“I don’t think I can go through this again.” I shake my head.
He nods. “You and Quinn share the rarest kind of love. It was strong enough to save both your lives. If you believe in it, I think it can again.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I rub my temples with my fingers.
“Find her.”
Find her. Why doesn’t James find her?
Rarest kind of love—strong enough to save both our lives.
I test the engine of my Nissan as I speed across the highway at over one hundred miles per hour, obviously not caring about my own life or anyone else’s.
Talk about the shit hitting the fan! Fucking Talon and his signs. I should have known better. I should have stayed away from her.
I fishtail off the exit.
Beeline to the nearest liquor store.
My cell rings; it’s Talon.
Nope. Don’t need it, don’t want it.
I let the call go to voicemail as I take up two parking spaces in front of the liquor store. As I go in, I realize this is Johnson’s Liquor Store, the one I stole Baileys from on Quinn’s sweet sixteen.
I rip open the door angrily.
I grab a bottle of tequila and slam it on the counter.
“Drinking angry makes for a bitter hangover,” old man Johnson says.
“It’s agony just to be alive, so the hangover will be a relief.” I throw a twenty on the counter and start to walk out. “Here.” I turn around and toss another twenty dollar bill down. “This is for her Baileys. Now we’re even.”
“What?” Mr. Johnson calls after me.
I get back into the car and see my phone on the seat.
Looks like, while I was in the store, Josh called.
Nope. Been there, done that.
Where the fuck am I going to consume this bitch? I can’t go home, she’s all over my house now.
I can’t go to my own fucking shop because she’s there too!
Fuck! FUCK!!
Fiancé. Asshole fiancé! He wasn’t even here for her.
Oh God, I want to crack this bottle open. Where the fuck can I go?!
Then I hear my mouth say, “Where the fuck are you anyway, Quinn? You came here for a funeral, and now you’re not even at the fucking funeral??”
Goddamnit! I hop on the highway and drive to Reardon’s Funeral Home. Can’t I just leave the woman alone? She’s the one who left my bed this morning!
Obviously not, I think as I park across the street from the home and run over.
Opening the door, I walk into the solemn service and stand in the back, checking heads for Quinn, but I don’t see her.
Over on the other side of the aisle is someone who appears to be an usher or the director.
I approach him. “Excuse me. I’m looking for the daughter of the deceased, Ms. Quinn Kelley …”
“I’m sorry. No one by that name has check in or called.”
“Thank you.”
My attention is diverted. At the podium, one of her mother’s friends is talking about what a wonderful woman she was and how she’ll always be remembered as a friend and caring volunteer in the community.
Bunch of fucking bullshit.
I remember the first time I met her. It was after she nearly killed Quinn by not letting her use a fucking phone. I went to her home to accuse her. Cade dragged me away. If she had been a man, I would have beat the fuck out of her.
And Quinn came back for her, not you, I remind myself.
I turn away and leave. I can’t take it.
Back in the car I check for a message from Quinn. When there isn’t any, I text Cade.
Any word?
He comes back. None.
Is the douchebag still with you?
Yeah, can’t get rid of him. Now I have his sister here too.
Better Cade than me. The asshat’s life expectancy would drop dramatically.
I put the key in the ignition, but pause to lean back in my seat.
“Where are you, Quinn Kelley?”
I’ve never stopped loving you, she said.
She didn’t leave you, Josh said. She was dying.
Dying.
Dying.
I tear away from the curb and race to the other side of town.
*****
July, 2005
Liam
“Where the hell is she, Cade?” I shout as I move past the police flooding Cade’s office at North House.
“It’s none of your concern, boy,” one of the cops says.
“It’s all my concern,” I spit vehemently but then stall dead in my tracks when I see Cade covered in blood.
“Liam.”
I’ve never seen the man broken. Not once. And I can’t even fathom or describe the terror, agony and fury that he’s wearing on his face, along with the splattered blood. I shake my head against anything he could possibly say, as if I could stop whatever it is or make it not real.
“She’s in the hospital, son,” Cade almost whispers.
“Why?” I grit out between my teeth.
Cade loses his calm, always-at-the-ready demeanor and breaks down crying.
“TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED!” I scream, banging my fist on his desk.
“You’re going to have to leave!” A cop grabs my arm and starts pulling me away.
I yank my arm back. The cop is about to lose his teeth.
“No, wait.” Cade stops him. “I’ll talk to him. He needs to know. The girl is his fiancée.”
He stands up and walks around his desk. “Follow me.”
We go into the family counseling room. It’s empty and dark. The only thing to hear is the sound of our breath. He clicks on the table lamp.
Now that he’s standing in the light, I can see the blood is all over his hands and shirt and pants. The perfect outline of a slender bloody handprint is set over the shoulder of his white t-shirt.
“Is the blood …?” I’m shaking now.
“Hers.” He swallows. “She was jumped by Vince and some of his thugs.”
“Jesus Christ.” Hospital, he said hospital, I remind myself. “Is she …?”
He shakes his head and pushes out with a sob, “Son, I’m so sorry … they’re not sure if she’s going to make it.”
