His hands tightened on my arms, an instant reaction to my words. He forced them to relax as he answered, “Yes. They were. Franco Dunvan is a monster, but I can’t pretend that I’m not like him. I became like him.”

Carter gazed at her. She was so earnest. She wanted to understand and he saw that she needed to understand, but he still held back. Could she handle knowing everything? His man told him that Troy couldn’t be reached. He was their confidante in Dunvan’s organization, and he always got word back to them. But something had happened, or something was going to happen. The last communication they got from Troy was that the boyfriend had sold her out and Franco’s men were looking for her.

She had to know, before it was too late. So he’d start from the beginning.

She needed to be ready.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

My lungs strained against my chest. It hurt to breathe, but I bit my lip and listened.

“Franco didn’t order the hit on AJ. Everyone thinks he did and he took the credit, but it was Cristino who ordered it.”

I closed my eyes as a shudder went through me, remembering my brother’s pleas. “Please, Tomino, please.”

Carter’s voice grew rough. “It was Tomino, his little brother, who did the hit.” I felt his scrutiny as he added, “But you know that. You were there.”

The image of Tomino raising the bat came back. It seared me.

“So was I.”

Reeling, I tried to slide off his lap. His hold on my thighs kept me anchored to him. He pulled me closer and kept going, now in a whisper against my ears, “I was upstairs. AJ was coming to me and I saw it, but I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t even get my window open long enough to yell down. Hell, not that I could’ve done anything, but I wanted to try.”

He was there. My eyes were wide open now and unblinking, crushed against his chest. He was there. I couldn’t get around that.

His hand started to brush my hair back as he continued, “When it happened, I couldn’t look away. And when they took that bat to him, that was the beginning for me, Emma.”

Oh god. A whimper left me. I burrowed into him now.

“I already knew I was going to kill them, but then, when I saw you crawl out from that vent, I snapped. You, you! You saw the whole thing. They did that in front of you, but I replayed it in my head. I realized that they didn’t know you were there. They couldn’t have, because,” his hand shook behind my head, “if they had, they would’ve killed you too. Or worse. They would’ve taken you with them.” There was no restraint now. His voice slipped and the icy rage he felt that day was in him again. “I killed all of them, Emma. I’d do it again. I have done it again. I went to Tomino’s house that afternoon. I went from room to room and I sliced their throats. When that didn’t work and there were too many of them, I used their guns on them.”

My hands turned into fists on his shirt. My shoulders bunched together and I hated what I was hearing, but I had to hear it. A part of me wished that I had been there, that I had been the one enacting the revenge that I could only hear about. I was biting my lip, trying to keep everything in, and I tasted my own blood. But I didn’t stop biting, I only bit down harder.

Carter’s voice had grown distant as he remembered that day. He took a deep breath. His chest lifted up and down. “I’m not going to tell you everything. I don’t need to add to your nightmares, but when I was done at the house, I went to The Blue Chip and shot Cristino. I shot him and his two drivers in his office. There were a few more that I didn’t know about until later, but I still killed them. I killed all of them. For you.”

There was a hitch in his voice, but I didn’t move. I stayed pressed against him, biting so hard that blood trickled out. I felt it slide down my chin and knew it covered him as well. It didn’t matter. “You went to Mauricio after that?” I wrung out, my own voice was hoarse. It was painful to speak.

“I left The Blue Chip and took a cab to their warehouse. It was Farve who saw me first. I was damn lucky he did. I had blood on me by then. I don’t know how I got it on me, I don’t remember touching the bodies, but somehow it got all over my face. I’m surprised the cabbie didn’t take me to the police. He could’ve. I was out of it by then, but yeah, it was Farve that saw me first. He remembered me from my dad. He’d been drinking buddies with him, but I knew he never approved of the beatings I got.”

I remembered when Carter would sleep at our place; almost every night, he would slip in through the patio door. He had never spoken about it when we were kids, and since I had come into his life again, the topic hadn’t been raised. I remembered one night when he had been laying on the couch, bruised and still bleeding. I never knew what to say. AJ ignored it; he did it because that’s what Carter wanted. But I couldn’t ignore it that night. I slept on the floor beside him. When I woke, his foot had slipped off the couch and rested against mine.

I didn’t move for hours. I held still until Carter took his foot away. When he woke, he never said a word. He got up and went back to his home. Thinking about it now, a few tears for him came back to me, but I remained quiet. When he wanted to talk about that, I would be there for him.

“Farve vouched for me. He said I was a good fighter and loyal.”

I knew the rest. They had taken him in and there had been more massacres left behind by him. When I was taken into social services and shuffled between foster homes, I still heard stories about Carter Reed, the Cold Killer. The stories had stopped by the time I graduated high school. It wasn’t until my first year at college that I realized why, he had moved up. Octave opened, and a few more clubs followed.

Four years later Carter Reed had turned into a legend.

He held me now and pressed another kiss to my cheek. He whispered, “Franco Dunvan replaced Cristino in the Bertal Family. They found out that everything I had done stemmed from AJ’s death. Everyone knew he’d been my best friend, so he wanted to put a hit on you.”

“What?”

He nodded, his eyes were remorseful. “But they couldn’t. What I had done was too big. The police were never pulled in because Tomino’s house was their base for making sex slaves. The Bertal family hid everything and cleaned it all up, but Franco wanted to avenge Cristino to make more of a name for himself.” Carter shook his head. “We heard his elders never allowed it. You were too young and you were an innocent, but that didn’t stop Franco from trying. He just never made any outright moves that the Bertal Family could link back to him.”