There’s going to be a lot more blood once I do that.
I grit my teeth, count to three, and yank the knife upward as hard as I can. It comes out with a meaty squelch that turns my stomach and makes the pain throbbing in my thigh about ten times worse than it was.
Blood bubbles up from my leg as I take the knife and manoeuvre it in my clumsy fingers, sawing at the thin, but incredibly strong silk holding my hands hostage.
I saw for what feels like a lifetime before the knife makes a solid break in the fabric and my arms fall to my lap loosely, free and numbed. I immediately ball a corner of the bed sheet up in my hand and press it to my stab wound to staunch the bleeding.
Of course, it’s my exact luck that Jase chooses that exact moment to knock on the door.
“Go away,” I call out, my breath catching.
“Are you okay?” Jase yells back. “I heard screaming, and it didn’t sound like good screaming. Ohhhhh.”
He opens the door as he’s saying it, peeking his head around the corner, and when his eyes land on me, or more specifically, my blood littering the sheets, he baulks, rushing me.
“What the fuck?” he says. I tug the sheets around my naked body, suddenly embarrassed by how I must look.
“It’s like the red wedding in here,” he breathes. “What the fuck happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I say bleakly, tossing the knife on the bed beside me. I’m not fine. My leg hurts like a motherfucker. And I don’t want to look at him.
He just continues to stare, mouth agape.
“Can you pass me my dress?” I ask tiredly, pointing to the black material on the ground by his feet.
“Sure.” He picks the material up between two fingers and gingerly hands it to me. It’s going to get blood all over it, but I don’t care. I just want to be somewhat covered.
Jase turns around and I pull the dress over my head, letting it pool around my hips so that it covers me, but doesn’t touch my stab wound. Not that it matters. I’m drenched in bright red blood, which is turning colder and stickier by the minute.
Jase approaches me cautiously, studying my blank face.
“What happened?” he asks quietly.
I swallow thickly. “Apparently, I remind your father of someone he used to know. Someone he beheaded.”
Jase’s eyes go wide and he does this kind of choking thing with his throat. I curse myself silently, remembering how close he and Mariana were. How she was like a mother to him after his own had been killed.
“So he stabbed you and left you in here?” Jase asks, not surprised at all.
I nod, giggling inappropriately. “He tied me up first.”
Worry flashes in his dark eyes. “You should have run when you had the chance,” he says.
I don’t answer. I won’t run. Not now, that I’ve tasted Dornan’s tears and sorrow, not after I’ve watched as Chad took his last breath. I won’t leave until this is over.
I lift the sheet from my thigh to see that the bleeding has slowed. Jase stares in sick fascination at my mangled leg.
“I’ll get a first aid kit,” he says. He looks around. “Let’s get you the hell out of this room.”
I look at my leg, wondering if I can walk on it, and decide to stand and test it. “Fuck,” I mutter under my breath, my leg buckling underneath me, tears biting at the corners of my eyes.
“Here,” Jase says, and in one swift move he has picked me up in his arms like he is about to carry me over the threshold.
“Now it’s like the red wedding,” I say groggily, my head lolling forward and smacking into his chest.
Jase just shakes his head, and I can see the beginnings of a small smile form at the corners of his mouth. “As if you’ve read A Game of Thrones,” he says, easing me through the open door and carrying me down the deserted hallway.
“I watched the show,” I say, hiding my face in his chest. “Does that count?”
He enters another doorway, maybe ten doors down from Dornan’s room, and deposits me on a bed.
“Is this your room?” I ask, looking around. I fall backward on the bed, dizzy, weak and feeling like I’m drunk. My eyes flutter shut for a moment and Jase shakes me roughly.
“Hey, Samantha?” His tone is one hundred percent serious now.
I crack one eyelid, even though the effort is almost impossible. “I’m tired,” I say, closing my eye again.
“I’m gonna take you to the hospital,” he says, and upon hearing that, my eyes snap open and I sit up. “No. No hospitals. Just a first aid kit.”
