Carnage by Sarah Bailey

Thirty Nine

Francis

This morning had turned into one huge shitshow and it had barely begun. Prescott had taken it upon himself to let Scarlett stay in his fucking room last night. Then West had to go psycho on her for talking back to him. And now Prescott had decked West for fuck knows what reason.

“You did not need to take it that far,” Prescott ground out through his teeth, staring at West with murder in his blue eyes.

West shoved Prescott away from him and bared his teeth. There was blood on them. Prescott’s right hook had always been deadly. He rarely hit anyone. The man was almost as calm as Drake, too busy making idiotic jokes to get mad, but when he did, it was sure as shit a good idea to run as far away from him as possible. Even then, you weren’t guaranteed to escape his wrath. The man was damn fast. He needed to be, given he was into primal play. I did not envy the woman who ran from him. I’d seen Prescott in action and he was fucking deadly.

“Me? Take it too far? What the actual fuck, Pres? What’s got into you?”

Prescott stabbed a finger into West’s chest, getting up in his face.

“Threatening her like that. She’s been through enough already without your psychotic bullshit on top of it.”

Drake leant over to me.

“You grab Prescott, I’ll handle West.”

We didn’t need this to dissolve into an all-out war between them. Being at each other’s throats wasn’t helpful in the slightest. Especially not when it was clear Prescott was in the mood for violence.

Drake and I walked out from behind the counter towards the dining table. Before West could get another word in, Drake dragged him away from Prescott, who tried to go after them, but I stopped him with an arm around his chest.

“Take a breather, Pres,” I hissed in his ear.

“He needs to learn some fucking self-restraint.”

“We all know that, but you need to calm the fuck down. Kicking the shit out of him isn’t going to change the way he is. You know better.”

Prescott shook me off and paced away, but not before I got a death glare off him. Drake had pinned West against the window, who was grinning at him in that fucking manic way of his.

“What the fuck has got into you?” Drake asked, his voice a quiet calm that told me he was close to losing his temper.

“Me?” West scoffed. “What about him? He’s gone all fucking soft over her like she’s a porcelain doll.”

That comment made Prescott start towards him, but I grabbed his shoulder to stop him from going after West again. We did not need to go downstairs with black eyes or any other sort of facial bruising. If we did, Scarlett would know we’d been fighting when she returned later. And it would be obvious it was over her. Something we did not need to deal with on top of everything else.

“Trust me, I want to know the answer to that too, but this isn’t about him. It’s about you.”

West glared at Drake but didn’t answer. Who the fuck knew what went on in his brain. West had never exactly been what anyone would call sane, and it got worse after Scarlett disappeared. As if the only thing holding him together was gone. I thought when she came back, he might regain his equilibrium, but it was wishful fucking thinking on my part. If anything, it had only exacerbated his psychotic nature.

“West.”

“Nothing has got into me, Drake,” West ground out. “Nothing at all.”

None of us believed him, but it wasn’t worth pressing the subject. If he didn’t want to talk, he wouldn’t. West could be a locked box. He had many secrets, things he’d hidden from the three of us. No doubt they were things we should know, but the man was a law unto himself.

Drake let West go, the latter smoothing down his suit and walking it off. I kept hold of Prescott just in case. I could feel his anger radiating off him next to me. Drake turned to Prescott, his indigo eyes narrowing.

“You have some explaining to do.”

“I don’t want to do this anymore.” Prescott shoved my hand off and walked away into the kitchen, leaning his hands on the counter and taking a deep breath. “I can’t hurt her… I won’t hurt her.”

“What?”

I couldn’t believe my ears either. What the hell happened between him and Scarlett? He’d always been fully on board with all our plans right from the start. He even argued with me over taking Scarlett when she’d told him she hadn’t been with a man before. He advocated for taking her, regardless. And now here he was dropping a huge fucking bombshell on us like he’d undergone a personality transplant in the last twelve hours.

“Last night, she told me her memories are bleeding back into her present. She fucking told me she wants to remember who she is.” His voice shook with his words. “She sounded so… broken. So lost. Fuck, I can’t look at her without thinking about how we used to protect her with our lives. How we’d do anything for that girl.” He dropped his chin to his chest. “And look at us now, what the fuck are we all doing? We’re fucking her up worse and for what? For fucking what?”

I couldn’t remember the last time I saw Prescott look so defeated.

“You know what, Pres. You know exactly why we’re doing this.”

I flinched at Drake’s hard tone like he couldn’t believe that out of all of us, it was Prescott who’d cracked. For a moment Prescott did nothing, then he spun around, his blue eyes full of turmoil.

“They stole her from us. They fucking stole her away. They took her before she even woke up. We never stood a chance. One day she was there, the next she was gone. And now she doesn’t know us. She doesn’t know who I fucking am.” He slammed a fist against his chest. “She was everything, fucking everything. The sweetness and light I never got anywhere else. She understood what it was like to grow up the way I did, something none of you fucking well gets. So no, you don’t get to stand there and tell me I know why. You don’t get it. I can’t turn off my feelings at the fucking flip of the switch like he can.” He waved at West who was leaning against the wall by the staircase. “I care. I fucking care and I can’t hurt her.”

