Chapter Thirty-Seven

Collin

Phil got to his feet with wide, confused eyes and opened his mouth to say something. I didn’t wait to hear what it was. It didn’t matter.

A right cross to the nose made his face explode with a crunch, blood flying up in the air as his head rocked back with the blow. He stumbled backward and into the receptionist desk to keep himself upright. I marched toward him, not rushing, but cutting the distance quickly, and hit him in the stomach with another hard blow. As soon as he bent over, I raised my knee and hit him in the jaw hard enough that I heard his teeth click.

He fell to one knee and began to scramble away from me, looking over his shoulder in panic. I grabbed his leg and pulled hard, making him slip and fall on his side before jumping onto him, throwing a haymaker at his jaw. His body slacked a little underneath me, and I hit him again.

“Get off me!” he shouted with a bloody mouth.

“Give us the thumb drive!”

“No!”

Another right to the cheek. I was sitting on his chest, my knees pinning down his arms. He wasn’t going anywhere, and I wasn’t going to let up. It was a war of attrition now.

“Collin,” a voice said behind me, but I was too focused. I wasn’t going to stop until I had what I wanted.

“Give it to us!”

“No!”

An elbow to the eye socket. A groan on his end and regret on my own. I forgot I’d had surgery there. It was the injury I didn’t notice until I was on a gurney on base.

I dug in his pocket, finding a thumb drive and yanking it out. I held it an inch from his face and seethed.

“Now I have it, you son of a bitch,” I growled. “The rest of what I do to you is payment for Brandy’s suffering.”

“Collin! I’ll take over,” the voice behind me said, and I could feel hands pulling me away.

“Stop,” I shouted. “I have him! I have him!”

Suddenly, Luke’s face came into view. His expression was one of worry and surprise. Owen had lifted me off Phil and put me down away from him. Luke stopped me from going back. Owen was already on top of Phil, subduing him with some kind of hold.

“Collin, it’s over,” he said. “It’s done. He’s done.”

“I’ll break him,” I said. “I’ll tear him apart!”

“Collin, calm down. He’s not worth it!”

“I’ll kill him!”

“Collin!”

The last voice wasn’t Luke. It was Brandy. She stood behind me, tears in her eyes. All the anger and rage seemed to seep out of me in a second, replaced by a protective empathy. I reached for her, and she fell into my chest, sobbing. I kissed the top of her head and squeezed her tight.

“Shh, shh,” I said. “It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s over.”

She shook violently in my grasp as she wept openly. I stroked her hair and rubbed her back as we gently rocked side to side. Behind her, Jesse and Owen secured Phil, who was nearly limp and clearly dazed. His eyebrow was cut and bleeding, as was his lip, and his nose was smashed and already beginning to swell. He looked like he’d been beaten with a shovel.

It dawned on me that I had done that. Not only had I done that, but I’d barely broken a sweat. Hand-to-hand combat just came back to me, and unlike when I got into scraps to help my brothers from being outnumbered, this time it had been a calm, calculated rage that propelled me. I wasn’t just getting involved because I had to. A part of me absolutely wanted to hurt him.

Slowly.

Everyone saw it, too. The mild-mannered, jovial Collin, the guy who stayed in his room and did numbers and was quiet outside of loud laughs and Dad jokes had beaten this man to an inch of his life without changing his facial expression. That’s what everyone saw. Me, changing before their eyes into someone they didn’t know.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to Brandy. “I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry,” she cried into my chest. “It’s all my fault. I did this.”

“Shh, no, Brandy, no.”

I held her tightly and kissed her head again. She was sobbing so much she was coughing, and I inched her over to a chair and motioned for her to sit. She did but kept her arms around me, burying her face in my stomach.

“Has anyone called the cops?” Luke asked to the now growing crowd again.

People had been fleeing when I tackled him, running out of every door and escaping to the parking lot or elsewhere. Now they were seeping back in, like the tide returning to the beach. Wave after wave of people, curious to see how it all ended.

Then I noticed a camera. Just one, pointed in our direction.

“Anyone?” Luke shouted.

“I did,” a woman said, and I recognized her as one of the crew members from the shop. “They are on the way.”

Luke nodded and turned to me. A slight, almost imperceptible smile cracked his face.

“That was a hell of a fight there, brother,” he said.

