I hear the door close behind us. Now it’s just Devon, Gibbons and me, and if I have my way, there will only be two of us walking out of here.
“So how are we gonna play this, bro?” Devon asks, breaking through the eerie silence that has filled the room.
“Right now, I wanna wring his f**king neck, rough him up a bit since he felt it was okay to do that to my girl, and then I wanna break him, limb from f**king limb,” I spit out, staring at Gibbons limp body lying on the floor in front of me.
“You sure about this, B?”
“No! That’s the f**king problem! I’ve done a lot of things in my life that I’m not proud of, but killing a man is not one of them,” I reply exasperatedly. Looking around this dark windowless room that Elle has been held captive in, I can’t even imagine how scared she must have been. I start pacing, trying to rid my mind of the dangerous thoughts swirling around it.
Even when her parents and sister were killed, she wasn’t touched by the darkness that the murderer had in him. But over the past three hours, she has experienced enough desperation and helplessness to scar her for a lifetime. Even if it takes everything I have to give, I’ll dedicate my very being to getting her past this whole ordeal, hell, everything bad that has ever happened to her. I want to be that for her.
We scoped it out for all of a minute before storming in, guns blazing. This time I was packing, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m not afraid to use the piece of cold metal that is burning my skin on my hip. My trigger finger is aching to be used; to hurt this piece of shit who felt he could abduct Elle and hold her for ransom in this dirty, flea infested pit of a house in the middle of nowhere. This kind of filth should never have touched Elle, never have gotten close to her, and that’s on me.
Devon speaks up behind me. “B, you know what we have to do.”
“Nope, not gonna go there.”
Devon sighs loudly, kicking Gibbons when he starts to groan. “Look, we don’t have long. The cops will be on their way already. You wanna end this? We gotta do it now. You wanna walk away? You get out now so that none of this comes back on you.”
I snap my head up, squaring my gaze on my brother. I know what he’s not saying, and it shocks me. Eight years I was out of his life, too chicken shit to call him because I thought he was tainted by our father. Eight years I lost out on this. “D, I can’t ask you to do this.”
“You’re not asking, and I’m not offering. I’m saying there are things that have to be done. You have a beautiful woman waiting at home for you. She loves you more than her own life. She has no one except you and Shay. Let me do this for her, for you, and for the life you can give her. A happy peaceful one. The life she deserves.”
“Well, well. Looks like I missed out on all the fun,” a low familiar voice bellows from behind us, breaking the tension filling the room. Devon and I turn towards the voice, and come face to face with Michael Evans, the paternal anti-christ himself. He’s dressed in a white dress shirt and black slacks, a bow tie lying limply around his neck. He looks like he just walked out of a high society function to come here. He’s every inch the debonair, millionaire, crime boss.
And he came alone.
But for all his faults, he is standing here. Putting himself on the line.
I wondered what it would be like, the moment I came face to face with my scum bag sperm donor again. I knew it would be tense, and that I’d be consumed with the hatred I felt for the man. But in that precise moment, I actually felt relief. If anyone can talk Brax out of making the biggest mistake of his life, it will be the mastermind himself.
“Brax, put the f**king gun away, son. You’re not a killer. You never were. You don’t have it in you,” he states vehemently before swinging his gaze towards me. “Devon, you need to get him the f**k out of here. The police are five minutes out, tops. You don’t need to violate your good behavior bond for this piece of shit,” he says, pointing to Gibbons’ writhing body on the ground.
“Whatever you’re gonna do, I don’t want to know about it. I don’t wanna see it, and there’s to be no blow back on either of us. Capiche?” I say sternly. “Brax does not need to suffer like I did just because he’s had the misfortune of carrying your blood.”
The f**ker’s eyes actually soften and I start losing my resolve. For the first time in over ten years, I see a glimpse of the proud, loving, responsible father that I grew up with. The one who taught me how to throw a ball, who spent an hour with a baseball mitt while I practiced my pitches for little league, the man who once loved my mother.
I shake my head in frustration. That isn’t the man standing in front of me. That man was lost years ago.
“Get out of here, both of you!” he yells at us. “I’ll clean this up. Now go!” The bellow of Michael Evans reverberates around the room.
I grab Brax’s arm and drag him towards the door. “Run, bro. We gotta get Elle out of here,” I say as we run in the direction of the car.
Two gun shots echo throughout the night air behind us. We don’t stop to look back, we don’t need to, but the sirens we hear in the distance tell us that we need to leave now.
21
I wake up just as the car comes to a stop. “Sweetheart, we’re home,” I hear Brax softly say from above me. I roll in his lap, my head resting on his thigh, his hand tangled in my hair. He hasn’t taken his hands off me even once since he got back into the car and told Shay to ‘Get the f**k outta here.’
He hooks his arms under my shoulders and knees and gets out of the car, carrying me like I’m light as a feather. He hasn’t smiled once since he got back into the car. Whatever went down in the cabin after I left is obviously haunting him. You can see it in his cold glassy eyes, the furrowed brows, his defeated posture. The only time I got a glimpse of the Brax I know was when he shifted over in the back seat beside me and laid my head in his lap, stroking my hair ever so gently, over and over.
There were no words exchanged for the entire drive home. I didn’t ask what happened when Shay took me out of that room, or ask who was in the black town car that turned up just as we reached the Mustang. And I really didn’t want to know who shot the gun that we heard booming through the night.
Shay and Devon lead us up to the apartment, opening the basement and then our apartment door so that Brax doesn’t have to put me down. Brax doesn’t stop walking until we reach our bathroom. I’ve been watching him the whole time, his face showing no emotion. He sits me down on the vanity, making sure I’m steady before walking into the shower and turning the water on.