PRAISE FOR M. O’KEEFE
LOST WITHOUT YOU
“Angsty and beyond beautifully written, Molly O'Keefe has created Tommy, a hero unlike any other I've read. He's perfect. He's heartbreaking. He's in my heart forever."
ILSA MADDEN-MILLS, WSJ BESTSELLING AUTHOR
BABY COME BACK
"Breathtaking and incredibly sexy, BABY, COME BACK is an emotional tour de force."
SKYE WARREN, NYT BESTSELLER
RUIN YOU
M. O’KEEFE
Copyright © 2017 by M. O’Keefe
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Created with Vellum
Many thanks to so many people for their help with this book. All of my books, really. My life, actually. These people basically help with my life.
Lexi Houghton who designed the most beautiful covers while I screeched in her ear.
Wanda Ottewell, a beautiful amazing editor who has come back into my life and now I won’t ever let her leave.
Skye Warren, Annika Martin and Shari Slade - truly just the best squad. I am deeply indebted and grateful for your wisdom and of course for the cheese. And the penguin masks. And the soufflés.
Steph and Julie - we’re doing it! WE ARE ACTUALLY DOING IT! And I couldn’t do any of it without you.
For the readers who pick up this book and every other book and write such beautiful reviews, letters, facebook/instagram/twitter posts - I am just so lucky and I can’t thank you enough.
And for Adam. For everything.
CONTENTS
Introduction
I. Then
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
II. Now
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Epilogue
INTRODUCTION
Ruin You is a standalone romance in The Debt universe.
Other books set in this world are:
Lost Without You
Where I Belong
PART ONE
THEN
ONE
San Francisco Civic Center
Eight years ago
THE KNIFE IS heavy in my pocket. It burns with its own heat. Pounds with its own pulse. It’s alive against my palm. And I can’t quite believe I’m doing this. Part of me is ice cold with fear and doubt and…fear. Mostly fear. So much fucking fear.
Mom, I think. Because I’m scared and I’m seventeen and missing her is a bitter taste in my mouth that doesn’t let me sleep. Or think. Or eat. It barely lets me breathe.
Mom. Mom. Mom.
The thought of her…of her rattling breath from the hospital bed we put in our living room, her fragile skin tearing at a touch, the sourness of her body as she lay dying. My beautiful, wild, fierce mother reduced to a paper husk.
All preventable. All for nothing.
The injustice of it, the wrongness of it, that my mother is underground, my father next to her, while Dale Simpson just got exonerated for his crimes…
Vengeance and fury and righteousness; it’s a wildfire in me, burning down my doubt. Clearing out my fear.
Dad, I think, I’ll finish what you started.
I’ll make you proud.
No one notices me as I walk through the crowd. A seventeen-year-old kid wearing a jacket in the gray drizzle of a San Francisco afternoon. Like a ghost I ease between people standing outside the courthouse waiting for Dale Simpson to come out and make a statement.
To lift his hands in the air in triumph, to say something so vile and repugnant about the nature of the free market and the cost of doing business.
That’s when I’m going to run up the steps and stab him.
Without warning, tears are pouring down my face. A nerves thing. An anger thing. I can’t stop them and my ghost status changes. People notice me.
I wipe my face with my sleeve, my other hand in the pocket, holding the knife.
You don’t even know how to hold the fucking thing.
That voice, reasonable and so sure, is not helping. It’s the last tantrum being thrown by my logic. My better sense.
You really think this, THIS, is going to make Dad proud? Who the hell are you kidding? Acing the AP physics test you have next week, that will make him proud. Writing that essay for the state competition. THAT will make him proud.
And what’s the best-case scenario, the voice continues. You manage, through a miracle, to actually kill Simpson and then what? You get shot immediately? You think they’re going to ask questions first?
You die and all your parents’ dreams die, too.
For a second I think I’m going to throw up. For a second my throat is clogged and my eyes stream and I miss my parents so much it’s a weight pushing me down and I stop to catch my breath, bracing myself against a garbage can.
And what about your aunt? And school? What about college? Law school?
Worrying about those things — my future — feels selfish. Because my parents are dead and someone should do something.
And the only someone who can do something is me.
Their only son.
And part of me knows I’m going to fail.
Part of me knows I’m too much of a coward.
A crowd is gathering around me and I’m about ten feet from the steps of the courthouse. It’s the third courthouse. The first two were destroyed, the first in a fire, the second in an earthquake.
We came here on a field trip in seventh grade.
Nausea rolls through me again.
“You okay?” a voice asks and I look up to see a girl standing on the other side of the garbage can. She’s wearing a sweatshirt like mine and for a second, ridiculously, I wonder if she’s got a knife in her pocket, too.
“Don’t I look okay?” I ask, reaching for a joke. I’m pretty confident she can tell I’m crying. There is probably snot everywhere.
“You look like shit,” she says and I glance at her face. She’s my age, maybe a little older. Her cheeks are thin and her skin clear. She’s not wearing makeup and her blonde hair is pulled back behind her ears, revealing a port-wine birthmark on her neck. She’s not looking at me; she’s looking at the steps of the courthouse where someone wearing black is setting up a microphone.
