And now he’s going to try to use me against them somehow.
“Why do you hate them so much?”
It’s a stupid question, maybe. But I need to understand what the fuck is going on here. And I need more time. Time for my head to stop pounding, and for my body to stop feeling like it’s sinking under water.
Carson makes a noise in his throat. He cocks his head, sharing a glance with the dark-haired man who still stands in front of my chair, then looks back at me.
“I think the bigger question is, why don’t you hate them at all?” He narrows his eyes. “Come on, Ayla. I know what they did. How they’ve been following you. I mean, I knew Marcus was keeping tabs on you, but until recently…” He whistles. “I had no idea how fucking obsessed he was. How deep that shit goes.”
“So what?” I pull a little against my restraints, but they’re fucking tight. My ankles are taped to the legs of the chair too, so I can’t kick him in the face. I can’t run. I can’t move. “Why do you care?”
“Well, I don’t.” He shrugs. “Not about you. But I care about what they care about, because that gives me leverage over them, you understand?”
“No.”
“Yeah.” His grin widens. “I figured you wouldn’t. They really didn’t tell you shit, did they?”
“About what?” Panic is finally starting to really set in as the fogginess in my head clears more and more, and with it comes anger at the way he’s obviously enjoying toying with me.
Instead of answering my question, Carson stands up again. He reaches behind him to tuck the gun into the waistband of his pants just like his friend, and then he digs into his back pocket for something.
I flinch when his hand reappears, but all he’s holding is a photograph. I can’t see what it’s of, but the back of the photo paper looks a little wrinkled and bent, sort of like the picture I carry with me of me and my brother.
“You picked the wrong side, Ayla,” he says in a grave tone. “I know what you did for Marcus. How you saved his life. Took three fucking bullets for him. Almost died for him. But you really shouldn’t have. You really shouldn’t have trusted him.” His blue-gray eyes narrow. “Did he ever tell you what happened that night? Why someone wanted to kill him?”
“No.” My tongue feels thick. I asked Marcus that the first time I ever spoke to him, and he refused to answer. As he continued to invade my life, I learned more and more about him—but I never learned that.
“Right. Of course he wouldn’t.”
Carson presses his lips together, shifting his gaze to the photo in his hand. Then he flips it around and shows it to me, holding it right in front of my face so there’s nowhere else I can look.
A choked gasp falls from my lips.
The picture was taken at night, and parts of it are obscured slightly by shadows. But I can see what Carson is trying to show me clearly enough.
It’s a body.
A man’s body, splayed out on the ground with limbs bent at slightly odd angles. Blood pools around his torso and soaks through the front of his dark gray shirt. He looks young, teens or early twenties at most.
Vicious memories assault me in a rush as I stare at what seems like a mirror image of the way my own body must’ve looked the night I was shot. I remember the wet feeling of blood pooling around me, growing cool as it left my body and soaked between the cracks of the grimy cement. I remember not being able to feel my legs or my arms. Feeling numb.
Did my limbs splay out awkwardly like that? Like I was a doll that’d been dropped by a careless child?
Bile rushes up my throat, and I retch, dragging in gasping breaths to try to force down the vomit.
“Why the fuck… are you showing… me this?”
Carson doesn’t move the picture away from my face. “Because I know Marcus never will. He likes to pretend he doesn’t have blood on his hands—yours and this man’s. But he has both.” He leans a little closer, dropping his voice. “This man’s name was Devin Brooks, and he was killed by Marcus Constantine in cold blood the same night you saved Marcus’s life. Just hours before, in fact. That’s what you did, Ayla. You saved a murderer.”
My throat closes up. Air stops moving in and out of my lungs.
; No. That’s not right.
That can’t be right.
Another barrage of memories flows through my mind—and these ones are all of Marcus. Of his fist flying over and over toward Greg’s face. Of the rage that seemed to fill his entire body in that moment, as if violence was an unalterable part of his DNA.