by Jennifer Ann
“I get it,” he interrupts in a flat tone. His hands raise out at his sides. “I shouldn’t have taken advantage of you like that. You were crying, and—”
“It’s my fault,” I insist, starting for the door. “I take full responsibility for what just happened. Just please don’t fire me for this because I really need the money. I’m sorry, but I have to go home. I’m not feeling well.”
Like a coward I spring from the room, ignoring his pleas for me to come back. I’ve managed to make the worst day of my life suck even more.
* * *
Sharlo greets me with open arms when I return, blubbering about my screw-up with Nolan. “It’s partially his fault for being so bloody attractive,” she insists, hugging me tightly. “What can I do for you, love? Tell me how I can make this better.”
“Unless you know a way to restore my dignity, it can’t get better,” I mutter. Burying my face in her shoulder, I release another whimpering cry. “God, I’m such an idiot! I did exactly what I swore I wouldn’t do—let him convince me that I was in love with him and agreed to have sex right before my name went public! Now that my family will hear all about it, I’m not even with him anymore!”
Her chest rises with a humorless laugh. “Hard to believe that’s the way it all went down. You’re far from daft. If his intentions weren’t pure, don’t you think you would’ve caught on from the start?”
Flashbacks to the time I’ve spent with Charlie flicker through my mind, going all the way back to the night Sharlo and I went to his apartment. Had he only been interested in using me, would he have gone through all the motions of pretending to hold back and insistent on proving I meant more to him than a casual lay? The way he said those things on the boat about wanting to adjust his life around me…they truly seemed to come from his heart.
Except he isn’t in love with me.
God, I must be the most gullible person on the planet.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I whisper, releasing her. I only want to forget that Charlie Walker ever walked into my life.
She doesn’t leave my side, though she’s cagey as hell and every few minutes I catch her staring into the hallway like she’s expecting someone to come storming in. Maybe she thinks Charlie is actually going to come after me. I guess it would make sense since she didn’t see how easily he let me go.
We sit on my bed into the early morning hours, watching slasher movies. Every now and then my mind will wander away from the movie and I’m hit with another harsh dose of reality that brings me to tears. Sharlo doesn’t say much, though she occasionally brushes my hair away from my wet face. It reminds me all too much of the way my mom would comfort me when I was young, making my heart ache a little more.
My soul and mind are wrecked. I never knew love could cause so much physical pain.
Sometime in the middle of night I finally pass out.
* * *
The way the sun hits my floor when I open my eyes, I decide it must be late afternoon. The events of the prior day slowly unravel as if playing out in a movie trailer and tears instantly soak my face.
How can things ever go back to being okay?
My loud sobs bring a wide-eyed Sharlo bursting into my room. She climbs into my bed, wrapping me in her vanilla-scented embrace. “You’ll get through this, love. One day at a time.”
“It…doesn’t…feel like it,” I answer amongst a whimpering cry.
“I know you’re hurting, but at some point you’re going to have to step back and consider everything you’ve heard is a bloody misunderstanding. You don’t know for a fact Charlie’s secret had anything to do with those slags and I’m really doubting this whole ‘hire a wholesome girl’ theory. It doesn’t add up. You told me he was crying when he said he had something to tell you. I believe he truly loves you and deserves a second chance.”
With the sound of our doorbell, she crawls back out of the bed. “Stay here, love. I’ll take care of it.” As she’s leaving the room, she eyes me with heightened paranoia before closing the door. Does she think I’m going to go postal if Charlie miraculously makes an appearance?
I move over to my door, cracking it enough to see Sharlo’s back at the front door as her voice volleys with a higher one.
“She is here!” a woman’s voice says. “Evelyn, can I please talk to you for a minute? It’s about Charlie.”
I roll my door open all the way open. It’s Parker, the woman I first met at Charlie’s concert then again while working. She looks seriously distressed in a rumpled T-shirt and micro-short shorts with a pair of dirty Keds and a messenger bag slung across her body, bleached hair limp around her shoulders. Did someone try to run her over?
