𝐕𝐄𝐗𝐄𝐃 ❷

𝟏. ✭ 𝐁𝐑𝐎𝐎𝐊𝐒 ✭

I've been all sorts of pissed off and sad in my lifetime. I've been to all the dark places. Seen the good, the bad, and the all-consuming fucking ugly of what people are capable of. I have seen it and dealt it all firsthand.

That all-consuming fucking ugly, yeah, well it's about to rear its' head. Delivered by yours truly.

My feet feel like they have million-pound weights on them, heavy like the burning painful sensation in the center of my chest. I smash the call button for the elevator with my fist so hard it splinters, fragments stab my knuckles. I look at them and can't even feel them. I can't even be bothered enough to take them out.

"Brooks!" My name is a cry from behind me as the elevator doors ding open. "Brooks wait!" I don't. I enter the elevator and I turn around, catching Malyssa entering right before the doors close. She slams the stop button. "Please stop, Brooks. Don't be reckless." I grit my jaw as I look down at her, eyes still full of tears.

"You mean like your fucking son?" Arrogant. Impulsive. Controlling. Reckless. So. Fucking. Reckless. I want to tag on all of that but I don't. Not when he's likely bleeding out, lying in a pool of his own blood. Not when she's looking at me with as much pain as I am currently experiencing. "I am nothing like Torey."

Her eyes roam over me for a few long seconds. "No, no you're not like Torey. Not at all. But you understand him, truly understand him, which is why he needs you." I quirk a disbelieving brow at her. "He's going to need you after he recovers from this, Brooks."

"After he recovers?!" I bark out an incredulous angered laugh. "There is no recovering from that!" I shouted the words at her because she can't be fucking serious. I watch her blink once, twice and a few more times after that, trying to keep the tears at bay from my bluntness. 

"Yes, I am fucking serious." Her gem-like blue eyes harden and all I can see is Torey in that gaze, along with anger and determination. "Yes. When he recovers. My son is like me in a lot of ways and having been stabbed in the abdomen is one of them. He will survive because he is a fighter. He will survive just in spite of those fucks. He will survive because he will want vengeance." That last word was said vehemently.

I have to tear my eyes away from the intensity of her stare and tone. She looked like death come to life, murder itself, and malicious as her nickname. And although I wish I could believe her, wish it were enough, I know it isn't. Torey's dominant arrogance and endless stubbornness, that darkness inside of him, wasn't enough to keep him alive. I was in the marines and men don't survive from wounds like that. No matter how big and muscular you are. No matter how strong you are. It just doesn't happen. Torey is going to die and I will lose another person I care about.

"We have all the resources you're going to need to set out on whatever warpath you were about to set out on." She said after I can't find it in me to respond. Not with my previous thoughts. I won't reiterate what she already knows and is denying. She's killed enough people to know. "We can work together, like we had planned to, nothing has changed."

"Everything has changed! They have Dani! They have Wolf!" I feel her tense beside me as I shake my head in disbelief. "They took them. Who knows what that fucking monster will do to her. What they will do to her; to her son."

She reaches out and squeezes my arm with, "we will get them back. "

"If they keep her alive." I picture Dani's bloodied and bruised face after dealing with her father the last time. "You saw what that man did to his daughter, his own flesh and blood. He beat the shit out of her. He booted her in the fucking face. Imagine all the sick shit he will probably do to her now. All the ways he might tor—" I can't bring myself to say the word torture. I can't bring myself to think about what they'd do to her.  "I can't leave her with a man like that knowing what he's capable of."