It’s a nightmare. I’m sleeping, and it’s a fucking nightmare. WAKE UP, LIAM!
I step forward and take hold of Cade’s hands. I smear the blood with my fingers. “This is all her blood?”
He nods.
“Is any of it Vince’s?” I ask not looking up.
“No. She was so bad by the time I got to her … behind the gas station …” he chokes out. “It was all I could do to save her.”
Someone knocks hard on the door. “Come in,” Cade calls out.
“Mr. North, we just got a call from the doctors,” one of the cops says as he and his partner walk towards us.
Debra bolts into the room and grabs Cade, sobbing.
The cop says, “They’ve taken Ms. Kelley into surgery—she has several fractured ribs, one of which has punctured her right lung, and her jaw is broken in two places. Both of her arms have been pulled from their sockets and dislocated. She’s lost a lot of blood from the knife wounds and internal bleeding.”
This isn’t happening—it isn’t real. I’ll wake up, and she’ll be in the kitchen with Debra, making breakfast, and then we’ll go to the Mall of America to the amusement park. I’ll win her a stuffed animal, and later we’ll ride the Ferris wheel, and when the car stops at the top we’ll kiss and not be able to keep our hands off each other.
Debra reaches over and takes one of my hands from Cade’s.
The cop takes a moment to pause. “The tests show that she was sexually assaulted. We’ll need to do a DNA test to determine the number of assailants.”
DNA test? Assault. Number of assailants.
“There were five of them,” Cade barely gets out. “I think they all—” He sobs. He can’t go on.
“I need to see her.” I r
ub the pads of my fingertips into her blood, which now paints the palms of my hand.
“The doctor said family tomorrow … if she makes it through the night. They’ll have her in the ICU.”
“We are her family,” Debra cries.
“Of course, ma’am,” he says. “I’m so terribly sorry. They’re doing everything they can to save her.”
If.
Knife wounds.
If she makes it.
Jaw broken in two places, arms pulled from sockets.
Internal bleeding.
Ms. Kelley has fractured ribs that have punctured her lung.
Everything they can to save her.
Quinn … could die.
Is dying.
That’s when the gravity crushes me. The angel was supposed to protect her. I was supposed to protect her.
If she dies, I die.
What’s happening inside of me is indescribable—I’ve never felt it before. It’s as if one switch inside of me has been turned off while another is switched on.
Cade and Debra are both crying. I will not cry.
Not yet.
Quietly, I move towards the door.
“Liam …” Cade and Debra say at the same time.
I don’t answer. I leave the room and walk past all of the cops talking in the hallway.
What I mistake for the deepest numbness settling over me is really a white-hot rage that devours every other emotion in its path, until I am consumed by it and nothing else remains.
I climb the stairs to my room and begin getting dressed.
“Where are you going?” Josh, who is sitting on the edge of his bed, wide awake, asks me.
“None of your fucking business.”
He nods. “Okay, I get that.”
I pull my blue jeans on over my shorts and throw on the first t-shirt my hand gets hold of—my bloody hand.
Quinn’s blood.
Talon is hopping into his sneakers. “So where are we going, Liam?”
“You’re not going anywhere, now butt the fuck out,” I tell him.
Ryder comes crashing into the small space of a room Josh and I share. “She has a fucking tube in her chest for her fucked up lung!” He slams his fist against the wall, leaving indentations from his knuckles. “Did you know that, Liam? Did you fucking know that?!”
I lace up my heavy, steel-toed, shit-kicker boots then go for my pack that I still keep ready in the closet.
Reese leans his head in the door. “Connor, they’re talking about a forensic exam that might end up showing multiple strains of DNA. What does that mean?”
Somehow Connor is in the room too and answers, “It means that she was …” He goes quiet, then finishes with, “probably raped … by multiple guys.”
I hear a sound rip through my throat. I ignore it and unzip my pack. I grab my knife and a five inch steel fist bar to put behind my knuckles, and I know I’m taking the metal baseball bat that’s in the garage.
I leave my open pack on the bed, turn and walk out of the room. I won’t need it again, not where I’m going.
“If you’re going for Vince, we’re coming,” Talon says.
I’m going to take Vince to hell.
Chase gets in front of me. “You can’t get out through the downstairs; it’s swarming with cops.”
“I don’t give a fuck about cops,” I say blankly. I walk around him and into the bathroom, where I lift the window and climb out.
“It’s two stories up, what’s your plan?” I hear Josh’s voice behind me.
“My plan is to get the metal baseball bat in the garage.” With that, I disappear out the window and climb down the vined lattice Quinn and I use to sneak to the roof.
Quinn … dying.
Doing everything they can to save her …
Save her.
Stay focused.
The sky is pitch black with no stars. I open the garage side door and rummage through for the bat. When I find it, the smooth, cool metal feels perfect in my palm. Perfect for the vengeance I’m about to exact.
I carry it out of the garage, and as I get down the walkway, I see Talon.
“Come with me,” he says.
“I’m busy.”
“Connor wired a car down the street. You didn’t plan on walking all the way to Westhill, did you?”