“Evelyn, stay there,” Sharlo insists, turning to look at me. “This woman could be nutters for all we know.”
Hands on her hips, Parker glares at Sharlo like she’s ready to throw her down. “Trust me, she’ll want to hear what I have to say.” Her eyes draw back up to mine. “It’s true what they’re saying about Charlie and those two women. One of them is a friend of mine. I picked her up from Charlie’s the next morning.”
Sickness surges through my stomach. I bend over like I was punched, backing toward my room. I was naive when Charlie told me he didn’t do that kind of thing anymore. I’m starting to wonder if he ever uttered a single truth while we were together.
When I look back to where Parker stands watching me, there’s a disturbing smile on her lips.
“How did you find me?” I ask, feeling increasingly uneasy about the situation.
“I’m actually a reporter,” she answers. “My real name is Gwen Porter. I’ve been investigating you and Charlie separately for an upcoming feature in Rachelle Magazine. Thought I’d stop by to see if you want to tell your side of the story before the truth about your relationship goes viral.”
“Definitely nutters,” Sharlo mutters at her side.
“You’re wasting your time,” I say, shaking my head. “There’s nothing I have to say to any reporter. You should leave.”
When I turn back to my room, there’s a loud cry and a scuffle down below. I spin back around to see “Gwen” all the way inside our apartment.
Holding a gun to Sharlo’s head.
“Shar!” I cry, gripping the railing.
“I’m okay, love,” Sharlo insists in her usual easygoing manner. “Not the first time I’ve had a weapon held to my head and I’m sure it won’t be the last.”
“No one has to get hurt as long as you do everything I say,” Gwen tells us. She dips her chin at the stairway. “Get your skinny ass down here, Evelyn. Hands up where I can see them. Do you have your phone on you?”
With a small shake of my head, I hold my hands up at my sides and shuffle toward the stairway. “Why do you have a gun?”
“Yes,” Sharlo agrees. “What are you hoping to accomplish, Gwen, or whatever your name is? Is there a point in this random violence, or are we to assume you’re hopped up on Molly and have mistaken us for aliens?”
Gwen’s lips pucker. “Evelyn, inside my bag you’ll find a role of tape. You’re going to wrap it around your friend’s wrists and ankles. Try anything funny and she’s going to pay the consequences. Understood?”
Meeting Sharlo’s resigned gaze, I nod before reaching around her for the bag. As soon as I have the heavy roll of duct tape in hand, Sharlo holds her wrists out and blows a deep breath from between her lips. “Funny, whenever I’ve had this fantasy, I didn’t fancy my best mate being the one to bind me. Promise once you’re done, you’ll at least give my arse a little spanking?”
With tears in my eyes, I meet her gaze and give a little shake my head. How can she joke around at a time like this?
“Do you ever shut the hell up?” Gwen asks, grabbing a handful of Sharlo’s hair behind her head. “Hurry up and do it, Evelyn.”
“If you won’t share your plan, I believe it’s at least fair I share mine,” Sharlo warns, watching my unsteady hands as they wrap tape around
hers. “Harm one hair on Evelyn’s head, and I’ll claw your bloody eyes out.”
Gwen throws back her head with a strange little giggle. “The three of us are going on a little road trip to the docks. It’ll be hard for you to do much of anything from inside the trunk.”
“You’re not putting her in a trunk,” I snap, stopping to shoot the woman a warning glare. Though my stomach’s roiling and my heart feels like it’s going to beat out of my chest, I’ll be damned if I’ll let this bitch know I’m scared to death. “Leave her alone and I’ll do whatever you want. When I’m done taping her up, she won’t be able to do anything anyway. I’ll tie her to the damn fridge if it’ll make you happy.”
Her eyes burn through me. “You’re not in any position to be making demands.”
“If you’re doing this because you want Charlie, you can have him,” I tell her with a sneer. “I was just another fling to him. It’s over between us.”
