Better When He's Bad

  “I wouldn’t do that. You have more needlework on you right now than a quilt.”

  I shifted my eyes and squinted until Bax’s older brother came into focus. He looked terrible. His face was a mess, twin black eyes, a swollen lip, and it looked like he had his own set of stitches running across one of his cheeks and near one of his ears. Beyond that, he looked tired, and if the dark scruff shadowing his face was any indication, he hadn’t been home in a while.

  “How’s Race? Where’s Bax? How long have I been in here?” I had a million questions and they were all tumbling out in a slurred rush.

  Titus groaned and climbed slowly to his feet. He was cradling his ribs as he walked to my bedside.

  “You lost a lot of blood . . . a lot. You needed a transfusion, but on the way here in the ambulance, you went into shock. You almost didn’t make it.”

  I gasped and looked down at my tightly bandaged chest. I knew it had hurt, that the knife felt like it was cutting into the very heart of me, but I couldn’t believe I had almost died.

  “Race took a pretty bad beating. He’s got a broken leg and a dislocated shoulder and they were worried about internal bleeding because of the severity of his injuries, but all in all, he’s actually in better shape than you at the moment. He was discharged this morning while you were still out of it. He was taken to a safe house by the feds, but now that you’re awake, I’m sure he’ll be here in a flash. He was really hard to handle when he heard how bad your condition was.”

  I was so relieved that Race was okay I started to breathe a little bit easier, until Titus kept talking.

  “Gus didn’t make it. They shot him in the gut and left him to bleed out. I’m sure it was Novak’s way of paying him back for double-crossing him, for letting Race hide out right under his nose this entire time.”

  I gulped. I didn’t really know the old mechanic that well, but he was important to Bax and he had gone out of his way to keep my brother safe and offer us shelter in the storm. It wasn’t right. I cleared my throat a little and asked Titus to hand me a glass of water.

  “I’m a little out of it, but not so much that I can’t tell you are avoiding telling me where Bax is.” If he had been willing to die for me, shouldn’t he be here when I narrowly escaped death myself?

  Titus’s hands curled around the rails of the hospital bed, and even under the black and blue coloring his handsome face, I could see the ghastly white of his pallor.

  “Listen, Dovie.” He sighed heavily and peered at me intently out of his swollen eyes. “You can’t say anything about what happened to Novak.”

  “What? No way. I’m not letting Bax go back to jail for something he didn’t do.”

  Titus swore under his breath. “You don’t have a choice. I knew Novak was going to have his guy on the inside grab me. I knew there were dirty cops in on all his action. I called the feds the day Bax handed me the flash drive. Getting Nassir to agree to help was a little trickier because that guy doesn’t do anything for free. I had him set up the fight, knew Bax would show, knew Novak would grab me and take me in, but I have no clue how he found you or Race. The feds have a good case against most of Novak’s crew, including the abduction of you. You can’t start telling people you shot Novak in the back. It would ruin everything and Bax would come unglued. Do you understand me?”

  I tried to shake my head, but it hurt so bad, I had to squeeze my eyes closed and concentrate on breathing.

  “There was a room full of people. Everyone saw me shoot him. Bax gave up so much for my family, for me, already. He can’t go back to prison.” I didn’t feel like I could make it without him.

  Titus sighed again and let his head fall forward. “I’m not going to let him go back, but right now he’s an ex-con caught up in a seriously tangled federal investigation. If you try and get involved, try and sacrifice yourself for him . . . Jesus, Dovie, can you imagine the kind of self-destructive shit he’ll pull to keep you out of trouble? He’s in love with you, he was going to kill himself so you would be safe. Do you really think he’s going to stand by and watch you sit in a cell while the feds try and figure out who is to blame? Fuck no.”

  I let my head fall to the side and felt my heart thud in my chest. “He’s locked up?”

  “For now. He’s in a federal holding facility while the feds decide who is who and what charges to level at all the players. They need you and Race to testify, and chances are they’ll cut a deal with Bax in exchange for his testimony as well.”

  “I didn’t mean to kill him. I just wanted him to stop.” My voice was so soft, I wasn’t sure I actually spoke the words aloud.

  “I don’t care what you meant or didn’t mean. I’m glad the bastard is gone. It’s the only way Bax has any kind of shot at living a seminormal life.”

  “He never even told me Novak was his father.”

  “Because he hated it. When he was a little kid, Novak spent a lot of time denying Bax was his. He called my mom a whore, pretty much ruined her. She was never great, but I think that made her hit the bottle even harder. When Bax got a little older, started getting in trouble, started boosting cars like it was effortless, all of a sudden Novak sees the heir apparent to his criminal kingdom. At first Bax thought it was cool. Guys like Benny handing him wads of cash and having anything and everything handed to him was addicting. It wasn’t until he got popped a couple of times and Novak kept pushing him to go harder, make bigger deals, take more risks, that Bax realized what he was doing. Novak never wanted to claim him as his son, but he sure as shit wanted to mold him into a carbon copy of himself. Novak hated that he could never fully control him. Honestly, Bax’s stubborn, go-to-hell attitude is the only thing that kept him free of Novak’s grasp, plus I think that’s why Novak wanted him so bad. Novak couldn’t handle his own kid’s defiance.”

