by Mary Martel
What You Deserve
A Gem Stone Book
Mary Martel
Contents
Untitled
Also by Mary Martel
1. A Dead Girl’s Name
2. Where’s Your Boyfriend
3. Consider It Done
4. It’s Been A Long Day
5. Kick Them To The Curb
6. Worth Every Penny
7. We Got That In Common
8. A Gross Invasion Of Her Privacy
9. Boozing And Sad, Sorry Ways
10. Bad News, My Brother
11. The Titty Bar
12. Make Me Bleed
13. Chicken Shit
14. I Couldn’t Hang With This Girl
15. Rich Girl Pussy
16. Amara, Riley’s Mother
17. Girl, Byyyeeeee
18. You Think She’d Pick Me Over You
19. I Want Her To Watch
20. Rich Girl Problems, Man
21. Maybe I Should Get A Dog
22. Put Me In Rotation
23. Dead Girls Couldn’t Feel Anything
24. I’ll Be Back, Ginny
Keep In Touch!
Untitled
Untitled
About the Author
Copyright © Mary Martel 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Mary Martel, except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.
1st Edition Published: September 2020
Cover Design by: EVE Graphic Design
All Rights Reserved: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction in whole or in part, without express written permission by Mary Martel.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Created with Vellum
Also by Mary Martel
Ariel Kimber Series:
Brothers of the Flame
Love Potion
Blood Magic
The Ties That Bind
Tyson (Novella)
Good Witch, Bad Witch (Short Story)
Black as Midnight
Rain (Novella)
Dash (Novella)
Unforgotten Family
The Dollhouse Series:
No Mercy
Lost Faith
Dark Beginnings
Broken Pieces
Last Sins
Willow
Mercy Motorcycle Club:
Pretty Ugly
Pretty Complicated
Pretty Painful
Two Princes:
My King
The River Ash Wolf Pack:
Ashes
Embers
Kings of Torment Motorcycle Club:
Killing Time
Villainous Retelling:
Vanity
Co-writes:
Zombie Queen
What You Deserve Blurb
One half of a whole.
That’s what I always thought I’d be.
Being an identical twin, I always believed I had that to rely on. I thought wrong.
Losing half of that whole left me feeling like I had nothing.
It crippled me.
Almost destroyed me.
And left me with an aching heart, a slew of questions, and a need for revenge so strong I could almost taste it on my tongue.
My name is Gem Stone. My twin’s name was Gin. We might have looked like the same person, but we were not. Divorce and a disgusting mother forced us apart at a young age, and a horrible family kept us that way.
Still, we remained best friends—or so I thought.
When you lose the other half to your whole, the other half of your soul, you lose everything.
But I wasn’t ready to give up everything, even when I felt like I was dead inside.
My twin kept a secret from me. One that changed everything and made me look at her in a whole different light.
I ache for answers to my questions, and I find salvation where I shouldn’t. Mostly, I crave some type of vengeance. Something, anything, to make me feel better about what I’ve lost.
What You Deserve is a 100,000+ word m/f/m contemporary book for readers 18 and up.
Chapter One
A Dead Girl’s Name
Gem
I once shared a womb with someone. Obviously I had no memories of it, but the time spent there before my birth into the world had definitely marked me in a way where I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I would carry it with me forever.
My twin, Gin, had been perfect. Incredibly beautiful in a way where everyone noticed her no matter whether she’d done her hair and makeup that day or not and had raggedy old sweats on. Believe me, I would know because we were identical and people looked at me exactly like that. I knew just how pretty I was and often used it to my advantage.
Now, Gin on the other hand? She had been far too kind and sweet to ever do anything like that. And, oftentimes, she had chastised and lectured me about my behavior, even though she hadn’t been around to witness it with her own two eyes. Somehow, she’d always known when I’d done something bad or acted like a horrible person. She always called me out on it. She’d said it was a twin thing and I should know better than to try and keep anything from her.
The hole in my chest where that little piece of her soul I’d inherited in the womb, but was now missing seeing as she’d taken it with her when she died, ached like a motherfucker. I had never felt such excruciating pain before, and I wasn’t entirely certain I could survive this festering wound. I didn’t think anyone could.
I looked to the people sitting stoically beside me on our front row of cheap, folding metal chairs and inwardly seethed.
My mother and my father sat beside me, side by side, as if it were a normal thing for the two of them to be next to each other. As if they were still a couple. As if they didn’t absolutely hate the other’s guts with a passion that most people would find terrifying.