“What I want is that asshole to pay,” she assures me. “I need to make things right for Danny. I won’t give up until your man gives me the answers I need. You’ll thank me one day for doing this. He’s not good for you, Evelyn. He’s not good for anyone.”
What kind of answers could Charlie have that would make her go off the deep end?
“I don’t understand,” I say, trying to make the pieces of her fucked-up puzzle fit. “What does this have to do with Danny?”
“Stop trying to make sense of this, love,” Sharlo tells me. “You won't understand a thing that comes out of this nutter.”
“I said shut the fuck up!” Gwen bellows. When she raises the gun, I cry out and reach for her, but in the blink of an eye she’s cracked Sharlo in the head. I catch my roommate as she slumps to the side like a rag doll. Blood seeps from a gash in her forehead, instantly soaking her hair.
Please tell me she isn’t dead!
“What have you done?” I yell over my shoulder. “Shar!” I cry, pressing my fingers against her neck. When I find a heartbeat I carefully set her head on the floor and jump to my feet, turning my back on the psycho.
A metallic click stops me from moving any further. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I have to get something to stop the bleeding!”
When I hear her shoes lightly pad against the floor, I whirl around. An excruciating amount of pain shoots through my skull, and the room becomes black as night.
Chapter 26
CHARLIE
By the time we get to Sharlo and Evelyn’s place, night has settled over the neighborhood, and it’s equally as dark inside the house. I won’t fucking leave until I know for damn sure that no one is home. After a solid minute of banging on their door without an answer, I grab a large rock from the landscaping and chuck it through one of the windows on the side of the building. Dogs somewhere close by yip with the loud crash.
“Someone’s going to see us breaking in, bro,” Lorenzo says behind me as I’m swinging one leg inside. “Maybe we should call the cops. Let them handle this.”
I shine my phone’s flashlight inside. My heart roars to a stop with the sight of a woman’s legs sticking out from behind the kitchen counter, her ankles wrapped with silver tape. “Call an ambulance!” I holler at Lorenzo.
I dive the rest of the way in, hissing through my teeth when a piece of broken glass cuts into my arm. Until I’ve found a light-switch and I’m down at the woman’s side, staring into Sharlo’s bloodied face as her eyes flutter open, my brain refuses to accept that it’s not Evelyn. If she’s not here and someone knocked Sharlo unconscious, it can only mean one thing.
Gwen has Evelyn.
“Hey,” I greet her with a grimace since my lips refuse to smile. Lorenzo appears to hand me a kitchen towel. I press it to her head, checking for new blood. At least it appears to have stopped before she bled out. “You’re going to be okay. We called an ambulance.”
“Either I’m having a wicked dream about a rock god coming to my rescue, or I’ve died and gone to heaven.” Her blue eyes dart around us as she moves upright. “Where’s Ev?”
I support the back of her head until she’s sitting tall. “I don’t know. What do you remember?”
“There was a blonde twat—”
“Gwen,” I snarl, giving Lorenzo room to work on removing the tape from her hands with a knife. Once I get my hands on that bitch, I’ll rip her goddamned throat out for doing this. “What’d she say? What’d she do?”
“She held a gun to my head, made Evelyn bind my hands and feet.”
Growling, a rush of blood pounds inside my head, burning through my ears. Gwen has a gun. This fucking mess is becoming more dire by the moment. If anything happens to Evelyn…
“Bitch is crazier than we thought,” Lorenzo comments, catching my eye.
Sharlo nods in agreement. “She was prattling on about how she knew the women you slept with last weekend.” Her face pinches with a scowl. “I should string your arse up to the rafters for what you did to our girl. She was a complete wreck last night. Took her hours to settle down.”
On instinct I want to correct her by saying Evelyn is mine not ours, though I’m not about to challenge anyone with that menacing of a stare. “Everything they’re saying is bullshit.” I say. “I didn’t hurt her.”
