“Thank you,” I say to the quiet room, and to the boy who took me on the Ferris wheel on our first date and held my hand tight. The boy I was always meant to be with. How did I ever think he could be capable of killing my father in anything other than mercy and desperation?
“What for?” he asks, rocking gently from side to side, his chin resting on top of my head, his arms clutching at me like he’s drowning and I’m the life raft. Which is rather ironic, really, given what’s just happened.
“For ending his suffering,” I say, my voice cracking under the burden of the truth. “For making sure he didn’t die alone.”
FOUR
The relief, the embrace, is held for several minutes before we break apart.
Because there’s something else. There’s always something else.
“Are you…are you all right?” Jase asks, his eyes roaming my face. They drop to my neck, my arms, looking for damage I suppose. I turn my arm, too late, and he shoots a hand out, clamping it around my wrist.
He stares at me and there seems to be a thousand unanswered questions in his eyes. What do I say? What do I do? I cannot bear the shame of what I am, of what I have become. Of what Dornan has caused me to be.
I have become my mother. An addict. A junkie. Mere hours ago, I sat and let someone put a needle into my flesh, to push forth a substance my baby—our baby—shouldn’t be subjected to.
I am a terrible person, because instead of thinking about how to stop, I am already thinking about how to get more, how to hide this, because I. Can’t. Stop.
I feel like if I have to stop, I will die.
Jase turns my arm over, exposing my scarred flesh, the tender skin where veins run underneath like rivers and tributaries, like a great system of influx and outflow. I shudder as he presses his thumb to the punctures in my skin, some new, some old, all telling a story best left unsaid.
“What is this?” Jase murmurs, his eyes hovering between my eyes and the telltale track marks, the story of my destruction. I might be free, but I still belong to Dornan.
In this moment, I feel like I will always belong to Dornan Ross.
“He gave me drugs,” I say softly, casually almost. Don’t let him see how bad this is. Don’t give him another burden to bear.
“What drugs?” he growls.
I lick my lips nervously, feeling dry, chapped skin under my tongue. I am a mess. I must look like some sort of gross caricature of my former self, all bony and dull, pale and vacant.
The word heroin is on the tip of my tongue. I almost tell him. It’s ready behind my teeth waiting for breath to make it alive. Heroin.
But I am a coward. I remember my mother. How tragic her existence was when I was a child. How nobody, not even my father, wanted her around because of the way the drugs turned her into a monster.
I remember the pity in my father’s eyes. The frustration. The way he ended up dying for another woman because the first one he loved destroyed herself every single day until there was nothing left.
I don’t want to lie to Jase. I love him.
But he’s all I’ve got, him and this baby inside me, and I cannot become my mother.
I cannot risk him leaving me. Not after everything.
“Antibiotics,” I say automatically. It’s not a lie, really. They did give me that huge disgusting needle full of antibiotics once, to stop my infected stomach from turning gangrenous.
“For what?” he asks, looking dubious.
I look down. See that I still haven’t changed out of this blood-spattered dress.
I pull my dress over my head, letting it drop to the ground beside my bare feet. I’m naked save for my panties, a scarred, disfigured girl who was too stupid to listen to his warning all those months ago.
Don’t leave like this. He’ll kill you.
Dornan didn’t kill me, but he might as well have.
Jase inhales sharply, his eyes stuck on my midsection.
“How—what the hell happened?”
My eyes burn but I keep my voice steady. I can do this. I can be numb.
“He didn’t like the way I covered up his marks with the tattoo,” I whisper. “He kept cutting until it was all gone.”
“With a knife?” Jase asks. He’s disgusted. Disgusted by me. And I deserve it.
I nod dejectedly.
I want to ask him, Will you still love me? Even with all my scars?
He seems to read my mind. “Jesus, Julz,” he says, pulling me toward him again. He hugs me like I might break, like I’m made entirely of glass, and if he squeezes too hard I’ll shatter into pieces, gone forever. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, baby.”
