Chapter 8

ETHAN ‘SIN’ VOLKOV.

“Tristan? Stop them! Oh God, they are going to kill him… just stop this!”

There’s a reason I carry my cousin around.

And an occasional baseball bat once in a while.

Today I failed to carry both and the consequence of that?

“Break every bone you can find”, Tristan Colkin commands, his arm in a sling, his other arm locked on Violet’s wrist.

I get three punches in before the rest of Colkin’s minions have the upper hand.

First jock aims for the back of my knees, crippling me to the ground.

Once I’m down, it’s game over.

The bastards follow Tristan’s commands to the T.

The kicks to the ribs, I can handle.

The punches?

That, I can’t handle.

First skin contact, has me immobile.

By the third punch, everything around me rings, my head taking a dive to that small room I have been locked in for twenty-one years.

The copper taste of my own blood pools in my mouth.

Pain eats me up like a chainsaw threading through my organs.

The only tether holding me from going berserk is the violet eyes wet and crying for me.

Sobbing for me.

She’s pathetic. This isn’t the worst fight I have ever had.

Not when I had destructive mafia uncles, an unhinged father and a bodyguard like Yan teaching me how to fight while I was growing up.

“You promised. Never… to be like dad.”

Violet’s voice sounds like a whisper now. Tristan says something about his brotherly duty and how much of a crooked sociopath I am.

Everything dims and my brain chooses to shut down rather than psychoanalyze every single touch my skin has received for the night.

xxx

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Yes, he… he is breathing but he doesn’t look too good. There’s blood… I have to take him to the hospital or somewhere he can get medical treatment. I… I don’t know… they wouldn’t stop and he wasn’t fighting back. I told him to get up and fight and…”

“Deep breaths, mama. I’ve known that fucker all my life and this isn’t what’s going to kill him. You got the address? Do I need to repeat it? You are doing great. So great. Stay with him for the night, I’ll get everything you need by tomorrow.”

“What...what about the hospital?”

“Hospitals ask too many questions. Questions that would lead back to my uncle. If my uncle hears of this then your brother will be dead by morning, mama. We can’t have that, now can we?”

“No.”

Rhys’ voice haunts me in my delirium.

The need to grab something to keep my head and body straight urges my body to lunge forward.

Lunging forward has my hands landing on a thin waist that trembles in my hold.

“Sin?” she purrs.

Heat travels all across my body like I’m standing in a pit of sulfur fire.

My lips feel heavy, my tongue dry.

“You have a fever. We have to cool down the fever so please… please if you can hear me, help me out. Help me help you.”

“Not mama”, I mumble, my teeth gritting in my mouth, “You are not his mama. He shouldn’t call you that.”

“You are doing great.”

Water pours between us but the rising heat teetering across my skin isn’t stopping.

Her hands touch the side of my ribs and I groan at the pain that bites me harder than the cold water pricking my skin.

“Scrub… harder”, I scowl, holding her hand against my torso.

“Get rid of them. Get rid of their touch.”

“Sin?”

“They kidnapped us right under my father’s nose. We were in Chicago for dad’s work and they... they took us."

"Sin, I don’t… I don’t-.”

“They locked us in a room. Me, my nanny and her. My nanny… she started getting hysterical.

‘We are going to die, Ethan’, she said.

‘You’ll never see the light of day again, Ethan’, she warned.

The men… they got tired of listening to her go crazy… so they… they shot my nanny in front of us.

You’d think that was… that was the worst part but no. They shot her and left her in the same room we were in.

She wasn’t dead not yet anyway. She held me to her chest, going crazy, saying the world was coming to an end.

She held me while she bled out calling my name over and over again. Then she died and I was too scared to move after she’d painted every inch of my skin with her blood.

I was six, violet. The only thing I could do was lie to the girl locked in with me that everything is going to be… okay.

Close your eyes. Everything is going to be okay. Close your eyes. Everything is going to be okay.

But why do I close my eyes and see her? Feel her touch? Her blood? Why do I...

They didn’t move her body for approximately six hours. I counted. I counted every single minute her dead and cold body touched… me.

Dad rescued us but he didn’t know what happened.

