Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,53

she didn’t. Like I had experience with this kind of shit.

“Why didn’t I let you smash the phone?” I asked and then I shrugged. “Stockholm syndrome?”

She laughed, a wild strange gust. “This has to be the worst kidnapping ever.”

“I don’t know,” I said, looking around the tidy and cool condo that still smelled like good, healthy sex. “I’ve seen worse.”

“I’ve done everything you wanted.”

“Except let me go.”

“Right. Not much of a kidnapper if I did that.”

I didn’t acknowledge the joke. I didn’t want to find her funny. Or brave. Or anything other than in my way.

“You have the phone, you have the number. You’re not getting anything more from me.” Already it was too much. Already it was enough to get her killed.

“I called your brother,” she said.

“What?”

“From the pay phone across the street. I called to tell him you were safe. Okay.”

“Fuck, Joan, you made me a promise.”

“And I broke it. It’s what I do. But I know what it’s like to worry about your sibling. To not know if they’re alive or dead. If they’re okay. If they’re hurt. If they’re alone and scared—” She turned away and I had to look away, too. “You must have felt that way when he was in jail?”

I felt exactly like that. “The fuck do you know about it?”

“Annie told me some of it. Your Pops a little more.”

All that time Dylan was in jail, taking the years for something I got him into. And then when shit got real for him behind bars, with the Dirty Bastards club taking retribution against Pops on Dylan…and then later with the fire and what happened to his body…I felt like I was going to lose my mind. I wanted to lose my mind. I went deep into the club, taking on every batshit assignment, putting blood on my hands like it might wash away the blood on Dylan’s.

Like somehow I could balance the scales.

It didn’t work. Nothing worked.

“He said you could go stay with him,” she said. “That you had a place. With him. Home. That’s what he called it. Home.”

I ran my finger over a scar I had on my knee. A stupid thing from when Dylan and I were kids. We’d been riding double on my bike and I hit a rock and both of us went flying. I got this rock stuck in the thick skin just over my knee cap. I told him to pull it out, but he kept gagging, because it was gross. And then I was laughing because he was gagging and then in the end, he got mad at me for laughing at him and told me to fuck off. So we walked back to the Skulls clubhouse on opposite sides of the street. Me with a rock in my knee. Him with the broken bike.

Pops pulled the rock out. Dylan almost passed out from the blood, which I thought was kind of nuts because it was my blood. There was so much even I felt a little woozy. But Pops called Dylan a pussy and I locked my legs and stayed on my feet while blood ran down my leg, into my shoe.

Because no way was Dad calling me a pussy.

I had forgotten that. I had forgotten all about that.

I had forgotten so much.

“What are you going to do?” I asked, tired of my bullshit thoughts.

She shrugged and walked over to the pillow on the floor. She picked it up and threw it on the other side of the bed.

It couldn’t be more obvious that it wasn’t my business, but I couldn’t let it go. Jesus. And she thought this kidnapping was fucked-up. Here I was, chained to the bed and worried the woman who put me here was going to get herself killed.

“Joan? You going to stay here? With your aunt?”

“No,” she laughed without any humor. “She’s made it clear we need to clear out at the end of the week. I’ll go back to North Carolina and drive down every road until I find Lagan’s fucked-up compound.”

“Why don’t you go to the cops?” I mean I had my problems with the cops, but I was an outlaw.

“When we first arrived at his little camp, after it was obvious we bought into the bullshit and were going to stay, he gave us this little bag to wear around our necks.”

Oh fuck, I knew where this was going.

“There were three pills in it, and if the police came, we were supposed to take all