We sit there in silence for awhile, munching on pretzels and sharing the Jack. After awhile I start to feel relaxed.
Stop drinking. You need to keep your wits about you.
“Your dad’s a little… full on,” I say finally, piercing the silence.
Jase looks at me with an expression devoid of laughter or light. “He’s one of a kind,” he says, and I can hear the bitterness in his voice.
“You two aren’t close?” Please say no, please say no.
“Huh!” Jase chuckles, but there is no joy in the sound. It is more like a strangled cry of desperation.
“No. We’re not close.” There is so much more behind those words, a story I can tell he wants to share, but he’s smart not to. He doesn’t know me. I could go and blab everything he’s telling me to Dornan.
“He’s kind of scary, isn’t he?” I say gingerly, not sure how much he’ll reveal.
He just stares at me until I want to blush under the power of his gaze. “What?” I say. “Did I say too much? I’m sorry.” I shift uncomfortably as he continues to watch me.
“You’re kind of freaking me out,” I say finally, looking away.
“Sorry,” he says, the tension broken. “I just–”
“You just what?”
He leans closer to me and looks around nervously. “You need to be careful,” he says, the worry in his voice clear. “You seem like a nice girl. My father meets girls like you and gets a little obsessed.”
“I’ve noticed,” I say, no humor left in my voice now either. I shake my head. “I just wanted a job,” I whisper. “Now he’s got me here, I feel like he won’t let me leave.”
“He won’t,” Jason says flatly. “My father’s fucking intense. He wants you, he’ll have you.”
I look at him, horrified. I remember Dornan being obsessive and calculating when I was a child, but not like this.
Although, he did organize for his sons to take turns raping a fifteen year old girl who called him Uncle. So, its not terribly surprising, I suppose.
“You’ll be fine,” he says quickly, seeing my face. “Just don’t piss him off. He’ll get a new obsession in a month or two, and then you can breathe easy.”
I nod, suddenly overwhelmed and claustrophobic despite being in a room with see-through walls. I take the bottle from Jase and have a long, deep drink from it. Screw staying sober. I don’t know how the fuck I’m going to deal with being Dornan’s prisoner when all I came here for was to dance at the burlesque club and get close to the clubhouse. This close wasn’t part of the plan. Although, at the same time, it’s deliciously convenient and will no doubt speed things up considerably.
“What happened to his last obsession?”
Jase takes the bottle back but doesn’t drink. He is thinking.
“Maybe I don’t want to know,” I say reluctantly.
“I can’t talk about it,” Jase says finally. “I just met you. He’s my father.”
I nod, but inside I’m deflated. Jase is protecting him. He’s protecting Dornan, who held his high school sweetheart down and raped her. While he made Jase watch.
“I get it,” I say flatly. “He’s your father. Of course you want to be loyal to him.”
Jase appears pained. “Want to? Have to. You think you’re the only one trapped here with no way out?”
I swallow thickly and sit there, my heart pounding in my chest.
Not protecting him.
Being held hostage by him.
It all makes perfect sense now.
We stay in the glass house for hours, eventually talking of lighter things, only leaving when the sun decides to slip below the horizon. By the time we do, something has definitely shifted between Jase and Sammi. Which is a wonderful thing to cling to amongst the madness I am drowning in.
When I finally collapse into Dornan’s king-sized bed at midnight, tipsy and exhausted, I can only hope that he stays away another day.
TWELVE
When I wake in the morning, I am still alone. Thank Christ for small miracles. After spending a blessed day with Jase, the last thing I want to do is wake up to a nightmare. I have a pit in the bottom of my stomach when I wake up, a nervous, cloying tension that something is wrong. I wonder if it’s because Elliot is going crazy trying to contact my useless, smashed phone.
There is a soft knock at the door and I sit up, tensed for whoever might be there, and wishing I had a gun. I relax when Jase sticks his head in.
“Awake?”
“Yeah,” I reply, stretching lazily. I stand up, brightening when I see he is holding a tray with two coffee cups.