He shakes his head. “Samantha, you’re fucking bleeding everywhere! A bandaid is not going to work.”
He goes to scoop me up and I put my hand on his forearm. “No hospitals,” I say adamantly. “Just a needle and thread.” I think about that for a moment. “And a bottle of Jack.”
“Wouldn’t swabbing alcohol be better to disinfect it?” he asks dubiously.
“It’s for me to drink,” I say through gritted teeth.
He disappears, and returns a few minutes later with a small plastic box marked with a white cross over a red square, a fresh, unopened bottle of bourbon, a bottle of cola and a small sewing kit.
I eye the cola as he pushes my dress up my thigh, moving the blood-soaked pillowcase I have been using to staunch the bleeding out of the way. He opens the first aid kit and pulls out a package of sterile wipes, tearing it open with his teeth. That’s probably not sterile, but I’m not complaining.
“Who’s Mariana?” I slur, my head full of cotton wool and my leg a sharp, throbbing pain that won’t dull.
“She was my stepmother, I suppose. She never married my dad, but she was with him for a long time.”
“Jesus!” I swear as he swabs my leg with alcohol. I grab the bottle of bourbon that he tossed on the bed next to me and twist the lid off, taking a long, deep drink that simultaneously burns my throat and soothes my ragged nerves.
“Sorry,” Jase mutters, finishing his wiping. He stands back and surveys my wound. “It really needs stitches.” He prods it gently. “How deep did he put it in there?”
I want to laugh, but I don’t. “Up to the hilt,” I say, swallowing back bile and chasing it with more bourbon.
“We need a doctor,” he says. I grit my teeth and hand him the bourbon, snatching up the calico sewing kit from the bed next to me and unzipping it. I locate a small needle and some black cotton and clumsily try to thread the cotton through the eye.
“Here, let me do that,” he says. He takes the needle and thread from me and produces a lighter out of his back pocket. I lie back on the bed as he busies himself with the needle and thread.
“You ready?” he asks me.
I sit back up, the room spinning. “Not really.”
“On the count of three,” he says, using one hand to push my torn skin together and the other to hold the needle. “One, two…”
On two he presses the needle into my flesh. Pain ricochets through my entire body, every nerve ending alight with sizzling, searing pain.
“Was there a three?” I mutter through my clenched teeth.
He doesn’t answer, just swears and holds the needle up to me. “The thread keeps breaking,” he says.
I roll my eyes. “Fishing line,” I spit. “Fishing line will work.”
“I’ll be right back,” he says, leaving the room and closing the door. He isn’t gone long, maybe five minutes, and when he gets back, he is panting.
“Did you go for a run?” I ask sarcastically.
He holds up a spool of brand new fishing wire in one hand and a small bag of off-white powder in the other.
I immediately look to the bag, intrigued. “Smack?” I ask.
He hands over the bag, nodding. “It’s pretty pure,” he says. “You’ll only need a tiny pinch.”
I take a pinch of the powder from the bag and nestle it in the webbing between my thumb and forefinger. Holding it up to my nose, I close off one nostril and breathe in forcefully.
Al
most immediately, a sense of blissful calm settles on my shoulders, even as I swallow the bitter taste of heroin that coats the back of my throat.
“You good?” Jase asks. I nod.
“Yeah. Go for it.”
He digs the needle into my flesh, and though the pain is still apparent, it is now much more bearable.
“I don’t know how to knot this,” he says. I wave my hand dismissively. “Doesn’t matter.”
“It’s going to scar,” he continues.
What’s another scar?
“Doesn’t matter.”
He laughs. “Nothing much matters when you’re high.”
“I am not high,” I say, staring at the weird shapes the ceiling fan is creating on the walls.
“Okay,” he says, standing to admire his handiwork. I crane my neck, trying to get a glimpse of my war wound without sitting up.
“Do you feel okay?” he asks.
I shrug lazily, floating on a cloud of fluffy marshmallows. “As well as I can when I’ve just been stabbed.” A thought enters my fuzzy head and I frown.
