I sat down on the edge of the bed and let my head fall back.

Marcus.

My brother had tried to kill me. Not just ordered someone to kill me, but was going to pull the trigger himself. I in turn and pinged him with a throwing knife. Then again, considering our family, I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised.

He’d run his hands over Ava because he knew that I wouldn’t like it. He was selling hostages to people. He had been using me until I wasn’t necessary.

It wasn’t that it surprised me that he would do it. It surprised me that it hurt.

A soft knock on the door made me open my eyes.

“Owen?” I could see Ava’s bright blue eyes through the crack in the door.

“Come in.”

“You okay?” She closed the door behind her and put her hands behind her back like a kid told not to touch things in a store.

“I’m fine.”

She took a couple of steps to close the distance between us. With a slow hand she reached out and touched my jaw. “What happened here?”

I fought my desire to close my eyes as she touched me. “It’s a little fuzzy.”

“Can I do anything to help?” Her words were quiet. I looked up to see the concern etched on her face. Concern for me.

“Sit with me?” The words exited my mouth before I could rethink them. It was fucking weak, but I wanted to have her near me.

She didn’t say anything, just sat down next to me. Our arms brushed against each other and she played with the hem of her shirt. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. It was nice to know that she wasn’t going to try to hurt me. To use me for something. Wasn’t that how I should have felt about my brother? About my mother?

“Marcus is a year older than me.” The words were hard to say. For so long I’d kept every little detail about my life locked away in a vault. It felt weird to even say Marcus’ name out loud. “He was always the brain, the schemer. I thought he knew everything.”

Her hand moved and she threaded her fingers through mine, but didn’t say anything.

“It was just us and our mum. She was a whore.” I wasn’t trying to make her upset, but I’d promised to tell her the truth. “We didn’t see her often and when we did we wished that we hadn’t. She wasn’t horrible. She didn’t beat us and we had food, but she always looked close to death. Like she had given up her will to live.”

Her fingers tightened on mine, but I just felt hollow as I explained my life to her.

“By the time I was seventeen I’d followed in Marcus’s footsteps and was running with a bunch of thugs. Underground fights, that sort of thing. I didn’t visit my mother often. I barely came home. When I did, it was to give her some of my prize money. I had a pocket full of cash that day I found her on the front porch. She was unconscious. Her face was beaten so badly I wasn’t sure if it was her at first. It was… bad.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“She was hemorrhaging from her kidney. It was touch and go for a while.” I shrugged. “The police came, but there wasn’t much to report. They said it could have been a john, not her pimp, so without her testimony there wasn’t much they could do.”

“That’s bullshit.”

I snorted. “Yeah.”

“Did they ever find out who did it?” Anger laced her words. Anger for my dead mother, a prostitute she had never met.

“No. They didn’t.” I closed my mouth at that point. I wasn’t a saint. I wasn’t an avenging angel like Mrs. Abernathy thought. I was just a murderer.

“But you did.” Her words were calm.

“Her pimp came to the hospital and wanted to know when she was going back to work.” I looked at her so that she would understand I had no regrets about what I’d done. “He said she’d been late with her money. Called her names and threatened Marcus. I would have killed him there if a nurse hadn’t come in.”

Tears glistened on her cheek, but if I stopped now I’d never finish the story.

“He laughed as he left. When they told us there was nothing else they could do for my mum and pulled the plug, I went straight to his place.”

“Didn’t he have bodyguards or something?”

“One of them managed to shoot me in my thigh.”

“What happened? How did you get away?”

“I killed them all.”

She swallowed.

“There were five.” An image of the room flashed through my mind, the thick stink of smoke, and dreary lighting. “They’d been counting their take for the day. I remember some of the women grabbing stacks of bills off the table before they ran out.”

“Did the police find you?”

“Marcus did. I was sitting at the table, staring at the blood. He tried to get me to leave, but I wouldn’t move. Probably shock.” I shrugged. “When he realized I’d been shot, he called Edgar to help get me out of there. I don’t think I said anything until they started shoving money in their pockets. Marcus told me we had to run and we’d need the money.”

“There are a lot of people out there that would have done the exact same thing, Owen.” She turned toward me so that her legs pressed against mine. “I’m not sure I wouldn’t have killed him after watching my mom die.”

“I didn’t just kill him, Ava. I killed all of them.” Her eyes met my stare without flinching. “I enjoyed killing them, felt satisfaction when they were dead. I knew they wouldn’t be able to kill those other women the way they had my mum. All of that adrenaline had added up to five dead bodies, but it hadn’t brought my mother back.”