Rule Breaker(154)

            She needed to think, to consider how to work around what she couldn’t go through. Rule would employ whatever means it took to keep her from leaving the room. That meant she would have to find a way to slip around him and make her way to her parents’ home.

            God help her, what was in her mother’s mind to take such a risk? What had she done, Gypsy wondered, to make her mother chance her very life like this?

            Where had she messed up?

            Gypsy knew she had to have done something, she had to have made a mistake somewhere. What had she done to give anyone a chance to use her mother in such a way? And no doubt it was her fault. Her mother would do anything to protect her children after she lost her oldest child, and Gypsy knew her mother had suspected for years that there was a reason her elder daughter continued to attend the desert parties and clubs that had initially given the Coyotes the chance they’d needed to draw Mark out and kill him.

            Would she now be responsible for her mother’s death? Were her actions risking the rest of her family despite all her precautions?

            Could she bear to lose anyone else she loved to her own reckless decisions?

            Huddled beneath the blankets, dry eyed, aching, she stared into the slowly darkening room, unaware of the moment her eyes finally closed and sleep claimed her. There was rarely peace to be found in her dreams, though.

            Especially at night.

            Gypsy had made a habit over the years of remaining awake until dawn began lightening the sky. She’d learned that if it wasn’t dark, then the nightmares didn’t come near as often.

            The room was only just darkening as sleep took her this time, though, and that darkness began spreading through her, dragging her into memories she’d forced to the furthest depths of her mind.

            Her parents had taken Kandy to New York with them that week. It was her sister’s first visit and teenage shopping trip. They’d left Gypsy with her older brother, Mark. Ten years older, strong, always laughing, he spoiled her, but he watched out for her. Everyone knew if they messed with Mark McQuade’s wild baby sister, then Mark would come calling.

            That night she and Khileen Langer, the Wolf Breed Lobo Reever’s stepdaughter, had planned to attend a desert party that many of Gypsy’s school friends were attending. But it was also an adult party, and Mark always attended those with her, or she didn’t go.

            “Mark.” She stepped into the living room, where he was working intently on his computer. “I’m going out with Khileen to a party in—”

            His head jerked up, his green eyes feverish, making her wonder if he’d been drinking that night.

            “No!” The harsh denial shocked her.

            She’d overheard her parents talking about how much Mark had been drinking lately, and how worried they were for him. Staring up at him in shock, Gypsy felt the hurt that came from any sharp word that her precious brother gave her. Not that there had been many, which was why this one stopped her in her tracks.

            “But you said—”

            “I said no, Gypsy, get back to your room now! And stay there for a change instead of aggravating the fuck out of me.” Then he threw the whiskey glass he’d been drinking from at the wall to her side.

            She felt herself pale.

            Tears filled her eyes and for a moment, there was something in his gaze that might have been fear. And agonizing regret. As quickly as it had been there, though, it was gone.

            “Go to your room, Gypsy,” he rasped, his expression hardening in an instant. “We’ll discuss these parties later.”

            Her lips trembled as she ran back to her room, slamming the door behind her before moving straight to her bedroom window.