“My father’s on his way back,” he says. “Should be here any minute. You want breakfast?” He holds up a brown paper bag. “I grabbed bagels.”
I love bagels. “Sure,” I say. “Just let me get changed.”
“Meet you on the roof,” he says, leaving my coffee on the dresser next to the door.
I sip the coffee as I change into a sleeveless turquoise-colored dress with little lace details cut into the hem. I had to buy a whole new wardrobe when I had my boobs done. Nothing from my old life fits me anymore, which is kind of a good thing. New clothes for a new identity.
I slip my feet into clear plastic flip flops and tie my hair in a messy bun on top of my head. Grabbing my sunglasses and my coffee, I head up to the roof.
This morning, the storm has cleared and the view of the ocean is stunning. Jase has buttered two blueberry bagels and sat them on a brown paper bag on the edge of the building, which comes up to my waist.
“Thanks for breakfast,” I say, shoving a piece of buttery bagel in my mouth and following it with a slug of warm latte. “I would’ve settled for Cheerios and instant coffee, but this is delicious.”
Jase smiles. “No problem. The first one’s free.”
“Oh, really?” I ask. “What does the next one cost?”
He opens his mouth to answer me, but before he does, the fire escape door bursts open and several of the Ross brothers appear. I almost choke on the bagel in my throat.
“They’re up here!” Chad calls down the stairs.
I stand there, looking for a weapon just in case. I don’t know what they’re up to. I don’t trust any of them for a second.
Except Jase.
My worst nightmare arrives at the top of the stairs, bound, gagged, and bloody.
Fuck.
Dornan pushes the poor boy forward, and I rush to them, freaking the fuck out.
This is bad. This is so very, very bad.
“Baby girl!” Dornan booms, clearly amped up on a mixture of adrenalin and some kind of drug, probably crystal meth. “Got you a gift!”
“Dornan,” I stutter. “What are you doing?”
Dornan removes the boy’s gag, and grabs the back of his neck, pointing his gaze towards me.
“Remember her, motherfucker?!” Dornan demands, spittle flying from his mouth and landing on the boy’s face.
“Dornan, it’s not what you think!”
“Shut your mouth,” Dornan yells at me. “Let him speak.”
Oh God. What am I going to do?
“Dornan, he’s not who you think he is–”
“Chad, shut her the fuck up, will you?” Dornan points to me and before I can move, Chad has sidled up alongside me and grabbed me in a bear hug, his hand planted firmly over my mouth. I gasp, unable to scream. I look over at Jase, whose peaceful breakfast has been shattered by all the ruckus.
“Pop,” Jase says slowly, “what’s going on? Who the hell is this guy?”
“What’s your name, son?” Dornan demands. “Speak!”
“M-Michael.”
Michael Trevine.
I just have one question for you, baby girl.
The boy is terrified. One of his eyes is swollen shut, there is blood all over him, and I wonder how much of the long journey back to LA was spent beating him.
Tears form at the corner of my eyes as the full brunt of Dornan’s obsession with me b
ecomes apparent. He left me here for this. He asked me who my ex-boyfriend was, and then proceeded to travel across the country to kidnap an innocent boy from his house. A boy who has never laid eyes on me, a boy who I found online and added to Sammi’s backstory for credibility.
A boy with a gun pointed at his head.
I struggle against Chad’s stronghold, but it is useless. The guy is built, and he’s probably been snorting the white powder with Daddy Dornan all the way home.
I bite down on Chad’s hand and he pulls it away, yelling at me.
“He’s not my ex!” I scream, fighting against Chad’s rigid embrace.
Dornan looks at me like a man possessed. A man on a mission.
“I lied,” I gasp, still struggling. “I’ve never met him before. Please, just let him go.”
Dornan lowers his gun and looks me up and down. “You don’t have to be scared of him anymore,” he says.
He lifts the gun, his finger putting pressure on the trigger.
“Please!” I scream.
My pleas go unheeded.
He pulls the trigger.
