“I don’t need to report on what I do with my personal funds.”
“I was hoping you were going to tell me that you had found a way to go get Emily back.”
I flipped my eyes to her. “That’s not going to happen.”
“Why not?”
“Because Emmy is better off without me.” I knew that Carly had never approved of my plan to fake my death and release Emmy from me. But the fact that Carly was bringing this back up again made me angry.
“Emily isn’t the porcelain doll I thought she was,” Carly continued, unscathed by my determination. “I’ll admit that she’s innocent, even a little naïve. But there’s something about her, about how we all change when she’s here. It’s like she’s a light at the end of a dark road.”
Carly was an alien to me now. The lovely words coming out of her mouth were not those of the sarcastic, angry, bitter Carly I knew and loved. Yet despite all the borderline bullshit religious crap she was insinuating, I knew what she was trying to say. Emmy brought us—brought me—love.
But I could only bring her pain.
“Having Emily here, it was like everything felt right for us. Like things would finally get better somehow. Like maybe we would find a way out of all this blackness,” Carly persisted.
Why was Carly so intent on rehashing this? She was losing it, losing her grip on reality.
“There’s no way out, Carly. I figured that out a long time ago. Emmy wouldn’t change that for us. She would just get jammed, like we are. This is our life. Live with it. Emily isn’t coming back. The day you get that in your head is the day we move on.”
All of a sudden, Carly winced, from the outside in. She held her breath and clenched her teeth. Then she shut her eyes.
Redness seeped through her beige pants.
When she opened her eyes, she shot up from the bed. I could see her start melting as she put her hand to her soaked pant leg, touched it, pulled it away, and stared at the blood on her doll-sized hand. She started shaking her head, her eyes filling with every shake. When she looked up at me, she was already unconscious. I caught her before she slumped to the ground.
****
Doctor Lorne was used to getting woken up in a panic, even if it was in the middle of the day. Everything for us was always a matter of life and death.
Tiny helped me carry Carly to my car, and he called Doctor Lorne as we sped out of the city. Doctor Lorne was sobered when we got to his farmhouse. Carly was starting to wake up as I carried her into Doctor Lorne’s fully operating emergency room.
“You’ll be okay,” I whispered to her, though I hardly believed it myself.
She stared at the ceiling as Doctor Lorne bent over her, and a nurse directed me out of the room.
Doctor Lorne’s farm had been built in a conclave on his property. While I felt like a gofer every time I came here, at least it was buried and away from prying eyes as we dragged bloodied bodies out for Doctor Lorne to fix.
The pastures came down the hill in front of the house where a handful of horses neighed and walked around. Meatball used to love tormenting them.
A few times when we had been here early in the morning, I had seen Lorne walking out to tend to his horses, always with a stiff drink in his hand. I guess that made him a functional drunk. I wasn’t used to that kind of drunk.
Tiny and I were pacing about on the porch for a while before the doctor came back out. When he appeared through the doorway, Tiny disappeared. He knew his place, and he knew what was none of his business.
“It was inevitable,” Doctor Lorne told me as he dried his hands on his smock. “There wasn’t much I could do. Her body never let the fetus develop. I just made her more comfortable.”
I stared ahead. “Thank you.”
“She’s awake, if you want to go see her.” He went back inside.
Carly was no longer pregnant. Carly was no longer going to be bringing a child into our monstrous lives. This was what I had wanted, wasn’t it?
I went back into the house and into Carly’s room. There was a nurse busying herself by Carly’s bedside, checking Carly’s temperature, checking her IV. When she was done, she left us.
Carly was awake, eyes still on the ceiling. Except for the pillows plumped under her head and the change of clothes, it was as if she hadn’t moved at all.
I felt like all the air had been sucked out of the room.
What was I supposed to say to her? That I ought to be shot for telling Spider that he needed to make sure this baby never came to be?
I stood over her. “Carly,” I started to say as the fist in my throat expanded.
Carly turned her eyes and looked through me. “It’s for the best. It’s like you said, there’s no way out for us. This is the life we made. This is the life we’ll die in.”
I came to grab her hand, but she pulled away and pulled the covers up to her chin, turning her head away.
I stayed for a minute, searching for something to say. I came up incompetent. I wasn’t built for this kind of stuff.
When Spider finally got there, we had been there just a few hours. He sent a cloud of dust storming through the air as his car came to a halt. He ran past me on the porch without ever noticing me, his eyes straight ahead, desperate to see Carly.
After a while he came to join me on the porch and sat, staring at his shadow on the floorboards.
“Will she be okay?” I asked him through the sounds of crickets in the darkness.
“Physically? She’ll be fine. She just needs to rest,” he said. “But every time she miscarries, she changes. She gets a little darker. None of this is her fault. It’s a medical thing. Her body just keeps fighting against any pregnancy. There’s nothing the doctors can do to change that. She’ll probably never be able to have kids. But Carly sees more into this than that. To her, the miscarriages are a form of punishment. She says it’s God’s way of retaliating against us for what we do, what we’ve done.”
“How many have there been? How many times has she miscarried?”
“This is her fourth miscarriage,” he told me.
