Absolution (Sacrificial Duet Book 2)

by Riley Ashby

  Shawn blew through a yellow light just as it flipped to red, weaving in and out of traffic as fast as he could. “We should have called the police.”

  “It wouldn’t matter.”

  His mouth set into a thin line. “She said the same thing.” Cursing as we were forced to roll to a stop in a line of traffic, he slumped against the seat and turned to me. “You seem worried.”

  I pressed my hand into my thigh, letting the pain distract me from everything else. “I don’t want to have to clean up a body.”

  “Dick,” he muttered, and we sped forward once more.

  He dropped his car with the building valet and instructed them to keep it running, and then we were up the elevator and sprinting down the hallway to his unit. Even from several feet away we could see the door was wide open.

  “Fuck!” Shawn burst into the condo while I stood in the doorway. It looked like he’d blown out the lock with a pressure gun, like from that fucking movie. There was a frozen dinner lying upside down on the counter; melted sauce leaked out from underneath the plastic tray and dripped to the floor. The blankets we’d laid in all morning were back on the floor, and I walked over to touch them though I knew they’d be cold. I thought I could still smell her.

  Shawn was going room to room, calling Madeline’s name, but there was no one to answer.

  “There’s no point,” I said as he ran for the door, phone in his hand. Who could he call? There was nothing we could do.

  “I’m calling the police,” he snapped. “I don’t care what you have to say.”

  I was across the room in an instant, knocking the phone out of his hand and sending it flying across the floor.

  “What the fuck?”

  “He’ll ruin you, too.” My fingers pinched the bridge of my nose. “You don’t understand. This is bigger than you or me. It always has been.”

  “You’re going to give her up, just like that?” I started as Shawn grabbed my arm, forgetting for a second that he was my best friend and not my father. Unlike Madeline, he didn’t notice my flinch. Or maybe he just ignored it. “Breaking her heart is one thing. Letting Conrad toy with her is another.”

  I wrenched my arm out of his grip, but he stepped forward to crowd me. I forced myself to hold my ground. “He won’t kill her. He’s got bigger plans.”

  “Oh, so that’s better? Torture? Rape?”

  I slapped him across the face. He spit at me, the disgust and contempt clear on his face. And then I didn’t care about my hand, I was on him, taking him to the ground and hitting him as hard as I could before my arm gave out again. He shoved me off him and pinned my wrists to the floor.

  “Why the fuck are you angry at me?”

  “You left her here!”

  “You did!” He punched me square in the face and jumped back. I reeled on the ground, rolling over to let my blood drip onto the hardwood.

  “God dammit.” I watched his footsteps retreat to the kitchen, heard the clatter of ice, and then he was crouching in front of me with a bulging wash cloth. “Put this on your fucking face.”

  He looked at my hand while I leaned against the couch, closing my eyes against the cold and wincing as Shawn tugged at my fingers before re-setting them and wrapping the bandage once more.

  “Look at me.”

  I opened one eye. He was sitting back on his heels, arms folded in front of him with a red mark across one cheek. He grabbed the ice from me, ignoring the blood staining the cloth, and held it against his face.

  “What is going on, Meyer? Why are you acting so cold?”

  I laughed and closed my eyes again. “I’ve never been anything but.”

  “You were with her.”

  My eyes snapped open once more. “You barely saw us together.”

  “Then imagine how pronounced the change must have been for me to notice.”

  I didn’t want to tell him I was right. I had been throbbing all day with the need to run off and come back here to her, whether it be to whisk her away or to sit and await our fate together. I should never have left her. Every time I blinked, I saw her face behind my eyelids. My mind ran through every possible scenario—coming back and finding her gone. Hiding from me with a kitchen knife, ready to swing. Naked and wrapped up in the sheets, waiting for me to come to my senses. But my brain never allowed me to consider the worst—that he would come and take her. I’d shut out that possibility completely, unable to even comprehend what it would mean for her. What it would say about me, to allow that to happen?

