Run With Me (Fight For You Book 1) (7 page)

It reminds me of my first Christmas on Maui, when we took turkey sandwiches down to the beach for dinner on Christmas Day and made snowmen out of sand.

“I bet a lot of people do Christmas at the beach around here,” I say as Sam and I turn the corner onto a narrower street and the upscale restaurants and boutiques give way to bulky looking apartment buildings and smaller Mom and Pop shops. “They wouldn’t think your mom’s mermaid Christmas tree was weird.”

“I don’t know about that,” Sam said. “You saw what she did to it last year, right? With all the sparkly, shirtless mermen hanging at the top.”

I snort. “It looked like a gay underwater strip club.”

“Or the kinkiest Disney film ever,” Sam said, laughing, that low, husky laugh I haven’t heard in what seems like forever.

“I’ve missed your laugh.” I nudge her shoulder with mine. “It’s one of my favorite things.”

Sam smiles but keeps her gaze on the gum-pocked ground in front of us. “Thanks.”

“Really.” I shift closer to the street as we pass a darkened apartment building with overflowing trash cans muscling in on the left side of the sidewalk. “It ranks right up there with your smile and your ass and that place right behind your jaw that smells so good when you get out of the shower.”

She laughs again. “You’re so weird about that place.”

“I’m not weird,” I say, grinning. “I’m a connoisseur.”

“You’re absolutely weird,” Sam says with a wink I almost miss as something moves behind the trash cans, pulling my focus. “That’s one of the reasons—”

She breaks off with a startled cry, but by the time I realize the thing moving behind the trash cans is a rangy teenage kid, he’s already got his arm locked around Sam’s shoulders and the knife in his right hand jabbed against her throat.

The second I see the knife pressing into her pale skin, fear unlike anything I’ve felt since I was a kid trying to hold my shit together the night my sister was kidnapped floods through me, filling my mouth with a poisonous taste.

All I can think is
No.
No way. No fucking way is this piece of shit going to take Sam away from me, not after everything we’ve been through, not before we’ve made things okay again, not before we’ve had the life we’ve dreamed about, and the adventures and the kids and the grandkids and all the rest of it.

I want to lunge for him and squeeze the life out of him with my bare hands, but before I can grab for his arm, he tugs Sam several steps back, increasing the distance between us.

“Give me your wallet and anything else you got that’s worth anything,” he says, his voice breaking in the middle of the last word. “Do it or I cut this bitch!”

“Relax, okay,” I say through gritted teeth, holding up my hands as I size him up.

He’s a little taller than Sam’s five seven, but the arm locked around her neck looks strong beneath his stained white thermal. Judging solely by his fuzz-free face I’d peg him as no more than thirteen, but his body looks older, solid enough to be in high school.

But it doesn’t matter if he’s thirteen or sixteen, or how easily I could take him if circumstances were different. Right now, all that matters is the knife at Sam’s throat and how quickly I can make it go away.

“Hurry the fuck up, man,” the kid says, head jerking as he casts a nervous glance up and down the street. “I’ll cut her. I swear I will. I don’t give a fuck.”

“I’m getting the money right now.” I slide Sam’s pack off my shoulder to rest on the sidewalk and then set mine down beside it. “Give me ten seconds.”

I try to catch Sam’s eye, to silently assure her that I won’t let this little monster hurt her, but her eyes are closed.

Her lids are squeezed tightly shut, her lips are pressed together, and she’s trembling so hard her curls are vibrating around her head. If I didn’t know her the way I do, I’d say she was scared out of her mind, but I was there that day in seventh grade P.E. when Sam jumped the girl who’d been calling her pube head all year. I was there when we were sixteen and caught two homeless guys torturing a dog behind the Mana Health food store in Paia. One moment, Sam was vibrating on the sidewalk next to me, the next she was shoving the bigger guy so hard he ricocheted off the Dumpster before falling flat on his drunk ass on the pavement.