“So why does she keep—”
“Why does she keep getting pregnant knowing that she’ll probably never be able to have children?” He shook his head. “She has this idea of what her life should look like. She misses her family and wants what her sisters have. A bunch of kids running around. A normal family life.”
“This won’t happen again,” he promised.
I was about to apologize for what I had said on the plane, but then I realized that Spider was talking to himself.
“I can’t let her do this to herself anymore,” he breathed, his head in his hands.
I left Spider and Carly alone so that they could grieve and regroup; I sent Tiny on an errand before I drove off.
I should have been off to travel for business. Especially with Spider out of commission for however long it took. But Doctor Lorne’s farm was too close to my favorite place in the world for me to pass up the opportunity to stop by. It felt like a lifetime ago since I’d last been. In some ways, it had been in another life.
Besides, it was already night.
When I turned onto the gravel mile-long road to the cottage, I missed Meatball. This was usually the point when he’d start to go nuts in the car, forcing his meaty head through the small opening I’d leave for him when we drove. He always had to be the first to smell the cottage air. Then he’d pummel over me as soon as I opened my car door so that he could be first to the porch, first to the pond, first to get everything in the cottage soaking wet and smelling of waterlogged dog.
Meatball had led a charmed life with me as far as a dog’s life was concerned.
But that hadn’t always been the case.
The first day I laid eyes on him, Meatball was in a cage that was barely big enough for him to stand in. I had business dealings with a creep of a distributor who ran dogfights on the side as a pastime. We were walking past the two dozen cages of barking, raging dogs. Th
at was how I noticed Meatball. He was the only one that wasn’t acting up. He sat and watched us go by without a sound.
When the meeting ended and I was walking back to my car alone, Meatball was there, waiting for me by the car. I had no idea how he had gotten there. I hesitated at first—he was, after all, a huge ball of meat that was trained to fight to the death. Though the dog didn’t growl, he wasn’t moving either. I opened the door; he got in and took possession of the front seat, staring straight ahead. I glanced around, shrugged, and followed him in. We never looked back.
It took a while before he would even let me give him a bath. I had to coax him with hotdogs. He had a big gash that went from one ear down to the side of his jaw and multiple lacerations on his thick neck and paws. I cleaned him up and decided to keep him. Or he decided to keep me. I wasn’t really sure how it had really happened.
Before I knew it, I had a dog named Meatball.
As soon as I opened the door to the cottage, I knew Emmy had been there. It was the way the dust had shifted, and it was the jacket she had left on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. My heart bounced. I didn’t know which was worse—the thought that she might still be there and see me, or the thought that she was gone.
I kept the light off and crept upstairs.
The bed was empty.
I stared at it for a while, as though it were unfamiliar. The only way I remembered it was with Emmy in it. Now it was just sheets and a mattress. Foreign.
I climbed in and turned my face into the pillow. I could still smell her shampoo. Or I dreamed of the smell of her shampoo.
I dreamed that my face was in her hair. I could hear her soft breaths over the song of the crickets outside.
I honestly tried to resist at first. Hearing her breathing, so close, was a piece of my heaven.
But my fingers crept up the side of her body, following her curves, over skin and T-shirt while she squirmed in her sleep. By the time my fingers made it up her neck, she was awake and had flipped over, her face flush and plump from sleep. Her sweet, teasing smile made my darkness crumble.
With my fingertips over her eyelids, I bade her to close her eyes before putting my lips to hers, drinking in their smoothness. It was like silk falling over an apple.
I worked my way down to her neck. What I really wanted to do was bite off a piece of it, to keep. Instead, I nuzzled in hard, on purpose. She twisted, trying not to laugh.
I kept going to the top of her chest, jealous of the collar of her T-shirt that bordered her clavicle. I glanced up, catching Emmy’s emerald eyes peeking through thick eyelashes. She never listened to me, not even at play … but God, did I love to see those eyes.
I kept our eyes locked as my chin ran over her cotton T-shirt while my fingers crept up to pull her shirt up, revealing her delicious stomach and tiny belly button. I growled, took the skin between my teeth, and gently tugged. She laughed, finally.
I loved to hear her laugh.
I loved that I could make her laugh.
I wished she would laugh always.
I kissed her stomach, and she resisted, twisting again, taking a slight jump back. Gasping. I chuckled and kissed it again. She screamed, in horror. I looked up to find her pushing herself up to the wall, away from me. I tendered my hand to her, trying to calm her, but she screamed again. Her hands were covered in blood.
I looked down at the beautiful milky skin of her belly to find it oozing red, a gash in place of where my lips had been. I tasted her blood in my mouth. It was thick and luscious.
My eyes shot open like a bullet had gone off in the dead of night. I sat up in bed and took a couple breaths to shake it off.
I jumped out of bed and went to the fridge to get a drink. It was totally empty. Not even a ketchup bottle.
I flipped the switch on and checked the cupboards and the pantry. They had also been cleared out. I grit my teeth and grasped the back of the kitchen chair. I closed my eyes and took a few more calming breaths, resisting the urge to fling the chair across the room.
