Hooked: A Stepbrother Romance (27 page)

I found Robert’s gun today, stashed away in the bedside drawer.

I stared at it for a long, long time.

It would’ve been so easy.

Emilia came in and raised a fuss, and that was the end of that.

It’s weird, but it actually was good to hear her talking to me again.

Even if she was screaming.

No answer.

I should’ve expected that, but I didn’t know what to do. Panicking, I knocked again, louder and harder. Soon I was pounding on the door with all my strength, desperate for some kind of answer.

When the door finally opened and a tall, dark-haired man looked at me, I stared at him with wide eyes. I could see Simon behind him, his back turned as he looked out the window.

I wanted to run to him and hug his broad back in a never-ending embrace, to grab his familiar shoulders until he spun around and I could give him a long, hard look. I wanted to explain how scared I’d been, how lost and alone I had felt without him.

How much I loved him.

I wanted to do all that, but my feet felt like they were made of lead. All I could manage was a single, strangled cry.

“Simon?”

The air in the room was stifling, filled with floating anxiety. Simon turned around slowly, and I gasped when I saw his swollen face. My eyes trailed down to the front of his shirt, splattered with bloodstains, and I could feel the tears beginning to fall.

He was barely recognizable, his jet-black hair coated in grey dust, his lip busted open and still seeping fat drops of hot red blood onto the floor. His chiseled cheeks were battered into a pulp.

What scared me the most, though, were his eyes. They were the same, but yet completely different. The light had gone out of them, utterly devoid of the piercing quality I’d first hated and then loved. He looked at me with immense sadness for a moment, turning back around to stare out the window once more.

“Simon…” I muttered my nose facing the broad wall of his back. “What happened? Are you okay? What can I do to help?” I touched his elbow, his skin cold and clammy.

“Ms. Jones,” the other man began. “You should—”

More rapid knocking on the door cut him off mid-sentence, and I stood in front of Simon as he stood up and walked towards the door. I was hoping for a moment of attention, a small sign of reassurance, the familiar touch of his fingers on my back.

None of that came.

He opened the door in silence, shaking the hand of the small man who entered with a couple of uniformed police officers.

“Mr. Ferguson. I’m glad you called,” the new man said slowly and professionally. “You’re going to need some medical care for this.”

Yes, of course he needs care!
I wanted to scream. Trembling, I wanted to explain to everyone that I was going to take him to the hospital, and then he would hold me and finally tell me what was going on.

Everything would be fine, it had to be.

Again, as if in a nightmare, fear sapped me of my ability to move or speak. I didn’t utter a word as the tall man moved next to me, addressing me in a hushed voice.

“Ms. Jones, you should leave now. I’m Simon’s lawyer, and I will take care of this,” he said quietly before joining Simon and the police officers. I drifted over to Simon’s familiar bed and sat, my knees wobbling beneath me.

In the corner of the hotel room, the three men were huddled together and speaking in voices I couldn’t hear or understand. The two police officers stood beside the group, looking as if they were setting up a human barricade that couldn’t be crossed.

My eyes went to Simon, his pale face completely closed and unattainable.

Fear coiled in my stomach.

I stayed on the bed, my hands shaking, until I finally found the courage to stand again. Leaving without a single word from Simon was one of the hardest things I ever had to do, but the sinking feeling in my chest told me that I had no place here.

I stepped out of the room and into the hotel hallway, turning one last time in Simon’s direction.

He was looking straight at me, and my heart squeezed in my chest. I opened my mouth, trying to summon the will to speak as his eyes scanned across my face.

And then his lips formed one soundless word.

“Go.”

The lack of comprehension on her face, giving way to despair.

I’d seen that look from her before.

God, I wanted to run to her and hold her in my arms.

I wanted to tell her everything would be okay.

But…it won’t.

I’m an asshole. I’m always going to be an asshole.

She’s better off without me.

I feel sick.

I kept replaying Simon’s last, desperate word.

“Go,” he’d said. Over and over in my head, I imagined his lips forming the O-shape that had managed to bring my insomnia back with a vengeance. Every time I managed to fall asleep, my dreams would cruelly twist to nightmare. Everywhere I looked, I saw the dead look in Simon’s eyes, haunting me, startling me back awake.