The man was nearly twice her size, but he was a coward who got off on torturing animals and he didn’t have a knife. If she decides to fight back right now, it could end with her throat getting slashed open in the middle of the street and her life isn’t worth the risk. Not even a little bit.

I’m opening my mouth to beg her not to do anything crazy, but it’s too late.

My words die on my lips and my heart lurches into my throat as she reaches up, grabbing the arm that’s holding the knife with both hands. The kid reaches for her hair with his other hand, but she’s already turned her head, opened her mouth wide, and bitten down so hard I can see the tendons in her jaw pop as her teeth dig into his flesh.

“Fuck!” The kid screams and the knife clatters to the pavement.

He fists his hand in Sam’s hair and pulls hard enough to make her cry out, but before he can do any more damage I’m all over him.

My first punch connects with the center of his forehead, bone hitting bone with a satisfying thud, sending a wave of pain up my forearm I barely notice because it feels so fucking good to know Sam’s free and this trash is getting what he deserves. As he stumbles back, Sam slips out of the way, giving me a clear shot at the rest of the creep. Before the kid can recover his balance from the first punch, I’m pummeling him in the stomach, hunching my shoulders, ducking my head, and getting in close, protecting my torso as I make him wish he didn’t have one.

It’s been years since I’ve been in a real fight, but it comes back to me like I never left that rough, sad schoolyard in South Carolina. Like I was never spirited away to a softer existence in Maui, and an even softer one in Croatia, where Gabe’s money made sure I was never treated like a waste of flesh again.

Back in Giffney, I’d been nothing but Chuck Cooney’s oldest son, the kid most likely to get sent to juvie. I’d grown up in a neighborhood where you had to fight to prove you weren’t an easy victim, and I’d learned my hood lessons well. I was a runt until my fifteenth birthday, but by the time I was eight, I could level kids twice my size.

I learned to fight like a monster because I knew no one was going to take it easy on me if I didn’t. If you lost a fight in my old neighborhood, there was a chance you’d lose a few teeth or an eye, as well. I once watched a kid get beaten so badly he was puking blood by the time the two guys beating the shit out of him got bored and went to go steal cigarettes from the corner store.

When you grow up like that, you don’t see any other way. Beat or get beaten.

Learn to be tougher than the people who want to hurt you, or get used up, battered, and abused.

If I were still the little beast I used to be, I wouldn’t feel an ounce of regret for beating the fucking shit out of this kid. Back then, I knew the laws of the jungle. I had absorbed them into my blood stream, been born with them encoded in my DNA. Weak fucks who try to take what the stronger fucks have deserve what they get. They deserve to suffer and to die if they’re unlucky enough to get punched in the wrong place one too many times. This kid had tried to hurt someone under my protection and take what was mine, and he’d lost, and now it was my right to make him wish he had never been born.

But I’m not that monster anymore. I don’t have a taste for blood, or the freedom to risk killing someone with my fists. I have a conscience that would eat me alive if I took a life for any reason other than self-defense, and I have so much to lose.

I have Sam and our future and that is…everything.

“Get out of here.” I shove the kid away, breath burning my lungs, making me aware of how much energy I’d been exerting.

He falls to the ground near the trash cans with a groan and doesn’t get up for a long moment, making me wonder if I took too long to regain control.

I silently start counting, promising myself I’ll go find a phone to call for help if he doesn’t get up by the time I reach ten, no matter how fucked I’ll be if I end up in jail in a foreign country. But finally, after another groan and a whimper that makes me think he was closer to thirteen than sixteen, he staggers to his feet and lurches away around the edge of the apartment building.

I watch him go, torn between feeling relieved and disgusted with myself.

A quick glance at the building reveals sheets hanging in the windows, a Christmas tree still visible in a second story apartment, and an air of poverty so heavy there is no mistaking the building for anything other than the slum that it is. This is where the people who are just a few rungs above rock bottom are clinging to the shit splattered concrete before they’re swept away into the sewer.