  Now it was my reality, and I had to face the truth.

  “He would have taken her anyway, Shawn.” My head dropped into my uninjured hand. My voice was stuffy from my bloody nose. “At least this way I didn’t have to be here to witness it when it happened.”

  He seized my wrist. “He doesn’t have to win, Meyer.” His voice was plaintive, eyes searching mine as if he could find the last ounce of humanity hidden in my gaze. “We can go get her.”

  “He’d stop us.”

  “What do you think she’d want you to do?”

  I ground my palm into my eyes. Fresh blood dripped down my face. “She won’t want to see me again.”

  “She loves you, Meyer. You’ll need to beg her forgiveness, maybe for the rest of your life, but she’d rather be with you. I’d bet my life on it.”

  Blood slicked across my hand as I wiped my face. “You said it yourself. I broke her heart. Even if she didn’t hate me now, I’d have to fight Conrad to get to her.”

  “And what makes you think you can’t do that? Meyer, you’ve lived your entire life surviving him. What in the world makes you think you’re not strong enough to stand up to him now?”

  Blood dripped down the back of my throat. “It’s exactly that. I’ve lived my entire life surviving him, and I’m still barely alive.”

  He pushed to his feet, frustration evident in every movement. Hitting me in the face had done nothing to calm him down. He was committed to doing the right thing, I had to give him that. I wondered if he’d be so eager to run to Conrad’s house if he had any real idea of what he’d face when he got there. “I can’t make you care enough, Meyer. We’re losing time. If you’re not going to go after her, I am.”

  I stared at the floor as he turned around and ran back down the hallway, pausing only to scoop up his phone. My body was aware of his every move, even if I couldn’t see him, but my thoughts were focused on all the ways I had been fucked over my entire life.

  From the moment I came into the world, I was told that being nice was the way to lose. “You don’t get ahead by being kind. You just get hurt.” Conrad didn’t mean hurt emotionally. He meant physically wounded. My father was never my friend, even as a child. There was no coddling, no hiding from the horrors of the world. “You have to be like ice if you want to earn anything.” He’d rap me on the shins with his lacrosse stick, never allowing me to daydream during our drills. The endless practices were torture on my small body. When I became old enough, I chose baseball as my sport simply because it generally required little to no physical contact. Conrad wanted me to do football, and he fought me every step of the way. I was only permitted to continue once became clear that I excelled at it.

  But I couldn’t find a way around every one of his lessons. His brutal form of instruction found words lacking, and substituted fists when what I needed was a soft hand. When he did deign to speak to me, the words were meant to incite fear and mistrust, not to comfort or guide. To anyone watching, his hand on my shoulder and quiet words between innings were reassurance. In reality, it turned every drop of blood in my body cold as I contemplated the punishment waiting for me at home if I dropped a play again. As the years went on and he ground me down like sandstone, I became closer to the man he wanted me to be.

  Still, I was never good enough.

  I made myself cold. I learned to examine everything with frigid detachment. When he hit me, I thought not about the betrayal I felt at suffering yet another beating but of the way it was
strengthening the bone he struck. When he snapped my arm, I attacked physical therapy to ensure my muscles came back stronger than ever. I survived physically, and cauterized the emotional ends of my psyche that were never given the chance to take root.

  Being near Madeline had helped me remember the child that I never truly got to be. Where before I had mocked her for being too sensitive in a world that demanded grit, I found myself craving her solace and warmth. She pushed past the anger and torment I wielded as a shield and rooted out my feelings, fed them sunlight and water, coaxed growth from sensations that were only dormant and not dead. What I thought had been covered with miles of scar tissue was really sitting just below the surface all along, waiting for the right conditions to break through and grow.

  She was my light.

  I had already decided that I wanted to be worthy of her. I wouldn’t survive any other way. I just had to become what she deserved before she found a way to destroy us both. And if I couldn’t—if she tore me down just like she promised before I could prove the truth of my soul—then I would know I hadn’t ever deserved her at all.

