cold in here,” Violet says, “and the jacket is yours.”
It is cold. The bitterness already biting at my arms, but I’ll be damned if I’m warm and she’s not. To avoid the argument, I drop beside her and toss the jacket like a blanket over her shoulders.
“Chevy,” she starts, but I cut her off.
“Just take it.”
Silence on her end and I feel like a dick for snapping at her. I raise my knees to rest my arms on them and stretch my fingers like doing so could release the anger, then tension. “I couldn’t stop them from taking you. I couldn’t stop them from hurting you, but I can keep you warm. Let me do this. It’s not much, but it’s all I got.”
Violet slowly turns her head in my direction, and it’s damn hard not to stare at her damaged lip. The light falling into the room is weak, but bright enough to highlight a strand or two of her red hair. I try to focus on that and how I used to lie with her and run my hand through her hair for hours. Better times. Happier times. What I sure as hell hope we can find again after we escape.
“I was going to say we could try to share your jacket.” She hesitates. “That I don’t mind being close to you.”
My brain freezes, and I hear more than what she’s saying. Hear her fear, hear there’s more to what happened in the backseat of that car, hear that she needs me.
I straighten my legs and Violet eases into me. Her shoulder, leg and arm pressed to me as she attempts to cover both of us with my jacket. I wrap my arm around her and briefly close my eyes at how soft she feels. It’s been a long time since I held her, and each night without her has been torture.
Violet rests her head on my shoulder, and she reaches up to try to make my jacket stay on my other shoulder, but it falls. “You’re not covered all the way.”
She’s covered and that’s all I care about. “I’m okay.”
“No, you aren’t,” she whispers. “You should be home. I should be home. We should be nowhere near here.”
She’s right, but instead of replying, I lean forward, slip my arm under Violet’s knees and gather her onto my lap. Violet stares at me, eyes blinking, a bit bewildered, and I shake my head slightly to let her know I’m not fighting with her. I’m not claiming some stake in our future. I just need her, maybe more than she needs me.
She exhales. It’s a long one and then she lifts her hand. I stop breathing when she brushes her fingers along my cheek. “They hit you. You’re bruising. Everywhere.”
And I’d go through each and every hit again to protect her. My only regret is that we ended up here.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t know how else to protect Brandon.”
“We did what we had to.”
Violet rests her head into the crook of my neck, and when she raises my jacket to my shoulder again, it stays. I weave my arms around her and rub my hands up and down her cold arms, almost like I’m trying to convince a dying fire to stay burning.
“Why is this happening?” Her breath tickles my neck, and I wish we were anywhere but this damp, cold prison.
“I don’t know.” Yeah, Cyrus had warned us off the road, but I don’t know why they would target Violet. Why they would target me. Odds are it’s me. My grandfather’s the president of the Terror and my uncle is the man the Riot hates the most. The Riot feels Eli stole their daughter and their granddaughter even though Meg and Emily left Eli, too.
Maybe the Riot decided to play out an eye for an eye, and I’m the closest Eli has to a blood child in the state. “Guess it was me they were after and you were caught up in it.”
“The Riot hasn’t kidnapped anyone before.”
Beat the hell out of members of our club? Yeah. Killed people belonging to our club? That, too. But I agree, at least from my limited knowledge, kidnapping wasn’t their style. “If they wanted us dead, we would be.”
She snorts. “You need to work on your comforting skills.”
My lips slightly turn up. “Noted.”
She settles further into me, her arm curving around my body. “What do we do now?”
Not much. We stay alive and... “We wait.”
“For?”
She’s not going to like my answer. “The club will figure this out. Eli and Cyrus will get us.”
The way her body tenses under mine is a confirmation of her disbelief that the club will make the situation better. I want her to have faith in them. I want Violet to be part of our family again.
“Waiting is its own form of torture, isn’t it?” she says. “I’m not sure if waiting and thinking of all the horrible things that can happen is worse than what will actually be done.”
I cling tighter to her as my own demons and nightmares awaken. The what-if’s messing with my mind are the torture she speaks of. Anything happening to me isn’t the problem. I’m plagued with thoughts of what will happen to her.
Fear.
I’ve never been scared by much. Never believed in bogeymen living under the bed. Magic and sorcery belong to people like me who have fast hands and can deceive the human eye. It’s hard to believe in evil locked in closets when you realize at an early age it’s all made-up stories to explain what people think is unexplainable.
It’s not unexplainable—only mere men manipulating shadows and mirrors.
But there’s a bitterness in my mouth now. A metallic taste I don’t like much. A coldness in my blood and a freezing in my bones at the thought of what the men outside that door could do to Violet.
“I’m scared,” she whispers.
Me, too.
I strain to hear anything beyond her breaths and my heartbeat in my ears. Occasionally there are footsteps overhead. Muffled voices. The sound of the ascending and descending of the old wooden staircase. Violet curls closer into me whenever there is movement outside the door, and I keep up a steady caress up and down her arm.
My gut tells me we’re in here for a while. Tells me that they want us to be tormented by our own thoughts before the next round.
“Do you think Brandon’s okay?” she eventually asks.
I pray he is. I pray harder he kept his courage and called Eli for help. Faster the club gets involved, the faster we’ll be out of this mess. “Yeah. Your brother is a fighter.”
“No, he’s not. He’s scared of the world and most everything in it.”
I know, and Violet loves him more than she loves anyone or anything else in the world. Family first is a priority I understand. “He’s all right. You saved him tonight.”
“We saved him.”
We. It’s
