He awoke before the alarm. Before dawn. Before the light he resented. Screams and the crack of leather and eight year old Mason's sobs slowly finished echoing in his head. There was a finger's worth of gin left in the glass beside the bed. Whatever time it was, it was too early for gin. But that didn't stop him, just like it had never stopped him before.

He finished it off before standing. Muscles protested, his body ached. In part from hours upon hours of sitting in a car, in part from the struggles between him and her, short as they had been. He could feel where her fingers had been wrapped around his neck. It stirred a fire in his belly he didn't need already this morning, but once the thought was there it wouldn't depart.

Her heart wasn't in it. He'd never fully lost the ability to breathe, no matter how hard she'd squeezed. There had been real defeat in her eyes, coming and going. Not just compliance as she formed a plan; she'd given up. He'd barely been able to awaken the fight in her. Had the Mick being in jail devastated her that much?

The woman he desired, that he lusted for, was buried in there somewhere. She'd been fighting it back down again, hiding it under the layers of matching curtains and linens in her new house, under that engagement ring. But it was the woman he wanted that bought the motorcycle in the driveway, he had no doubts about that. Flames were faded to embers, but they still burned. They just needed fueled.

He shook his head at himself. He had gone there to get rid of her. But he didn't. Couldn't. He wasn't like... Not even worth thinking about that now. In the first few moments she had sealed it. She had stared at him in that defiant glory that he'd come to savor about every encounter with her. With a gun in her face she hadn't wavered. She hadn't run. She had challenged him.

Nothing that followed had gone as planned, if he'd even had a plan to begin with. Oh, he didn't expect things to go the way he might have wanted them to. He didn't expect that she'd be overcome by that addiction to danger and fuck him there on the sitting room floor. Would have been nice, but he didn't expect it.

But he hadn't accounted for that defeat in her. He hadn't anticipated that she would just resign herself and not fight him every step of the way. The unexpected vulnerability had frozen him. He had tried to help, something he was altogether unfamiliar with. He tried things he'd seen the Mick do when he'd watched the two on occasion before.

She rejected his attempts. He suspected she thought it was to needle at her, mock her weakness. It should have been. It was something he should have exploited. He had tried, but his own actions felt half-hearted.

After she had passed out he had watched her sleep. He didn't even know for how long. Frankly he was surprised she hadn't checked the regular closet in the bedroom. By the looks of things it was the Mick's closet, probably didn't cross her mind to go in there because she didn't have much to do with it on a daily basis.

Between the drug and the whiskey she'd already had before he got there he was sure that he'd fucked with her head sufficiently that she wouldn't be certain what had happened when she woke up. The little scene he had left for her would help. She might wonder about the knuckles and the ribs, but hopefully the “evidence” he'd manufactured in the basement was enough. She always did second guess herself.

The curtains of the cheap Delaware motel never opened. He didn't care to leave the room for the day. The television droned in the background, but his focus was cemented either on his phone or his lap top, watching her Twitter and the GPS he had put on her vehicle. If she suspected anything, she didn't come out and say it.

He wrestled with thoughts of going back. Whether it was to finish the job or... something else, he wasn't sure. Her pride made the decision for him. She got herself into a good-natured pissing contest that lead to what was probably going to lead to an ill advised drinking contest. Poor sot didn't know what was going to come his way.

He would let her go. He would let her try to convince herself that it had all been a nightmare. She'd feel better that way. But this particular monster wasn't in her imagination.

He stood before the mirror in the bathroom, looking at the scars on his stomach and chest. The two were still slightly tender, but if a few phantom pains were all he had to suffer for being shot he would take it. The one on his side stirred other emotions. That look in her eyes eight years ago when she'd punched the blade between his ribs; he could still picture it with perfect clarity.

Was his reaction to such things a cause or an effect of what he was? His eyes lifted to regard themselves in the mirror. The self-aware monster. He was a cliché, wasn't he? He knew what he was, hated what he was, wanted to change what he was. But he was, and always would be, what he was.

He wasn't a fool. He knew what had made him. The same thing that had made Mason. His brother had always just been weaker. Maybe it was because he was younger, because he'd had an older brother to defend him from the worst of it, to take the punishment in his place. He hadn't had to harden himself as much.

Mason had been haunted by their mother's screams until the very day he himself died. Though he'd never admit it, Mason had woken up to the nightmare at least a couple times a week, usually more. He'd never pointed it out to his little brother, or mocked him for it. Maybe he should have. Maybe it would have toughened him up.

Those particular ghosts of his past mostly left him alone anymore. Mostly. A handful of times a year they haunted his sleep, just to be sure he never forgot where he came from. No matter what he made himself now, they'd never let him forget that he was less than nothing to the man who'd squirted off a load inside his mother thirty years or so ago.

The same man who had been the first thing he'd ever killed outside of the odd bug or rodent. But he'd done that too late. How many times had he promised himself that he was going to do something someday, that he was going to save his mum and his brother from that raging drunk as he cried himself to sleep? He'd saved Mason, but he hadn't saved his mother.

Because of Mason.

Because Mason had pled with him just to hide like they always did. Because he had to shove Mason off and convince him that it was all going to be okay. Those minutes that it had taken made him too late. Somewhere inside he'd always known he resented Mason for it. Maybe that was why he didn't lament his brother's death like he should have. In a way it relieved him of a weight he had carried for too long.

Mason had always been weak. He'd always wanted to be more, always tried to prove what he was. That was why he always wanted the same things his big brother wanted, why he had to steal his toys. It wasn't competition, but idolization. He'd always hated that. He didn't want Mason looking at him as some kind of example of what to become. But maybe he should have. Maybe Mason would have been better that way.

Ironic then, that Mason had fallen for her first, and he hadn't until later. But once he had, he was never going to let his weak little brother have the woman. She was too good for Mason, too much for Mason. His view of her was too idyllic. He didn't see what was really hiding beneath that lovely body and glowing smile. He wouldn't have appreciated the woman Aidan Carlisle truly was. He would also have destroyed her when she wasn't what he expected.

The woman that was hell bent on her own destruction. He felt like an idiot as he stared at his phone well into the early hours of the morning, waiting to see that her vehicle made it back to the driveway. Claims of Creed's girlfriend being a driver for the night hadn't been enough to assure him.

He didn't close his eyes until she was home. When he did the old screams in his head made him sigh. Aidan had never screamed like that. In anger, yes. As she fought, certainly. She wasn't without fear, but she had never laid there and sobbed and let herself be beaten. She had never not tried to protect the ones she loved.

What did that feel like, he wondered? Having someone love you? He wasn't sure he ever had. His dreams weren't going to show him.