Chapter 2

CHAPTER

TWO

Noah

I'd known, hadn't I? It was always going to be him. Killian .

Nobody survived him.

He stared down the barrel of his gun now, at me on my knees in the cold snow, as though I were nothing. Just another mess to clean for my father.

My heart thumped up my throat, trying to choke me. But I wasn't scared, not like I'd thought I'd be when it ended.

The reason didn't matter. I'd never been what my father wanted. And so here we were, Killian and me. He'd pull that trigger and nobody would give a shit that Noah King was gone. Nobody understood how I'd had to live every fucking day like it was my last, because I'd known that day had been coming. And here it was, staring me in the eyes.

I'd never noticed how dark his eyes were before. How many people had been in the same position, on their knees, gazing up at Killian, only really seeing him in their final moments?

"Tell me what I did." My voice quivered some, but that was okay. It would be over soon. For both of us. "What was the final blow? What's so bad that he has to kill me for it? You can tell me. You owe me that."

"You fucked the Southies girl, told her about the shipment of guns. Got two men killed when the cops raided the dock warehouse."

There was a lot of wrong in his grumbling sentence, but one part of it had laughter bubbling inside. I shouldn't laugh, but it seemed as good a reaction as any.

I dropped my ass on my heels and chuckled. Of all the shit I had done, Killian was going to kill me for something I hadn't . Story of my life. I should have gotten higher, partied harder, I should have fucked the Southies girl, even if that would have been impossible. But he didn't know that. None of them did. If I'd told my father I was gay, this whole scene would have played out years ago.

"You think this is funny?" Killian asked, his cruel mouth half sneering. Maybe he didn't have nice eyes after all. Maybe that was the coke I'd taken earlier screwing with how I saw him. "You understand what's happening here, right?"

I snorted. "Oh sure, I understand."

His face scrunched up. "I've never had someone laugh at a gun in their face before."

I might have laughed harder, but panic began to ruin the hilarity. I really was going to die here. "How long have you wanted to do this? You've always hated me. I saw it in your eyes every time you looked through me."

"Stop talking."

"Is it me you hate or the fact my father always sent you to clean up my shit?"

He pushed in, and the end of the gun nudged between my lips.

"Stop. Talking."

I swallowed, tasting metal. It would be quick, if he tilted the gun's angle. Not so quick if he shot me through the throat. I didn't have words now anyway. What else was there to say? Breathing hard through my nose, I tried to keep the pieces of myself together, but the longer I stared at his face, the more I trembled, and the more I wanted to beg. I didn't even blame him. How fucked up was that? Killian didn't want me dead; this wasn't personal. It never was with him.

I wished we'd known each other, wished he'd seen more of me than the drunken, high, boss's son he kept pulling from the fire every Friday night.

He pulled the gun free. "Fuck."

I gasped and swallowed again. He'd lowered the gun at his side. Wait… was he…

He jerked the gun up again, pointed at my face.

"Wait!" I raised my hands and ducked my head, expecting the shot, expecting these to be my last seconds. But it didn't come. I peeked through my fingers and found Killian's glare on me, as cold as ever, but when my gaze caught his, a flicker of something softened his hard eyes.

Wait, what was this?

He lowered the gun, and with a snarl, he swooped in, grabbed my arm, hauled me to my feet, and shoved me back along the tracks we'd made in the snow. "Move."

I kept my hands up and stumbled on. What was happening? Was he going to shoot me in the back? No, or he'd have done it already. Was he taking me somewhere else? "What's happening?"

"Do not say another fucking word."

"Yeah, but?—"

"Get in the car!"

I fumbled with the door handle and dropped inside, shivering—only now noticing how cold it was. Killian threw his muscular bulk behind the wheel, gunned the engine, and twisting to glare through the rear window, he launched the car backwards down the road. Okay, so he was furious . But in an unexpected turn of events, I was alive. So there was that. Maybe all this had been a warning? Make it seem as though he was going to kill me so I quit causing trouble for the family?

He fishtailed the car onto the paved road, rammed it into gear, and roared the car onward. We weren't going back the way we'd come. So we weren't going home, to Boston. That wasn't so good. If it had been a warning, he'd be taking me home. Maybe something spooked him about that spot in the woods. Maybe I was still about to die, but somewhere else?

Thirty minutes later, he pulled the car off the main road, down a snow-dusted dirt road, hit the SNOW button on the Lexus, and bumped us another ten minutes into the woods until the headlights swept over a grim-looking cabin.

I peered through the windshield. "What the fuck is this?"

He threw me a warning glare. "Get out." He left the car and marched through the headlight beams, coming around to my side.

I wasn't getting out. No way. If he wanted to kill me, he'd have to do it in the car. No way was I going into that murder cabin.

He yanked open the door. "Out."

"No."

He reached in. I ducked away and kicked out, catching his thigh. He grabbed my leg and yanked me off the seat and out of the door. The back of my head hit the doorframe, then he dumped my ass in the snow. I writhed, but his big hands grabbed both my wrists, pinching them together in front of me. "Hey!"

More times than I cared to count, he'd slung me over his shoulder, dragging me out of a fight, or that one time when I'd gotten so drunk, he'd had to carry me home. Not my best moments. He'd seen them all.

He dropped me on my feet and hauled me along behind him, still holding my wrists trapped in his large, rough hand.

"Is this your cabin?" I asked, stumbling up the icy steps behind him and onto a porch.

He elbowed the window glass, shattering it, reached inside, and unlatched the door.

"Not yours, then," I muttered.