He didn’t know I hated my name. He didn’t know skin contact scared me to death. I couldn’t… tell him. Tell… anyone.

I think I’m not okay, Violet.

Your hands are the only things that come close to making me feel… okay.

Don’t cry. Not for me. I don’t deserve those pretty tears.”

She mumbles something then her eyes go wide with more tears before she leans to my chest and drops a small kiss on it.

I try to focus but once again, delirium shoves its angry fangs inside of me.

****

Rosy cheeks, dark hair splayed across my chest, peaches scent hovering inside my nostrils, Zadie Colkin is asleep on top of me, her hands lying still on my bare chest.

The first instinct is to push her away and the second is to enjoy the unsolicited warmth and contact I didn’t ask for.

I settle for the former.

Every inch of my body fails me with throbbing pain, I push the snoring girl away from me being careful not to wake her.

With a limp, a pulsing headache, the walls of my cabin help in aiding me to my living room.

I need vodka and Tylenol.

Vodka for my bungled body. Tylenol for the headache.

Bright sunlight blinds my eyes and my day gets worse once I gaze at the guy in my living room.

“Glad to see you walking in the land of the living, sleeping beauty. Walk with me. And it’s not a request, Sin”, Rhys Sokolov warns.

Five minutes later, I’m limping away through the woods with a warily quiet Rhys.

“With what happened yesterday, thank-.”

“Don’t thank me. Zadie took care of your ass last night. She could have left you to bleed by some pavement in North U like a dog but she saved you from her own prick of a brother.”

“What’s this about?”

I know a ticking bomb when I see one.

We stop, he turns to face me as birds twitter around us and the morning light filters to us without a care about the tension.

“Why did you break Tristan Colkin’s arm? The guy was seeing Millie, sure but your grudge is more than that, isn’t it? I looked into his background. I should have done so from the very beginning.”

“Rhys-.”

“I should have asked myself why you were concerned with the Colkin girl too.”

“She can touch me.”

“Bullshit. Is that what you are telling yourself to justify every unhinged thought running in your mind?

I looked into their family, Sin. Zadie Colkin and Tristan Colkin are related to ex-Marine Thomas Gerald Colkin, their father.

Uncle Vicious took care of the guys that kidnapped you and Myra when you were six but he didn’t catch the mastermind, did he?

He failed to catch the man who had orchestrated your kidnapping in exchange for unlicensed guns for ransom. Thomas Gerald Colkin is that man, isn’t he?”

He is.

I didn’t settle for this campus by chance. I could have gone to New York, Cali… but I chose here and my siblings and cousin chose to follow me right to this campus.

That wasn’t my fault.

I knew Tristan Colkin was in North U. I became enemies with him for a reason.

What I wasn’t informed of, was that there was a sister.

There was a violet-eyed girl related to the Colkins. In North U too.

Thomas Gerald Colkin hid his daughter, the same daughter that suffered ocular albinism that made her eyes violet, from the world.

I learned of her existence from Theodore Archibald the day I first saw her.

“What’s the plan here? Break Tristan’s other arm for the sins of his father? Make Zadie Colkin your maid till you feel better? Lie to yourself that she is healing you when you are planning to fuck her over when you get the chance.”

“They deserve it”, my words thrash my throat.

“Then say it. I’m not Uncle Vicious, I’m not your siblings, I’m the first guy you came to tell about your trauma from the kidnapping. I’m not going to judge you.”

“I want to fuck them up. Mess them up like their father messed me up.”

“Then what? There’s gotta be an endgame here, Sin.”

“Find their father. End this once and for all.”

“And the chick? What about all that shit about her touching you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It better not. You want to hurt her, hurt her and walk away. There is no in-between, you do not keep her, Sin. You are with her to get to her father, once it’s done, you put the Colkins behind you for good.”

I nod.

I can’t keep her, I know. Yet…

“Wait a minute, is that the reason why you insisted on this hell of a school when we could have been gods ruling the Brockovich campus in Russia?”

“You dipshits followed me here.”

Even my twin and his hate followed me to South U.

“We dipshits worry about you.”

They shouldn’t.

Nor should the violet-eyed girl who kissed my chest last night and took care of me.