They had both forced their significant others and their other children and the children they collected through their other relationships to sit in the rows of seats behind us, even though there was still plenty of room left in the front row for some of them to fill. I had no idea what point they were trying to make, but I thought they both looked like serious assholes. Like usual.
I wanted so badly to be able to curl my lip and sneer at them, letting out some of the disgust I felt toward them. I wanted to scream and rage in their faces to let out some of this anger I had building up inside me. I wanted to hit something. Or, better yet, I wanted to hit someone.
I sat on the very first chair at the end of the row. My father had been smart enough to sit in the chair between my mother and me, so she sat in the chair on his other side.
I despised my mother and everything about the woman. My dad I could take or leave, but that woman was akin to the devil himself. Unless your name was Gin. She’d treated my sister like gold. It was the only decent thing the woman had ever done in her life, and as much as I loved my sister, it still wasn’t enough to make me dislike the woman any less.
When Gin and I were born, our mother insisted upon getting a nanny for us because she claimed there was no possible way for her to take care of two babies at a time and do everything else that she had to get done throughout the day. The woman had never even once
had a job and had a trust fund from great-grandparents that made it so she’d never have to work a day in her life. Her grandparents had left her with an even bigger inheritance and several properties all over the world.
Then, when her parents had died young, she’d really struck it big. As their only child and heir, they had left her everything. Their rather large estate, properties scattered all over the world, all of their assets, and every single dollar they’d had between the two of them. Plus their life insurances, which had paid out a pretty penny.
She was beyond loaded and had been since birth. The only upside to this I could see for me was that there had been contingencies in place for her children and money put aside for them. Which made me loaded too.
My dad had money too. Maybe not quite as much as her, but he was still filthy rich and working hard at making himself even more so. I had two trust funds from his family, a hefty weekly allowance, and a black American Express card that allowed me to buy whatever, whenever I wanted to.
So they could afford the nanny, and instead of one they went big and sprung for two.
Gin and I were eight when my mother discovered that my father had been sleeping with not just the one nanny, but the other one as well, and had been since soon after they’d moved into our house. It had been worse than she’d thought because those two hadn’t been the only women he’d been having an ongoing affair with. A PI had been hired and the whole dirty thing had been exposed.
My mother was not a woman you fucked over and got away with it. She felt like her money gave her power and a right to everything and anything her little black heart desired.
My father and the nannies got kicked out on their asses. Then she did one better. She threw my eight-year-old ass out there with him. And it hadn’t been the last fuck you to the man either. Oh no, she’d used their children to continually stick it to him all the time. But, what was worse was she was sticking it to her children right along with him, and although it had to have sucked for the man, it almost destroyed Gin and me.
We kicked and we fought and we screamed and we cried. Still, the woman tore us away from each other simply to get one over on my dad. She tried to make it so we couldn’t have contact at all, but that backfired on her terribly.
You could not separate one half from its other and expect them both to be whole. There was no fucking way.
And my mother had always had a soft spot for Gin. She claimed she was the quieter of the two of us, the better behaved, and, if you could believe this shit, the prettier one. Again, did I not say we were identical? The bitch was insane. Though, if I was being honest here, I thought she was quieter and better behaved than me too, but not prettier. If Gin were alive, she’d agree with me wholeheartedly.
At eight years old, all communication between the two of us had been cut off. We weren’t even allowed to talk on the phone and we certainly weren’t allowed to see each other.
My dad had moved the two of us, plus nannies, three hours away from home, and it felt like I’d had my heart ripped out and left behind with Gin.
Four months later when Christmas rolled around and both my mother and Gin showed up at our front door, I found out that the time apart had taken its toll on poor Gin worse than it had me. Her usually shiny blonde hair had been lank and unclean, as if she hadn’t bothered to brush it or wash it in a very long time. She’d lost so much weight her normally pretty, girlie clothes hung off of her like a potato sack. She had dark purple circles under her eyes, and there was a deadness to them that frightened me so much I almost fainted from the scare of seeing her that way.
My father had been appalled and righteously angry. I had been horrified and immediately burst into tears. My mother had been determined and almost as angry as my father had been.
My beautiful twin had stopped talking. Stopped eating. Stopped bathing. She had basically shut down entirely, and no amount of therapy or hospital stays my mother had forced on her had worked out and she’d only gotten worse. My mother had easily figured out the cause for Gin’s deteriorated state, given the fact she hadn’t stopped crying and complaining about wanting to see me up until the point where she’d stopped speaking entirely.
