How Sinners Fight Read online

  How Sinners Fight

  Sinners of Hawthorne University #2

  Eva Ashwood

  Copyright © 2020 by Eva Ashwood

  All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Learn more at www.evaashwood.com

  Books by Eva Ashwood:

  Clearwater University

  (college-age enemies to lovers series)

  Who Breaks First

  Who Laughs Last

  Who Falls Hardest

  Magic Blessed Academy

  (paranormal academy series)

  Gift of the Gods

  Secret of the Gods

  Wrath of the Gods

  The Dark Elite

  (dark mafia romance)

  Vicious Kings

  Ruthless Knights

  Savage Queen

  Slateview High

  (dark high school bully romance)

  Lost Boys

  Wild Girl

  Mad Love

  Sinners of Hawthorne University

  (dark new adult romance)

  When Sinners Play

  How Sinners Fight

  What Sinners Love

  (contemporary romance standalone)

  Say Yes

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Books by Eva Ashwood

  1

  I’ve always wondered if sleep is somewhere between living and dying.

  That’s what it feels like now.

  Am I alive?

  Am I dead?

  My thoughts drift somewhere between awake and dreaming, visions and pictures floating through my mind in a muddled confusion of colors and faces, things I can’t quite grasp. All I know is the rush of air from my lungs. In and out it goes, keeping me alive. Blood pumps through my veins.

  Not dead, then. At least, not yet.

  Something is wrong. It tugs at the edges of my mind, scraping at my consciousness like barbed wire. But I’m not quite sure I’m ready to face it. I’d rather stay here in this peaceful, empty space than go back out into a world of saints and sinners.

  Sinners.

  My breath catches in my throat. A pulse of aches and pains flutter to life in my body as an unfamiliar room spins into focus. Head thick and groggy with confusion, I blink away the stars that prickle the sides of my eyes. Shadowy forms loom over me, backlit by the light in the ceiling. I blink again, and the faces come into better focus.

  I know them. I know these faces.

  Gray, Elias, and Declan.

  The Sinners.

  My vision is still blurry and not quite right, but I can clearly make out all three of them. Their heads are gathered in a tight knot over mine, all looking down at me with nearly identical worried looks on their faces.

  “Sparrow. Thank fuck.”

  Tension fades away from Gray’s face as he speaks. The line between his knitted brows vanishes as he scoops up my hand in his, bringing it to his face. He hasn’t shaved, and his jaw is rough with stubble. From the other side of the bed, Elias brushes my blue-streaked hair away from my face. Declan grabs my free hand, squeezing it tightly as his deep brown eyes watch me intently.

  Each of them seems to hold their breath, either waiting for me to speak first or unable to speak for themselves.

  It’s almost like… something is wrong.

  Wrong with me?

  My gaze flickers away from the guys’ faces when I realize that I’m not in my own bed. I’m in a bed that angles upward a little at the top, surrounded by a tangle of cords and monitors. An IV is hooked up to the crook of my arm, and a thin gown and sheet cover my body. The room I’m in is lit by bright sunlight, which means the clock on the wall must read seven in the morning, not in the evening.

  It’s a hospital room.

  I would know. I’ve been in my fair share of them. This one is way fancier than any of the hospital rooms I’ve ever been in before though. Like the stuff you see on those TV shows about medical practices, not the beatdown, shitty establishments I’ve been housed in for various injuries, the ones where you don’t know if someone else has died in the gown you just put on.

  I tear my gaze away from my surroundings and look back at the guys.

  Why am I here?

  I open my mouth to ask the question out loud, but no sound comes out at first. My mouth is dry, my lips a little chapped. It feels like I’ve got sandpaper in my throat, and words seem to get lodged somewhere between my lungs and my lips. The feeling of not being able to speak sends a sudden rush of panic through me. I don’t like the feeling of being silenced. I fucking hate it.

  “What… what happened?” I manage to say, forcing the words out even though they don’t want to come. My voice is barely more than a croak. “Why am I… here?”

  Gray is the first to speak, and his voice is low and serious. Gentle. It reminds me of the way he spoke the day he told me it wasn’t the three of them who wrecked my paintings.

  “You fell down a flight of stairs,” he says, “at the end of semester party we were at. Don’t you remember?”

  Do I remember?

  I wrack my brain for something, anything, but I come up empty. The only party I can think of is the party where I put Gray’s little game to an end, where I stripped in front of the entire fucking school, but that can’t be what he’s talking about. That was weeks ago.

  Is he talking about the night I kissed Elias after the football game?

  But I didn’t fall down any stairs there either. Life went on afterward.

  Goddammit. What is he talking about? Why don’t I remember?

  “No,” I rasp. “I… fell?”

