Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,21

touch them. Not even a little. Just to keep a lid on the drama. But I’d wanted this woman. Bad. I almost broke my rule for her. There’d been a night. A dance?

I couldn’t remember.

“Yeah, well, you’re a violent criminal,” she said. “We were not meant to be.”

She had a chip on her shoulder so big and so hard it was like armor, hiding something so hot, so fucking needy, I could barely stand to look at her and not bend her over something.

Her wrist was still in my grip. It had to hurt. But she gave me nothing. Not one sign that my touch—brutal and mean—did shit to her.

Kudos to her.

“Dylan’s not here, is he?” I asked. She shook her head.

If Dylan wasn’t here, someone else had to be. One of the boys. BLJ. Clock. I blinked, something was rising up out of the dark that I really didn’t want to look at.

Rabbit.

Jesus.

He shot me.

I tried to sit up but my body felt like it had the weight of a bike on it.

“Calm down,” she said.

“Rabbit—”

“He got away.”

“The rest of the guys…?” They’d all been in on it, all those “brothers” standing there ready to mow me down.

“I don’t know. But they’re far away. You don’t have to worry about them.”

The redhead—wearing some kind of tennis getup, with the little skirt and everything, came at me with a syringe.

“The fuck!” I cried, lifting my leg like I would kick her. “What is that?”

“Serious antibiotics to fight the infection which is causing the fever.”

The gunshot. All of this came back to the gunshot. Some memories settled down around me and I put together the pieces. Crazy fucking Joan with the bombs had saved my life.

And tennis star over here was helping.

I could thank them. But I wouldn’t.

Not while I was chained to a bed.

“What’s with the handcuffs?” I asked giving them a rattle.

“You tried to kill me,” Joan said. Tennis star jabbed me with the needle but I still had Joan’s hand.

“I still might.”

She grinned with half her mouth and I felt the dark echo of how badly I’d wanted her. That was powerful shit if I could still want her as fucked-up as I was. Trouble. She was so much trouble.

“Then the handcuffs stay.”

“I need to get back to the club.”

“They tried to kill you!”

“That’s why I need to go back.”

“I’m not even sure there is a club left.”

I shook my head, because there was always something left. That’s how we were…that’s who we were. Cockroaches after the nuclear blast—guys like me. Like Rabbit. We come scurrying out of the destruction when you think the world has ended.

And I was going to find him.

And kill him.

I felt a sticky fog coming up around me—some kind of poison from that needle she had stuck in my thigh.

“There’s nothing there for you,” she said in the way women had when they couldn’t quite understand the insanity of my world.

There was always something there for me.

Revenge.

I made a fist around the idea and I held on as tight as I could.

Revenge.

They wanted to kill me and they couldn’t.

So I would take them all down. Every last one of them.

Joan

Aunt Fern followed me out of Max’s room, surrounded in a dark cloud of all the things that Max had said.

I wanted to fuck you. What a charmer.

“I should have taken the bullet out in Atlanta,” I said, before she could start with whatever uncomfortable questions she had piled up in her head.

“You couldn’t have done it.” She shook her head, pursed her lips. “You would have made it worse. And he’s going to be fine. The antibiotics will knock that infection right out.”

Her dismissal was comforting, absolving me of guilt. And familiar.

She shoved her medical kit back together. “He’ll be himself by tomorrow.”

“Lovely,” I joked. It was safe money that Max doped up on pain medication and out of his head with fever was a whole lot easier to handle than Max as he usually was. Healthy and whole Max was a straight up killer.

And now he had revenge on the brain.

She didn’t smile and I was reminded of how not funny she’d found me as a teenager. They’d been awful years for both of us, which made her kindness now seem miraculous.

“Why is he calling you Joan?”

“Because that’s the name I’ve been using for the last few months.”

I knew she was dying to ask me more questions about why I was living under a different name, but then I saw her put