  We stared at each other for a long, tense moment. I flinched automatically when he reached out and brushed a knuckle across the pristine white bandage that was covering my entire chest.

  “He talks about sometimes having to make the hard choice. I know you don’t want to let him sit behind bars for something he didn’t do, but if you care about him, if you love him like I think you do, then that’s what you’re going to have to do. Right now I’m ninety percent sure I’ll have him out in a week or so. If you go storming in and throw yourself on the pyre, he’ll do something stupid to try and save you, and we’ll never see him again.”

  I gulped and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to believe what he was saying, but I could hear the logic and truth behind his words. Whatever issue Bax had with him, Titus really did have his younger brother’s interest at heart.

  “Can I go see him when I get out of here?”

  A bitter laugh broke out, and even behind his battered eyes I could see frustration and sadness.

  “He won’t even see me. He’s locked up, back in jail; that’s the last place on earth he’s going to want you to see him. You’re just going to have to be patient, Dovie. Let this play out.”

  I would have nodded in agreement, but letting Bax control the way it played out meant giving him the option of walking away from me. I knew it. He didn’t want me to see it—the violence, the vengeance, the vitriol, the vileness that worked in his life—but now I was going to have a giant V stitched across my chest to remind me of it every day anyway. I was just going to have to show him that that the V also represented victory, value, vividness, vitality, and maybe even virtue, which he would never believe. I was in love with him, both sides of him, and I wasn’t going to let him go.

  “I won’t do anything stupid, but you better get him out, Titus.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  He told me good-bye and swore he would stay in touch. He also told me there was a federal agent posted outside the door, so if anyone else was planning on trying to kill me in the next day or so, it would be slightly more difficult. I think normally I would have appreciated his dry humor, but I was tired and I was sad and the only person who could make
me feel better was so far out of reach that it made it impossible for me to think things were finally on the upswing.

  I passed out as Titus was closing the door and didn’t wake back up until a nurse came in to check me over. She ran down a mile-long list of do’s and don’ts with the wounds on my chest. Apparently they were far worse than just a superficial cut on the surface. I had over a hundred stitches holding me together, and underneath the gauze and bandage, it wasn’t very pretty. Again she mentioned I was going to have to look into plastic surgery and I wanted to laugh and tell her I was from the Point, we didn’t do things like plastic surgery. We wore our battle scars loud and proud and showed the rest of the world they could try and take us down but we survived anyway. I wasn’t sure if it was the painkillers working through me or not, but I also thought a badass scar made it more understandable how a boy with a star tattooed on his face could love me back.

  She told me I had a visitor waiting to see me. I assumed it was just Race checking up on me, so I told her to send them on in. She nodded and mentioned that the guard at the door would have to approve them coming in first, which I thought was odd since my brother was supposed to be under protective custody as well. I asked her to find me some food and she laughed and told me she would see what she could do about getting me fed.

  I heard muted voices outside the door and rolled my head on the pillow when the door creaked open. I was stiff all over, and now that I was more awake and aware, I could feel the tightness pulling across my skin and the individual burn of the threads holding me together. I groaned and tried to get more comfortable. I balked in surprise when I saw that it was Reeve who came to stand by my bedside.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She wouldn’t look at me directly, but she reached behind me to adjust the pillows I was lying on until I found a more comfortable position to relax in. She was twisting her hands together, and even though I was still slightly doped up, I could tell she was out of sorts . . . distracted and fidgety.

  “Reeve, why are you here?”

  “You know how I know guys like Bax are bad news, how I know they can destroy your life without thinking?”

  I scowled. “You don’t know anything about the kind of man Bax is. You have no idea what he was willing to do to keep me safe.”

  If she was just here to try and talk me out of being with him again, I was going to find my way out of this hospital bed and smack her.

  “My sister.” Her voice cracked and she had to take a second to clear her throat. “She’s a couple years younger than me. She was a straight-A student, class president, the apple of my parents’ eye. We were best friends.”

  I couldn’t figure out what she was getting at, but I didn’t have anything else to do but let her tell me her story.

  “Her senior year of high school she met this guy . . . a guy a lot like Bax. Good-looking, charming, and messed up in all kinds of really bad and dangerous things. He just overwhelmed her. It took a month for her to start skipping school, three for her to start ignoring me and start constantly fighting with my parents, and then six months in, she was doing drugs and stealing. By seven, she had dropped out of school, was working as a stripper, and I didn’t even recognize her anymore.”

  She was crying silent tears and her hands were curled into fists at her sides. “He left her when she refused to start turning tricks for him, but he didn’t just dump her, he beat her to death. She died strung out and alone because of him.” She gulped loudly and stared intently at me. “The reason she didn’t want to prostitute herself out was because she was pregnant. He killed her and her baby because she wouldn’t fuck strangers for money. She was only eighteen.”

  I felt bad for this girl. It was a heartbreaking story, but Bax wasn’t like that. “I’m sorry for your loss, Reeve, but what does that have to do with me or with Bax?”

