Creeping Beautiful, Book 1

by J. A. Huss

  I shrug and sigh. Because her mind is made up and I have long since learned to pick and choose my battles with Indie. “Fine. You can move over to the carriage house with Nathan. But Indie, I’m begging you. Do not marry that boy. If you love him now you will love him in three or four years. There is no real reason to get married other than to… to prove that you can walk away from us whenever you want. I know you can walk away. You have been able to walk away since the day I brought you home. You don’t have to prove anything anymore.”

  She stays quiet, biting her lip a little as she looks at McKay and then Donovan.

  “You don’t have to choose, Indie. That’s what I’m really saying. You can have him and us. It’s all fine.”

  She lets out a long breath. A huge sigh of relief. And that might just be the best outcome I could’ve hoped for. She doesn’t want to walk away. She wants to keep us. All of us.

  And as long as we accept that, she will stay.

  “I can live with that.”

  Now it’s McKay’s turn to sigh. And I realize he is against this marriage idea as well.

  Well, of course he is. She belongs to him more than anyone. He was the one who took care of her on the day to day. He took her to the doctor when she was sick. He made her meals every day. Called her home from the woods every night. Paid for those braces that straightened her teeth. Hell, he even went to parents’ night when she was in those schools.

  But the more I think about all this shit, the more enraged I become.

  Because Indie is mine.

  Mine.

  McKay helps her move out too. He boxes up her room and drives it over to the carriage house in his truck.

  It’s well after midnight when the lights from his truck pass through the dark front room of the house.

  I’m waiting for him in the TV room off the kitchen when he walks in. Our eyes meet as he crosses the room and sits down next to me on the couch, sinking back in the cushions with a sigh.

  “I hate that fucking kid.”

  I can’t stop the laugh that comes out with my words. “Me too, dude. Me too.”

  “And Donovan is pissing me off.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Do you know he wanted to take her to LA?”

  “He mentioned it.”

  “Fuck him. He doesn’t get to walk in here after all these years and tell us he knows what she needs.”

  “No shit.”

  “And Nathan St. James. I mean… I guess he’s OK. But for some reason, I hate that little fuck.”

  “He ain’t so little no more.”

  “No shit. Did you know he was on the football team?”

  “Get out of here. That pissant puke?”

  “He told me. Showed me his varsity jacket too. He’s even got a football scholarship to Ole Miss for next fall.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. The offer came in the mail last week. He thinks Indie and the baby are gonna move to fucking Oxford with him next summer.”

  I am… stunned. “Do you think she’ll go?”

  “I dunno. Not if she’s smart.”

  “Well… better a Rebel than a Gator, I guess.” We both laugh. “But seriously. That’s like a five-hour drive, McKay. She can’t move to Ole Miss.”

  “I know.”

  “She’s not OK. She will never be OK. They fucked her head up so good before she came to us, there’s no telling what could happen if we weren’t around to keep her in line. She doesn’t even understand it, ya know? Because she blacks out when it happens and then we… well, we just bring her out of it and pretend it didn’t happen. Seven times Donovan had to fly in and do an emergency brain un-fuck.”

  “Preaching to the choir, brother. But what are we gonna do? She’s got her own money. And a truck. And in six months she’ll be eighteen and we’ll have no more say in anything.”

  “Should we tell her? We could tell her. Try to make her understand.”

  “She won’t believe us. I mean what are we gonna say? ‘Hey, Indie. I know you want to move out with your little baby daddy and be a normal grown-up like everyone else. But you can’t. Because you have a hidden evil killer lurking deep inside you. Except you don’t know about it because we’ve been keeping it secret for all these years so you don’t go insane.’ She would flip out and call us a bunch of liars.”

  “We have the tapes.”

  “Shit. That’s a fucking can of worms all its own. Why the hell you and Donovan felt the need to record all that shit, I’ll never understand. If anyone found them, we’d be heading for the fucking electric chair.”

  “No one’s gonna find them. I’ve got them hidden.”

  “Hidden where?”

  “Here in the house.”

  “Are you shitting me? Dude. If the FBI ever got wind of us—and let’s be clear, that black ops division that protected us all those years, they are not on our side anymore—if they ever got wind of us, they’d come tear this whole place down to find evidence.”

  “They’re safe. Trust me.”

  “You should burn those tapes. Like… tonight.”

  “I did burn the tapes. The interviews are all in my safe on a hard drive now and it’s encrypted with a self-destruct firewall. I paid this hotshot kid genius from Oxford to do it for me and that dude. Trust me. He knows how to hide shit on a hard drive.”

  “Some asshole kid from Ole Miss?”

  I laugh. “No, you dipshit. Like the real Oxford. In the UK. He’s ex-Company. Or he would’ve been if it hadn’t gone down. Now he’s just a hacker with a pedigree, I guess. But I knew his older sister. I’m not worried about the tapes.”

  “And Donovan’s copies?”

  “I assume he took the same precautions. He is a genius, right?”

  McKay does one of those head-shaking eyerolls. “Well… anyway. If she heard the shit that came out of her mouth during those post-blackout interviews, she’d lose her mind forever. We cannot play those tapes for her. And that’s the only proof we have that we’re not assholes.”

