Draw (Gentry Boys #1)(4)

I paused in the living room with my bag over my shoulder. Devin seemed like he was beginning to sober up. Amid the splinters of the ruined table, he appeared to be struggling to pull his phone out of his back pocket.

“Devin, you are a cruel bastard,” I told him coolly. “And you are going to have a miserable life.” It felt good to say that to him. He gave me an uncomprehending look. “Goodbye.” I left.

When I sat behind the wheel of my ancient Civic I breathed a quick prayer for it to start. Then with a sigh of weak relief I pointed it east. I wanted to get the hell out of California. The entire state seemed wrapped up in Devin. Wrapped up in the worst things I thought about myself. I wasn’t at all the confident, successful woman I’d planned to be. I was a weak-willed girl.

Worse, I hadn’t learned a thing about who not to trust.





CHAPTER TWO


CORD





I hate dreams. My mother used to be one of those crystal-wearing Tarot-reading types who saw every twitch of the subconscious as a message from the universe. At least that’s how she would talk when she wasn’t f*cking high. And she was high most of the time.

No, dreams were the useless leftovers. It was shit that had been shoved to the back of your mind for a reason. It was the nightmare of constant childhood hunger. It was the agony of watching your brother get the tar kicked out of him by a madman who was your blood too. And it was the knowledge that you would be next. Dreams were the place that made you and the place you hated most. They were heat and dirt, sometimes with blood and screaming. Worst of all, dreams were isolation because you had to walk them alone, without the two people who were a part of you since the moment you existed.

Creed and Chase knew I liked to wander after a fight so they let me be. We all handled it differently. On the rare occasions Creed did the work he would lapse into a dark place, grumbling about our bastard father as he drank himself into a blackout. It wasn’t good for him to be in that place and anyway he was better at the agent role, making deals and getting the action set up. People looked at him and were reluctant to pull any bullshit. Chase was different; he needed to exercise his dick until he ran out of juice or ran out of women. But on my nights I only wanted a few hours of quiet.

“Damn good fight,” Creed said, slapping my shoulder.

“Hell yeah,” I agreed, picking the last of the tape off my knuckles and rolling it into a sticky ball. My knuckles had impact cuts anyway; they would be stiff tomorrow.

“Three G’s, bro,” hooted Chase, fanning himself with the cash. Creed made a face and grabbed it from him “You takin’ the truck?” Creed called as I started to walk away.

“Nah,” I answered, pulling on a frayed old flannel shirt with the sleeves cut out. Chase liked to tease me about my Goodwill pickings. He shouted that 1993 called and wanted its fashion sense back. He laughed when I flipped him off.

We lived in an apartment complex less than a mile from the university and the place was crawling with students. I hadn’t been in a classroom since the last bell rang in the dusty hallways of Emblem High. These college kids seemed like a different species; sleek, shiny and groping their way through the best days of their lives. Finals had ended and parties oozed out in every direction. The two girls nudging each other ten feet to my left were cute. I knew they were whispering about me. They looked like expensive types though, the moneyed daughters of Scottsdale who were looking to roll with the rough stuff for a night or two. Another time I might have taken them up on the nasty offer in their heavily lined eyes. A glance down at their shapely, tanned legs was enough to get me rising. But my head still wasn’t right and I didn’t want to deal with anything more difficult than myself.

I got all the way to the north side of the complex before finding a building which wasn’t the site of some wild orgy of a party. Stepping on the stucco frame of a dark patio, I hauled myself onto the second floor balcony and from there hopped up to the flat roof. I knew a guy who lived there, an owlish kid from Emblem named Brayden. The first time we’d run into one another at the mailbox, I’d read his loathing. I couldn’t pretend not to know why. But the years we’d spend in the same shithole of a town seemed to cement a nameless bond. He struck up a conversation one day at the pool and we’d been something like friends ever since. I asked him that day why he didn’t just spit in my direction and walk the other way. He would have been justified. Bray McCann dangled his skinny white legs in the pool and looked thoughtfully over to where his hot little taste of a girlfriend was toweling off.

“Everyone should have one chance to remake themselves, Cord.” Then he peered at me with a green-eyed intensity which reminded me uneasily of someone else. “Don’t you think?”

Yeah, I did think so. Creed hadn’t wanted to stay in Arizona but Tempe was a far cry from Emblem. And Chase just wanted to go wherever there was a diverse selection of ass. A college town was just his brand of pretty. We scraped by for the first few years, finding work where we could and hitting the after-hours scene pretty hard. Everything was lively here, clean. In that way it was worlds different from the place we’d come from. Emblem was seventy miles away but might as well have been the far side of the moon.

Here, in the shadow of one of the nation’s largest universities, we didn’t have to be ‘those Gentry boys’ and everything the curse of our last name entailed. All the men in our line went rotten at some point and everyone in Emblem just knew we would follow suit. After a while we gave them reason to believe it. We weren’t good kids. We were a tough unit, terrorizing our peers and running roughshod over every exhausted authority figure who tried to give a damn. And when we grew a little older we were the nightmare of every man with a daughter.