  She shook her head a little and her eyes got really big in her face. “You’re so nice, you have such a big heart. I couldn’t stand the idea of him doing to you what happened to Rissa . . .” She trailed off and turned her head to look out the window. “I was mad when Rissa died. I think I went a little crazy. The guy that screwed her up, he was evil, and the only way to fight evil is with evil. If you ask enough people in the Point, they eventually tell you about Novak.”

  I felt my heart start to drop and my breath go still in my lungs.

  “Look at me, Reeve.”

  Her midnight-blue eyes clapped on mine, and even though they were shiny with tears, I knew, just knew in the bottom of my gut, that she had something to do with Novak’s goons pulling me off the street.

  “I’m not asking you to forgive me. I just wanted to explain. Novak took care of the guy that destroyed Rissa, but he always asks for a price. For a long time he never came calling, never bugged me about money or working it off. I thought I was just lucky. Rissa’s killer was dead, a victim of his own horrible lifestyle, and I would work myself to death to help those in need so I could pay the world back for being vengeful and wanting blood.

  “Benny showed up at the group home the first day Bax dropped you off. He spun this big story about what Bax was doing to you, how he was using you to get revenge on Race. The time to pay Novak back had come. They wanted to know when you were going to be alone and if I knew where you were staying, because they knew you weren’t with Bax anymore. I got you suspended. I called the home administrator and told her you took off with Bax. I told them you would be walking to the bus stop alone and that you mentioned someone named Gus. I don’t think you were even aware you let the name slip, but it was all they needed. I tried to tell myself I was helping, that anything that got you away from that guy was for your own good . . . but I knew. Inside I knew they would use you, kill you, and I gave them the info anyway.”

  I should want to string her up, want blood for blood, and who knows? Maybe if things had gone differently and Bax had pulled the trigger, I would indeed want all of that, but right now, all I could feel was pity. Reeve had wanted an evil man dead that had hurt someone she loved, and I had made an evil man die because he was going to continue to hurt and torture those I loved. We just stared at each other, I don’t know if she really wanted redemption or some kind of validation from me, but she wasn’t going to get it.

  “My brother almost died because they found him. A very nice, decent man didn’t make it because you handed over that location. I’ll heal from the knife wounds, they hurt but not nearly as much as watching the man I’m in love with hold a gun to his own head because he was that desperate to get me out of that warehouse alive. I understand what happens when you make a deal with the devil, Reeve, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think you don’t deserve your time in hell for paying him back.”

  She opened her mouth and then closed it again. She blinked back the last of her tears and her mouth twisted up in a sardonic grin.

  “I quit the group home. I’m going to the cops to tell them what I’ve done. I don’t know what that means for me, but it’s the right thing. I got so lost in what I was doing, in revenge and hate, I don’t even know who I am anymore, and that’s exactly what I was trying to prevent from happening to you. Only you seem more like yourself than you ever have before.”

  “Having all kinds of people trying to kill you can really be eye-opening, and Bax . . . well, let’s just say he makes me understand that there is who we want to be and who we ultimately have to be in order to make it in this life. Finding the right blend of those two parts of ourselves is really the only thing we can strive for. When you go to the cops, you might want to avoid a detective named Titus King. He’s Bax’s brother, and if he knows you gave away my location, it might not go so hot for you.”

  “I’m so sorry, Dovie. I know I screwed up and I hate that someone as honestly wonderful as you had to pay for it.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “I can pay my dues as long as the reward is worth it in the end.”

  Her smile went from sardonic to sad. “You think your reward is Bax?”
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  “I think my reward is happiness, and I can’t be happy without him, so my reward is living in a place where that happens.”

  “It’s never going to be easy. Giving everything you have to someone like him . . . he could end you.”

  I would have shrugged, but by now the pain meds were wearing off, I was starving, and moving anything but my eyes and my mouth caused bolts of agony to run under the entire length of my skin.

  “Some boys . . . they are just better when they’re bad. Bax is one of them and I’m starting to think my brother might be one of them, too. I just have to be good enough for all of us to balance it out.”

  She laughed a little and I saw genuine remorse on her beautiful face. “If anyone can be that good, it’s you. I wish you the best of luck, Dovie. I really do.”

  “You too, Reeve.”

  I should’ve probably warned her that once Bax was out of jail, once he knew she was the reason Novak’s creeps had known where to grab me, she might want to keep an eye out. I could look past it, but something told me he would be much slower to forgive.

  The nurse came back in and offered me some Jell-O and the blandest broth I had ever tasted. I was tired again, but the fed at the door mentioned Race was coming in with his own protection detail, so I forced myself to stay awake.

  When he finally showed up, it took everything I had not to burst into sobs at the sight of him. He looked like he had been run over by a truck, and the worry and concern in his moss-colored gaze had to reflect the emotion in my own.

  “I’m so glad you’re okay.” His deep voice sounded like rocks rolling down the side of a cliff.

  “You too. You look about as good as I feel.”

  He limped over to the side of my bed and gingerly picked up my hand. He turned it over and put his fingers on my pulse. It was a little thready and weak, but it was there.

  “You almost died, Dove. I’ve never been so scared of anything in my life.”