“How do you know how to stitch wounds, anyway?”
His face appears directly above mine, a hint of amusement on his slightly upturned mouth.
“I’ll tell you some other time,” he says. “Come on. We’re getting out of here. I’m taking you to my place.”
I sit up and look around the nondescript room. “Isn’t this your place?”
“Samantha,” he says, the hint of a smile tugging at his mouth. “You really think I live in a bikers’ clubhouse?”
TEN
We are roaring down the highway when it occurs to me that I’ve driven this route before.
“Where are we going?” I asked. It was hot, the air blowing into the car stifling. Jase and I sat in the backseat, Mariana and my father in front.
“You’ll see,” Mariana said, her Columbian accent clipped and anxious.
I looked over at Jase, who was glancing between Mariana and my father before landing his gaze on me, a troubled expression on his face. I put my hand on the hot leather seat between us and held my palm up, wiggling my fingers. Jase smiled, his dark eyes crinkling at the corners, grabbing my hand and squeezing it.
My father stopped the car when he reached Mariana’s house, parking out the back, hidden from view. My stomach roiled when he did that. I had grown up in the life and I knew that when my father started hiding and acting secretively, things were about to get bad, real fast.
Inside Mariana’s apartment, the one where Jase lived, we were told to sit down on the sofa, Mariana and my father sitting across from us.
“Daddy,” I said thickly. “What’s going on?”
He sighed, his eyes pinched and old, as he looked pointedly at my hand and Jase’s, squeezed protectively together between us.
Mariana didn’t sigh, though. She smiled, her beautiful face lighting up with things long forbidden for the mistress of the Vice President of the Gypsy Brothers. For although the name suggested they were vagabonds and travellers, the same could not be said of their families, their children, their mistresses. These people were effectively trapped in a web of lies and bloodshed, forbidden to step away from the watchful eyes of the club.
“We’re leaving,” she said, hope dancing in her eyes. That hope she carried around with her was such a dangerous, devastating thing to clutch onto.
I nodded, looking at Jase, who looked like he was about to flip out.
“You are coming with us, hijo,” Mariana said affectionately, reaching her hand over to brush his cheek. “You don’t need to be scared. I will always take care of you as if you were my own.”
I continued to look at my dad, one thought troubling me, a weakness in their plan.
“Is mom coming?” I asked, finally noticing the way Mariana and my father sat so closely together, their knees touching every now and then, her hand patting his arm, the way she gazed up at him and the way he looked down at her.
My throat constricted as I saw what they had been trying to hide for a very long time.
“No,” my father said heavily, and I could practically taste the guilt in his words.
I didn’t drop his gaze, something powerful passing between us. I needed him to know that I understood. Why he would leave his wife, the mother of his child, to the wolves.
Because she was one of them.
“Good,” I said firmly. “She’d only rat you out.”
At that, my father hung his head, with relief or sadness, I’ll never know.
“You’re a good girl, Juliette,” he said to me, his words hitting me hard in the chest.
A few weeks later, we were all either dead, or wishing we were.
Before I know it, we are at Jase’s place. He’s never moved, even after Mariana was killed here. I am shocked, thinking of all the times my hand itched to snatch up the phone and call him, to tell him that I was safe, to tell him that I was loved by someone, even if that someone couldn’t be him. I wonder what compelled him to stay here, and realise that since his own mother died, it’s probably the only place that’s ever felt like a home to him.
He helps me inside and past the same sofa from my memories, the smack and my grief threatening to tear me open and expose all of my secrets. As Jase helps me to his bed and tucks the covers over me, I swallow back tears, and the powdery remnants of snorted heroin that coat my throat.
“Sleep,” he says, gentle and firm all at once. I open my mouth to protest, but he has already left the room.
***
Hours later I wake up with a start. Where the fuck am I? I can smell coffee and bacon, and my stomach complains as it reminds me it hasn’t been fed in a very long time.
