“I promise, Anya,” I told her, my voice never wavering. “On my friendship with Ryan, I promise that I won’t speak a word of what happens on our trips. Ever. This is our secret.”
10
Nova
Ryan Age 18 : Nova Age 13
The dull ache in my arm wasn’t enough of a distraction as the front door opened and my brother stumbled in. The smell of weed and booze on him was enough to alert the entire house that he was home, but there was no need, not when our father was standing there waiting.
Dad grabbed Garret before he could even realize there was danger. Hands fisted in his son’s shirt, Dad jerked him close until mere inches separated their noses. “Where the fuck were you when your sister needed you?” he snarled savagely.
Garret blinked, too high and drunk to comprehend that he was one wrong answer away from the angel of death. “Nova needed me?” he asked, slurring his words and only causing Dad’s blood pressure to skyrocket.
Garret glanced over at where I sat on the couch, his green eyes trying to focus on me, but I wasn’t overly confident that I was any more than a blur to him right then. I had a jacket on, so he wouldn’t have been able to see the huge bandage that took
up my entire upper arm even if he could make out the shape of my body. It had taken fifty stitches to close the knife wound I’d gotten thanks to one of Matias Ramirez’s men. That, and the split lip I had along with enough bruises to make me look like I had polka dots were their gift to me.
Mine to them was to send them to hell.
I shuddered, remembering how the knife that had cut through my flesh like a hot blade through butter had so effortlessly gone into that man’s neck. While the second one had been surprised by the ease with which I had killed his partner, I’d jumped onto his back and broken his neck.
Just like Anya had shown me on our last Paris trip the day after Christmas.
Without those trips we told everyone were shopping sprees that my best friend’s mother treated me to each year, I would have been dead, and those bastards would have been the ones with a kill under their belts.
No one believed that I’d killed two men, however. And that was the way Anya wanted it to stay. How could sweet, little Nova Hannigan, who was so tiny and fragile, possibly have broken the neck of a man who was triple her weight?
Luck, was what I’d heard Ben telling Uncle Bash earlier at the hospital. Pure luck and the skills Aunt Raven had taught me from the time I could toddle around. I hadn’t disabused them of the reality, and I never would. That would mean breaking my promise to Anya and letting everyone—including Ryan’s enemies—know that I could take care of myself.
According to Ryan’s mom, it was better if no one but she and I knew of the skills she taught me. Let the world think that I really was sweet and fragile. That I needed a big, strong man to watch over me twenty-four seven. It would give them a false sense of security if they ever took me.
Let them continue to think I was easily broken, until I could break them instead.
“She’s fine,” my brother said now, with a drunken laugh.
“Where were you?” Dad asked again, his voice becoming calmer and causing all the fine hairs on my body to stand up in alarm.
Garret shrugged carelessly. “With friends.”
Dad dropped his hold on him, causing my brother to stumble back. Thankfully, the recliner was right behind him, and he fell back into it like he’d meant to do it.
“Friends,” our father repeated. “You mean the lazy fuckers who use you for the cash in your pockets to pay for the drugs you smoke?”
“They don’t use me,” Garret told him. “I didn’t even pay for the…” His voice trailed off, and he coughed before clearing his throat and then blinking at me. “Hey, Nova, what happened to your lip? Wait, are those fingerprints on your neck?”
“Gar, you should probably shut up now,” I cautioned. “Do you notice Mom isn’t here?”
He blinked again. “Yeah. Where is she?”
I lifted a finger to my mouth, silently urging him to keep his mouth shut.
“She went for a walk with Raven,” Dad informed him, his voice still calm but full of ice. Not that Garret realized that. His hazy mind was too out of it for him to understand that Dad was at his most dangerous like this. Or that Mom was on a walk in order to calm down enough so that she didn’t kill her son the moment she set eyes on him.
I didn’t blame Garret for what happened to me that afternoon. How could he possibly have known that the enemy of my best friend’s family would send his men to deliver a message? He was just doing what he always did, fucking around and trying to ease by until he graduated and could go to New York to work for Ciro and Cristiano. He hated it in Creswell Springs—honestly, we both did, but for completely different reasons.
For Garret, he couldn’t stand the small-town life.
For me, I hated it because it was so far away from Ryan.