I light up, thinking about Fitzsimmons. I don’t trust him as far as I can throw him. I want the other girl back, the first DEA agent who approached me three years ago, when I’d just been freshly evicted from my dungeon at Emilio’s and back into society. But she’s not even DEA anymore. I think she’s FBI, if Tommy’s queries were anything concrete. She’s FBI, and we’re stuck with Fitzfucker, who I don’t trust.
After I’ve taken a few drags of my Marlboro, the harsh smoke settling into my lungs like an old friend, I hear the screen door open and close. I don’t turn. It’ll either be Juliette, asking me questions, or Elliot, asking me questions. Whoever it is, they’ll be asking me the same fucking questions. I’m leaning against the lip of the balcony, looking into the dirty canals, wondering where I’d dump a body if I needed to.
“How’d it go?”
Juliette.
I turn my head as she settles in beside me, her elbows balanced on the side of the balcony. She’s got her bright red locks pulled up into a messy bun, and she’s put makeup on while I was gone. Heavy eyeliner and mascara that make her green eyes stand out, especially with the hair. She’s fucking beautiful, and she’s mine, and I can’t bear the sight of her.
I shrug. “Nothing new.” I’m not lying, technically. I didn’t find out anything new. She doesn’t need to know that I didn’t meet with anyone. If I talk too much about my suspicions—that I think the DEA is going to sacrifice us in this trial—I think her anxiety will get so bad, I won’t be able to help her come back down to reality again. She’s on the brink of madness, and something like this could be the thing that makes her fall.
She plucks the cigarette from my lips and places it in hers, her lips so fucking sexy when she sucks, inhaling the same poison I’ve just been breathing in. It’s a perfect fucking metaphor for our relationship; I’m poisoning her a little bit more each day. She doesn’t even know it. She thinks I forgave her for everything she’s done—fucking me and my father at the same time, running away from me back in Santa Monica, lying to me about her drug addiction and losing our baby in a haze of brutal heroin comedown—because I’m a nice person.
When really, I forgave her because I’ve done so much worse. And she thinks I’m her light, but I’m her worst fucking nightmare.
She passes the cigarette back to me, and I look out to the canals, dirty, dark water the perfect breeding ground for sharks. There are signs everywhere: BEWARE THE MANATEES, but it’s the sharks I’d be more worried about.
“Have I done something to make you angry?” Julz asks in a small voice, and I sigh. Turn to her, pulling her into me. Every man in her life has either abused her, let her down, or just plain fucking left, and I have to remind myself to get out of my own damned head and be there for her like she needs.
“No, baby,” I say, hugging her so tight I can feel her ribs. “I’m just tired of this fucking place.”
I feel her head nod beneath my chin. “Me too,” she whispers. “I just want to go home.”
I kiss the top of her head, as she adds wryly, “I just wish we had a home.”
I put my hands on her shoulders and pull her back so I can see her face; those green, glassy eyes will be the death of me. “Baby,” I say, softening, squeezing her to my chest again. I put the cigarette between my teeth so I can use both of my hands to grip her slight frame to mine, to make her feel safe, to make her feel like she’s still mine. I’m so fucking angry with myself for the way I left her on the bed with my come all over her. She thinks I was gone when she started crying, but I heard the first sob before she muffled herself.
I fucked her, and left her, and made her cry. I’m a fucking bastard.
“We’ll have a home. Wherever you want. Colorado, or LA, or fucking Antarctica. When this is all over we’ll be free.”
When you’re dead you’re free, right? Eternal freedom. Except we’re probably going to hell to hang out with Daddy Dornan. I don’t tell her that, though. I don’t tell her that for the first time, I’m not sure if we’re going to make it out of this alive. I know she feels that way too, and I know that more than anything, she needs me to be her voice of hope.
“I wish we hadn’t buried her,” she whispers against my chest, and I stiffen at the mention of our baby. I suck on the cigarette between my teeth, savoring the dirty smoke that comes with air, a physical destruction from the hammer that’s shattering my heart into tiny shards. I hate talking about our daughter. It just makes me remember all over again, every minute of that day in a fucking loop. The argument Julz and I had. The bright blood on her white panties, the way she touched a hand to herself and brought it away red, almost in slow motion. The way I held her as I raced to the fucking hospital, not knowing if either of them would survive.