Trapped in my own private world of pain, it took me a long time to register the significance of Adam’s newspaper. Once I did, though, I couldn’t stop rereading the headline over and over.

ALLEGED GANG LEADER ARGUS HUNT ARRESTED OVER DECADES OLD CHILD MURDER.

I shivered, staring at the two pictures printed across the paper. Simon’s lawyer in a small inset, next to a large black and white photo of Hunt as a young gangster.

“What’s the story with that?” I asked, my voice dry and strangled.

Adam shrugged. “Seems like we might finally be rid of the old bastard. Someone tipped the cops off, from the sound of it. Someone involved in the killing of one of Argus’s old mules, way before you moved here. The paper doesn’t go into much detail, but I’m sure the media will have a lot of fun covering the story. It’s been a damn long time coming.”

I nodded, incapable of forming a single word.

A damn long time coming
, indeed.

I took a long, deep breath, grabbing the edges of Adam’s desk.

“Where is Simon today?” he asked, folding the newspaper back up on his desk.

I shrugged, Adam’s eyebrows shooting up to ask a silent question. Neither Simon nor I had confirmed his suspicions, and Adam was too private to ask directly, but he had to know something was going on between Simon and I.

“Are you okay, Em? You look pale as a ghost,” Adam asked.

My brain felt shrouded in fog, but I still recognized the opportunity when it came to me.

“Yeah, not feeling great. Could you cover for me for about an hour, please?” I said in a rush.

“Sure,” Adam answered, placing a warm hand on my shoulder before getting up and heading to the gym.

Amazed at what I was doing, I stood up and opened the drawer to Adam’s desk, snatching the jangling collection of keys. Picking out the one labeled “archives,” I grabbed the metal key ring and unlocked the staircase in the corner of the room.

The stale smell of old, rotting paper assaulted me as I made my way down to the basement. I pulled on the string to the exposed light bulb hanging overhead, casting a weak amber light that barely shone bright enough to cast an eerie glow over the rows and rows of cardboard boxes.

I squinted at the nearest box, recognizing Adam’s curvy handwriting written across its front. I made my way down the shelves at last finding the boxes of member records from 1999-2000. Fifteen minutes of searching later, I’d found the one file I was most interested in.

Simon
.

He’d been fourteen then, and an old photocopied picture attached to his papers threw me thirteen years back. He looked simultaneously defiant and adorable, not yet having transformed into either monster or gentleman.

Taking a deep breath of the musty air, I started to read every word.

Simon’s mother’s name was Evelyn, I learned as I sorted through the thick stack of letters that the counselors had sent to her. Apparently he had been a perpetual troublemaker and had almost gotten banned from the center on a few occasions.

When Simon had called himself a thug, he hadn’t been kidding, a fact that the paperwork made crystal clear to me. The most interesting information, though, wasn’t from the center at all.

In the back of the folder was a clipping from an old newspaper article, yellow and fragile beneath my fingers. My heart began to beat faster as I read, a story about two teenagers caught in gang-related crossfire.

One of them, unnamed, had been grazed by a bullet. I closed my eyes in dread, remembering the small straight scar I knew was hiding underneath his tattoo. Horrified, I continued to read that a boy named Jake Simpson had been struck in the throat, drowning on his own blood while his friend could only watch.

Jake
.

Simon had said that name before.

I felt sick as all the pieces came together, my stomach revolting at the horrible revelation and the stale air. I slammed the folder shut and threw it back into the box, yanking the light off as I bolted up the stairs and straight to the bathroom.

I stood over the sink, splashing my face with water and trying not to throw up. A million thoughts rushed through my head, all hypotheses about Simon’s life as a teenager. How he’d hated me, not just because his father had chosen my mother over him, but also because I’d had a much fairer chance at life. No trauma, no nightmarish memories of a friend dying in my arms.

He’d suffered for years, and now clearly his demons had returned full force.

And he was facing them alone.

Suddenly I felt suffocated, like time was running out and there was nothing I could do about it. I dashed to the gym and shouted to Adam that I was leaving
now
, hurrying out the door before he had a chance to answer.