  I think about this for a moment. Because he’s right. The only proof of what and who Indie Anna Accorsi really is can’t be used to change her mind. It will only make things worse.

  McKay thinks for a while too because we’re both quiet. But then he gets up and looks down at me. “So what should we do? Just wait it out and see if she wants to stay here with us when Nathan goes off to college? Because that doesn’t sound… proactive enough for my tastes.”

  “Nah. Mine either. But leave it to me. I got a plan.”

  He narrows his eyes at me. “What plan?”

  “Just… let me handle it.”

  I spend the next several weeks doing a lot of thinking and a lot of spying. The thinking part… well, I feel bad for that. But not the spying part.

  Because I start thinking back to that day of the auction and how different life would be if I walked away with no one.

  Just… left. Empty-handed. Came back here, did whatever. And then the Company would fall five years later and I’d be free.

  No little girl to worry about.

  I mean, the fact is—Indie Anna Accorsi upended my entire fucking life. I haven’t really been looking for a girlfriend, but there’s no fucking chance of having one now. Not since Indie came along. How the fuck do I explain her? And I get it. If I could tell someone normal about this, they’d say, “Just call her your sister.”

  But I don’t want to call her my sister. That’s the point. She’s not my sister. I don’t think of her as my sister. Or my kid.

  She is Indie. She is my girl.

  People can take that any way they want. It’s just the truth.

  She’s mine. In every sense of the word. And she will be with me, in one way or the other, forever.

  But she comes with a price. And that price has been high. Most of her fuck-ups came early in the training and the Company was still around back then. Everything got handled. One phone call and whatever mistake Indie made was erased. And everyone wh
o got in the way of that erasure was taken out too.

  But after the Company fell things got decidedly more complicated.

  I guess it was fine for some, but not for us. I know people wanted the Company gone. Hell, I wanted them gone too and I played my part in their demise. But life is a lot more complicated without them than it ever was when they were in control of shit.

  The whole world changed afterward. I’m talking… governments changed. New world leaders were suddenly elected. People who had no idea the Company even existed saw this and it made them uneasy. They didn’t know why they were uneasy, but it was the fall of the Company that caused these things.

  Several stock markets crashed. Not in the US, but lots of other places. I mean, turn on the news any night of the week and it’s nothing but chaos. The whole planet is filled with crisis after crisis. And even in countries that have traditionally been stable, things are going off the rails quickly. Those that were traditionally unstable just got worse.

  And I get it. People want to feel in control. They don’t want some secret cabal running shit behind their backs. But sometimes the devil you know is better than the one you don’t.

  Just thinking this shit makes me feel like one of the bad guys. And I swore up and down, the whole time I was growing up, that I would not be one of the bad guys. But am I any better now, without the Company, than I was before?

  I’m not talking about money or prosperity. I have too much of both to be worried about that. I’m talking about that high road I thought I was on. That moral compass I thought I was holding.

  But I am doing exactly the same thing I was before the Company fell. Only now I’m exposed. There is no one covering for me.

  Sane people would say, “Well, just stop doing that shit, Adam. Stop taking those jobs. Stop killing people. Stop all of it.”

  But I own a Company killer. What am I gonna do with her? What will happen to Indie if there are no more jobs? Let me spell it out for you. In a way, she’s like a heroin addict. She needs it. She needs that life. So if I stop the jobs, if I force her to conform to societal norms, how long before she crashes and burns? And who will she take down with her?

  If it was just me, I could probably live with that.

  Hell, I could probably even live with her taking down Donovan.

  But not McKay.

  So these are my choices:

  Protect her and give her jobs to do that keep her in check.

  Or kill her.

  That’s it. Those are my options.

  There is no other way this plays out. It’s either work with who she is and mitigate it, or put her out of her misery and move on.

  Because Indie Anna Accorsi is… insane.

  So I’m in the middle of mitigating when I see Nathan St. James exit the diner in Pearl Springs and walk across the street to the parking lot where his black Ford truck is parked.

  I’m in the back seat of said truck. Waiting for him.

  I’ve been watching Nate for several weeks now. I had a hunch about this kid. He’s not a bad guy. Not like me.

  But he’s not a good one either.

  Definitely not good enough for my Indie.

  It’s not late. But it’s midwinter and it’s dark as fuck out tonight. So Nathan gets in his truck and doesn’t see the shadow sitting directly behind him. Not until he goes to turn left off First Street and checks his mirror.

  His foot slams down on the brake as I grab him by the hoodie with one hand and yank hard until he starts choking. Then I hold up the gun so he can see it. “Keep driving and this whole thing is gonna turn out OK, Nate. Do something stupid, and you won’t have to worry about it. Because you’ll be dead.” I watch him in the rear-view mirror as he opens his mouth to speak, but I cut him off. “Whatever it is you’re gonna say, it’s not gonna change things. And I’m not interested in having a conversation with you, Nathan. I’m here to deliver a message and go on my way. If you hear my message and heed my message, you’ll go on your way too. If you choose to ignore it, well… then things are gonna get dicey. Nod if you understand me.”