I don’t want to remember everything that we lost that day, but it’s all she wants to talk about. I think Juliette’s afraid if we stop talking about our baby, it will be like it never happened, even though it’s all I think about. I’m young, and I’m a fucking loose cannon, but I was somebody’s father for a moment there, and in that moment, I saw all the good things I could have been.
There’s no good left, and I don’t want to fucking talk about it.
I have to agree with her, though. I wish we hadn’t buried her ashes in Colorado, because we’re getting further away, and even though our daughter’s dead and it doesn’t make sense, I want to be near her. I want to brush the snow from her grave and take fresh flowers. I want to carry her with us, always.
We’re so fucking far away.
“Me too,” I say, my throat painfully tight, my fists clenched. I take the cigarette from my mouth and drop it, smashing it beneath my boot as the sun pounds down onto us. Even the sunshine here feels grimy, and that’s coming from someone who lives in dirty Los Angeles.
“We never named her,” Julz says, the side of her face still squashed against my chest, probably listening to make sure my heart’s still beating and I’m not completely dead inside.
I stroke her hair, marveling at how the color change hasn’t taken away from the feel. It feels—and smells—just like it did the first time I touched it, when she was fourteen and blonde and I was just a boy. It smells like vanilla and feels like silk. I love her. I don’t fucking deserve her.
“We didn’t,” I agree. “No name ever seemed good enough. No name was perfect.”
“That’s how I feel, too,” Julz says, her voice oddly calm. Usually she’s crying when we talk about this. It’s a relief, to hear her able to speak without crying for once. Because when she cries, I just want to run out into the street, gun drawn, and start shooting motherfuckers until she stops crying. Problem is, the right motherfuckers aren’t here for me to shoot.
“No name was ever good enough,” I repeat. “She was just ours. And we loved her. And that’s all that matters.”
Julz pulls back, the ghost of a smile on her mouth as she reaches her hand up, brushing her thumb across my lower lip.
“Where’d your name come from?” she asks me. I shrug, because I honestly don’t know. “I just know my mom picked it for me.”
“I never asked my mom why she picked Juliette,” Julz says, and my blood runs cold in my veins. That’s because she didn’t name you, I think, trying to compose my face. But Julz … Jesus Christ, she’s sharp. She can read me like a fucking book.
My father told me the story of Juliette’s birth one day. He wasn’t always horrid to me. Most of the time he was, but after I’d been down there a while, he would visit sporadically with a couple beers and just … talk. He always had a gun, so it’s not like I could stop him. He was always in control. But; yeah. When you haven’t spoken to someone in weeks, and then your psychopathic father comes for bonding time with you, it’s pretty fucking weird.
Anyway. He told me about Juliette’s birth. How her mother had been so fucking high, she couldn’t even name her own kid. How he’d always wanted a daughter, but how, after all sons, he’d realized that was never going to happen. How he’d
always liked the name Juliette.
And as all this is flashing before my eyes, the cogs in Juliette’s brain are drawing lines and connecting dots and firing fucking synapses. I glance to my left, watching Elliot as he paces inside the apartment, talking on his cellphone. Great. I can just tell that as soon as I’m done destroying Juliette’s soul a little more out here, I’ll be hearing some bad fucking news in there.
“Emilio’s brother is called Julian,” she says, and I snap my gaze back to her as she steps back from me. “You don’t think—”
“No,” I say too quickly. Goddamn it. She’s shrewd, even when she’s kind of crazy. Her green eyes stare at me, full of questions, full of suspicion. God, I’m a bad liar. To her, at least.
“No secrets,” she whispers. “Remember? We don’t keep secrets. No secrets.”
The way she keeps repeating herself freaks me the fuck out. I mean, I’m no doctor, but something’s wrong with my girl. I feel it. I see it, in the way she zones out. The way she has to line up everything in perfect synchronicity—our toothbrushes, our shoes, the threadbare sheets that wrap around our temporary bed. Everything must line up perfectly. And the way she watches me, when she thinks I’m not looking. The way she looks at me like I’m something frightening. She never used to look at me like that.
