“I’m not one to blab about others. You know that,” she said.
“’Kay, just so we’re straight on that. I fuck her all the time—every chance I get. I’m not going to stop just ‘cause Dad won’t let you two get in each other’s pants. That’s super fucked up, by the way—his cock-blocking rules.” He smiled. “Behave, youngsters. No sex. It’s bad, bad, bad! You’ll get hepatitis C or worse! And that’s no joke,” he lectured in a mocking, deep voice and shook a paternal finger at her.
She laughed. “You’re such a dork.”
“Who’s a dork? Zach?” Adam asked, rejoining them.
“You know it!” Zach pounded his chest. “Is she gonna feed us, or what? I’m so hungry I could hunt and eat a bear.”
“You are a bear,” Mari said, shoving his shoulder.
The next thing she knew, the three of them were tussling on the floor and laughing like maniacs.
She got up after a few minutes, trying to catch her breath.
Samara walked by, stepped into the kitchen and started slamming pots, pans and cabinet doors.
“I better go shower,” Mari said, excusing herself.
“Yeah, you nasty ho—get that stank washed off!” Zach called after her, snickering. “I don’t know how Adam was able to bear your stench while you grubbed around with him in his sheets today.” He plugged his nose and waved his other hand in front of it.
She heard Zach and Adam go back at it, tackling each other and laughing hysterically.
Mari paced up the steps and then eventually took her time in the shower, getting cleaned up.
She kept smiling and bursting into inexplicable fits of giggles.
This felt like a real home now—like she really belonged.
So much so, that she didn’t wipe down the entire bathroom when she was done. Her shampoo bottle stayed in the shower along with her other toiletries. She even left her toothbrush and toothpaste in the medicine cabinet.
It was amazing how warm and gooey she felt inside. Each breath was filled with more peace.
Mari was humming as she finished dressing. She went back to the bathroom to grab her comb so she could go to dinner without a wet rat’s nest for hair.
She looked up and gasped.
Samara stood before her, knife in hand, shaking from head to toe. “You’re not welcome here,” she said through her bared teeth.
Jaaaaabbbbb . . . Sliiiiiice!
The chopping knife tore into Mari’s right side, and she was thrust on the floor, with Samara jumping on top of her. “You will leave!”
Chapter 8
Adam heard something heavy fall upstairs where Mari was. Had she dropped something and hurt herself?
Without a second thought, he ran upstairs as swiftly as he could. He slipped inside his sister’s unlocked door, and his jaw dropped right away. This couldn’t be possible! His eyes were opened so wide they hurt.
He stood in place, shaking.
“It’s your fault!” Samara hissed, and her hand flashed back behind her with a blade gripped in her fist, ready to rip Mari to shreds.
No!
Adam pounced, ramming his shoulder straight into Samara’s side like he used to do when he played football with Zach, but this time, he didn’t close his eyes.
He watched exactly where he was going.
His fist pummeled into her at the same time as his shoulders, and the side of his head indented the dry wall a little.
Samara rolled away, sprang to her feet, gave him a look of absolute, mortified horror and ran straight through the bathroom and out of her bedroom door.
He considered chasing after her when he heard the downstairs front door slam and his car start up. Samara was gone before he could holler for Zach or Dad to go after her.
Mari lay in a lump on the floor, blood all over her stomach.
“Mari! Mari! Are you okay?” He took her into his arms and put pressure where he could see it gushing out of her.
“It’s not a big deal. Are you okay? You hit the wall,” she said, breathy.
“Fine, fine. Don’t worry about me.”
Dad and Zach barreled through the bathroom, stopping abruptly and out of breath.
“What the hell happened?” his dad asked, voice strained.
“Samara . . . She attacked Mari with a kitchen knife. She left,” Adam said.
“Jesus, she needs stitches.” His dad was at her side already and examining her wound.
“I’ll carry her to your car,” Adam said. “Samara took mine.”
