CHAPTER ONE

TYSON

Thirteen years later

“Let me make this very clear, you rotten punk. You’re dealing on my Goddamn streets. I do not give a fuck why you’re doing it. The point is you are. Now, I’m asking you one more time to tell me who you’re buying this shit from.” My face is less than two inches away from this well-groomed, limp dick motherfucker, and he doesn’t even flinch. I’d love to be able to bash his head up against this cement wall, drive my fist into his mouth, and kick his ass until he requires medical attention to sew his lips back onto his face. The cocky bastard. I hate lousy people who think they can bend the law to their advantage, then break it and continue to walk the streets as if life owes them a fucking favor when life doesn’t owe anyone jackshit. You earn what life gives you, and this asshole is about to be paid with a life behind bars.

I’ve been home from a much-needed hiatus from my screwed-up life for two weeks now. Those entire two fucking weeks I’ve been searching from here to Bumfuck, Idaho, for this piece of shit who in his high-as-a-kite mind sold cocaine to an eighteen-year-old college student a few months back. Whatever he laced it with caused the drugged-up young woman to become so high she actually thought she could fly. Imagine that. Fuck!

Thank God, a couple of her friends had found her before she decided to attempt her flying skills off an overpass that would not only have killed her by splattering body parts all over. It would have caused a major wreck on the highway. Possibly killing or injuring several more people in the process, and this money-hungry punk has the gall to sit here with a smile on his face over it. Well, he has no idea what’s about to rain down on his hundred-dollar light blue yuppie as fuck polo shirt with the collar turned up. I suppose he has matching deck shoes, too. I take a chance, look down, and sure as shit, he does. Damn. He isn’t going to last an hour on the block before someone claims his ass.

“I’m not telling you shit, pig. I want my lawyer.” Hell, no. He did not just decide to lawyer up. Shit don’t go down that way with me. Not today and definitely not with the likes of him.

“It’s cool. You can call him. You better pray like a whore being fucked in the face by her worst nightmare that he comes before any of us are through with you. ‘Cause the way I see it”—I place my hands on both sides of the chair he’s sitting in, lean my head up to his ear, and whisper—“I have less than five minutes before an FBI agent walks through that door, and that’s plenty of time for me to break a few fingers. Might shove your balls up your ass, too, ‘cause I gotta tell you, boy, where you’re heading, your little nuggets are going to be fresh meat. They will all want a piece of you.” Yeah, he’s starting to shake.

“You threatening me, cop?” he says while smirking. I see him, though, his throat starting to bob, voice starting to quiver. Won’t be long now before he’s bending, breaking, and signing the sweet tune called snitch. There isn’t a lawyer in all this country who will get him bail. Not with all the cocaine, crack, and speeders this kid had on him.

“I don’t have to threaten, boy. Not when my promises are worth gold around here,” I snarl, grab his hand, and bend his pinky finger back until it snaps, crackles, and fucking pops. Shit, that had to hurt.

“You crazy fuck! You’ll lose your badge for that,” he screams, voice sounding as if he hasn’t reached puberty yet. Shit, the boy doesn’t even have a set of balls big enough to wail like that. It’s still echoing off these walls. Pussy.

“That’s right, buddy; you better loosen up those vocal chords, because soon enough, you’ll be someone’s screaming little bitch. Now, where were we?” I take hold of his wrist and bend it back. Place a foot on the top of his and press. I’m pushing my limits here. I really do not give a fuck. “I could do this all day, you know? Break fingers and toes. Tell me something, Richie Rich, you ever been punched in your Adam’s apple? Do you have any idea what that does to a man?” I ask, draw my other arm back, internally laughing when he tries to jerk free in order to bring his hands up to cover his neck only to remember they’re cuffed to the arm of the chair.

“You’re violating my rights,” he spits.

“You lost any rights you had when you starting selling drugs, you little piss ant. Now, back to my question. Do you know what it feels like?”

“Fuck you.”