She looks at me the way she looked at him in those moments before he shot me. Utter terror. Like she’s made of glass, and if I look at her front-on, she’ll smash into a million bloody shards at my feet.
Pity she can’t line up the broken pieces of her soul. Or mine.
“Dornan named you,” I confess, because I can’t lie to her. Because I promised I’d never lie to her. Because she deserves to know. Dornan named her. The daughter he never had. The vessel for all of his rage. Juliette. “Your mom took off after she had you. She didn’t give you a name. Your dad was in solitary confinement in prison. The birth certificate needed a name.”
Dornan named her, and now she knows.
Her eyes go wide for a second. That’s it. That’s the only reaction she has. She doesn’t cry. Doesn’t gasp. She.Does.Nothing.
“Julz,” I say, “It doesn’t mean anything.”
Elliot chooses that exact fucking moment to step out onto the small balcony, so small that we barely fit. I glance at him, his mouth open and his cellphone still lit up in his hand, and my eyes must tell him to shut the fuck up, because he closes his mouth again and looks from me to Juliette.
“He killed me. Did I tell you that?” Her face is blank, so utterly vacant I’m the one who’s terrified. “He killed me and brought me back, over and over again.”
“What?” I say. “What are you talking about?”
“Guys—” Elliot interjects.
“Shut up,” I snap at him. “Let her talk.”
I don’t want to hear. I don’t want to know. But I have to know.
She looks from me to Elliot and back again, rubbing a spot on the top of her arm, finally turning her gaze to the ugly canals below us.
“He had this stuff that he’d inject, into my arm,” she murmurs. “Or my neck, or sometimes my thigh. It hurt. After a while, I stopped feeling where he put the needle, because it didn’t matter, everything was just pain. He’d put one needle in and I’d stop breathing, and everything would go dark, and just as the pain was fading away he’d put something else in the needle to wake me up again. He was stopping my heart and starting it again. He was killing me and bringing me back.”
I remember how I felt when Dornan shot me in the chest, when everything went cold and I was bleeding out on the ground between him and Julz. I glance at Elliot, his jaw clenched, his eyes bloodshot, and I bet that’s what he’s remembering, too. He and I both almost died by Dornan’s hand that day, a bullet each for our treachery, and I imagine what Juliette had to go through waking up alive and knowing he was going to do it to her all over again.
Juliette swallows thickly, looking so small, so alone. “And then he’d tie me to the bed and take his clothes off and push inside me—”
No.
“—and I’d cry because I was so fucking ashamed that I wanted him to rape me instead of putting those needles in me, because at least it felt better than dying.”
I clench my fists until I feel bone crunch on itself, every muscle in my body coiled and ready for attack. I imagine Julz naked and bound, her legs tied to rusted bedposts, being fucked, enjoying it. No. I want to tear someone apart, to feel their fucking life drain away between my hands as I squeeze every drop of life out of them. I remember the way I took Donny’s knife and butchered him, my own brother, hacked and stabbed and cut until he was unrecognizable and it felt like I was drowning in his blood.
I want to do that to someone now. I want to do that to Dornan. But I can’t because he’s dead, and we’re hiding, and there’s nowhere else to go.
I can’t help it; my rage screams to a boil inside me, and something has to come out. I smash one of my fists into the wall, feeling the way my bones protest, cracking under the weight of my fatal desire. I want to kill him. I want to kill them all.
Julz doesn’t even react.
Her eyes fill with tears, now, her eyes on me.
“He named me?”
I wish to God that I’d lied to her.
“Guys,” Elliot says again, his tone sharper this time. “We’ve been made. Cartel knows we’re in Miami. We’re leaving. We have to go. Now.”
CHAPTER NINE
JULIETTE
“And go where?” I ask Elliot incredulously, watching the way Jase’s knuckles drip with blood. “There’s nowhere left to go. Everywhere we go, they find us.”
