by Kyanna Skye
“No matter what she had to do,” Erika said, tears gathering in her eyes. “She made sure we were free.”
“But she was still a thief,” Lucas said. “How much easier, and how much of a better life she could have had if she had stayed here with me? And she would have watched your brother grow up. She took the relationship you could have had with him away from you.” He lifted the gun. “You’re no better than she is.”
Alec and Kiefer were closing in on the barn when a shot rang out in the silence.
The barn doors were closed, but not locked. Kiefer grabbed the edge of the door and threw it open as Alec darted inside.
The open door allowed in a flood of moonlight. All that Alec could see was a man standing in front of him with a gun, and Erika’s form on the ground, still partially tied to a chair. He wanted to go to Erika, make sure she was alright. She wasn’t moving, and for all he knew, she was unconscious or dead. He fell back on his training. Neutralize the threat, then treat the victim.
He aimed at the man and pulled the trigger.
Chapter 9
One Month Later
Erika stood on the balcony of Alec’s house with a cup of coffee in one hand. His backyard had an excellent view of the hills and the city below. It had become a habit of hers to get up early enough to watch the sunset while she drank her cup of coffee.
She had been living at his house for the better part of the month. At the time she hadn’t much say in the decision. She’d been lucky. Lucas tried to shoot her, and she had lifted an arm to protect herself; an instinctual movement but it had saved her life.
Lucas himself was not so fortunate. Alec shot him in the chest. Doctors had been able to save him, but he wasn’t doing well. While he was expected to survive, he was also facing serious charges. He was the head of an international ring of thieves, after all. While he was in the hospital, his wife Martie had gone to the police with his laptops and his files, at least a decade’s worth of proof of his criminal activities. The police had questioned Erika as well and given her immunity.
Because her arm was in a cast (which according to her doctor, would be for six weeks) she recommended that Erika stays with someone who could help her out. Alec, of course, was happy to volunteer. The first week after she got out of the hospital was ridiculous. She had to figure out how to do everything with one hand. After she figured out how to do things on her own she refused him helping her. What she hadn’t expected how much she enjoyed living with him. They were going to have to talk about what they were going to do once her arm was healed. She was going to have to admit that she would miss him once she went back home to her apartment.
Rick had been by a lot too. When he came they would sit and talk. Mostly they were filling in the stories about each other’s younger lives which they had missed out on. But there were things in the present to discuss, like the new woman in his life. They even talked about Alec and how she was beginning to understand what she felt for him was not a passing thing.
“He’s a good man, you know,” Rick told her. “You could do a lot worse, kiddo.”
“Are you supposed to like him?” Erika teased. “Isn’t it against the big brother code?”
“You picked one of my best friends,” Rick laughed. “What were the odds I wouldn’t like him?”
Erika had just finished her coffee. She put the cup down on the table and found to see Alec standing behind her. He leaned in the doorway, arms across his bare chest. He was only wearing pajamas, and those there thin enough to reveal all the masculine lines of his body. She couldn’t help but smile. Her man was beautiful and she never got tired of seeing him naked or with as little clothing as possible.
“Morning, baby,” he said and pulled her into his arms.
“Morning,” Erika smiled. She was looking forward to being able to hold him with both arms again, but for the time being, she could at least squeeze him with one. She reached behind him and pinched his ass.
“Hey,” he chuckled. “Don’t make me tickle you, woman.”
“That’s no fair,” she batted her eyes at him. “I can’t defend myself properly.”
“Mmmmm,” he said. “If you say so.” He bent down and gave her a long, deep kiss. He held her tight against him and she felt his hardness pressing against the fabric of his clothing.
“Why don’t you come back to bed, honey,” he whispered lustily.
Erika smiled, and let him pull her back inside.
The End.
Thank you for reading Rascal! I have included extra bonus books for your enjoyment!
Ruthless Prick: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance
Lana stared at the TV through the glass surrounding her nurse's desk. The patients, mostly victims of dementia, were lined up in a half circle formation in front of the screen in the corner. None of them knew where they were, or what was going on around them.
The clients at Sunset Boulevards were completely restricted to either their bedrooms, the visitation room, or the day room, which is where they spent most of their time. It was a white, square room with a filthy, tile floor that had seen every substance known to man. There were game pieces and old crayons thrown about, and sometimes a random playing card would be found plastered to the wall with some unknown concoction holding it in place.
Lana usually just watched TV and filed random pieces of paperwork. She was supposed to sound the alarm for an emergency, but there were never any serious altercations. In fact, there was rarely any excitement at all.
It was late afternoon, and she was ready to get off work when the phone rang at her desk.
“Hello,” she yawned.
“Are you watching soap operas again? Do you really want to waste your life stuck on those things? They're not even that good.” It was Tia, one of the doctors.
“They're not that bad.” Lana blushed.
“You wanna help with a black bag?”
