Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,37

she wanted me, maybe I was a good person, too.

Even though I was a piece of shit and I knew it. I had been fucking her and buying bombs all at the same time.

I gave her what she wanted to see. It was a show. Everything. All the time. A show.

But Max…fucking, Max.

I was not going down this road with him. I was not…opening myself up to this nonsense. This devastation.

In the kitchen, in the bottom drawer, I grabbed the gun I’d had the night of the explosion.

Chapter 11

Max

I did not expect the gun. When she came back in, wearing her cutoffs and a tank top, her hair a sweaty mess from the fucking she’d given herself, it took me a minute to see the gun. Its blunt, black barrel pointed at my head.

Did I really think she wasn’t pretty before this?

Oh God, I’d been so wrong.

She was a fucking force of nature. Every other woman in the world looked like a child compared to her.

And she was pissed right now, because I had pushed her. Because I had forced her to show me something she wanted to keep hidden. I could see that. But there was something else, too. Something dark and dangerous under all that pissed.

And I recognized all of it. Dark and dangerous was my home. Dark and dangerous was the air I breathed.

“You’re going to help me,” she said. “You’re going to call Lagan, and you’re going to set up a meeting. Or something. You’re going to find out where his fucked-up camp is and we’re going to get my sister back.”

“Lagan isn’t telling anyone where that camp is, Joan. Zo tried, but Lagan gave him nothing. You were at that club for months. Why didn’t you follow him?”

“I did, but he stayed at a hotel in Cherokee most of the time. When he did leave…I lost him in the backwoods.”

“That’s on you, then.”

“Fuck you, Max. He’ll tell you, he trusts you!”

He did trust me, that was true. But that didn’t mean he was going to tell me.

I wiped the come off my stomach and put my dick back in my underwear.

“He will have gotten rid of all his phones. Changed all his numbers. There’s no way I can find him,” I told her.

“You’re lying.”

“You know I’m not. Think about it, Joan.”

“Do you know what he does to them?” Her voice broke over the words. “His wives?”

“I can guess.” I could guess all kinds of things. But a memory bobbed up from the other night in the back room of the strip club.

You’re the only one I hurt, because that was what you needed.

Lagan said that. To Joan.

Fuck.

She’d been one of Lagan’s wives. For a minute, pity swamped me, but I didn’t let her see it. Showing her pity would get me shot.

“Whatever you’re guessing…it’s a thousand times worse,” she said.

I had to look away. I made a big show of pulling the blankets up over my crotch.

“If you were one of his wives, you know where the camp is.”

“He moved after I left. He moves anytime anyone leaves.”

That was smart. Lagan was insane. But he was the smart kind of insane.

“Put the gun down, Joan. You’re not going to shoot me,” I said, forcing myself to be cold. “Neighbors, remember?”

She cocked the gun. She fucking cocked it. The sound was stupid loud in this shitty room. Despite her level stare and the steadiness of her hands, I could feel the frenzy of her. She was coming undone and that could be really fucking dangerous for me.

I shouldn’t have taken my cock out. I shouldn’t have demanded she stop her little stripper show and show me something real—but goddamn, I’d been living on the edge of a blade for months. Knowing the minute I went back to the club, I was going to die at some point. And having to pretend I didn’t see Rabbit’s intent in those beady eyes of his. Pretending that this thing with Lagan wasn’t going to blow up in all our faces. Pretending that what was left of my soul wasn’t getting poisoned by the deal I was orchestrating.

Getting shot is what I get for wanting something real. Something honest.

I should know better. Real things, authentic things—they weren’t for me. They didn’t belong in my world, with the criminals and the liars and the killers. We all walked around each other surrounded by bullshit so thick, it suffocated whoever we’d been before.

“You’re going to have to shoot me, Joan. Because I