I look out towards the ocean, where storm clouds are gathering, like they do almost every afternoon at some point. Fucking Florida. I never thought I’d say that I miss LA, but I fucking miss LA and its reliable sunshine.
“Back to California,” Elliot says. “Fuck this DEA bullshit. I’m going, Luis is going, and Tommy’s meeting us there. This is a war, and it’s time to stop pansying around and make shit happen. Since when have either of you cared about immunity? About following orders? How about never? But, hey, if you two want to stay here and talk about Daddy fucking Dornan and get killed? Be.My.Guest. But I’m betting you want a one-way ticket back to LA with me. So grab your shit, or we’re all going back in body bags.”
The body bag comment gets Jase and I moving. I’ve already got my gun shoved in the back of my jeans, easily accessible at a moment’s notice. We haul ass into the tiny apartment, each grabbing our bag—one each, to hold a toothbrush, underwear, bullets, and water—and all three of us are out the door and in Elliot’s rental car inside of ninety seconds. Jase and I shove into the backseat and Elliot takes the driver’s seat. This isn’t the first time we’ve had to move. It’s becoming a blur now, it’s happened so often.
Elliot guns the engine and dons a baseball cap, pulling it tight over his head so his face is obscured. As Jase and I check the clips in our guns, shrinking down low in the seats so we won’t be seen, Elliot shrugs into a zippered navy blue hoodie, pulling the sleeves down to his wrists to cover his tattoos.
Without warning, we screech off, fishtailing as we pull onto Biscayne Boulevard. Elliot’s always been a good driver, but the way he’s weaving in and out of cars right now makes me want to puke. I reach over and squeeze Jase’s hand. He seems surprised, but he looks back at me, gripping my hand tightly.
“What about Amy and Kayla?” I ask Elliot as he speeds down the highway.
“We’re meeting them at the airstrip,” Elliot says. “They’re with Luis. And we’ve got—” he checks his watch—“an hour to get to the airstrip before our pilot goes back to LA without us. If we don’t make it, at least the girls will. Tommy will meet them there.”
“You think we won’t make it?” I ask.
Elliot shakes his head tightly. I see the way his hands clutch the steering wheel, a death grip that’s turning his fingers white. “We’ll make it.”
&nb
sp; “Who was on the phone?” Jase asks Elliot.
“Tommy. He got a tip-off. Julian Ross is on his way to Miami.”
There’s that name again. Julian. Emilio’s younger brother, Dornan’s uncle. I cringe as it leaves Elliot’s mouth. Then I remember that he didn’t hear the conversation Jase and I just had about my name. That Elliot doesn’t know what I’ve just been told. That Dornan chose my name. That he’s been choosing for me since the day I was born. When I lived. When I died. When I suffered. And how, even though he’s dead, he’s still deciding for me.
“I just spoke to Tommy, like, half an hour ago,” Jase says. “He was fine.”
“You didn’t tell me you spoke to him,” I say, a strange feeling in my chest. It’s odd that he wouldn’t tell me they had spoken. I feel so left out of what’s going on. So useless.
It makes me angry.
“I didn’t meet with Fitzsimmons,” Jase says. “I was talking to Tommy. Figuring out how to check on Fitz, see if he’s dirty.”
Elliot takes his cap off and slides his sleeves up, and I take that to mean we’re far enough away from the motel block to be pretty safe. I sit up, looking out the window to see more palm trees and fucking canals.
“I’m calling Isobel,” Jase says.
“The fuck is Isobel?” Elliot glances over his shoulder at Jase, saying what I’m thinking. A ripple of jealousy flares through my stomach, unbidden and completely unfair. I’m not allowed to be jealous. I fucked Jase’s father for months, some of it while I was fucking him at the same time. Sometimes, I fucked them both on the same day. More than anyone, I have no right to be jealous.
“My old DEA handler,” Jase says, flipping his phone open and scrolling through numbers.
“Old?” I echo. “What do you mean?”
“Before Fitz,” Jase says, still not looking at me. “She switched to FBI. Wanted to stay near her family. The DEA kept sending her away on shitty cases. Plus, the DEA’s fucked.”
Zero Hour (Gypsy Brothers #8) Page 4