7. ~Skylar~

Justice.

Deliverance.

It was none of that.

Not anymore.

There was no overarching noble goal, no doing fucked-up things in the name of the greater good, or anything like that.

There was just a singular purpose.

To terminate my objective.

Him.

It wasn’t even lethal justice.

It was vengeance through and through.

He’d suffer under the wrath of my punishment and when he was begging for mercy, he’d discover that I no longer had any, just before I took his miserable life.

That thought consumed me as blackness swirled around me.

And I drank the dark liquid in, letting its toxicity burn through my veins and feed me the power I needed, while keeping out all the rest. Namely, my humanity.

I stepped over one of the dead bodies that had bled out from its throat, my knife having severed its carotid artery. I made my way through the dive bar that fronted a whole lot of illicit activities. Whimpering from the joint owner rolled through me. He was sprawled amongst a carpet of jagged glass and booze. As I neared the bastard, a hand wrapped around my ankle.

I leaned down and yanked on the offender’s hair, forcing his pained gaze to mine with my free hand, while I spun my ballistic knife in my other. “You have something to tell me?”

“He… he was here,” he croaked.

“And?”

“He… wanted to… recruit… us.”

There it was.

The bastard was building an army.

“What was your response?”

“Need the… money… power he has… had to.”

A thump sounded to my right and I looked to see the lanky guy who co-owned the place with the one currently feeding me the intel I’d come here for, now digging his nails into the bar top as he pulled himself up to lean against it. His long, gray hair was matted with booze, blood, and shards of glass, and the gut wound I’d inflicted had soaked through his checkered shirt.

“I’ll show you… the surveillance footage.”

I smiled, baring my bloodied teeth from a couple of hits I’d taken while putting down the five assholes in this shithole.

Then I reached down and jerked back the fingers grasping my ankle, making the guy scream out into the eerily quiet bar.

It only served to feed the darkness infusing every cell of my body.

I wrenched him up by his hair and brought my knife to his chest.

Eyes wide, he actually trembled as he told me frantically, “You don’t need… to do this.”

“Sure I do. You’re a mercenary. No loyalty. That makes you dangerous. Worse, it makes you detrimental to my mission. You know what I’m capable of now, can’t have you using that intel against me and I can’t have your boss learning too much there either.”

With that, I thrust the blade forward, burying it deep in his chest, tearing and twisting, ensuring I hit my target of his heart. More shrieks filled my ears. Gurgled ones this time, especially as I wrenched my blade out and he collapsed back onto the floor.

I rose to my feet and continued toward the one guy still left alive by the bar, wiping my slick blade on my leather pants as I went. “Show me the footage.”

It was him.

A specter made flesh.

Well, what should have been a fucking specter.

He’d escaped death, cheated it.

Just like he cheated everything.

Not for long.

I gritted my teeth as I took in that peroxide hair, more overgrown than the last time I’d seen him, the gelled spikes higher than normal, as he stood there in his jeans and white tank all that muscle on display as he held court in the center of the dive bar with the very guys I’d now destroyed.

“Taken two days ago,” the lone survivor of tonight’s slaughter told me.

He was slumped in an old wooden chair in the backroom as I kept an eye on him in my peripheral vision while I took in the surveillance footage via the screen of his desktop computer.

I nodded to myself, then rounded the desk toward him.

He scrambled in the chair, but he could barely move with that gut wound. Dragging himself in here had been all the energy and mobility he’d had left remaining. “You’re… you’re gonna kill me too?”

My eyes darted out the door at the bar and all the carnage I’d wrought.

The death I’d dealt tonight.

So much death.

I felt that aggravatingly nagging sensation trying to rise up and draw breath.

Remorse.

I growled low in my throat and shoved it down deep where it couldn’t touch me.

There was no place for that anymore.

No weakness.

No mercy.

Only conviction and deliverance.

Lethal fucking justice.

I fisted the guy’s shirt and jerked him to me. “You caught a lucky break. I need a messenger.”

“Messenger?” he croaked.

“Contact Jett. Tell him Skylar Bennett is coming for him.”

“What have you done?”

I pulled up short as I crossed the threshold into my bedroom, the lights turning on and temporarily blinding me after navigating my way through the old house in the darkness for the last few minutes since I’d snuck back inside.

And there he was, sitting on the foot of my bed, glaring at me, definitely none too happy.

Jeremy Wheeler.

Ex-military.

