Killian: A West Bend Saints Romance Read online

  I was a big star. But I was no different than before. I never would be.

  Inside, I'd always be River Gilstead, the girl with dirty bare feet and a runny nose, still hanging around outside the trailer, waiting for someone to rescue her from hell.

  My hands trembled as I unzipped the leather case, opening it and looking at the implements inside. My heart raced, and I felt the kind of nervousness that I hadn't felt in a long time, the sense of being overwhelmed, mixed with a feeling of anticipation. My breath caught in my throat, my chest rising and falling quickly as I tried to steady my breath, to steady my thoughts. They swirled around me, faster and faster, and I felt like I was sinking.

  I couldn't breathe.

  I couldn't breathe, and I couldn't handle the memories of my past.

  I had come far, but it wasn't far enough. It wasn't far enough to take me away from that girl I once was.

  Some things never changed. That was true of this.

  I pinched the cold steel of the blade between my fingers, and almost immediately began to feel my heart rate slow. I needed this. It was the only thing I could do to manage the pain.

  I found a place on my inner thigh, between the faint lines that crisscrossed my flesh, the lines that served as markers, a timeline of my life, of all of the bad things that had happened. They were faint now, barely visible to the naked eye and only if you knew what you were looking for, their fading a result of work with the plastic surgeon who specialized in fading away scars. But I could still run my fingers over the place they once were, the place were the lines just barely existed, and remember each scar.

  Some people memorialized the good things of life, the things they wanted to remember, the way they wanted their lives to be. I memorialized the things I couldn't forget.

  I drew the blade across my flesh, feeling strangely detached from the whole thing, like I was watching it happen to someone else. The sharp sting of pain threatened to bring me back to the present, promised to bring me back to the present, but just barely.

  I watched as the dark red blood beaded to the surface along the line of the cut, little droplets that clung to it. I sat there, my mind suddenly focused on the pain, the stinging sensation that I could count on to distract me from everything else.

  People think that cutting is about enjoying pain. Viper thought it made me a masochist, someone who liked being hurt, not just physically but emotionally. He liked hurting me, got off on it. I think that why he chose my sister.

  But cutting wasn't about that, at least it wasn't for me. For me it was about memories, about distancing myself from the past and focusing on the present.

  Sometimes the only way I could do that, the only way that I could snap myself out of the past, from being pulled down, sucked inside and drowned by the intensity, was to jolt myself out of it by feeling pain in the present.

  I had been deluding myself to think that I could stop doing this. I was who I was. There was no changing that. Anyway, I'd made progress, no longer the teenage girl who'd tried to overdose when she was sixteen. At least I wasn't suicidal, even if I wasn't sure quite what I was living for.

  But just as quickly as I had felt overwhelmed, the feeling dissipated, and a sense of calmness washed over me, this wave of stillness and peace.

  15

  Elias

  I sat in the car outside The Thirsty Frog for at least fifteen minutes before I finally decided to get out, just watching things. It was a new bar, but I knew that if Silas was in a bad place like my mother had said, it wasn't any kind of reputable establishment.

  Silas was at the front door; I could see him standing there, arms crossed, beside the front door occasionally checking an ID, but mostly leaving it up to the other bouncer doing the ID checks while he scanned the crowd.

  He'd gotten big, bigger than when I last saw him, and I wondered if my mother meant that he was juicing. Knowing Silas, if he was on the same trajectory he had been on when I left, it was more than just juicing he was doing. I thought he'd changed, but maybe not.

  I got out of the car, and walked toward the bar. Silas didn't see me, but I heard his voice, loud even above the din of the people in line. One of the other bouncers was silhouetted in the doorway of the bar, pushing a guy out the front door, where Silas caught him by the back of the neck and dragged him out toward the street. Silas' face was contorted in anger, his cheeks ruddy and red.

  Shit. Three years later, and nothing had changed.

  He saw me standing there, and stopped, pushing the kid forward, without breaking eye contact with me. "Today's your fucking lucky day, shitbag," he said. The kid whimpered, stumbling forward into the parking lot and running away.

  "You come down from on high to join the rest of us mere mortals?" Silas asked. "Or are you just coming back to West Bend to give me another lecture?"

  "Screw you, Silas." I spat the words, already pissed off at his shitty attitude before we'd even had the chance to say more than two sentences to each other. He hadn't always been like this. I could remember a time when he was my best friend in the world. I could recall a time when I'd take a bullet for him, and he would have done the same for me.

  His expression softened for a moment, clouded by something else. Regret? I wondered. It was probably too much to expect from Silas, but I felt my fists begin to unclench anyway. "They already cremated the asshole, you know," he said.

  "I saw," I said. "She has him up on the mantle."

  Silas spit on the ground. "Real fucking awesome," he said. "On display, like he was some kind of goddamned saint."

  I shrugged. "Did you expect anything different?"

  "Not from her," he said, his voice bitter. Silas and I had always had different expectations when it came to our mother. I think I always understood that she was incapable of being who we'd want her to be. Silas was perpetually disappointed in her, angry at her for not living up to who he thought she should be. Angry at the world for the same reasons.

  "She said you were in Vegas," I said, leaving off the rest of it, the unspoken part. Vegas was a couple of hours from San Diego, not exactly on the other side of the fucking world. My fucking twin, and he hadn't come to see me after my leg had gotten blown the fuck off - not in the hospital, and not afterwards.

  Silas shuffled, kicked at the pavement with his boot. "Yeah," he said. "Got on the fight circuit out there for a while."

  "Legit?" I asked. Silas had always been a fighter- wrestling, boxing, MMA, you name it. Even when he was a kid, scrapping after school, taking on bullies, kids who used to talk shit about our family. It was like he had no fear, no sense of self-preservation.

  "Mostly," he said. "Until I tore my ACL."

  "I didn't know."

  He shrugged. "I heard about what happened, the explosion. I was going to come see you, but - " His voice trailed off.

  "Yeah, well, shit happens."

  His expression looked pained, and he opened his mouth, then shut it again.

  "You heard from Luke or Killian?" I asked. I wasn't on the outs with them, not like I'd been with Silas, but my older brothers were incommunicado a lot of the time, on the road.

  Silas shook his head. "Not in a long time," he said, the implication obvious. Silas had established himself as the black sheep when it came to the four of us. "You sticking around here?"

  I wasn't sure if it was hope or fear in his voice. "Not sure," I said.

  "Yeah, well, West Bend ain't the place it used to be," Silas said.

  "What does that mean?"

  He shrugged, kicked at the ground. "Have to watch yourself here," he said, not bothering to elaborate.

  A yell from one of the other bouncers interrupted us. "Stop fucking socializing and get your ass back over here."

  Silas turned toward the direction of the sound. "Fuck you," he yelled back. "I'm coming."

  "Watch yourself how?" I asked.

  Silas opened his mouth, then closed it again. "I didn't mean anything by it," Silas said. He kicked the ground with the toe of h