Inside, the air was colder , if that was even possible. With a flick of a switch, the lights came on, so the murder cabin had electricity, but its small interior was basic, with décor left over from the nineties, complete with a tired leather couch and fluffy stained rug. Killian left me standing in the middle of the living room while he rattled through drawers in the kitchen to my right.

He returned with a length of thick rope.

"Wait, that's—" He grabbed my right wrist, then my left, and slung the rope around them.

"Asshole." I yanked and managed to slip free from the rope.

He grabbed my arm, fingers digging in. I didn't think, just swung my left hand, open, and slapped his face so damn hard a fire blazed up my arm.

Killian paused, shocked for a heartbeat, then smacked my cheek. I reeled, gasping, more alarmed that he'd hit me than from pain.

"You hit first," he said, like it mattered.

By the time I'd found my balance, the rope was firmly around my wrists. "You can't do this."

"Fine, then I'll kill you."

I bared my teeth at him. Almost dared him to but swallowed that remark before it could bite me in the ass. He waited for it too. Waited for the excuse to finish what he'd brought me out here to do. "What are you going to do? You can't leave me here. Just take me back. Let me talk to my father, let me explain. He'll have to listen."

"Stop talking or I'll tape your mouth." He stepped back and studied me as though I was some kind of puzzle he needed to figure out.

"Wow. So what are you going to do, huh? Leave me here, like this?" Wait, that was exactly what he was going to do. He was trying to cover all his bases. Which meant tying me up so I didn't get picked up on the road, trying to escape. "This is a terrible idea. You realize that? Whose cabin even is this? You can't leave me here. I have needs."

"Stop talking." He stepped back and rubbed his face. "Let me think."

"Oh, you do that? Think for yourself? I thought my father did all the thinking for you."

"I will tape your fucking mouth, kid."

"I'm not a kid, old man. What are you, fifty?" I snorted.

"I'm thirty-five."

Just over ten years older than me. "Ah, sorry, man. Those years have not been kind." I stumbled back as he huffed and grunted through his decision to keep me here.

In fact, those years had honed Killian Donovan into a man in his prime. He had one of those naturally big bodies that made having muscles seem easy. He worked out when he wasn't babysitting me. I knew because I'd interrupted one of those gym sessions once when I'd needed a ride home, and I'd watched him lift weights from the sidelines. With muscles like his, it wasn't any wonder he could bench-press me. That gym session had given me enough late-night fuel to jerk off for a few months, until he'd told my father how he'd caught me scoring some coke.

Asshole.

It was a shame he was up my father's ass, when I'd fantasized about having him up mine. But I wasn't thinking about that, since he'd almost executed me. And had now decided on kidnapping instead.

"This is only going to get worse for us," I said, glancing idly around the shitty cabin.

"Do you want me to kill you? Because that's option one. This is option two."

"Why didn't you?" I asked, fixing him in my sights. "Kill me?"

He huffed, vanished into the kitchen, then returned with a roll of tape.

"Oh, fuck no. Wait." I backed away, but he was coming like a goddammed freight train. I tried to turn, stumbled against the couch, and then he was on me, pinning me down. "Fuck, don't… I won't say anything." He hovered a strip of tape over my mouth. "I won't, please."

With a sigh, he eased off and let me up.

I stayed on the couch, feeling vulnerable and confused, hot and cold at once, coming down from my earlier binge and the rapidly receding rush of adrenaline he'd spiked almost killing me in the woods. "You don't need to tie me up?—"

His glare cut me off. Right. Silence. I could do silence.

He went to work shoving the mismatched furniture to the sides of the room, then tied a new length of rope to the loops around my wrist. He tied that off around a big floor-to-ceiling post. I had enough rope around the post to maneuver but couldn't leave the room or reach a window. What about my needs ? The moment I thought it, he brought over a bucket.

I arched an eyebrow. "Really?"

He pointed at me. "If you escape, I'm fucked." He pointed at the bucket. "So you will piss in that until I figure out what to do with you."

"Just let me go. I'll go north, to Canada. Tell him I'm dead. Nobody will ever know."

Seemed like an easier solution than whatever this was. But Killian's dry glare made it clear that wasn't an option.

He couldn't keep me in a cabin in the woods forever, and if he didn't let me go, then he was going to have to confront my father. But whatever, while he figured that out, I'd sit tight, seeing as I didn't have a choice. And I was still alive.

He'd left the couch in my circle, so I sat and wondered how the fuck this had happened. He'd said I'd slept with a Southies girl and told them about the warehouse deal. Whoever had told my father those lies must have been trusted for him to believe it. Or maybe my father really had just wanted me gone.

"I didn't do it, you know," I called.

Killian was slamming cupboards in the kitchen, out of my line of sight.

"Doesn't matter. He believes you did." He sauntered back with a jug of water and a box of cereal and stood by the couch, not knowing where to put either. He puffed again and looked at me as though I were a different problem now. Not one to snuff out and be done with, but a problem that needed to be put right.

He put the jug and cereal on the floor.

"Thanks," I said, sensing he might be having a thoughtful moment in that hard head of his.

"Cereal is all that's here. I'll bring more supplies…"

Look at him, getting all domestic. Who knew. "I meant for not killing me, but the cereal is good too."

His eyes narrowed. "I still might kill you."

No, he wouldn't. Or he would have already. I smiled, and he glowered. But whatever he needed to tell himself to make peace with the fact he hadn't killed me was fine by me. The cabin wasn't so bad. I'd passed out in worse places. A few days here, then he'd let me go. He'd have to.

"Now what?" I asked.

"Now I tell your father you're dead."