Two things happen. Firstly, the roar of a single bullet as it leaves Dornan’s gun and enters the back of the boy’s head. Secondly, almost at the exact same time, I am showered with a fine mist of blood and what I think are pieces of Michael Trevine’s skull.
Michael lays on the ground, motionless. The red cloud around his head grows swiftly, reaching my flip flops. I scream and Chad releases me, letting me slump to the ground. I crawl through blood and bits of skull to get to the dead boy, cradling him in my arms. He is heavy, a dead weight, because he is dead. And it is my fault.
I heft the boy onto my lap and realize his eyes are still open.
Fuck.
With trembling fingers, I reach over and press his eyelids shut.
I feel hands on my shoulders, pulling me away, and it takes everything inside me not to kick and claw and bite Dornan as he carries me away. He pulls my clothes off and puts me in the shower, where I huddle into a ball and stare at the lines of grout that separate each white tile.
You don’t have to be scared of him anymore.
I make a strangled sobbing sound, but nothing much comes out of my throat except a dried-up, pathetic scream.
Dornan pulls me from the shower, wraps me in a towel and walks me to his bed, where he sits me down.
“Do you understand how much I care about you now?” Dornan asks with a throat full of gravel. His hands are all over me, feverish, and I don’t fight back when he presses me down onto the bed and unbuckles his belt.
I just lay there, in shock, his lips at my throat and his hands roving every inch of my shell-shocked body.
“Do you know why I did that?” he breathes in my ear as he grips my hips and slides inside me.
My breath hitches in my throat as he begins to thrust into me, and I feel a single tear roll down the side of my face.
“Because I’m yours,” I whisper into the darkness.
THIRTEEN
If I think watching Michael die in front of me for a careless lie I created is bad, the aftermath is horrific.
Dornan is high, the blood on his hands washed clean away but still leaving invisible handprints all over my body that spell murderer.
Because it is my fault. I should never have used a real person’s name in my fake past; I should have just made one up.
It seems that the only thing that gets Dornan hornier than a girl auditioning for a job by screwing him is killing her supposed ex-boyfriend. The hours after he shoots Michael are possibly even worse than the night six years ago when Dornan and his sons took turns raping me. Because at least then I could struggle.
At least then I could scream.
Now, here, it is like I am in a hell that I will never escape. Six years’ worth of nightmares are coming to life in the space of a few incredibly torturous hours.
Dornan is high and he wants to fuck.
“What’s wrong, baby girl?” he keeps asking me over and over as I lay flat on my back, being fucked, unable to move.
I just have one question, baby girl.
After it has been going on for an hour or maybe more, I clear my raw throat.
“Stop,” I plead.
He doesn’t stop.
I push his warm chest away from mine. I can’t breathe. I threw up my breakfast in the shower as I watched Michael’s blood and pieces of skull rinse from my skin and drift lazily down the drain, gone forever. I am shaky and starving.
For a moment, I think he will stop, afford me a small rest before he starts up again.
“Please?” I ask him. “Please just stop for a minute.”
He doesn’t stop.
It’s the drugs, I realize. He is frustrated. He is hard and he is horny and the drugs are stopping him from having that release that he needs so desperately to calm down.
“Stop!” I yell, pushing his chest with all my might. Surprisingly, he doesn’t pin me down as I suspected he would, but draws himself out of me and rolls to the side, coming to a standing position beside the bed. I draw my knees up to my chest and watch in horror as he pulls a shiny black gun from his side table.
It is only now that I see his entire body is shaking, balanced precariously on the edge of an overdose.
“What did you take?” I ask calmly, sitting up on the side of the bed. I am alarmed. He can’t die, not now, not before he suffers for me. It would be too easy for him to just OD and die before I’ve made him regret ever meeting my father.
He doesn’t answer, just starts to pace the room, his cock still erect in front of him, his index finger nervously bouncing against the trigger of his gun.
“Dornan, you need to calm down,” I say, still in shock and not ready for him to shoot me, too. “You’ve taken something.”