“Why would she do this?” Zach asked, shaking his head.
Adam grunted as he lifted Mari, and his dad opened the door so he could carry her downstairs.
Adam stumbled a few times, trying to go as fast as he could.
Zach’s hands would brace him when that happened.
“Stay behind in case Sammie comes back,” his dad told Zach.
His dad drove, and Adam never stopped stroking her gently with his quivering fingers, kissing her face all over and cooing to her, “I love you. You’ll be fine.”
He rocked her in his lap.
At the hospital, he never left her side.
“Marissa Cole?” a nurse called out with a clipboard and file in hand.
Adam jumped up and helped her stand. “Here!” he answered for her.
The nurse motioned for them to follow her through the double doors.
His dad walked behind them. Once Mari was settled into a bed, his dad left to go fill out the insurance information for her.
Adam climbed right up into the bed with her and kissed her cheek. “How bad does it hurt?”
“Not so bad,” she said, but her whole face was in a tight grimace.
“She needs pain medicine,” he told the nurse bustling around the little area they were stuffed into.
“Sir, you need to get out of her bed. You’re not allowed to be there,” the nurse answered.
“No.”
“Sir . . . I’m sorry, but it’s regulations.” The nurse pointed to the ground.
“I don’t care. I’m not leaving her,” he said.
“You don’t have to leave, but you can’t be in the bed.” She walked over to Mari and started inserting an IV needle.
“You’re doing that wrong. You shouldn’t have to search around for the vein like that. She has good veins. She used to do drugs, so it should be easy to insert it.” He slipped out of the bed, raced over to the nurse and swatted her hand away from Mari’s arm. “Here, let me . . . My dad showed me how to do this.” He had that IV in before the nurse could blink.
The nurse’s face went pale, and she left the area in a rush.
“Adam . . .” Mari reached out and stroked his cheek. “She’s probably out there getting security to throw you out. You can’t do stuff like that, sweetie. Not even your dad is allowed to do that, and he has a license to practice medicine.”
“They won’t throw me out.”
Her eyes softened. “Please, be brave. Go wait out in the car. Your dad will take care of me. I don’t want you to have an episode because of this stress. They’ll give me some stitches, and we’ll be right out.”
His lips trembled. “But I . . . I ca—”
“Go. We’ll be snuggled up against each other very soon. I love you. Wait for me in the car,” she said and stroked her hand down his cheek, then landed her palm on his chest. “Now.”
He kissed her, groaned and shuffled his feet in place, unable to leave.
But then he heard the nurse’s agitated voice approaching their area, and she was talking to some men.
He ran out of there, straight back out into the ER waiting area and slowed when he finally hit the pavement.
His dad had the keys. He turned to go back inside when a flash of black hair crossed his peripheral vision.
His whole body went rigid.
Samara walked straight up to him, her hands shoved in her pockets.
“You’re not gonna hurt her ever again!” he snarled.
“I know . . . I’m not here for her, I’m here for you.”
His hands fisted.
“You try to hurt me, and you know I’ll overpower you. You’re little, Sam. Too little to fight me.” His heart was beating so hard, shoving numbers into his head.
He pictured Mari bleeding, Sam attacking her, and the numbers fell to the ground, gone out of his head.
“I wanted to explain what happened,” she said softly, taking a few hesitant steps toward him.
“Explain why you hate her and you don’t want us together?” He snorted and rolled his eyes.
“Who always takes care of you, Adam? When Mom screwed up and gave you sodas, who was there? Me. When kids made fun of you or tricked you at school—it wasn’t Zach that rescued you, it was me. It was always me. When Dad’s too old to take care of you, I’ll be the one to do it.” She pulled her hands out of her pockets, and he flinched, his shoulders hunching up to his ears as he ducked.
There was nothing in her hands. She held her palms up like she was surrendering.