“I should have listened to you,” I say tonelessly, letting him pull me closer. I can’t even ask him, I’m so afraid. I don’t want to know if the sight of me hurts him. It hurts me enough that we even have to go through this. It’s my fault. I’m the one who left, who stormed out of his apartment and back into the arms of the devil himself. It’s my fault.
He slides one hand into my hair, letting his thumb brush up and down my cheek. His other hand rests in the small of my back. I am ruined.
“Tell me,” he says softly. “Tell me about the baby.”
A light in the dark. Something to hope for.
A baby. Our baby.
A tiny sliver of hope - our beacon in this, the darkest of nights.
FIVE
After I tell Jase the few details I know—the test was positive, the baby was moving, I had morning sickness when I woke up in the dungeon, and according to my basic math Jase is the father—we both curl up on the bed, him behind me with a protective arm slung across me. It feels wonderful, albeit totally foreign. In the night I turn onto my back, his arm still heavy across my ribs, and I study every inch of his face. I watch the steady inhalation of each breath, the way his lips occasionally move subtly, and his slow exhalation. With light fingertips I trace his eyebrows, his eyelids. His cheekbones. Let my touch come to rest on his full lips.
And by then, of course, he’s cracked an eyelid, giving me a sleepy grin. He hasn’t been sleeping, after all. He moves his hand to cover my stomach, his touch gentle against my marred flesh, and I have to bite my lip to stop myself from bursting into tears again. Not because it hurts, because it feels good. He’s really here, with me, and maybe, just maybe, things are going to be okay after all.
And then we have to go and fuck it all up, this fragile peace. He shifts beside me, propping himself up on an elbow, pushing tangled hair out of my eyes.
“Julz,” he says to me. “I love you, okay?” There is a but in his tone.
“But?” I supply the word for him.
“But, the baby could still be his. Right?”
Sucker punch, right in the gut. Fuck you, Dornan Ross.
I want to die. I push Jase’s hand away, devastated, and turn onto my side, getting as far away from him as I can. Our feet are still touching, tangled together underneath the covers and I angrily kick his away from where they’ve been resting against mine.
I don’t have any right to be angry. I know I’m being a fucking diva, honestly, and even as I’m reacting like this, curling inward, drawing back inside my shell, I hear the voice of reason inside my mind. He has every right to ask you that question after the things you’ve done.
“You’re mad at me?” he asks me, seemingly bewildered. “Don’t you think I deserve to know? Don’t you know I’d be by your side no matter what?”
Inside my rational mind, I’m ninety percent sure Dornan didn’t father the baby. The dates are all wrong for that, and I had a period after the last time I slept with him. Plus, I’d been on the pill the entire time I was screwing Dornan—just that reality revolts me, the depths I’ve sunk to to procure my endgame—and I stopped taking them, purely by accident, after leaving them at Emilio’s compound when the bombs blew. And then, twice, Jase and I had had sex, unprotected, no pills, no barriers, nothing. The baby is Jason’s.
But that ten percent of
maybe it could be Dornan’s chews at me, gnaws and snaps until I’m a mess of tears again.
I explain these details to Jase, through my tears, feeling like the biggest whore in the entire world for even having to explain in the first place. God, what have I become in the name of vengeance? I am so utterly, utterly ashamed.
I vowed at the beginning I’d do whatever it took to bring Dornan and his sons down, but to what end? Is it worth this, here, right now? I don’t think so.
“It sounds solid,” Jase says dubiously, as he cradles me in the darkness. “No mater what happens, Julz, you’re out. You’re here. Everything is going to be okay.”
I clear my throat and ask the question I’ve been dreading.
“What do I do?” I ask, wiping the tears from my cheeks. “What if it turns out, by some shitty stroke of fate, that it came from him?”
Jase would leave me. He’d leave me, and I’d be all alone carrying the baby of the devil himself.
“Hey,” Jase soothes. “I came from him, remember? And I’m okay. I’m on your side. It doesn’t matter.”