“Too pure,” he says, “too pure. We gotta cut it down, cut it down–”
“Hey!” I say loudly, trying to cut through his incoherent monologue.
He swings around and presses the tip of the gun to my forehead. I gasp.
“Why did you come here?” he asks me, his breathing short and sharp. He is angry. Angry and peaking.
Stick to the story.
“I had nowhere else to go,” I say honestly, and it is true. I had nowhere else to go.
“You know what I did for you? The risk I took?” I nod.
“I know. Thank you for protecting me.” The words are pouring out of my mouth before I can even think. I will do anything for him to take the gun away from my head and calm down.
“I fucking risked EVERYTHING for you, and you don’t even care?”
Oh God. Oh Godohgodohgod.
“I do care,” I say, and I do the only thing I can think to do to calm him down. I take his cock in my hands and start stroking back and forth, making a tight fist. He seems to relax almost immediately, but doesn’t take the gun away. I look up at him through my eyelashes and see his face still incredibly tense, his body twitching with too much pent-up energy and high-grade methamphetamine.
I have to do something. I take his cock and guide it gently to my mouth, teasing the underside with the tip of my tongue. His whole body is still shaking but he moans and drops the gun to his side, his other hand stroking my hair.
I keep going, thankful that I at least don’t have to look at him. I pretend that we are other people, somewhere else, and this, too, makes it easier to keep going. I sigh with relief when the gun clatters to the floor and he uses both hands to grip the sides of my head.
“Baby girl,” he moans, rocking his hips in rhythm, his cock as hard as ever.
I take him all in, as far as my mouth will open, and he suddenly tenses. “Ohhhh,” I hear him say as hot cum hits the back of my throat. It takes every muscle in my body locked rigid so that I don’t choke. I am suddenly overwhelmed by a claustrophobic, trapped sensation that goes from my mouth all the way down to my stomach.
Dornan staggers back, a sated smile on his handsome face. I swallow t
hickly, looking around the room for something – anything – to get the taste of him out of my mouth. I spy my half-drunk coffee from the morning, sitting innocently on the nightstand. I have no idea how it got here. I reach for it and take a swig of the cold liquid, sighing as it floods my mouth with sugar and bitterness. My eye notices something on the cup and I look closer.
I shudder.
A fine mist of blood coats the Styrofoam, and I drop the cup to the floor as if it has burned me.
I turn my hand over to see that some of the blood is flecked on my palm. Disgusted, I wipe my hand on the dark bed sheets. I look up to see Dornan has already passed out face-down on the bed in the space of about ten seconds.
I finish wiping my hand and fish a pair of skinny jeans and an oversized black t-shirt printed with a skull and crossbones out of my suitcase at the end of the bed. I dress quickly and tiptoe out of the room as quietly as I can. Making my way to the roof, I take the stairs two at a time. I need fresh air in my lungs or I will scream.
Pushing the fire escape door open, I am panting audibly. I am two steps outside when I realize my error in choosing to visit Michael’s place of execution. I try to back up when I discover I’ve forgotten to wedge the fire escape open. Fuck. I am stuck out here, with the afternoon sun beating down on my skull, blood at my feet. At least they took the body away.
I can’t look at the floor or I will throw up, and I’ve got nothing left in my stomach. The concrete is still damp with someone’s efforts to hose the blood away, and I cringe as I think of the poor boy’s blood now coating the entire roof floor in microscopic detail. I focus on the sea breeze ahead of me, the glare of the afternoon sun overhead, the ocean lapping lazily at the shore a few blocks ahead. I am so preoccupied with the view, leaning against the waist-high wall with my palms digging into sharp brick edges, that I almost fall off the side of the building as I hear a crash behind me.
I startle, turning to see where the noise has come from. It is Jase. He looks worried. When I see him, I almost cry. But I don’t. I swallow back bitter tears and turn back to the view of Venice Beach, unable or unwilling to look at him – I’m not sure which.
I feel him take up a spot beside be and flinch when he passes something in front of my face.
Gypsy Brothers: The Complete Series Page 6