“You did nothing to help me or Mari when Tara and Kendra were saying awful things to me at that restaurant. They told me—”
Her whole face went wide and flashed with fear. “I’m sorry. I had to pay them to harass you both. I wanted Mari gone. She was hurting you, but you just couldn’t see it.”
He bit down on his tongue when his mouth slammed shut. “You what?”
She backed up, her face going pale. “I thought you . . . You said they told you—I thought you were saying you knew I told them to do that.”
His teeth clashed together, grinding loud, and his whole face was on fire as his fists tightened. “You paid them to hurt us?”
“I had to!” she cried.
“And what about Rory? Was he being paid, too?”
“Yeah—he didn’t want to do it, but I threatened him with a knife.” She moved to the side, getting a little closer to him in a sly way. He glared. “Mari would’ve found ways to humiliate you at school, so I found out who her enemies were and exploited them. It would’ve been another girl in a bathroom all over again, taking nude pictures of you, and me beating the shit out of her, slicing her scalp open and threatening to gut her if she came near you. I figured this was less bloody and painful for you and her. If Mari just would’ve been scared and left you alone . . .”
“I hate you!” he screamed, his chest puffed out, his fists and arms rigid behind his back as he leaned forward at the waist.
She flinched, jumped, and her whole face crumpled as tears rained from her eyes. “Don’t say that!”
“If you don’t leave now, I’m calling the police!”
She hesitated, but then suddenly bolted to the Mercedes parked a few spaces down. He could see her crying hysterically as she sped out of the parking lot, leaving him behind.
He slumped onto the back of the trunk of his dad’s car and covered his face with his hands as he sobbed.
“Samara . . . You’re bad! You’re so bad!” he wailed, stomping his feet and falling over into a heap of tears and pain. “I can’t like you.”
He stayed there, racked with pain, until his father and Mari finally came out and pulled him into the car to go home.
* * *
“Adam, I’m fine. It’s all okay,” Mari said, stroking his hair.
His head was in her lap, and he kept crying, his entire body shuddering with each breath.
“He’s scaring me,” she told his dad. “He’s not responding, and his eyes are kind of . . . glassy.”
“Keep talking to him. He’ll snap out of it once we’re home. You guys can go lie down, and Zach and I will see if we can track down Sammie.”
“She has his phone. I called it when he was out in the parking lot. She answered it, then hung up,” she said.
“I’ll be able to track her, then.”
Adam wrapped his arms around Mari’s legs. She flinched when it made her stitches pull for a second during his shifting movements.
It was gone a moment later, so she went back to stroking his hair and hummed for him. Maybe the numbers were crowding his head and he was unable to see or hear anything.
When they got home, Zach ran out. He carried Adam inside. Mari went upstairs before Zach and pulled down the covers in Adam’s bed.
Zach set him down. “Do you need anything?” he asked her.
“No. I’m fine. You can leave us now,” she replied, watching Adam’s sweet face relax.
She kicked off her shoes and socks, then slid into bed with him.
“Sweetie, tell me. Was it that scary for me to be in the hospital? Did something bad happen to you in a hospital once?”
He blinked and licked his dry lips. “No. I like hospitals. I used to want to be a doctor like my dad, but . . .”
She combed her fingers through the hair by his temple and ran her fingertips behind his ear. His eyes relaxed and closed slowly.
“Sam . . . She was in the parking lot.”
Mari bit her lip, and her muscles tightened, spasming a little from the pain to her side.
“She told me she . . .” He coughed, and his hands went to his stomach. “She said”—those hands fisted—“she sent Rory, Kendra and Tara after us to split us apart. She thought you would hurt me, so she was protecting me. She paid them.”
Mari’s gut clamped down so hard, bile moved up her throat, and she spit up in her mouth. She had to swallow it back down.
His eyes closed, and his head lolled from side to side, as far as the pillow would let him go.
“I told her I hate her and to leave or I’d call the police,” he said, his expression distant.
“It’s okay, Adam. But I . . . I think we need to tell all of this to Dad.”
He nodded and relaxed even more with an exhale into the bed.