  Something shifts in Gray’s blue-green eyes, and his jaw tightens a little. Declan’s grip on my hand is on the verge of cutting off my circulation.

  Elias opens his mouth to say something, but he’s interrupted by a crisp knock on the door. A middle-aged man in a white coat opens the door a second later and steps inside. He’s clean cut, accessorized with a silver Rolex that glints in the sunlight, flashing little light bubbles on the ceiling.

  “Ah. I’m glad to see that you’re awake, Ms. Wright.”

  The doctor sets down a slim laptop on the small desk along one wall before coming over to the bed.

  The guys take a small step back to give him room, but their stances remain protective as the doctor takes my vitals. He returns to his laptop and checks something on the screen before typing out a few notes. Then he looks up at me.

  “How are you feeling?”

  How am I feeling? How am I fucking feeling? What sort of question is that?

  I want to say something rude. Want to ask him if he thinks I feel good about falling down a flight of stairs that I
don’t even remember.

  The man, whose name tag reads Doctor Cohen, purses his lips when I don’t say anything.

  “You fell down a flight of stairs, Sophie,” he says, dropping the formalities and telling me what I already know. “It’s likely that you’ll have short-term memory loss from the head injury you sustained. When we did a brain scan, we saw signs of previous trauma, so frankly, I’m glad to see that you don’t have more side effects. How are you feeling?” He repeats the question.

  “I’m…” My voice is still rough. Low and throaty. “I feel… all right. A little sore.”

  The doctor seems content with that answer. For now. He gives me a small smile over the glow of the laptop. “Good. You also sprained your ankle, not to mention the bruises you have. The worst damage was to your head, but luckily you seem to have taken that like a soldier.” He glances down at his screen again. “Which is no surprise, considering the injuries you’ve already received,” he adds on an exhale.

  A familiar prickle of annoyance and embarrassment crawls up my spine as he begins to read off my charts, as if I’ve somehow forgotten about the damage my body has sustained. As if I could forget about the other head injury or the small scars that decorate my body alongside the tattoos I’ve collected over the years.

  I shove the prickling discomfort down, refusing to let it fuck me up in the head. I know for a fucking fact that I had a rough childhood. I don’t need to be reminded of it by this asshole.

  If I could forget it, I would, trust me.

  Well, that’s not exactly true. I don’t remember much at all about my life before the age of eleven, and I’ve always wondered what I’m missing from my past. The social workers’ best guess was that my mom was a drug addict, which would account for both the scars on my body and the previous brain injury. They think she might’ve dropped me on my head at some point, and that eventually, she either abandoned me or I ran away.

  Super. Thanks a lot, Mom.

  The doctor goes on, but I tune him out, wrapped in a bubble of numbness that I force myself into.

  Short-term memory loss, he said.

  Did I really have to lose more? Really?

  As if I haven’t already lost enough. Just my luck to fall down a fucking flight of stairs and lose another chunk of information. It pisses the shit out of me, more than it should, knowing that my brain has locked away all of those memories, protecting me from whatever shit I’ve been through.

  I’m a fighter though. I don’t need to be protected. I’d rather know what I’ve been through and face it like a soldier, as the doctor so generously put it, than just have these blank spots, these gaps.

  “The good news is, it’ll probably come back,” Doctor Cohen concludes, just as I shake myself out of my dark thoughts and tune back in. “The brain does funny things, Sophie. It could be a random moment. Maybe walking to class, you’ll see something, hear something, even smell something, and it’ll all click back into place. Just one little trigger, and it’ll come rushing back to you. Short-term memories are much easier to recover than long-term ones, so don’t give up hope that they’ll come back.”

  I bite my bottom lip, staring down at my blanket-covered feet.

  Good pep talk, Doc.

  I don’t care what he thinks or says. He doesn’t know what it’s like to not know. He doesn’t know what it’s like to have large gaps in your memory, patches of darkness that are so ephemeral, you don’t even quite know where they start or end.

  “You’ll be able to go home in a few days,” Doctor Cohen reassures me. “We just need to keep an eye on you for a little bit longer, okay?”

  Home. I bite my lip to hide my scoff.

  I haven’t had a home in years. Maybe my last foster home, but that was only when Jared was still alive. My chest squeezes painfully at the recollection of his name, of his laughing features—and then the image of him lying on a slab in the Medical Examiner’s Office. I quickly shove the emotions down.

  When I don’t say anything, Doctor Cohen glances at the guys, as if they’ll have something to say. There’s an awkward silence that lasts for about ten seconds before the doctor gathers up his stuff and tells me he’ll be back again later to check on me. He nods and strides out, the door clicking softly behind him. We’re alone again.

  “What actually happened?” I demand, feeling like there’s some part of this that no one is telling me.