“I’ll pass. Your type of pussy isn’t my style. Let me tell you what it does. It could crush your windpipe. Make it hard to breathe, and that isn’t the worst part.” I literally cringe remembering all too well being struck there during a training exercise in the academy. The worst physical pain I’ve felt in my life. I couldn’t breathe or see for five minutes. I seriously thought I was going to die. “The impact to your throat is horrible, man. Depending on how you get hit, it could crush your windpipe. It turns the blood in your veins to red hot liquid and courses straight to your balls. It ignites this burning, incapacitating pain that feels like hell and sets your midsection on fire. You can’t swallow, can’t breathe, and can’t get your balls or your Adam’s apple out of the back of your throat. In other words, it fucking hurts.”

“I’ll take it from here, Corelli.” Agent Dietrich of the FBI waltzes into the room, slamming the door behind him. It’s about damn time he joined in. He can have this scum-sucking motherfucker. Gladly.

“You’ve either been saved or sentenced to death, boy. He’s ten times worse than I am.” I keep my stare steady on this twenty-something-year-old kid. His life is gone before he has the chance to properly get his dick wet. Too bad he got stuck with me priming him and Dietrich to finish. He isn’t going to see pussy for a long time. Dumb-ass punk.

“Get this little shit out of my precinct,” I voice, turn around without another word, and slam the door behind me. I’m not in the mood to deal with fucking idiots today. Selfish piece of shit.

I take a few steps down the hall, round the corner, and rest my back against the wall, letting it support me. I don’t know how much more of this I can take. The pretending that I don’t give a fuck about anything when the truth is it’s all killing me. It’s as if someone has gutted me open and pulled out everything inside of me that makes me want to care. Pure fucking agony, and I can’t seem to hold on to it tightly enough anymore. I’m hollowed the fuck out. Bone dry. And if I don’t get it together, one of the only things I do care about is going to be gone. My job.

I left here a few months ago to try and get my head on straight. To find some sort of peace with the woman who wrecked my life. Who stole my soul the day she left me at the altar. She left an empty hole in my chest that has now rotted out, and here I stand with my hands clenched to my sides, my pulse in my throat, living a life without meaning. Life without her and no peace in sight.

She should be in my life. Our time together should be flashing before my eyes with untainted memories. Beautiful ones. A family. Instead, this entire situation is so fucked up that never in my wildest thoughts would I have imagined seeing her again would drudge up old wounds that I thought I’d buried. One of them the unexpected reason she left me. “Fucking hell. I need to drag myself out of this,” I announce to myself. I’m spiraling out of control. Worse than I’ve ever been.

When I left, I prayed she would be gone when I returned. That my words of not wanting anything to do with her would sink in and she would have relented and disappeared again. No such luck. She’s still here and still fucking with my head, my heart, and everything else. I can’t get her out of my system, and it’s driving me back to a time in my life I can’t handle going back to. I’m barely hanging on to the last shred of sanity I have left.

Hell, I didn’t even want to come back. The truth is, I had to no matter how much it ripped at my soul. Time got away from me, and before I knew it, I was headed back here for Riddick and Cora’s wedding. I had to be there for him and for the woman he thought had died, only to find her very much alive. The man has been there for me more times than I care to count. More drunken random nights that big fucker has saved my ass from doing something stupid, and even though I’ve avoided every wedding since my own never happened, I came back for him. For Cora and Ethan.

It took me less than a minute to feel her presence as we all watched Ron escort Cora down the aisle. I looked up, and there Lynne was, standing on her porch watching them begin to exchange their vows while staring at me. It took everything I had not to march my ass across the sand and knock some sense into her. To cut out her heart in the same way she did mine. To choke the living shit out of her until she begged me to stop. I should have done it then, and I should do it now. Except, as much as I hate to admit, I can’t do to her what she did to me. Especially when deep down inside I know the reason why she left.

That’s only part of the reason my head is all fucked up. Now, Jude and Vivian are engaged. Happy and living together with Theo, the young boy Jude adopted, and their crazy-ass dogs.

I’m not angry that my two best friends are happy while I’m over here wallowing in my self-pity. They deserve happiness. The truth is, I’m pissed off because she’s still here. She should have been my happiness. She’s everywhere I don’t want or need her to be, and why the fuck Lynne Chapman has come back to stir up memories I don’t want to remember is beyond me.

