Witness Read Online Free PDF Page A

matter what it cost you.”
    A strained, unpleasant smile flirted with his otherwise sexy mouth. God, she so didn’t need to be thinking of Dash as sexy. The logical side of her brain declared war on the rest of it. After all, the man had injured her, kidnapped her, and before they were through, he might do worse. She couldn’t assume she knew him because she had once upon a time. Because they’d been…whatever they’d been.
    “How did this happen?” Serenity whispered.
    Dash cocked an eyebrow. “What?”
    “You. You’re with Gunner. In Lucifer’s Legion.” She almost spat the words. Since that awful night, she’d grown to hate them. “You know what this is, don’t you? What they do?”
    “Of course I do.” Dash glared at her. “Gunner’s my brother.”
    That made no sense. “Your—”
    “In all the ways that matter, Rennie. He’s my brother. He gave me this. A chance. Something to make of myself. To…” He broke off and shook his head, his nostrils flaring. “He gave me a reason.”
    “To what?”
    “To not follow Dalton. I owe him. Fuck.” Dash was on his feet the next minute, tearing up the floor in front of her in a fast pace. “I owe him.”
    Serenity frowned. “What do you mean, ‘not follow Dalton’?”
    He stopped and glared at her. “Just the way it sounds.”
    “You wanted to kill yourself?”
    “I didn’t want to, Rennie. I did. Tried, at least. Damn near succeeded.”
    Everything inside her went cold, her fingers numb. “Dash, why would you ever—?”
    A hard, callous laugh sliced through her words. “Don’t you know?”
    There was only one answer she could conjure, only one that made sense. “Because your brother died?”
    “No. Because I killed him.”

Chapter Three
     
     
     
    There was some amount of perverse pleasure in watching the horror that flooded her face. As though her disgust were justification. Dash had wanted to shock her, scare her, make her realize what sort of shit she was in. Since she’d first whispered his name, he’d felt his grip on control sliding through his fingers. Away. Snagged by the blast from the past that was Rennie.
    Her response to him had him unnerved, the way she looked at him with those big green eyes had his gut stirring in all kinds of ways it shouldn’t. Not to mention his cock, which needed no additional incentive where she was concerned. Never had.
    But she was looking at him the way she used to—she was looking at him like he was someone else. Whoever she thought she saw didn’t exist anymore.
    “What do you mean, you killed him?” she asked finally. “I heard it was heroin.”
    Dash arched an eyebrow. “Where do you think he got it?”
    “You don’t do drugs.”
    The words were automatic, almost programmed. They made his gut hurt.
    “No,” Dash replied. “I didn’t do drugs. Before. Things changed after you left.”
    Because you left.
    But he wouldn’t say that. She didn’t need it—with everything else, adding the weight of his brother’s overdose to her already burdened shoulders wouldn’t just be unnecessary, it’d be cruel. Dash had eventually reconciled that Rennie hadn’t had any control over the fact that her father was a controlling dickwad who’d decided to ship his daughter away rather than be a goddamned parent. Hell, a part of him—most of him—had known her disappearance from his life hadn’t been her fault, but it hadn’t hurt any less.
    The ticking time bomb he’d been before he’d met Rennie had made his peers and teachers nervous, especially in a post-Columbine world. The counselor who had initially paired him with Rennie had thought she would be a good influence on him, because she was one of the only teenage girls in town who didn’t give a rat fuck about his reputation or how damn scary he looked. Granted, scary wasn’t something that took much to achieve in rural, alarmist Missouri. A guy with a healthy build who let his hair go unkempt and owned a wardrobe comprised mainly of