  He nods.

  “Good. Head towards the highway like you’re going home. And by the time we get there all this will be behind us.”

  Nate and I have a chat. And that chat includes little details about his life that I’m one hundred percent sure Indie has no clue about. All these years I pegged Nate as just the boy next door. Some pussy kid who got lucky when my girl came to live in the big house across the lake.

  But then I heard he was playing ball. And he was good enough to get himself a full-ride scholarship to Ole Miss. Which, OK, I get it. Ole Miss isn’t Harvard by any stretch. But it’s no joke, either. So I started wondering what else I didn’t know about our friend Nate.

  I needed some specifics.

  Which led me to specifically finding out about that hot cheerleader he’s dating from high school. The one he just had dinner with.

  Specifically… he banged her in the front seat of this very truck just two hours ago.

  Specifically… Nathan St. James has a thing for rough sex.

  Because he had his hands around her throat, squeezing her windpipe, the whole time they were fucking. And if I find out he choked Indie when he got her pregnant, I will cut off his cock, shove it into his mouth, and let him experience sexual asphyxiation for himself.

  Not that I’m real worried about anyone hurting Indie like that. She can most definitely take care of herself. I just want to set some ground rules for my buddy Nate.

  And then, just as we turn down the dirt road that leads to Old Home and the little driveway to the carriage house, I tell him what we’re gonna do about this little problem.

  So when I walk past the duck lake towards my house, and Nathan St. James is safely tucked away inside his with my girl, Indie, who is none the wiser about our conversation, I feel a little bit of satisfaction.

  Not a lot.

  But enough.

  For now.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - McKAY

  PRESENT DAY

  I wake up to the sound of Donovan and Indie talking downstairs. They aren’t sharing secrets or anything. Just some normal conversation. And I figure they’re putting groceries away, because I can hear the tell-tale crinkling of plastic bags and the refrigerator door being repeatedly opened and closed.

  I don’t really want to get up. I feel like I could sleep for months and still not be ready to get up and face what’s coming. But I do. I get myself together and wander into the hallway, still half listening to Donovan and Indie. Though things have gone quiet down there now.

  I peek over the railing that overlooks the foyer and arched entrance to the front rooms. Someone—Indie or Donovan—has pulled a bunch of the white sheets off the furniture and has piled them in a heap just in front of the dining room.

  Adam not being here should feel weird. It’s his fucking house. But so much about that dude has been weird since Indie disappeared, I think I’ve become immune to it. We’ve talked a few times. Mostly texted. But I have not seen him since that day everything went down.

  I don’t know that I fully expected Indie to come back. I mean, I had always hoped. But there was a big part of me that figured she’d get herself killed somehow. Who knows how? Any number of ways, I guess. Or that she’d just… forget about us. All of us. Because Indie is very good at forgetting. She’s very good at losing track of things.

  Herself, mostly. But lots of other things too.

  But here we are on the verge of something.

  And it could go a lot of different ways. I guess we won’t know that until Adam shows up and we get Indie to remember what happened and explain what she was thinking that day. Why she did what she did.

  There are two ways to get downstairs from the second floor. The front stairs, which I am standing in front of. And the back stairs that lead directly into the kitchen. And for a second I’m not sure which route to take. I could throw those sheets in the laundry if I go down the front. But I could
sneak up on Donovan and Indie in the kitchen if I take the back ones.

  I choose the front ones, fairly certain I don’t want to sneak up on them.

  So I go down, pick up the sheets, and I’m heading towards the laundry room on the other side of the front room, trying to mind my own business, when I hear them.

  Do I get jealous? Doesn’t everyone? So… yeah. I do. But this is something I need to come to terms with. I have fucked her twice now. Twice in the span of less than one full day.

  But that doesn’t mean she’s mine.

  She is not fully mine. Or Donovan’s. Or Adam’s.

  She is ours and that’s just how it is. We can deal, or choose not to, but there is no way around that fact.

  Still. I know what they’re doing in the kitchen.

  At least I think I do. But then I hear them whispering. I place the sheets on the stairs and wander down the hallway to the back of the house where the kitchen is. Trying to be quiet so I can catch a few words.

  Because while I would be happy to give them their privacy if they were fooling around, secrets are something else altogether. I don’t actually like secrets. I’ve been living with them my whole life and they are a burden I could do without.

  I stop and press my back against the wall just before the archway opens up into the combined family kitchen area. Straining to hear them. Because while I like Donovan, I’ve never fully trusted him. All those tapes. I told Adam they were a bad idea but Donovan wanted them for some paper he was writing back in the day. And even if Adam put all of his on some super-secret hard drive, Donovan didn’t. I know that because he brought them with him. A whole fucking bag filled up with Indie’s thoughts.

  I hear Indie say, “They’re gonna find out, Donovan.”

  “It’s fine,” Donovan whispers back. “I can handle them.”

  I should get really suspicious about this line of conversation between Indie and Donovan, but I figure it’s about them. Something to do with their relationship. And I’m not sure that’s any of my business.