – I know exactly where the clubhouse is. I’m almost there when it occurs to me that the address looked a little off, and I stop to fish the card out of my bag.

Sure enough, the address on the card is not for the clubhouse at all. I stand under the yellow glow of a street lamp, trying to massage the stitch out of my abdomen without touching the fresh tattoo gouged into my side.

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