Former private security.

My bodyguard for a time.

And nowadays, my housemate.

He sat there on my vibrant-blue sheets, his arms folded across the chest of his teal long-sleeve tee. His legs were clad in his go-to black camo pants, giving way to a pair of well-worn combat boots.

“You hid the evidence well, I’ll give you that,” he said, shoving a hand through his short curly black hair, as he ran his gaze over me in a pair of distressed blue jeans and a strappy cobalt-blue tank. Yeah, I’d washed up at that bar before I’d left, then changed out of my Onyx attire in the car before I’d driven back here.

He pushed off the bed and sank his fingers into my blue and silver waves. “Couldn’t get it all out of your hair, though. Nah, that will require a shower or two.”

I looked to see him fingering some bloodied strands. Even with my bright-red wig, it had still gotten blood in my real hair beneath. Well, there had been a lot of it.

I batted his hand away. “It’s not your concern.”

“Not my concern?” he ground out.

“That’s right,” I said, brushing past him and heading for my nightstand.

I snatched up the bottle of tranquilizers I kept there, screwed off the top, then popped one.

They were the only way I could sleep at night these days.

Fortunately, despite my off-the-grid status, my dad had connections with a former military doctor who’d been able to help me with the trauma and grief of that hell from that night two years ago and he’d prescribed these.

Just as I put the bottle back down, Jer was there, crowding me against the nightstand.

“You are my concern.”

The heat from his skin, the intensity coming off him, rolled through me, making my breath hitch. “Step back,” I croaked out.

“Why? Too close for comfort?” he challenged.

“You know it is.”

He reached out and grasped my chin with his index and forefinger, tilting my head so I was forced to look him right in his gleaming brown eyes. “Because it was a mistake, yes? All four times?”

Dammit.

Even though I was twenty-two now, Jeremy was in his mid-thirties, more than ten years my senior. But that big age gap was the least fucked-up thing about it all.

The fact that my dad had been his commanding officer for several years, that they’d become close friends after serving together, then even gone into business together with Jeremy’s private security firm, JW Securities.

Not to mention, the fact that my dad had tasked him with watching out for me in his absence.

And, of course, there were the guys.

My guys.

I’d had to leave them behind.

That motherfucker whose trail I’d now picked up on had seen to that.

Not only hadn’t I been able to say goodbye, but I hadn’t been able to contact them in all this time that I’d been stuck in this cottage off the grid.

At first, my dad and Jeremy had refused to even look into them from a distance to make sure they were okay. When a few months had passed, they’d finally lifted that awful rule and done some recon using their many contacts positioned all over the place. That was when I’d found out that Caleb was in the wind, that Caspian was struggling under the weight of fighting a war against Elijah Bane, and that Bastian had succumbed to addiction and had suffered a massive relapse.

Hearing that had cut me open.

Knowing there’d been nothing I could do about it, that I couldn’t go to them, had been an awful torture that had eaten at me for so long.

As if my grief over my mom’s death hadn’t been enough to take on.

I shoved Jeremy back and stepped around him.

“Why did you do it?” he demanded, spinning around to face me. “You even used your name! Jesus fucking Christ, S!”

“Why did I do it?” I bit back. “Why do you think? That bastard murdered my mom! He destroyed my entire life! He stole these last two years away too! We’re in hiding because of him, because he’s the brother of that bastard, Elijah Bane. And after I take Jett, I’ll pull Elijah my way and end that elusive fucker too!”

“I told you what had been discovered about Jett to reinforce the need to remain here, when you’d gotten it in your head that enough time had passed to return to Rossun. Not for you to launch a deadly and very bloody crusade against him! You just put yourself back on the radar by doing that tonight.”

“I want to be on his radar. I want him to know I’m coming. And I want him to run like a scared little bitch so he can feel that fear and hopelessness that he made me feel—twice now!”

“This won’t end well, S!”

“I don’t expect it to.”

He jolted. “What?”

“I’ll take them down with me.”

“So this is literally a suicide mission now?”

“If that’s what it takes.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head vehemently. “I won’t allow this. And your dad—”

“My dad is gone! Because of him, because of what Jett did!”

He’d taken my mom from me.

He’d burned our family home to ashes.

He’d torn me from the guys.

He’d ripped them from each other.