It’s been more years than I care to count, and yet I still can’t get Lynne out of my head, out of my mind, or out of my heart. I’ve tried. God, how I’ve tried to shake that woman loose from my life, to pretend she never existed, and yet for some fucked-up reason I can’t. If a shrink were to analyze my way of trying to forget her, I’m sure I’d be locked up for life, sent to a deserted island reserved for the crazies, or told that killing, fucking, and drinking only leads to more self-destruction. Maybe I should make an appointment with her. She is a psychologist after all. Doesn’t fucking matter. The bomb inside of me ignited too long ago to try and disengage the fucker now. The funny thing is, it took all these years to finally blow up, and I don’t have a clue how to mend the fragmented pieces.

“Tyson, what the fuck, brother.” Jude grips hold of my shoulders before I slump forward to the floor.

“I can’t fucking do this anymore,” I wheeze out, look him stone-cold dead in the eyes for several beats before his intense, worried gaze becomes too much for me to take. Fuck, I want to tell him what the hell is going on so bad. It’s one of those stories where you have no idea where to begin because you can’t quite figure it out yourself. I’ve only held it in for years, ever since we all returned from the desert where we served our country. Christ, the memories flood in like a tsunami. I’m drowning. Damn near gasping for air.

“Something tells me you aren’t talking about being the best at beating a suspect down, man,” he gives way to revealing how well he knows me.

“That shit is easy. I have his ass all geared up for the FBI. He’ll talk.” I’ve been down this road with Jude before, as many times as I have with Riddick. They want me to tell them why I meant so little to the woman I thought I would spend the rest of my life with. They have no clue that her reason for leaving me is what has me so fucked up in my head that I can’t see straight. Well, maybe they do; they’ve just given me the time and space I’ve needed all this time. There isn’t any amount of time or space that will fix this. The only way to do it is to talk it out with her, and I don’t think I can do it without wanting to kill someone over it. Starting with her good-for-nothing parents.

For years, I suspected it had to do with her father hating my guts. He never thought I was good enough for his precious little girl. Kind of ironic when he didn’t pay her a lick of attention himself.

I was the poor young kid whose mother died when he was five, leaving a heartbroken husband behind who took to the bottle and then took his hands to his son. He beat me until the day came along where all that alcohol snuck up on his piss-poor excuse of a parent’s ass and turned his liver as dark as his black heart and killed him. I hope he’s rotting in hell.

Fucking bastards. Both her father and mine.

Then my mind twisted around itself again. I thought there was no way in hell she would allow him to change her mind. She hated him and everything he represented. His cheating ways. His lying and deceptive behavior. Lynne wanted away from him and the lifestyle she led. The fakeness behind being rich when money meant nothing to her. She had proven that tenfold by falling in love with me.

Then there was the it-must-have-been-another-man phase. But I quickly tossed that notion in the trash right alongside my bleeding heart. She wasn’t a cheater. Not with the way her heart broke whenever she thought of her mother and how she cut a blind eye to her dad’s philandering ways.

Her mother is a cold-hearted bitch. I don’t do cheating. That shit doesn’t sit well with me at all. That woman, though, she deserves everything that is placed in her lap.

The entire time I fought next to my brothers, I wondered what it was I had done to make the only woman I loved kill my chance at ever finding peace. I rarely spoke of it to anyone. It came out in my dreams, in my nightmares, and with every bullet I barreled into the enemy’s skull. I hated her, and I loved her. Still do. And that right there is the biggest issue that’s fucking with my head. It’s me pulling the trigger, and the bullet remains lodged in my skull. Keeping me alive when all I want to do is die.

“Go home. I’ll cover your ass,” Jude snaps me out of my heartbreaking memories.

“Thanks. I’ll call you later.” I push off the wall, hesitate in my steps to tell him more before exhaling a deep breath, shoving open the side door, and striding over to my bike without giving him the truth so he’ll stop worrying about me. “Someday, man,” I whisper, gear myself up, and hit the open road toward my apartment.