Her phone rang in her pocket.
She pulled it out and didn’t look at it before answering, “Yeah?”
“Tell him I’m so sorry. And tell him goodbye for me, and I love him,” Samara said.
The phone line went dead, and Mari lobbed the phone across the room until it hit the wall and crashed to the floor.
“She’s gone,” she told him.
“Good.”
They wrapped their arms around each other, stared into each other’s eyes and every few breaths, kissed until all the sadness and pain lessened.
* * *
The next day at school, they both felt off. It was strange wondering where Samara was, if she’d come back and what she would do once she reappeared. Would she attack again? Mari was constantly on the alert, keeping an eye open for his sister’s return.
Adam found out Samara’s boyfriend’s name by hacking into her emails.
At lunch, he and Mari went looking for him.
“Do you think he’ll tell us where she is if he even knows?” she asked him.
“I don’t know, but I have to try,” he said.
“We don’t have a clue what he looks like.” She set a hand on her hip and cocked her head.
She saw the back of Kendra’s head, walked up to her and nudged her chair.
“Before you turn around and say something dumb, I just wanna say I hope the money was worth it. Samara is gone,” Mari said, close to her ear.
Kendra gasped and pushed away with her chair, the legs scraping the ground with a squeal.
“I’m so sorry, Mari. I . . . Rory told me she had a knife at his crotch, ready to castrate him. What was I supposed to do? I’m not some street fighter, and I was afraid of what she might do to me and my cousin.” Kendra looked at Adam, then averted her eyes.
“I don’t wanna talk about that,” Mari said. “I want to know if you know who Daniel Robertson is?”
“Who doesn’t? He’s about as hot as they come . . . Well, you know, with the exception of Rory and these freak Latham brothers.”
“They’re not freaks,” Mari said.
Adam glared at Kendra.
Kendra rolled her eyes. “I’m not talking ab
out his . . .” she paused and rubbed the back of her neck “. . . issues. I mean, the fact that all three of them were all in the same grade. That never happens.”
“Doesn’t matter. Tell me what I need to know, or a knife will seem like a baby’s rattle to you,” Mari said.
“Yeah, uh . . .” Kendra looked around the cafeteria. “Over there. The tall one with the wavy dark hair and crooked nose. That’s him.” She pointed over by the corner window. Three girls and two guys sat at the table with him.
He was sitting there with a glum look on his face, leaving his food untouched.
“Thanks,” Adam said and took Mari’s hand, tucking it up against her hip. He liked having it there now.
Mari wondered if it was some kind of way to protect her wound.
That would be just like him to look out for her in that way.
“Does this make us even? You’re okay with me, now, right?” Kendra asked.
“Not even close. Maybe if you paid Adam the money Samara gave you and stayed away from us indefinitely, then I’d say, yeah, we’re good,” Mari said.
Kendra swallowed and frowned.
Mari left without another word.
She led the way over to Daniel, ready to kick the hell out of him if he kept quiet as to where Samara was and what was going on with her.
Mari carefully sat herself down on a seat right next to Daniel.
“Excuse me, who’re you?” one of the girls asked at the table.
“I’m the bitch that’s gonna tear his head off if he doesn’t tell me where Samara Latham is,” Mari said.
Adam squeezed into the seat next to her.
“And why should I tell you that?” Daniel asked.
“Please . . . She’s my sister. I only want to know if she’s okay and has somewhere to stay with food and water,” Adam replied, his voice pleading and gentle.
“She’s fine. She stayed with me last night, but she left this morning. She said she was leaving the country to find her mom.” Daniel’s eyes softened at Adam when he noticed how sad Adam became at this news.
“I’ve been looking for our mom—can’t find her no matter how hard I try,” Adam told him.
“She said she was pretty sure she knew where to find her.” Daniel extended his hand. Adam didn’t take it. “I’m sorry to hear you’re mad at Samara, but it’s nice to meet y—”
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