“Why had I expected you to remember? They mean nothing to you. You can’t even remember their names,” he said disgustedly.
“Sadie, right?” Micah bit out.
“She was my sister!” Sterling hurled. “And you killed her!”
A bomb could have fallen through the corroded ceiling and no one would have moved a muscle. My breathing became more prominent, my chin throbbing from the indents of his fingers.
“Well, that took a dark turn quick,” Micah mumbled, inappropriately as usual. He didn’t believe for one second that he was responsible for Sadie’s death.
Kenna gripped Fynn’s arm, glancing over the mountain that blocked her path. “Sadie’s dead?”
“That’s why you’re doing this. You blame Micah for her death.” Brock scoffed.
From the darkening of Sterling’s eyes, he’d hit a bull’s-eye.
“It’s your fault,” he directed at Micah, speaking to him as if he were the only person in the room. The rest of us mattered little. Well, maybe me, because I was his ticket to hurt the guy I loved. “If you hadn’t slept with her, she wouldn’t have died.”
Micah’s gaze flicked to me at the hysteria rising in Sterling’s voice. I did my best to express that I was okay. “I’m a little confused. Just how did my dick kill her?” he asked.
“This isn’t a fucking joke.” As if to hammer home his point, he lifted the hand holding the knife and lashed out, faster than I could have prepared myself. I didn’t know he cut me until after the fact when my cheek stung, and that stinging turned into sharp, throbbing pain.
“No!” Micah roared and lunged. Brock and Grayson grabbed him, holding him back, but not without difficulty.
I instinctively wanted to touch my face, but the ropes stopped me. A drop of blood splattered onto my shirt, and I swayed into Sterling. “You fucking cut me.”
“Just the first of many, Splash, if your boyfriend doesn’t take me seriously,” he said, laying the knife dripping with my blood against the side of my neck. If I so much as twisted my head slightly, I would risk injury.
Micah’s whole body went from panicked rage to desperate surrender. “Don’t hurt her. She has nothing to do with any of this.”
Sterling cocked a brow. “Doesn’t she?”
Kenna sniffled, tears welling in her eyes as I looked at her. It wasn’t reassuring.
“It’s me you want to hurt.” Micah held up his hands and took another step forward. “Everyone can leave. Let them take the girls out of here, and then it’s just you and me. If you want to beat the shit out of me, I won’t stop you. I won’t fight back. You have my word.”
“Micah, no,” I pleaded, tears blurring my vision. “I’m not letting you do this.”
“Do we have a deal?” Micah asked, lifting a brow.
Sterling’s response came without hesitation. “I don’t think so. You took something from me. It’s only fair that I take what you love most.”
It became clear to me then. He was going to kill me and make Micah watch. Sterling had to know that if he tried it again, he would have four very pissed-off guys on top of him. He wouldn’t just be sentencing me to death but himself as well.
“How did she die?” Fynn asked, shifting the conversation from me. His tone was mellow and even, like he was talking a jumper off the ledge of a building. He kind of was.
Sterling replaced the knife, glazed in my blood, near my throat. “Do you remember the night we met, Splash?”
It took me a few moments to realize he’d posed the question to me. The pain throbbing in my cheek, the blood rushing to my face and trickling down my chin, made it impossible to concentrate on anything he was saying. I tried to shove aside the spike of my fear. “Y-Yes,” I stammered.
Sterling laid out the details for those who didn’t know. “You found him in bed with another girl. Isn’t that right?”
I stiffened my lower lip. “I don’t know why that matters.”
“Oh, it does, Splash, because that girl he was fucking, that was Sadie.”
I didn’t want to believe him. I shook my head, but he didn’t stop. “She dragged me to the party that night, saying she had to go. All her friends would be there, and she couldn’t miss it, despite my parents already telling her no. At that time, I lived to piss off the old man. I have regretted taking Sadie to that party every day since. If I’d known she would end up in his bed, I never would have agreed.”
“You were on the porch,” I said, finding myself sucked into the past despite not wanting to go there.