Ten minutes later, I’m forcing my way through my door. The loneliness is striking me hard as I take in the bare white walls, the lack of furniture, and a television that takes up half of one of the walls. I despise this place. It’s quiet, subdued, and has never felt like home. Nothing has since her.

“Goddamn it!” I roar, toss my helmet on the well-worn leather couch, and make my way into the kitchen, where I pull down a bottle of whiskey out of the cupboard, grab a cigar, and open the slider that leads to the deck. “Why is she doing this to me?” I take several swigs, place the bottle on the table, and light up. The gray-blue smoke starts filtering through the dusk-filled evening air.

All I can see is her. She went from a young woman who was growing into womanhood to a goddess with thick, heavy, brown hair with streaks of blond that rests upon her shoulders, soft full lips on that mouth that always drove me out of my mind, and a sharp tongue. Toned arms and legs. Striking. The object of my dreams or the demise that puts me one step further to hell.

Every curve on her sinful body appears to be a handful. The slant of her haunting green eyes is clear as a bell right now. The rise of her ample chest is still humming through my veins, and I hate myself for allowing her to sit stagnantly, to take up space that doesn’t belong to her anymore. You sure about that? Fucking positive.

When I first noticed it was her on the beach all those months ago, I thought I had lost my mind. Time warped me back to the heartbroken young man who lost his mother, his father, and then the only woman he’s ever allowed in. A broken man split right down the middle. One half man, one half a complete stranger. I have no clue who Tyson Corelli is anymore.

Which was why seeing her that day, her long goddess-like legs taking small, tentative steps my way, was worse than anything I could have imagined. I pictured her walking to me in her wedding dress, and when reality sunk in and she was standing before me in a white, short, sleeveless dress instead, her face as innocent-looking as the day we met, I lost my shit. A neurotic drug pumped hard through my veins. Life’s dirty lesson she taught me pounded in my ears and every short hair at the nape of my neck poked out.

I had torn into her before she had a chance to speak. I yelled over the roar of the sea. My throat burned, and for the first time in my life, I wished to the Almighty God I was having one of my nightmares. Except I wasn’t. Lynne Chapman was a vision standing before me. Eyes misted over, tears streaming down her delicate face. I wanted to kiss her, bruise her lips, and cry.

“What in the ever-loving fuck are you doing here?” I’d said, lifting one hand and pointing a finger in her face.

“I came here for you. You need to let me explain,” she begged, and my head jerked back. What in the actual fuck?

“I need to let you explain? You don’t worry about my Goddamn needs. Now, get the hell off this beach and away from me. Besides, an explanation should have come the next day, the next month. Hell, a year later. Not after well over a decade. I don’t want an explanation. I know the truth. I’ve known for years, Lynne.” Her face turned as white as her dress. Her tears dried up instantly and her mouth went slack. She’s beautiful, and I needed her gone.

“How do you know?” she had asked. Confusion dripping off her and blending with the waves. I could have taunted and teased her. Made her wonder, but I didn’t. I was in shock over seeing her while standing in a spot I loved more than anything. The beach. And here she was sharing my air, making me breathe her in, and for the first time in years destroying the only place I found solace in allowing my thoughts to escape me. It was the only time I did not want to be standing where I was, gazing out into the water and thinking about how much of my life I allowed her to piss away. She was standing too close. Her smell surrounded me. I wanted to touch her, choke her, and for one damn minute, fuck her and taste her. Until reality settled in and my anger took over.

“How do I know? Let’s call it life’s lesson as to finding out why my fiancée didn’t have the guts to face me on our wedding day. To tell me to my face that she didn’t love me enough to become my wife. That the woman I loved didn’t trust in our love enough to believe that a man and woman fight through life together. Call it whatever you want, Lynne. I don’t care.” I couldn’t stand to be there anymore. Her explanation as to why she had suddenly landed in my friend’s backyard didn’t matter. I called after the dogs, turned to leave, and her last words teaching me that life had another brick wall for me to slam into broke me.

“I had to do it. You deserved more,” she whispered.

“I deserved the truth. I deserved you. So, fuck you and everyone else who kept this from me. You didn’t love me enough to let me be the one to help you.”

“I loved you enough to let you go. I still love you.”