“You didn’t run after her either, now did you?” After Lorenzo tears the remaining tape off her wrists, she rubs them a few times before grabbing the kitchen towel. Sighing, her little fingers go to work wrapping the clean portion of the towel around my bleeding arm. “We wouldn’t be having this bloody discussion if you had simply grown a pair and gone after her.”
“She told me you called for the car,” I growl.
Her eyes flicker to the ceiling. “Yes but it was your job as her man to stop her from getting into it.”
The distant sound of sirens drift through the broken window. I tense even more, knowing the police will want to hold us for questioning.
“Would you two quit bickering?” Lorenzo scolds, releasing the tape from her ankles. “We have to find Evelyn before Gwen does something stupid!”
Pushing down the urge to tear apart the room and break something more significant than a window, I gently take Sharlo’s arm. “Did she say anything else? Anything that would help us understand what she’s planning to do with Evelyn?”
Her blue eyes narrow. “She spoke of your bandmate, Danny. Said something about making it right and demanding answers. Told us we were going on some road trip to the docks. She’s a complete nutter, really. I had a hard time following her random thoughts.”
The room spins at a sickening slant. Gwen was involved with Danny. They were together the night he disappeared. She set me up with Madison and Christine. Now she’s taking Evelyn to the docks.
Holy shit. She knows.
I move toward the door so fast that my feet can’t keep up. I stumble several times like I’m drunk, grabbing onto furniture and walls for support.
“Off you go then,” Sharlo calls behind me. “No worries, love, I’ll take care of the policemen. Just don’t forget about me once you’ve saved her. They’ll likely take me to Mount Sinai to check my noggin.”
“What’s your number?” I hear Lorenzo ask.
I don’t wait for him. As she’s rattling off numbers, I’m already out the door. I know exactly where Gwen took Evelyn. I just pray I’m not too late.
* * *
The quiet docks are every bit as fucking menacing in the dark as I remember them being as a kid. Not even the awe-inspiring view of the Manhattan skyscrapers can ward off the chill that follows me as I roll Lorenzo’s classic Camaro to a stop beside a row of boxcars. Distorted memories of the last time I saw Danny flicker through my mind as I make my way over to the edge of the wooden plank, inhaling the sickly odors of the East River.
Congratulations, pussy, Danny taunts. You finally grew a big enough pair to come back to the scene of the crime! What’s next, a training bra?
The darkness stirs, spitting Gwen and Ev
elyn out from its depths. Gwen’s lips bend with a morbid smile. “Glad I finally got your attention. Leaking your girlfriend’s name and where she works certainly didn’t rattle your cage enough. Didn’t take you long to figure out where to find me.”
A violent vibration rattles me to the core. I hear my trainer’s voice telling me to breathe and count to ten as I study Evelyn’s panicked expression.
One. Breathe in.
Her eyes are as wide as I’ve ever seen them.
Two. Breathe out.
Even with the crappy lighting over our heads I can see she’s completely pale.
Three. Breathe in.
She’s gagged with a piece of dark cloth.
Four. Breathe out.
Gwen has one arm hooked around her throat.
Five. Breathe in.
She’s also holding a small handgun to Evelyn’s head.
Six. Breathe in some more.
Evelyn’s beautiful eyes, glistening with tears underneath the lights, throw me a look of desperation that rips me to shreds.
Fuck this.
“I’m only going to say this once,” I snarl, slowly stalking toward them. “Let. Her. Go.”
“I didn’t start to suspect you were involved until I heard you were going out on your own, without the band. Then I started poking around, trying to figure out what was going on in your head.”
My nostrils flare. “I’m not talking until you let her go.”
“Not until you tell me what happened!” Gwen snaps in a strangled voice. “I loved him, you bastard! We were talking about getting married in Vegas! I know he probably didn’t give two shits about me and saw me as nothing more than a good time, but he was going to boost my career!” The arm around Evelyn’s neck tightens. “I know you were here with him that night because he sent me a picture of you two together on this same fucking dock! What’d you do to him? Where’s Danny?”
Evelyn’s muffled whimper steals all the air from my chest. Does she think I killed him?