Better When He's Brave (Welcome to the Point #3)(2)

I gritted my teeth and wrapped my hands around the links on the cuffs so that I could look my captor in the eye as I bit out the stark and brutal truth that I knew would shove him over the edge.

I told him about the girl, who was now my girl, and how she was going to bring the world Roark was trying to destroy down around him and bury him under it when she found out that I was gone. I got in a few more pointed digs that would drive home the point that I knew what he was up to, understood his real motivation even if it seemed chaotic and unclear to everyone else.

A tick started in Roark’s cheek and he took a few steps closer to where I was limply hanging, slowly bleeding to death from inside and out. He stopped when the toes of his boots were touching the blood-covered toes of my own. I felt him put a finger under my chin as he tilted my head back so that we were looking at each other. He had a gaze that was familiar in both its darkness and its madness. Roark came by his insanity and ruthless disregard for human life naturally. There was no getting around twisted genetics.

“Your girl?” The accented voice was hard, furious, and I knew I had hit a raw nerve.

I barked out a laugh that sounded more like a dying wheeze, and felt a fleeting moment of satisfaction when some of my blood landed squarely on his face. We were almost the same height, and if I hadn’t been hanging limp and broken, we would’ve been eye to eye. I had a solid fifty pounds on Roark and I knew how to fight just as dirty as the next guy, but what I would never be able to overcome, what would always give men like him the upper hand over guys like me, was the fact that I still had a heart. I still cared. No matter how hard this city continued to kick me in the junk, no matter how many times I had to choose between my family and what was right, no matter how many times I was reminded that I lived in a place absent of justice and light . . . I still cared. I still had hope. I still wanted to be a force that fought for righteousness and the small amount of good that could be found hidden in the cracks and darkness, and I still loved. My heart was protected by a monster that lived deep inside of me, but that beast had kept the thing safe while we scraped by in this awful place.

I loved my brother even though he was a criminally minded hard-ass. I loved my job. I loved my small circle of friends that more often than not were on the other side of the law from me. I loved my mother even though she was a lifelong drunk with no interest in ever trying to dry out . . . and I loved my girl.

The girl. The one I would die for. The one I would fight this war Roark had started for, and if this was the way I was meant to go out, then so be it. I would die for having a heart but at least I knew I was going out for a f*cking valiant and important reason.

“Mine.” I gave him another grotesque-looking smile as he let my head fall limply back down, my neck too battered to hold the weight up anymore. “She’s been mine since the second she flipped on Novak and his crew. She only fell in with you because she wanted me and didn’t know how to ask for it. She thought you could keep her safe like she knew I would. How does it feel to know you were nothing to her but a poor substitute for me? Every time you took her to bed it was me she was thinking of. You haven’t ever been anyone’s first choice, Roark.”

I felt him tense up. I knew the girl was a sore spot, a loss that had really amped up his drive to take the Point down in a fireball of vengeance and hate. No way was Roark ever going to let that rejection and slight go, not on top of the others the Point had handed out to him

His hand fisted in the hair on the top of my head and my face was yanked back up so we were once again eye to eye. Mine were starting to swell shut and I knew I was losing too much blood. I couldn’t feel much below my shoulders except for my throbbing knee and every part of my exposed skin that I could see was covered in bruises, welts, and open skin, leaking the last of my life force out onto the cracked concrete below where I was dangling. I tried to focus on his face, but it kept blurring and fading into one that looked like another I loved. The metallic burn against my split lips made me gag when the end of a wicked black pistol was sudden shoved between my puffy lips and stopped with the open end of the barrel resting against my teeth.

I saw myself reflected in the absolute void of that black gaze watching me and I knew he was going to pull the trigger.

“She chose wrong. I could have laid this city at her feet.”

“If she wanted the city at her feet, she would have put it there herself. That’s why you never deserved her, you prick. You never understood she could run circles around you in the misplaced-rage and need-for-revenge department. Only she was smart enough to know that there had to be more to life than that. I’m her more. You were just a means to an end.” The words were garbled around the pistol but I had to get them out.

I closed my eyes and waited for it all to end. I wouldn’t beg. I wouldn’t plead. I wouldn’t waver. I wouldn’t go out any other way than the way I’d lived my life . . . I was going to go out bravely and there was no f*cking way this piece of shit would ever know how scared I was that not only was I leaving my brother behind in this tragic place, but I was leaving my girl . . . the girl. When I was gone she was going to unleash hell, and Conner Roark had no clue what a vengeful woman who was far more bad than good could do when she was suffering from a broken heart.

BANG!

EPIGRAPH

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

—Tennessee Williams