Free Elias (New Adult Romance) (West Bend Saints Book 1) by Sabrina Paige

almost immediately began to feel my heart rate slow.  I needed this.  It was the only thing I could do to manage the pain.
    I found a place on my inner thigh, between the faint lines that crisscrossed my flesh, the lines that served as markers, a timeline of my life, of all of the bad things that had happened.  They were faint now, barely visible to the naked eye and only if you knew what you were looking for, their fading a result of work with the plastic surgeon who specialized in fading away scars.  But I could still run my fingers over the place they once were, the place were the lines just barely existed, and remember each scar.
    Some people memorialized the good things of life, the things they wanted to remember, the way they wanted their lives to be.  I memorialized the things I couldn't forget.
    I drew the blade across my flesh, feeling strangely detached from the whole thing, like I was watching it happen to someone else.  The sharp sting of pain threatened to bring me back to the present, promised to bring me back to the present, but just barely.
    I watched as the dark red blood beaded to the surface along the line of the cut, little droplets that clung to it.  I sat there, my mind suddenly focused on the pain, the stinging sensation that I could count on to distract me from everything else.
    People think that cutting is about enjoying pain.  Viper thought it made me a masochist, someone who liked being hurt, not just physically but emotionally.  He liked hurting me, got off on it.  I think that why he chose my sister.
    But cutting wasn't about that, at least it wasn't for me.  For me it was about memories, about distancing myself from the past and focusing on the present.
    Sometimes the only way I could do that, the only way that I could snap myself out of the past, from being pulled down, sucked inside and drowned by the intensity, was to jolt myself out of it by feeling pain in the present.
    I had been deluding myself to think that I could stop doing this.  I was who I was.  There was no changing that.  Anyway, I'd made progress, no longer the teenage girl who'd tried to overdose when she was sixteen.  At least I wasn't suicidal, even if I wasn't sure quite what I was living for.
    But just as quickly as I had felt overwhelmed, the feeling dissipated, and a sense of calmness washed over me, this wave of stillness and peace.

 
    I sat in the car outside The Thirsty Frog for at least fifteen minutes before I finally decided to get out, just watching things.  It was a new bar, but I knew that if Silas was in a bad place like my mother had said, it wasn't any kind of reputable establishment. 
    Silas was at the front door; I could see him standing there, arms crossed, beside the front door occasionally checking an ID, but mostly leaving it up to the other bouncer doing the ID checks while he scanned the crowd.
    He'd gotten big, bigger than when I last saw him, and I wondered if my mother meant that he was juicing.  Knowing Silas, if he was on the same trajectory he had been on when I left, it was more than just juicing he was doing.  I thought he'd changed, but maybe not.
    I got out of the car, and walked toward the bar.  Silas didn't see me, but I heard his voice, loud even above the din of the people in line.  One of the other bouncers was silhouetted in the doorway of the bar, pushing a guy out the front door, where Silas caught him by the back of the neck and dragged him out toward the street.  Silas' face was contorted in anger, his cheeks ruddy and red.
    Shit.   Three years later, and nothing had changed.
    He saw me standing there, and stopped, pushing the kid forward, without breaking eye contact with me.  "Today's your fucking lucky day, shitbag," he said.  The kid whimpered, stumbling forward into the parking lot and running away.
    "You come down from on high to join the rest of us mere mortals?" Silas asked.  "Or are you just coming back to West Bend to give me another