“Not a fight,” I said. “That would require him to be able to fight back.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “You beat the tar out of him.”

I shrugged. “He deserved it.”

“Not arguing that,” Luke said.

The tension in the room began to melt away. Phil was dazed and clearly in pain, sitting on his ass against a wall with Owen and Jesse flanking him. He wasn’t going anywhere.

I knelt down so that I could be level with Brandy, stroking her face and wiping her tears away with my thumb. I kissed her forehead, and she grasped my hand, kissing my palm.

“I’m so sorry,” she repeated. “It’s my fault.”

“Shh,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not,” she said. “I tried to throw you away. I shouldn’t have done that. You came for me anyway.”

“Of course, I did,” I said.

“But I threw you away,” she said. “I thought it was the only way to save you. If it was just me coming after him, it didn’t matter what happened. As long as I got the thumb drive, it didn’t matter if something happened to me. I didn’t want you to get hurt or in trouble!”

“I would rather be in trouble and have you than be safe and not,” I said. “It’s why I made sure you were followed. It’s why I am here.”

She cried some more, unable to contain her emotions, and I kissed her forehead and let her hold me as tightly as she wanted. I understood her impulse. It was the same as I would have had. I would have tried to separate her to protect her and dealt with it on my own. But now a lightbulb had gone off in my head. Because she had done to me exactly what I would have done to her, I realized that it wasn’t the way forward.

If this was going to be real, if it was going to be a thing , then we had to face issues together. Even ones where the other person might get hurt. We had to face them together.

It was a foreign concept to me. I’d never had a relationship that was serious enough that there were actual challenges to overcome. Never a real adult relationship, if I was honest with myself. I’d been alone so long that I didn’t even recognize what one looked like. Now I had to adjust. I had to incorporate her into every decision, every thought.

What’s more, I was glad to do it. Excited, even. I wanted to have her be part of every move I made. From now on.

“I understand why you did what you did,” I said. “I get it. I would have done the same thing.”

“Really?” she asked, and for the first time since our embrace, she made eye contact. It seemed hard for her to maintain, guilt and shame filling her expression, but I held her there.

“Really,” I said. “But it was the wrong move. We are stronger together. We could have handled this together. We did handle this together.”

“I’m so sorry,” she wailed.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s over. We won.”

From the ground, a low, menacing laugh bubbled up from Phil.

Slowly, I stood, turning toward him. Luke made a motion like he was going to step between us, likely worried I would beat him the remaining inch to his death if he didn’t, but I had no intention of putting my hands on him again.

Yet.

“What’s so funny?” I demanded.

The laughter died away, and he rolled his head against the wall until it faced me. Bloodshot, glazed eyes stared back at me, and his bloody lip and stained-red teeth smiled.

“It’s not over, you idiot,” he said.

“Call me an idiot again,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Do you think I am an idiot? Hmm? You think the one I had was the only one?”

He belly-laughed, then groaned, then laughed again.

I touched the thumb drive in my pocket with my right hand, and my jaw tightened. I realized it was just a generic thumb drive, one you could buy at any Walmart in the country. He could have had dozens of them.

My urge to grab him by the throat and squeeze until he went blue was almost overwhelming.

“There are more?” I said through gritted teeth.

“One more,” he said. “I made a copy. Just in case.”

The world seemed to zero in on his face, the rest of everything blacking out. I felt light-headed, and I could hear my heartbeat thudding.

“Where?”

“I gave it to the only person I could trust.”

“Oh God,” Luke said. “Eugene.”

Phil coughed a derisive laugh.

“That moron? No. He’s an ape. A stupid ape. I couldn’t trust him. But there is someone I could. Someone with enough God damned sense in their head to make sure it was kept safe.”

All the air seemed to rush out of me, and I turned to Luke. His eyes were as clear and wide as mine felt, and I knew that we both were thinking the same thing. Both of us turned to Jesse, who already had his phone out. He seemed like he was also on the same wavelength as the two of us, and was finding the contact information for Logan to call him.

“Who?” Brandy shouted, rage still propelling her voice and tears of defiance now streaming down her cheeks. “Who, dammit?”

“I know who it is,” I told her. “The only one of the Andersons with a brain in their head. The only one we wouldn’t go beat up.”

“Who?”

“Trish.”