Ruthless Love (Ash and Innocence 1)

With a clatter of glass, I dropped the bag I was holding and walked toward her. Logan, Gage, and Cassian all stopped to watch with curious expressions.

“I knew your legs didn’t work,” I said. “I didn’t realize your ears were fucked, too. Or is it just your brain that’s faulty?”

She glared up at me, bringing her chair to a stop just a couple feet from me. She looked filthy, with dirt smeared across the bridge of her nose and her hands. She had fiery eyes, like being trapped in that chair had concentrated all the energy a normal person might put into their body and focused it in her head. I had to give her credit. Even though she was such a small, frail thing and bound to a chair, there was a kind of energy to her. It was like finding a lizard and picking it up by the tail. Even though it had no teeth, the little fucker would still try like hell to bite you and squirm free. It’d even detach itself from the end of its tail if that was what it took.

At the end of the day, it was still just a fucking lizard. But you had to at least give it a nod of respect for having the spark to fight back.

“My glasses.” She was trying and failing to sound tough.

I raised my eyebrows, waiting for more.

“They weren’t where I crashed. That means you took them when you came and got my wheelchair last night, didn’t you? What’d you do, hide them in your room so I’d come back?”

I cringed. I knew the guys were listening in, and when I’d told Kennedy to keep her mouth shut, that included the part where I rescued her pathetic ass from a bush and fixed her wheelchair. But the cat was out of the bag now, and the best I could do was play damage control.

I moved close enough that only she could hear me. “Roll your pathetic ass back home, now, or I’ll make sure you regret it.”

“I need my glasses.” Her voice was surprisingly calm, even though I could see she was breathing heavy.

I stepped back, raising my voice as I turned to walk back toward the guys. “Careful. Apparently if you give a little taste of dick to a cripple, she’ll roll all over Hell itself to get some more.”

Logan raised a skeptical eyebrow, then looked between Kennedy and myself. “You hooked up with her? When? Last night?”

I waved off his question. I didn’t need to add details to the lie. I knew Cassian would remember it and giving him someone’s weakness was like giving a raw steak to a hungry dog. I could already see the way he was looking at her. Calculating. His fucked-up mind was probably already trying to figure out how he could do the most possible damage with the new information.

I looked back at her. “You’re still here? Go. No dick today. Understand?”

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought tears were welling in her eyes. She was pissed, though, too. An angry cry. I wish I could say I hadn’t caused my fair share of those.

“He’s lying,” she said, voice breaking.

“Nah,” Cassian said coldly. He stepped toward her, flexing his muscular arms as he squeezed a football in his hands. “I’ve seen the type before. You’re hungry for cock. Only difference is you’re on wheels.” He smirked. It was a humorless smirk, like the kind a sick kid might get on his face if he was prodding a frog with a stick. “You’re kind of hot, though. If you want to suck my cock, we can—”

I stepped forward, putting my hand on his shoulder and trying to move him behind me. For some reason, listening to him taunt Kennedy pissed me off. “Enough,” I growled.

Cassian regarded me from the corner of his eyes, then laughed dismissively. “Was already bored, anyway.”

I made sure she was looking at me, then I gestured back the way she’d come. “Go,” I gritted through clenched teeth.

I breathed out a sigh of relief when she finally left. The guys and I broke into teams of two and ran some drills, which eventually devolved into a rough game of no pads tackle football once competitiveness got the better of us.

But my mind couldn’t stop running over Kennedy, like a scab I couldn’t leave alone. Yeah, I could tell it was her in the bush last night. And yeah, I’d mostly just wanted a chance to scare her straight. Part of me had thought it was just too damn pathetic to leave a disabled girl stuck in a bush in a forest in the middle of the night. The same part that had known it would only take a few seconds with a hammer to fix up her wheel.