  What the hell am I missing?

  I’m not really sure what I think is being hidden from me, but I can’t help the nagging feeling in the back of my head telling me that before this… this fall that I can’t remember, something important happened.

  I’m just not sure what.

  What is my brain trying to tell me, to remind me of? Something important. I’m missing something important.

  “Well,” Elias starts, wiping his palms against his jeans. “Last I saw you that night was in the kitchen. Declan and I went to go talk to Taylor, and we lost track of you after that. We were just chilling in the den, and then there was a huge commotion.”

  Declan nods, stepping forward to grab my hand again now that Doctor Cohen isn’t in the way anymore. “We ran out to see what was going on, and we heard you’d fallen down the stairs. A freshman girl found you when she got lost looking for the bathroom. Thank fuck she did.” He grimaces. “No one saw it happen. Or at least no one wants to admit to anything.”

  “Was I… was I pushed?” I wonder aloud, but no one says anything.

  Did someone purposely try to hurt me?

  “I was on the phone. I had to step outside to take a call,” Gray adds. Something flickers over his face, something I can’t quite read. “We’ve asked Max too. She didn’t see anything. The last time I saw you, you were dancing with her, but she says you disappeared at some point.”

  Dancing… Gray… Max.

  I try to fill in the blanks, but my head spins and throbs the more I think about it. The pulse of the headache I woke up with is growing into a full-fledged migraine, and whatever drugs I’m on right now are making it hard to think.

  “I’m so fucking tired. When I… wake up…” I mutter, not quite sure of anything. Words get lost somewhere between my brain and my mouth, just a jumble of half-formed, fading thoughts. “Maybe I’ll remember then…”

  Will I though?

  Not likely.

  It’ll just be another thing to live with. Sophie, the special Hawthorne scholarship student whose medical records were displayed for the entire school. Sophie, who stripped in front of a roomful of people to shut down a stupid bet. Sophie, whose life has become a circus, a shit show for everyone on campus to watch and obsess over.

  I shut down the thoughts as soon as they crawl through my pounding head, refusing to obsess over them now. When I get there, I’ll get there. For now, I just need to work on getting better.

  “You need sleep.” Gray echoes my thoughts, his voice firm. “You’ve been through a lot, and you’re still not recovered. You need to rest up, and you can’t do that with us keeping you awake.”

  It’s a signal for the rest of the guys to leave, even though I don’t want them to. I want them to stay here and keep guard as I sleep, as if they could protect me from my own mind, from my dreams.

  “We’ll be back, okay?” Gray says, his tone softening a little bit. I’m glad he can’t read my thoughts, because I don’t like feeling dependent on any of these men, let alone having them know how I feel. “I promise.”

  I promise.

  Those words stick in my mind, and I let them stay there. I let myself draw a little bit of comfort from them.

  Declan gives my hand another squeeze, reminding me that he’s still holding it, and Elias rests a palm on my thigh through the blanket. When I meet Gray’s eyes, something storms inside the green depths of his irises as he stands next to the bed, his gaze never leaving mine.

  He leans down, that familiar rich scent of his brushing over my senses. It reminds me of bare skin, of heated breaths, of tangle
d limbs and deep kisses.

  I may not remember falling down the stairs, but as Gray leans in and presses his lips to mine, the memories of every moment I’ve spent with him are clear and sharp. Almost biting.

  My breath leaves my lungs in one exhale as his soft kiss lingers, not wanting to pull away. Honestly, I want to pull him down into the bed with me, wrap my body around his and get lost in his kiss, but I’m limp with fatigue and exhaustion, and my head is still pounding. I’m a big fan of fucking my pain away—that’s how Gray and I met, actually—but in this instance, I don’t think it’ll work.

  “Sleep well,” Gray murmurs against my mouth. Our noses brush as he breaks the kiss. It’s a sweet, tender touch that shouldn’t make my toes curl beneath the covers, but it does. “We’ll be back.”

  We’ll be back.

  I believe him.

  Elias and Declan don’t bother to look away anymore, don’t bother to pretend they aren’t affected by the way Gray kisses me. I’ve kissed both of his friends more than once, not to mention that time all three of them gathered around me on Gray’s bed and made me come harder than I ever have before.

  I’m not entirely sure what discussions they’ve had, or if they’ve even talked about this strange thing that’s going on between the four of us, but they don’t seem to be fighting over me. They don’t even seem jealous of each other touching me—not like they once did. The fact that they’re all here with me in the hospital speaks volumes.

  It’s complicated and confusing, but I’m not in a place to really examine it right now, and certainly not in a place to talk about it. My temples are throbbing and sleep is tugging at me. I’m not gonna be conscious for much longer.