It hadn’t even crossed my mind.
I follow him across the street and around the corner.
I see the car and everyone in it. I shake my head. “You guys are not coming.”
“The hell we aren’t,” Ryder barks from the back seat.
“Do you understand that I’m going to kill Vince?” I ask, feeling eerily levelheaded.
“Goddamnit, just get in!” Connor snaps from behind the wheel. “It won’t be long before the cops pick him up or figure out we’re not here anymore.”
“What? You assholes are going to fight with me?”
“With you. For Quinn,” Chase states.
Josh steps out from the front seat and opens the door for me. “Let’s go.”
I sit by the window, squeezing the bat and bar in each hand. In the rearview mirror I can see into the back seat—Ryder, Reese, Chase and Talon ready their weapons—I don’t know where they got their hands on knives and police style batons, but they did.
Josh leans in to me. “We’ve got your back, man.”
And for the first time, I believe him.
No one speaks for the rest of the way.
Chapter Fifteen
2015
Quinn
“I TRUSTED YOU! I BELIEVED IN YOU!” My voice sounds raw as it echoes across the expanse of space and time as I shout at the angel. “I loved you!” I sob. “Couldn’t you have loved me back?” I scoop a stone from the pile of rocks I’ve made on the ground at my feet.
“Instead of helping me, it’s like you conspired with my mom to kill me!” The rock I throw sails through the air and nicks the statue’s torso.
“And now I’ve suffered without Liam, and I made him suffer, and I’ve had to put myself back together piece by piece—with no help from you!” I propel another stone and it hits her wing. “I thought all those years you put us together … but then you let it happen and it ripped us apart!”
My hands are shaking as I shoot another stone. “I could hardly live with myself!”
“AND I BLAME YOU! AND MY MOTHER!” I scream and hurl more rocks against her.
“Now she’s dead. My battle with her should finally be over. But I can’t even grieve right—because when someone dies, you’re supposed to feel sad and sorry and brokenhearted—and I don’t feel any of that! I feel forgotten, and unloved, and thrown away! I FEEL HATE!” I grind my teeth together and throw more rocks.
Another.
Another.
Another.
“She’s dead—there is no more chance for amends! And she never has to say she’s sorry! Sorry for what she did and didn’t do.” I drop to my knees in the wilted, soggy patch of grass, bend over and press my hand against my stomach to try and offset the agony of too many emotions all at once. “How does it still hurt like hell? How can you miss something you never had? Like a mother? How can you miss an idea?”
“I would have done it, you know, Angel—gone to the hospital or her bedside before she left this world. I would’ve forgiven her.” I pull as many rocks as I can into both my hands and squeeze. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? It’s just always going to hurt. It will always feel unresolved, because I loved her and she didn’t love me back.”
I shake my head as I fill with fury. “Every part of me has been violated—because of her! My mind, my heart, my soul, my body! Just a fucking phone call, that’s all it would have taken to protect me.”
The violent wave builds again as I scream, “I’M NOT SORRY SHE’S DEAD! MY LIFE HAD FINALLY FELT LIKE IT HAD COME TOGETHER! AND THEN YOU LET THEM SHRED ME!”
*****
July, 2005
Quinn
I hold on desperat
ely to the plastic, lifeless phone receiver before it’s yanked cruelly from my hand as the men pull me away and begin dragging me down the alley behind the dark abandoned gas station. I kick and scream as I press my Chucks into the dirt and gravel to get purchase.
Vince spits, “Secure the bitch.”
The four men that are with him each grab one of my limbs. They half carry me and half drag me, with my back scraping against the dirt and stones.
I can’t let them get me back there! I have to get away from them! I flail my arms and legs, trying to get even one of them free, but I’m no match for the four of them together, they’re too strong.
“Bitch ain’t stoppin’,” the big guy holding onto my wrist says.
Vince stoops down so he’s in my face and with cruel glee says, “Pull her apart and break her like a wishbone.”
Immediately, both the guys holding my arms and the two holding my legs viciously wrench my limbs in opposite directions. The pain is unfathomable—as if my limbs are being torn out of me.
With it comes a sickening dread. They don’t intend on leaving me alive.
I scream a warning, “Cade North is on his way! He knows you’re here!”
“I figure that gives me ten minutes before he comes.” Vince grabs my cheeks hard in his hand and squeezes. “I can do a lot of damage in ten minutes.”
He nods and his men pull again, ruthlessly. I hear as well as feel the pops from my ligaments and sockets as they seemingly break my bones. I’m blinded by agony. A strangled cry tears through my chest.
When they let go, my body drops hard against the rough gravel. Intense pain shoots through every nerve, while sharp rocks and stones pierce the skin along my spine. Vince and his men laugh.
“Get her naked,” he orders them.
I desperately want to move, but I can’t! I’m literally frozen in fear! Nothing will work! My mouth won’t make a sound—the scream I want to let loose is caught in my throat—and, like in a nightmare, it won’t come out!
I watch in horror as two of them pull out knives, flipping them in their hands until the blades are fully opened and locked.
Burn (Brothers of Ink and Steel #2) Page 22