My mouth tastes horrible, bitter and stale, and I crave that coffee like an addict needing a fix. I throw the covers back and stand gingerly on my leg, testing it with my weight to see if it will hold up. It hurts, but less than it did before, and I can limp to the kitchen by holding onto the walls and placing most of my weight on my unharmed leg.
Jase is busy, cracking eggs into a pan and flipping pieces of sizzling bacon. My stomach clenches again. I am positively starving. I collapse onto a stool at the breakfast bar, hauling my leg into the least painful position. Spying two coffee cups in front of me, I grab the handle of the closest one and drag it across the bench toward me. It is hot and bitter, a strong Columbian blend just like Mariana used to make, and I have to wonder what else Jase continues to do just like her.
I wonder if he thinks I look like her, too? If he’s been trying to place me since he laid eyes on me, or if he’s had me figured out as her taller, paler doppelganger all along?
“How’s the leg?” Jase asks as he butters toast on two plates.
I nod. “Alright. Thank you.”
He chuckles, and I wait for an explanation.
“You won’t be thanking me when you see the butcher job I made of sewing you up,” he says, sliding a fried egg onto each piece of toast.
I shrug, sipping my coffee. “It doesn’t matter.”
He surveys me intently as he finishes adding pieces of bacon to the plates, handing one to me. “It might make it hard to get a job in your line of work,” he says, aiming for casual but with a definite question behind his words. “After you leave, I mean.”
I almost choke on the piece of bacon I’ve swiped from my plate, my mouth full of delicious grease and salted meat.
“Let’s eat on the balcony,” he says, taking my plate back from me and walking over to the bank of glass windows that overlook Santa Monica bay.
He kicks open a sliding door with his foot and steps out to a terrace, large enough to hold a round table, two chairs, and a couple of potted plants.
I grab both coffees and go to walk, pain shooting up my leg. Jase hurries back to me and takes the coffees, setting them on the table with the food and zipping back to help me hobble to the table. With his help, I take a seat and breathe in the cool ocean air that drifts in from below us.
&nbs
p; Jase eats quickly, almost demolishing his plate before I’ve even picked up my fork, and afterwards sips on his coffee, looking studiously to the horizon and the turquoise water beneath it.
“You like views,” I say, the words out of my mouth before I can edit them or stop myself. “The roof, this balcony—seems like you’re always looking to something else.”
A smile tugs at the corners of his wide, sensual mouth, and he tears his gaze away from the water to look at me. “I like looking at beautiful things,” he says, his gaze lingering on me so that I blush and look away. “It helps me forget the ugliness of my life.”
“Is your life really that ugly?” I ask, and more than anything in the world, I want him to say no. I want him to say that he’s happy. But I can see on his face and hear in his words that he is not.
He chooses not to answer, instead gesturing to the apartment behind us. “This place used to belong to Dornan’s last obsession,” he says, his eyes dark and troubled.
I don’t say anything; just stare at him, waiting for him to elaborate.
He places his coffee cup down and scratches his thumbnail across the rim absent-mindedly.
“She’s dead now,” he finishes, his voice thick with finality.
“What happened?” I ask, afraid to hear his version.
“She was faithful to him, and the club, for ten years. And then she tried to leave,” Jase’s voice cracks, “and he killed her.”
I swallow the enormous lump in my throat, not allowing myself to imagine what life we could have had if they had succeeded. If we had gotten out. It would have been glorious.
“She was from Columbia,” Jase says. “She’d been here for years by the time I got here, but she still had this really thick accent. At first I could hardly understand what she was saying.” He laughs without a sound, but his tale is not a happy one. For a moment I wonder if she was alive as Dornan cut her head off. I’d put all of my money on yes.
It suddenly occurs to me, as I’m staring at his lips move, that we haven’t spoken about what happened last night at the wake. That kiss, so brief, but full of so much feeling, my heart skips a beat just remembering it. I want to press him about it, but I’m scared he’ll run again, so I leave it.
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