I sighed and pushed the kitchen table over. There was a loose board where I usually hid a stack of cash for emergencies. One of my many spots around the property.
I took the stash out and poorly hid it under the pillow of our—her—bed. So that the next time Emmy was desperate for money and couldn’t afford damn groceries, she would miraculously come across this hidden stash of cash. I only hoped that she wouldn’t be too stubborn to take it.
Before closing the cottage door, I put everything back the way it was, as though I had never been there. I sat in my car for a while and looked at my little cottage, the place that I loved, the place where I loved. It was her place now—hers and Meatball’s.
I was drumming my fingers against the steering wheel, debating … then ran back inside to get the jacket that Emmy had forgotten. I put the key in the ignition and vowed to never return.
CHAPTER FIVE: EMMY
UNHINGED
Griff, with the smile that could melt an ice rink and the arms that could crush a car. Griff, with the shot of enflamed hair that could only be overtaken by mine. It was hard to not let his effortless joy spread through when I was around him. Before I knew it, I was smiling, with such force that I could feel it in my teeth.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him as I pulled out of his grizzly arms and bent down to reassure Meatball that this was a friendly attack.
“I could say the same for you.” His gaze jumped from the peeling wallpaper to the secondhand furniture to the disgusting stains that covered every possible surface of the house. “Is this how the other half lives?”
I heard a cackle to the side, where Hunter was fidgeting by the archway into the living room.
“Is this how the other half lives?” he repeated to himself, giggling, shaking his head in utter amazement. And he continued to stand there, impervious to the fact that he was surplus.
“How did you find me here?” I whispered to Griff.
“Is there somewhere we can talk?” He eyed Hunter from the corner of his eye. “Alone.”
“My room is at the top of the stairs. Behind the curtain.”
He sighed. “Sounds glamorous.”
I went to the kitchen to put the stolen food away. Meatball and Hunter were on my tail; only one of them was welcome.
“Do you know who that is?” Hunter was so excited he was vibrating.
I stood on my toes to put a box of cereal up on the top shelf. “No. I have absolutely no idea who that man I called Griff and hugged is.”
“That’s Griffin the Grappler Connan. The Grappler.”
I was sure that if I’d turned around, I would have found that Hunter had tears in his eyes.
“He’s the best fighter known to man! His technique, his persistence, his dedication to the sport … I cried when he retired. I have his poster in my room.”
When Hunter’s voice turned to that of a tween girl, I threw whatever was left of the groceries into the cupboard and stepped back.
“Oh my god!” he peeped. “You think he’d sign my poster if I asked him?”
“I don’t know, Hunter,” I said as I got out of the kitchen as quickly as I could. I had so many questions lighting up my brain that I couldn’t afford to focus on anything else.
“Can you ask him?” he called out from the kitchen as I ran up the stairs.
It took me a little while to come to terms with the fact that Griff, my Griff, was under the same roof as me. This was the same Griff who had been at the Farm, entrenched in the underworld with me. This was the same Griff who had loved Rocco as a brother, as much as I had. This was the same Griff who had known, though hated, Cameron. It wasn’t until I saw Griff lounged on my bed that realization really set in. I hadn’t imagined it all. Cameron, Rocco, Carly—they had really existed. Which meant that Spider also existed; he still lived.
Having Griff there was like having characters in your favorite horror novel come to life.
“I’ve been waiting here
since last night,” he told me in his colossal English accent. “Interesting mates you have. Seems no one knows anything about where you go or what you do around here.”
I stood by the doorway, trying to find something to do with my arms.
He pointed to the ceiling. “Looks like the roof’s about to cave in.”
The roof had been leaking into my room since I had moved in. I mostly ignored it. I didn’t have a window, so at least I knew when it was raining out, and Meatball would enjoy the water bucket that would fill up once it started raining again.
When I had finally settled on coolly stuffing my hands in my pockets, Griff sat up and smiled. The sleeves of his button-down shirt hid the tattooed skin that I knew was somewhere under there.
“You gonna sit or what?”
“I’m fine standing.” I attempted to lean against the wall, but I misjudged how far from it I was and staggered a few steps back instead.
This made him laugh his deep belly laugh. He was on me before I could find the edge of the wall. He grabbed me in a tackle and carried me to my bed, where he sat me down and kept me in his clinch. I had forgotten how much warmth exuded from Griff. He didn’t hold back anything.
Meatball had taken a seat in front of the door, watching every move I made. I didn’t know much about canine behavior, but I could swear he was mad at me for some reason. I assumed he was still upset at having to leave Cameron’s cottage.
“You don’t know how glad I am to see you,” Griff said, his voice low and solemn. “Can’t say I ever expected to see you again. But when I got here, got so close, and you weren’t here …” He caught his breath. “Well, I thought I was going to go mental.”
“Yeah, Hunter has that effect on people.” Honestly, I had never expected to see him either. The last time I had seen Griff, he was working for drug barons in the middle of a cornfield somewhere in the eastern United States. I had no way of ever being able to find him again.
“I’m just glad you’re here, safe.”
I pulled away so that I could look him in the eyes. “How on earth did you find me … here, of all places?”
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