“Sure.” She hung up the phone and grabbed her keys and radio. Then she walked to the hospice ward, where the patients all had respirators and feeding tubes attached to their faces. Their hair was pure white, and their twisted, yellow toenails stuck out from their short, baby-blue blankets. Lana wished they could go with dignity, at home with their families saying their goodbyes. Many of these people were good and had seen amazing things, but their families abandoned them. Lana had seen it thousands of times. People would come in and talk about how they loved their mother or their uncle, but that they can't take care of them. Then they'd sign a piece of paper and leave them there.
The family might come once or twice. Some even kept up consistent visits for years, but they all eventually gave up and forgot about the loved one. It became too distressing for the families to see their loved ones decomposing in front of the TV. Eventually, the patients would stop recognizing their family, and they'd start acting erratically. During the later stages of Alzheimer’s, patients exhibit strange behaviors. Some revert to child-like states and other simply go blank and stop talking altogether. Sometimes they wander around aimlessly, babbling nonsense.
So their families would leave them behind and they'd die alone in a nursing home.
“Lana,” Tia crept up behind her.
“Jesus.”
“Come on.” Tia showed her to a black bag stuffed with a stiff corpse laying on a gurney in the corner of the room. Tia checked her chart. “Her name was Mary Esther Young.”
“How old was she?”
“94.” Tia closed the chart.
“Amazing. I wonder how long she'd been sitting in front of that TV,” Lana said.
They began rolling the gurney to the back wall.
“Does it get to you still, handling the dead bodies?” Tia asked when the gurney was facing the thick incinerator hatch.
“I don't know. You?”
“The first corpse I saw gave me a jolt, but that was it. Every other time after that, I learned to deal with it.”
“Do you still think about it sometimes though?” Lana opened the hatch and g
rabbed the woman by the feet. Tia grabbed her under her arms.
“A little bit.” The body made a thud when it fell to the bottom.
Lana went white and turned away. “I think I'm gonna quit.”
“Do it then. If you can't handle it, it's not right for you. You'll internalize everything.”
“It's not that easy.”
“Aww,” she patted Lana on the back. “Come on, you'll find something. It's not worth risking your sanity over.”
“You're right, but I'm going to give it some thought.”
“Listen,” Tia moved in front of her to face her, “I watch you react like this every time you see a body. You can't take it, and that's okay, but I won't stop you if you want to wait it out.”
“All right.”
“Go home and take a nap. Have the day off tomorrow. Then come in the next day refreshed. I won't fire you. I like you, but I am going to encourage you to find another line of work.”
“Okay,” Lana said. She was tired. Her eyes were droopy and she was struggling to hold up her body. “Thank you,” she said before she walked out to her car.
Lana did wonder about what she was doing working at the nursing home. Every day was torture. She was stuck watching TV sixteen hours a day for twelve dollars an hour. Then there were the corpses. At first, she didn't mind them so much. The shock was always there, but she was able to get past it. Then she kept thinking about how terrible it would be to die like that and the bodies started getting to her.
What would happen to her if she spent her whole life watching TV at Sunset Boulevards? She wouldn't have a family or people to take care of her. She'd end up alone, staring into space for years.
But what was she supposed to do? She peeled out onto the highway. The desert stretched for miles all around. In that part of Arizona, there was nothing for hours: just the rocky ground with dying, yellow grass peeking out from the cracks. There were two places to work: the grocery store and Sunset Boulevards, and the grocery store didn't pay enough to live off of. Everyone that worked there lived off either social security or their parents.
It didn't matter anyways. She couldn't quit. She had Jim to take care of. The grocery store wouldn't take him, so he was all out of options for money. If she wanted to have a real career, she would have to move, and she didn't have enough money for all the household expenses.
She had to buy food for two people, cigarettes, and beer. Those were just the basics, and they left her with nothing. They were barely surviving. Moving would cost upwards of three thousand dollars, and there was no way she was going to have that kind of money while she was trying to support herself and one other person.
Lana felt like she should've been grateful. She had a place to go and food in her fridge. Jim was a good man. At least he never hit her. There were times when it got close, but not once did he do it. If he did, she'd be stuck there with him, yelling at her and cussing with a bottle in his hand. That was her worst fear.
She stopped at the store and picked up some spaghetti using the change in her car's ashtray, then she drove back to the trailer. They had a single-wide sitting on the edge of the highway with an old, dead garden in front where she kept trying to grow different vegetables and flowers.
She parked her car to the side of the trailer and walked in. When she opened the door, she knocked over a bottle of malt liquor that had been sitting next to the bright-orange couch and cursed. “Jim!” She walked farther into the living room, doing her best to wade through the mess of old beer cans and bottles. “Jim! You can't be doing this anymore. You gotta clean this crap up.” She wanted to bash his face in, leaving things the way he did.
He was never going to stop. They'd been living like that for a decade. Lana kicked a green bottle across the hall and it landed in her room at the foot of the bed. “Jim! Where are you?”
He was there. His old, yellow pickup was outside. “Jim!” She stumbled into the hall, unable to believe the mess she was looking at. TV dinners were sitting in a pile on one side of the couch and there were ancient clothes strewn across the hallway.