This is a place like the one where I grew up, a place where almost no one gets out and no one gets better.

Generation by generation, people are sucked into ever more crushing poverty until kids are born knowing it’s pointless to hope for something better. The only way out is to take what the world won’t offer you, to steal what the powers that be will never give you a chance to earn.

As awful as it was to see Sam with a knife at her throat, a part of me knows where that kid was coming from. And I know if things had been different, if Caitlin hadn’t met a millionaire with a trust fund who loved her crazy family as much as he loved my sister, and if Sam hadn’t made me want to change, I might have been that kid.

“Are you okay?” Sam appears in front of me, her eyes so wide in her thin face she looks like one of those Japanese cartoons, reminding me of the other thing that’s been bothering me since I pulled her into my arms at the Kahului airport.

“I’m fine, but you’re too skinny,” I say, sucking in a relieved breath as she lunges into me, hugs me tight, and proves she doesn’t think I’m a monster. “I’m going to buy you a big stack of pancakes as soon as we get checked into the hostel.”

“We should probably get cleaned up somewhere first,” she says, pulling back to look up at me, eyes still wide. “Your knuckles are split and I…I think I have blood in my mouth.”

I capture her face in my hands, running my thumb over her full bottom lip. “No, you don’t. You’re fine. No blood.”

“Are you sure?” she asks, bringing her fingers to her mouth and wiping too hard at the edges. “I swear, I taste blood. It’s like my mouth is full of it.”

“I can’t see anything, but that was dangerous, Sam.” I bend, scooping up our packs, ready to get away from the scene of our near mugging. “If anything like that ever happens again, just give the guy the money. It isn’t worth risking your life.”

“I know.” She crosses her arms at her chest as we make quick time down the street, toward the green hostel sign glowing at the end of the block. “I don’t know what happened. One minute I was scared, and the next I was so angry I couldn’t think straight. I don’t even remember deciding to fight back. I just…did it.”

Her fingers drift to her lips. “I bit him so hard, Danny. I think I felt something…snap. A tendon or something?”

“It’s okay.” I study her face in the glow of the streetlights, not liking how pale she looks. “Don’t worry about him.”

“I’m not, I just…” She brushes her sleeve across her lips hard enough for the fabric of her fleece hoodie to rasp as it drags across her skin. “It’s nothing. I just need to get the taste out of my mouth. I’ll brush my teeth as soon as we get there. It’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.”

I want to believe her, but my gut tells me nothing is fine and maybe the fates are still against us, after all.

Chapter Eight

One Week Earlier

Samantha

“We are all the fools of time and terror: Days

Steal on us and steal from us; yet we live,

Loathing our life, and dreading still to die.”

-Lord Byron

“So you think I can finish in one more semester?” I pluck at the pilling fabric on the upholstered chair in my advisor’s cramped office, where stacks of hardcover books on mathematical theory war for space with his wide collection of antique beer steins.

The first time I’d met with Mr. Thompson freshman year, I’d thought his office was depressing, but now I can appreciate the cozy safeness of his tiny room on the third floor of the business school building.

It might not be much, but it was all his, and it had a door he could close and lock tight when he wanted to shut out the world. It sounded like a slice of paradise and was all I wanted for the rest of my college career—a space of my own, and to spend as little time with the rest of the student body as possible.

“You could, but you’d have to carry twenty credits,” Mr. Thompson says, squinting at his computer screen before dipping his chin to make a note on the printouts in front of him. “And two of the classes you need aren’t available online until the spring semester.”

My fingers dig into the seat, my nails scratching along the rough fabric. “But if I spread my classes out over two semesters I can do everything online?”

“I think so,” he says. “Just let me check a couple of things to be sure.”

“Okay, thanks,” I say, knee jogging as I wait for him to finish mapping out my educational plan for the next twelve months.