The brokenness of his tone had me walking over to him. I understood his pain. I got it. It was the exact same pain festering inside me. Prescott looked at me when I stopped in front of him. The haunted expression on his face echoed the ache in my chest.

“I know,” I murmured. “I know they took her and it destroyed all of us.”

“I want her back, Francis. I just want her back.”

Prescott didn’t stop me from pulling him against me and holding him. He looked like he was about to break apart.

“I want her back too.” I sighed, hating myself for what I had to say next. “But you realise we can’t deviate from the plan, right? There’s too much at stake.”

To his credit, he nodded on my shoulder, which actually made me feel worse.

“What really happened last night, Pres? Why did you leave with her?”

He pulled away from me and stared out the window, swallowing hard as he dug his hands in his pockets.

“I wanted to pretend for one night she was still our Little Nyx.”

The low growl emitting from the other side of the room told me West wasn’t happy about Prescott calling her that, but fuck if his words didn’t rip into me too. I didn’t know what the fuck to do with him. Prescott had clearly been harbouring these feelings for longer than just last night.

“She’s not the same girl we knew,” Drake said.

“Like fuck she isn’t,” West retorted. “She’s still in there. I see her. Every time she fights us, those snappy fucking remarks she makes… that’s our Scarlett, our fucking girl. We need to remind her of who she is. We need to fucking undo what they did to her before it’s too late.”

Drake glared at West.

“And how the fuck do you suggest we do that? We can’t just sit her down and tell her the truth. She’s not going to believe us. Ten years, West, ten fucking years they’ve had her. Do you really believe we can undo that without ruining her?”

West shoved off the wall and stabbed a finger in Drake’s direction.

“Did I say we tell her? No.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t have the fucking answers. If I did, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

Drake turned away, clenching his fists at his sides.

“Then we need to stick to the plan. We can’t afford to have feelings like this. We can’t afford to care about her.”

Prescott stepped around me and gave Drake a dark look.

“So what? That’s it? You’re asking me to stop caring and just go along with this shit?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m asking you to do.”

“Fuck you, Drake. She cried in my damn arms this morning.”

That made Drake’s expression falter and his mask slipped. My ever calm and controlled friend’s eyes filled with pain.

“What?”

“She asked me how I could be so cruel to her in one breath and treat her with care in the other. Not like I could answer that damn question, but it made her cry. I made her fucking cry. She’s broken inside. She wants to know who she is. Desperately. It’s all she wants.”

I stared at Prescott’s back. It finally made sense. His behaviour and reaction. Prescott had never been able to stand it when Scarlett cried. He’d always been the one who was most affected by her tears, her pain. At least when they were tears of misery. He liked it when he made women cry during sex, but that was different.

“You are cruel, Prescott, don’t fucking stand there and deny it’s who you are. It’s who we all are.”

It would be pointless to refute his statement. We couldn’t pretend otherwise.

“She’s one of us, Drake. One of us.”

“No, she’s not. She’s their agent and you know it. Until she remembers who she is, we can’t trust her. And even then, there are no guarantees she will choose us or even want to be near us. You know this.”

“Drake’s right,” I said, my voice quiet. “I hate it, but he’s right. We can’t trust her.”

I couldn’t see Prescott’s expression, but his shoulders sagged. The truth hurt like a bitch, but none of us had ever sugar-coated anything. It would be doing a disservice to each other if we did.

“Fine,” Prescott said, his voice echoing with his resignation. “Stick to the plan it is.”

He walked away towards the lift then, slamming his hand down on the button.

“Pres—” Drake started.

“No, don’t you fucking well make it worse, Drake. Just don’t.”

Silence descended upon us as the lift opened. Prescott walked into it, pressed the button for our floor. When the doors closed, Drake sighed and walked over to the table. He ran his finger over the dent West had made with his knife in it.

“Did you really have to mark our damn table?”

West smirked and shrugged. Drake tsked before picking up the plates on the table and taking them into the kitchen. He bent down to put them in the dishwasher.

“What are we going to do about Pres?” I asked.

“Nothing. We’re doing nothing.”

“We’re just going to leave him like that?”

Drake looked at me when he straightened, his eyes full of sadness.

“Yeah, Francis, we are. There’s nothing any of us can say. He doesn’t like this, fine, but he knows we have no other choice. He thinks I don’t care, but I do.” He rubbed his chest. “I care about her more than he realises. This shit keeps me awake at night. No matter how much I wish things could be different, they are what they are.”

Didn’t I fucking well know it. Things were shit, but Drake had a point. We didn’t have another choice. If we had any chance of getting all of us out of this mess, we had to do as we set out to. We’d risked everything to get Scarlett back. If we handled this wrong, all our cards could come tumbling down. We could lose everything. The company we’d built. Our livelihood. Our fucking lives. And I wished we had another option or path in front of us… but we didn’t.