  I had a chance. I knew that now. I could save us both, if I had the courage. And for her, there was no other option. I was afraid, but not defeated. And that was everything.

  I pushed myself to my feet, fingers slipping a bit against the droplets of blood on the floor, and snagged the ice to hold against my face as I stumbled down the hallway.

  “Wait,” I called, just as Shawn stepped into the elevator. He paused, straddling the doorway, and looked back at me.

  “Did you find your balls back there, Schaf?”

  I pushed past him into the elevator and jammed the button for the ground floor with my free hand. “Give me the fucking keys.”

  He smiled as he dropped them into my hand, clapping me on the back as if we were on our way to the bar instead of my father’s house to rescue an innocent woman. But the way he beamed at me, I knew I had passed some essential test in his mind. An evaluation that set the tone for our future relationship as much as it did for Madeline’s life. As the elevator doors opened and we stepped into the early evening, sky already black, I threw aside the ice and gritted through the pain in my hand as I gripped the gearshift of the car worth more than my own pathetic life would be if I had wasted too much time, and we peeled off into the night.

  Meyer

  The silence on the drive to Conrad’s house was a welcome reprieve from the yammering I’d had to listen to all day. Not only did it give my ears a break, but the quiet also helped me focus on keeping the contents of my stomach in check. With every passing mile, my anxiety increased and I thought of a new reason why we should turn around. The options looked through my mind: Go back to Shawn’s apartment. I could run off on my own, and I didn’t think he’d come after me. Not now he had Madeline. Or I could turn the steering wheel, slam us into the concrete divider and end it all for good. Maybe my next suicide attempt would be the final one. I dismissed each idea in its turn—too dangerous. Too painful. Too likely to fail.

  Wait until the next exit. Then you can come up with a plan.

  But suddenly we were pulling onto the road that led back to Conrad’s property where I resided in my own home, and I had no better idea of what I was going to do.

  My foot slammed on the brake as we approached the fork where we could either turn to my house or go on to Conrad’s.

  “Shit.” Shawn’s palm hit the dashboard as he flew forward, momentum stopped abruptly by the seatbelt. “What the hell? Why did you stop?”

  “I need a minute.”

  “We don’t have time. We—”

  “I need to fucking THINK!”

  I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyebrows, and my broken finger lit up like a beacon.

  Step one.

  I looked up and held out my hand. “I have to get rid of this.”

  “How come?” Shawn sat back in his seat, relaxed for a minute, as I shifted the car into park.

  “I can’t have a visual reminder of my weakness so obvious and on display.” I yanked off the straps holding my brace against my hand, wincing as the support allowed my bones to shift out of place once more. “Drive back to my house. Let’s take care of this first.” The outer edge of my hand was a deep red, not quite purple, but clearly an unnatural color. My finger was swollen to twice its normal size. Bending it was out of the question, but I’d have to figure something out.

  The house was dark as we pulled up to it, sitting in shadow even though the sun was still above the horizon. When we walked in my front door the cold emptiness hit me harder than ever before. Had it always been this desolate before Maddie came along, or was I just feeling sorry for myself and projecting on to an inanimate object?

  “Get me some ice and ibuprofen,” I instructed Shawn as I walked to my bedroom. I needed some of my own clothes, not Shawn’s cheap shit. Jerking the shirt over my head with my uninjured hand, I nearly ran into the door jamb before I got it off and tossed it to the side. The sight that greeted me stopped me short.

  The place had been tossed completely. Sheets torn off the bed and piled in the corner, drawers yanked from the bureau and overturned, clothes thrown throughout the room. I walked slowly into the closet, only to find every Armani suit and Hermes tie crumpled into a ball. My shoes had been yanked down and the shoe trees removed before being similarly dumped unceremoniously on the floor.