The only reason Lana stayed with Jim was because without her, he'd end up mummified in the desert with a forty-ounce bottle fused to his fingers. The man would never survive on his own, not without a steady flow of beer and cigarettes.
“Jim, you in there?” She peeked her head into the bedroom where the clothes that covered the floor were piled higher than the bed.
“Jim!”
Lana turned around to open the bathroom door and jumped back. He was so pale he was almost blue and his lips were losing color fast. The most frightening thing was the peaceful smile stamped on his fat face. Oh, he enjoyed it. She kicked him in the stomach. “Fucker!”
The needle fell out of his arm and crashed to the floor along with the spoon covered in black-amber heroin residue.
“I fucking hate you, you piece of shit. You can't do this to me.” She fell to the ground and started pounding him over and over again while she wailed at the top of her lungs, going until she was drained of all of her energy.
He didn't mind dying; he wanted to die. You don't shoot up heroin unless you've completely given up. Death was his release from the mess their life had become. Well, she couldn't let that happen. She wanted him to live so he could suffer and eventually end up drying out in the middle of the desert, sick and homeless, the way he deserved. He didn't get to go with a smile on his face.
She sat up, completely numb, and stared down at him. His stomach had grown and his eyes were ringed with pink and black circles, but he was still her dark god, a kind of poison that she couldn't escape. If she did this, she couldn't give into him, because the second she did, she'd lose the strength she would need to walk out the door and drive away. He knew what to say to make her stay. He always did.
She crouched down and swiped away a strand of black, sweaty hair away from his eyes. She still loved him, and she always would. He was her first and only, the boy she'd laid down with in the dry riverbed while they made love and planned their life out. He'd just given up.
She hated him for killing all of this, the life they were supposed to have together, and the family. They were supposed to move to Phoenix and buy a cookie-cutter house so he could become a software designer and she could work in a group home until they had their children. But he couldn't do it. He killed their dreams, and for that he had to suffer.
“You're gonna fucking live.” She pulled out her phone.
“9-1-1, what is your emergency?”
“Piece of shit boyfriend overdosed.”
“Hold for the sheriff's office.”
“Sheriff's office, what is your emergency?”
“My boyfriend overdosed on heroin while I was at work.” Jim was smiling up at her, taunting her. He just wanted to get high and he didn't care what it did to her or their life.
“How does he look?”
“His lips are going blue,” she said. Her voice was cold with fury.
“Ma'am,” the officer said. “I need you to begin CPR. Go ahead and tilt his head back.”
“I'm a nurse; I know what I'm doing. Just send somebody to the trailer near the 440 mile marker. I'm going to concentrate on him now. If he'd dead, he's dead.” She hung up and fell to her knees. Then she punched him square in the face. “Get up!”
About thirty percent of overdose victims will snap out of it if you beat them hard enough.
He didn't move. She used two hands to compress his chest as hard as she could, hoping to break his ribs in the process. “You don't get to die.” She slammed him in the chest over and over, tears flying down her face.
She checked for a pulse. His heart was beating, but his pulse was weak. She ducked down and pressed her cheek against his greasy nose; he wasn't breathing. She tilted his head to the side and squeezed his jaw open. Then she slammed him in the back of the head as hard as she could to remove the layer of mucus that had built up in the back of his throat. A yellow glob smacked onto the tile floor.
She hadn't kissed him in over two years, and even then it was uncomfortable. She told herself this wasn't a kiss, but it was, and it was one of the most passionate kisses she'd ever given him because she needed him to live. It wasn't just because she wanted him to suffer, but also because she loved him.
She slammed her lips against his and breathed life into him, over and over again, then she slammed into his chest, wailing and begging. “You've got to live. You've got to live. I love you.” She slammed him in the chest. “I love you. I love you. I love you.” He was going to die. “I love you.”
The medics had to drag her away and out of the house. She wrenched away from them as soon as they got her outside the front door. “Are you giving him Narcan?” she asked the medic.
“Ma'am, just calm down.”
“You need to tell me what is going on,” she demanded.
She could barely see the medic's cold face with the way his head blocked the sun.
“What is going on!?” She rushed at him, and he dodged her. She fell to the ground and looked up as they carried Jim out of the trailer on a yellow gurney. He was alive with his eyes locked on her, holding his stomach. He would be cramping and vomiting with a headache a thousand times worse than any hangover. He was going to live—and he was going to suffer. That's what mattered.
The police grilled her, searched the house and accused her of being a junkie. She screamed at them and they eventually left. Then she started grabbing her things.
Most everything was trash. All her old clothes were stained and wrinkled. Some stank like old smoke. There was nothing in that house that mattered. She tried. She put up a cottage painting in the living room and bought fine dishes with roses on the rims. It was supposed to be their first love nest. It didn't matter that he smoked a little bit of weed and went out with friends, but it did matter when he started bringing home cocaine and women and he began spending all his time on the couch. The drugs started drifting in shortly after. The bong on the coffee table turned into a pile of heroin-stained aluminum foil and broken pieces of glass pipes. Then their love nest became her personal hell and she found herself living with a monster.