And he’d even broken my dad. So much so that six months after we’d come here and things had first started to die down, he’d been filled with so much rage and grief that he’d been on the verge of starting a war against Elijah Bane. That was before we knew Jett had survived my attack and actually ended up in a coma. Jeremy and me had managed to talk him down, but it hadn’t stopped there. My dad had ended up enlisting with a dangerous black ops outfit about a year ago, needing to unleash everything churning him up through that. Since then, it had just been me and Jeremy here in this house.

Well, mostly just me.

Jeremy was here a few days a week, the rest of the time being spent doing security contract work for people needing covert off-the-grid protection like me. He couldn’t go back to his day job of his firm back in Rossun because he’d involved himself in this shitshow by helping my dad and I to disappear that night. It had put him on Elijah’s shitlist by association.

He got in my space again, grasping my arms and pushing me against the wall by the bedroom door. “This is insanity. You’re letting your rage get the best of you.”

“It’s far from insanity or even being that shortsighted.”

He frowned. “Your goal is clearly to murder Jett Bane.”

“Which will draw Elijah out.”

“Jesus fuck. Then you’re gonna end him too?”

“Yes,” I hissed. “Then you can get your life back and I can get out of this cage.”

“Not if you’re dead, you can’t.”

“That’s the worst-case scenario, but, yes, one I’m prepared for. This existence I’ve been forced into for the last two years isn’t living anyway. I can’t remain like this… shackled. If I can’t take down Jett and Elijah without dying, at least I’ll finally be free.”

“I can’t let you do this.”

“And yet you also can’t stop me. You and my dad inadvertently made sure of that when you trained me so hardcore since we came out here.”

“That was in case the worst happened and they found us and you had to defend yourself. We wanted you to have every tool possible at your disposal. You were well on your way with Onyx, but it wasn’t quite enough.”

“And now it is. Now I’m strong enough, capable enough, to do what needs to be done. You telling me Jett had woken up from a coma a few months ago was the in I’d needed all this time. I couldn’t go at Elijah directly, but I can reach him via his brother.”

“I sent a cleanup crew to that dive bar, Skylar. I know exactly what you did. If you continue in this vein, you’ll be blackening your soul beyond redemption.”

I stared up at him, all the concern and care from him bleeding through, trying to infect me, to weaken my resolve, to make me see reason.

But it was reason.

It was what needed to be done.

To fix everything.

“So be it,” I told him.

He rubbed my arms softly. “I care about you. More than I should, we both know that.” He leaned in and brushed his lips over mine. “I can’t let anything happen to you,” he breathed, sparking that need in me that had gone so long unfulfilled that it was always right at the surface.

But he couldn’t give me that, he couldn’t ease that ache.

As much as he wanted to, he just couldn’t be that for me.

I’d been beside myself when it had gotten the best of me and we’d tried—a few times. But it hadn’t worked.

Because of them.

Bastian, Caleb, and Caspian.

They’d left their mark on me and no matter how hard I’d tried, I hadn’t been able to move past it, past what we’d had, what we’d been building.

All my fears about losing myself in them had seemed so ridiculous in the wake of literally not being able to have them at all, in being pulled from them so brutally and unceremoniously.

They were still with me and I was sure they always would be.

I turned my head away from Jeremy. “I care about you too. You’re my friend. You’ve been here for me when I’ve had no one and I don’t take that lightly.”

He smiled sadly and released me and stepped back. “I know you don’t. Despite everything, you have so much love and care in you. I hope those boys of yours are deserving of that, and that they know how rare and special it truly is to have that from you.”

“I doubt that they do. I held back when I had them around me. I let my fear and insecurities get in the way. Now it’s too late.”

“It won’t be.”

I arched an eyebrow. What was he getting at?

“I may live to regret this and your dad might have my head too, but I’m gonna help you.”

“You… what?”

“I’m gonna help you in this crazy-ass mission of yours. This way, not doing it alone, you’ll have a fighting chance of coming out of it unscathed. Then you can reunite with your loves and fix what’s broken. Enough regrets have been forced on you, there’s no need to allow your relationship with them to become another permanently.”

“Jer, I can’t ask you to do that.”

“You’re not.”

“Even so, I—”

“My life has been turned upside down by the Bane brothers too. Although this is most definitely the dangerous road to travel, the potential payoff outweighs all the rest.”

“We can get back what we’ve lost. Well, most of it.”

“Exactly.”

“All right, let’s do this,” I said, holding out my hand.

“Let’s.” He took it and we shook firmly.

Here goes nothing.