But it does matter, I can see it on his face, even in the dim light thrown from the half-moon outside. He’s being amazing, telling me all the things I need to hear, but I know that deep down, it does matter to him.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” I whisper in the dark. Panic rises again inside me, threatening to strangle me.
“You have other options. Even where we’re going. If you don’t want to keep going with this, I would understand.”
Abortion. That’s what he meant. A vision of Elliot materialized in my mind, of a dented tin bowl that I held in front of me as I puked my guts up, while he held my hair back. What do you want to do? he’d asked me, and I had asked him to just make it all go away. How naive I had been, thinking it would make a difference. Because nothing ever really went away. I just traded one nightmare for another, one shitty set of circumstances for the next. I aborted the baby that had somehow, tragically, been created as I was held down and systematically raped, but I was still trapped in hell even after I stopped bleeding weeks later. And I mean, I’m glad I did it, I don’t regret the termination I had six years ago after what Dornan and his sons did to me—but I can’t go there again. Not again.
“I can’t go through that again,” I blurted out.
“You mean, a termination?” Jase asks gently.
I nod. “You think—you think it’s going to make everything better, that it’s going to take the pain away, but it doesn’t. It didn’t change what they did. Nothing does.”
Well, one thing does. Where is Luis? I want him to tap into my vein and blow all the pain and sorrow away with one press of the plunger. I can’t believe I’m thinking like this! Like my fucking mother. I suddenly have the violent urge to smash something.
“Let’s just wait until we get to see someone,” he says, and he’s trying to be reassuring, but to me, riddled with insecurity and need, it sounds more like, let’s see if I leave you or not.
I turn away from him for the last time, and I close my eyes.
“Julz?” he asks again. I don’t answer. I have nothing left to say.
I lie there awake for the entire night. Jase eventually gets the hint and leaves the room, closing the door softly. And after he goes, I sit up in bed, watching the water buffet the small round window to my side, waiting for morning, and for Luis.
I promise myself I’ll tell Jase about the heroin. Soon.
SIX
I don’t get a morning visit from Luis, and I’m starting to itch again. It sucks, this dependency Dornan has created in me. The lazy method he had used to sedate me, to force me into obedience, because he couldn’t be bothered tying me up or locking the door? And now, I am a heroin addict. I am addicted to the same drug that ruined my mother and destroyed our chance at being a real family. The drug that made my father virtually a single parent. The drug my mother traded me for, a bag of smack for her fifteen-year-old daughter. I would take Elliot’s gun and hold it to somebody’s head right now if it meant I’d get some more of what I need. Luis knows, he must. He nods silently at me when I come above deck, finally showered and kitted out in the jeans and loose black T-shirt he brought me last night, the flip flops on my feet two sizes too big, bright red, and feeling very, very strange since I haven’t worn anything on my feet in three months.
The tiny jetty that we dock at has obviously been chosen for a reason. It’s in the middle of absolutely nowhere by the looks of things, flanked by a tiny strip of sand, some rocks, and densely packed jungle beyond. The guys grab the bags—I don’t have a single possession to my name, except the bloodstained dress I threw in the trash after my shower—so I linger on the back of the boat, watching and waiting without making a sound.
The T-shirt sleeves are long enough to cover up my track marks. Thank heavens for small mercies.
I watch the three guys and wonder how they even found each other. I tell myself I must ask them one day soon, to tell me the story of how they even met. How did Elliot and Jase get beyond their abject hatred for one another, their desire to actually kill the other, to end up working together? I mean, they’re actually talking to each other and shit. It’s insane. And Luis fits in like they’ve all known each other a lifetime, in the way they communicate, the way they operate as a team.
I suddenly feel very out of place as the lone damsel in distress. It doesn’t alarm me, it just occurs to me that I’m in their space now. Funny that. And yet without me, without the things I’ve done in the name of revenge, they might have never met each other at all.
The boys finish loading their bags and things into the back of a tan-colored jeep, and gesture for me to get off the boat. Luis hands the owner a thick wad of cash, something that startles me out of my daydream.