We might have been identical, but even at eight, Gin had proven to be way smarter than me because she’d orchestrated the whole thing and I hadn’t even considered duping my father. She’d played our mom and it had worked.
We were able to see each other after that. With conditions and constrictions, of course. We got to spend three weeks of the summer together, but we had to spend them at one of our mother’s properties in Wyoming, a horse ranch that had been in her family for generations. It never mattered to Gin or me where we had to go. Just so long as we were together, we were happy.
We got to spend one weekend a month together in a house our mother had purchased halfway between where the two of us lived so we could meet in the middle. And we could talk on the phone twice a week, it didn’t matter which day just so long as there weren’t other people around when we made our phone calls.
We hadn’t been allowed to tell our friends about each other, and it was almost as if our mother had turned our relationship into a dirty little secret she was too ashamed to allow the world to find out about.
My father had raged about this, but after a while, he simply accepted the fact he never got to see one of his children and the daughter he did have only got to see her twin once a month. Eventually, he’d scraped the nannies off and found new women to occupy his time and move into our home so he could pretend they watched over me, while everyone knew they were really there to sit on his cock instead whenever he required them to do so. In my book, this had been another strike against the man. Not that I cared about who he chose to sleep with, I didn’t care about that at all. I cared about spending time with my sister and not much else. After a while, he seemed to not care about her much at all unless it was something he could use to bitch at my mother about whenever he talked to her. Otherwise, he didn’t usually speak about Gin at all.
Oh yeah, I definitely hated him. I hated both of them.
That was all my sister and I were allowed to have. We weren’t allowed to share with friends, boyfriends, teachers, anyone. It was like my mother had decided we’d become each other’s dirty little secrets, and since she decided and her word was law in our unhappy little family, we were all forced to suffer through it.
I didn’t know how Gin managed to pull it off, because she was Ms. Popularity and had so many different friends and a longtime boyfriend that she claimed to have been in love with. I didn’t know how she managed to keep the two worlds separate, but somehow she pulled it off spectacularly.
For me, it had always been a lot easier to hide because I never really had anyone to hide it from.
I had one friend and he was weird as fuck, hated almost everything and everyone besides me, and tended to refer to the human race as rats without tails.
I met him when I was thirteen, angry and sitting on the curb beside a dumpster behind a gas station. I was chain smoking cigarettes I’d swiped off my driver before hiding from him since he’d parked out front by a gas pump and ran in the store really quick. I heard him yelling for me, pissed when he returned to the car and found me missing. He’d been my driver long enough to know that he just had to stay in place and wait it out. I’d return when I was good and ready to.
That was where Franklin Nines found me. He was three years older than me, so skinny he looked in danger of blowing away if a strong gust of wind swept by, and dressed in a white long-sleeved button up, black dress pants, and sharp shiny dress shoes. He had huge, black-rimmed glasses perched on his nose that made his eyes seem even larger in his face. He was so shy it was sometimes painful to be around him. He dressed the same way every single day, he never ever cursed in public when he did go out—he cursed like a motherfucker when in private—and he blushed as easily as an innocently naive virgin, which I knew he was not.
He’d long since beefed up a good deal bec
ause he liked to work out. He said it took away some of his anger and was the best form of therapy he’d ever experienced. He’d grown into his personality as well, and the shyness had long since faded away and been replaced with boldness and hostility—never toward me—that I often found astounding. He rarely traded the glasses in for contacts and I would be a liar if I said he wasn’t goddamn attractive, because he was!
Somehow, someway, he’d become my very best friend and outside of Gin he was really my only friend. It hurt me right now that he couldn’t be sitting here beside me holding my hand. He’d never met Gin in person, but I had never kept her a secret from him like I was supposed to. I told him everything. That was what best friends did.
I hadn’t dared ask him to come because I didn’t think it would have gone over well with my mother.
I turned my head to the side to glare at her even though my father had warned me about doing such things in the car on the way over here. I paused when movement coming up the aisle caught my attention.
It was him, the boyfriend. And the supposed best friend. And a whole gaggle of Gin’s other friends. I knew who most of them were, my sister had shown me pictures of the part of her life I hadn’t been allowed to be a part of. Just as how I’d shown her pictures of Franklin, some of them I’d taken for the sole purpose of being able to share with her.