  “Shit,” I muttered, picking up a jacket and brushing at the wrinkles ineffectually. “That’ll be an expensive dry cleaning bill.”

  “What happened in here?” Turning, I saw Shawn standing in the door to my closet with his eyes wide.

  “Good fucking question.” I dropped the suit and held out my hand to take the bag of frozen peas Shawn was holding. “Where did you find these?”

  “In your freezer. Do you really not know what food is in your own house?”

  I shrugged as I held the ice against the top of my injured hand, the cold spreading up my bones to my elbow. “Joshua does—did—the shopping.” Pulling out my cell phone with my left hand, I licked my lips and hit the call button before I could think better, then set the bag of peas on the ground. I could deal with that in a minute.

  The phone on the other end of the line rang far too many times. He was making me wait, I knew it, but the tactic still served its purpose. My blood pressure rose each time a new ring began and ended without him answering.

  “Hello?”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. As if he didn’t know who was calling. “I think you have something of mine.”

  Conrad chuckled low in his throat, but the sound was anything but warm. “I told you to take better care of your things, son. It seemed best for me to step in.”

  My mouth was far too try, but I licked my lips anyway, my tongue like sandpaper against the sensitive skin. Behind me, my clothes rustled as Shawn picked them up and placed them back on the hangers. “She was a gift. The least you could have done was give me a head’s up.”

  “I gave you a chance. More than one, actually.” Yeah, in the form of a closed fist or the toe of your boot. “You bitterly disappointed me, too many times. I had to take things into my own hands.”

  Shawn was staring at me from across the room, a suit jacket in one hand and one of my left shoes in another. Glaring at him, I turned my back and walked into the hallway. “Do you expect me not to take her back?”

  “I expect you to try. It’s how I raised you. But it won’t matter, because you’ve used up all my good grace.”

  This wasn’t working. I needed to try a different track.

  “I worked my ass off all day to try and mitigate the damage your daughter did while you were off taking things that rightfully belong to me. Have you even looked at the news today?”

  He didn’t answer for a moment, and I actually checked the phone to ensure he hadn’t hung up on me.

  “Of course I’ve been keeping an eye on the news. I was also busy running around town trying to
clean up your mistakes.”

  I frowned. Had I really gotten to him? That didn’t seem likely. Something else was irritating him.

  “Would you like to enlighten me as to what mistake you think needed your attention more than the fact that our company is about to be investigated by the federal government?”

  “For one, you left a hostage in an unsecured location in the middle of downtown. There was a reason we wanted her out here, where she couldn’t run for help even if she tried.”

  God help me if he ever found out I’d left her inside a running car.

  “She was still there whenever you showed up, correct? You think maybe I trained her better than you’d like to admit?” By somehow getting her to fall in love with me. “I’ve never asked you for anything, Conrad. I didn’t even ask for her. You gave her to me, remember? I’ve earned this.” My hand thumped against my chest to emphasize the words, even though he couldn’t see me. I forced myself to swallow and take a breath.

  “If you want something in life, you take it. Fuck what you’ve earned. It’s not my fault you didn’t hold on to her hard enough.”

  This was always how it was with Conrad, playing a game I didn’t know all the rules to. By the time I figured them out, he had changed them again, and I was left bleeding or nursing a broken bone. I thumped my fist against the wall, then bit back the urge to scream. Fuck, that hurt. I shuffled back into the bedroom and slid down the wall, then grabbed the peas and rested my hand on them. Should have left the brace on.

  “If you’re going to hang on to her, I want something back in return. You owe me.”

  “This is not an exchange.”

  It’s a hostile takeover.

  “You owe me a life, Conrad.”

  Hers, plus the childhood you stole from me.

  “I don’t owe you shit.”

  He was angry, I could hear it in his voice. I should tread more carefully. Was he with her? He’d used me as a pawn to control Eva, back when she was still around. Somehow, I found myself in the same position, but with the roles shifted. I’d do whatever he wanted if it meant keeping Madeline safe.