Money. My money, the money my father and Mariana spirited away for me all those years ago, just in case the worst happened. Which of course, it did. Stolen cash, hidden carefully away, in a collection of bogus business accounts across several tax havens. It occurs to me I might actually need it soon. I mean, we’re in the middle of fucking nowhere, and I’m assuming we’re hiding out for a good long while. That requires money, and I need my stash of documents in the L.A. safety-deposit box before I can access any of that money. I’ll need to see a doctor sometime soon, we need somewhere to stay…I can already see the dollars piling up in my frazzled mind.
Right now, I am the poorest rich girl around.
Jase sticks a hand out to me and I grab on, letting him haul me off the boat and onto the thin jetty. It looks ancient, rickety enough to wash away in the next tide. Luis is already in the front passenger seat of the jeep parked at the end of the jetty, a caramel-colored dude who looks to be in his mid-thirties in the driver’s seat. I approach cautiously, my trust in humanity as a whole seriously eroded, wondering if this guy is legit. I study his face from behind my thick sunglasses—oversized drugstore cheapies to shield my basement-eyes from the glare, thanks Luis—and notice the two share the same nose and jawline.
“Where are we?” I ask Luis as I slide into the back seat. Jase slides in behind me, Elliot on the opposite side. Great. Because sitting between the two men I love isn’t going to be awkward at all.
Sandwiched in the middle, I look to Luis, who’s busy texting somebody. He drops his phone into his cup holder once he’s finished and turns around. “We’re in my country, bebé,” he says, winking at me. “Welcome to Colombia.”
As the driver throws the car into gear and burns rubber, I take a deep, steadying breath as a dense jungle whizzes past us.
As I think, we are a long, long way from Venice Beach.
SEVEN
Crammed between Jason Ross and Elliot McRae. In other circumstances, what a delicious sandwich that would be, but with our reality, it’s just fucking weird. Elliot tried to kill Jase. And Jase loathes Elliot. Yet here we are, the three Musketeers and me, with Luis’s older version driving us god only knows where. After about an hour
, we make it out of the remote jungle and onto a sealed road.
We don’t stay on the road for long, five minutes if we’re lucky, and then we’re pulling into another dirt stretch that leads up a hill and to a small stucco house. It looks like a dirty brown box, sitting there in the midst of tall trees and dense vegetation, but to me it is positively luxurious. If it’s got running water, that’s a plus.
Inside is just as drab, chipped laminate furniture and beds that sag in the middle. I couldn’t care less if I tried. I am out of the dungeon, finally.
As we get into the house, Luis directs me to a bedroom at the far end of the hall. I fix the most pleading look I can muster onto my face, and he grins, shaking his head.
“Five minutes, bebé.”
Before I can protest, he disappears, back in the direction of the car, and the boys.
I enter the bedroom, my nose immediately twitching at the dust. This house looks like it was once lived in, but it hasn’t been inhabited for some time. Thick dust coats the windowsills, a small dresser shoved up against one wall. Even the floral bedspread that covers the double bed looks like it used to be a brighter color, until the dust grayed it out. I feel like that right now. Dull. Grayed out.
It’s hot here, a humid kind of air that sticks to my skin. We mustn’t be that far from the ocean, because I still smell salt in the air that hangs around me, heavy and oppressive.
I don’t have any possessions with me. Nothing to weigh me down, nothing I am attached to. I float above the dark carpet like a ghost, my feet only barely touching the ground beneath me, my movements not making a single noise. It is unnerving, this silence. In the three months I was in the basement—the dungeon, whatever you want to call that hellhole—I’d grown accustomed to the noises. The dripping of pipes that must have intersected above my roof, letting me know whenever water flowed through the mansion Emilio had called home before Luis blew his brains out. The scraping sound, several times a day, that marked a key in the door - somebody bringing me food…or something worse. Bringing me pain, if it was Dornan visiting.
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