And if I look like shit, she…she looks like fury personified. Her pale cheeks are bright red and her hand is white-knuckled on the garbage can. She’s vibrating, she’s so wound up. She’s tiny, physically. Skinny and short with small features and small hands. But still somehow huge.
“You okay?” I ask her, because it’s like standing next to a grenade with the pin pulled. I’m the guy with the fucking knife and she seems more dangerous.
“No,” she says. Her lips are kind of amazing. Like one of those dolls, the top one bigger than the bottom one. In another life, another situation, I might think she is cute. I might try to make another joke to see if she liked her boys smart and nerdy.
But there is only now and the decision I’ve made.
You don’t have to do this, the voice says. Throw the knife in the garbage and get the fuck out of this place. See if
she wants to go with you.
What an appealing thought. We could go down McConnell and find a coffee shop, get some frappuccinos and pretend like I never contemplated murder.
We could end up together, her and I, and this…meeting outside the courtyard will be a funny story we tell our kids. The way my parents told me how they met at a marriage equality rally.
“TV stations are here,” she says, looking around at the cameras being setting up on the wings of the crowd.
I try with all my strength not to think of my father.
“He probably called them from inside,” she says bitterly. “He’s standing behind those doors making sure his stage is all set.”
“Probably,” I agree.
“Nothing is ever going to touch him, is it?” she asks then looks at me with eyes so sharp I feel like my skin could slice open.
“Something will,” I say. The knife’s weight solid and real in my hand. Suddenly, I want to tell her I have the weapon. Convince her that I’m going to be the catalyst that changes everything.
Just then the doors of the courthouse open and Dale Simpson steps out. He’s so much larger than he looks in the pictures I’ve carefully clipped off the internet and out of newspapers and magazines.
I have a book. A Dale Simpson III book. My revenge notebook. I pasted the clipped-out articles and pictures onto blank paper like a kindergartener. And I probably would have kept on doing that forever, comforting myself with thoughts of revenge, pretending to be the kind of guy who would find justice for his parents while just selfishly living his life.
But then this court case. And the ruling that came down that Simpson Pharma wasn’t responsible for the deaths of thousands of people who couldn’t afford their over-priced medicine.
His over-priced medicine.
His hands are so bloody and the Supreme Court of California just declared him innocent.
There is other stuff, too. Another case. Tax evasion and corruption. A woman went down for that. I read it was his mistress. She got twenty years. And Dale Simpson shrugged at the press conference. Like it just doesn’t matter to him.
In real life Dale Simpson looks bigger and brasher than he does in the small black-and-white pictures I’ve cut out. His yellow blond hair is pushed back off his head like he’s a cartoon villain.
He wears a long, camel-colored coat over a slick gray suit and a pink tie. When he steps up to the microphone he holds up his hands to quiet the crowd.
But the boos don’t stop.
“Hey!” he yells into the mic and we all cringe backwards. “I get it, you’re angry. You’re mad. Maybe some of you have lost loved ones that the medicine my company manufactures could have saved. I would be upset, too. But I am not a doctor. I’m a businessman.”
The crowd is starting to surge forward. The blonde girl and I are both jostled away from the garbage can. And the cops are no longer bored at the sidelines. They’re talking into walkie-talkies and stepping towards the foot of the stairs like they’re going to need to protect this asshole from all the people here like me, who are after his blood.
“Fuck you!” I yell and the girl next to me smiles.
Something weird happens. I get turned on. And…my dick twitches. Like the danger and her attention and her approval turns something on in me. A light in my gut I didn’t know I had.
A few more people echo my rage and scream obscenities, and I sense the power of the mob around me. Security from the courthouse step down from the doors to stand around Dale Simpson, who pushes them back. Like he doesn’t need them.
“The courts have just ruled that it’s not my job to save everyone,” he says. “It’s not my job to make my medicine accessible. It’s my job to make money.”
“You piece of shit!” I scream. And the mob takes my cry and amplifies it. They start chanting “piece of shit.”
I laugh, startled to be a chat creator and so does the girl. Won’t lie…that is pretty awesome.
“What did he do to you?” the girl beside me asks. I feel her attention like electricity.
“Killed my mother.” As clear as if he’d put a bullet in her brain.
She looks at me and, for a second, I’m caught in her gaze, the intensity of it. Her eyes are brown. Dark brown. Bottomless. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“It’s not your fault,” I say. “It’s his.”
“Fuck that guy,” she says. “Who gets to live like that? Treating everyone around him like garbage. Like nothing. And getting away with it.”
“Yeah.” I laugh in that weird bitter way people laugh at funerals. Like it’s laugh or tear the world to pieces. That’s the place I’ve been living since Dad brought a gun to the headquarters of the Simpson Company. I shake off the memory before it can sink its teeth into me.
“What did he do to you?” I ask, assuming she’s probably got the same story. A loved one wasting away in the living room while this guy counts his cash on a boat off his private island.
“He’s my father,” she says, spitting the words out like poison someone shoved between her lips.
“Wait. What? He’s —”
“My fucking father.”
And while I’m still shell-shocked, my mouth hanging up, she bends over and picks up a stone from the ground. She tosses it in her hand, like she’s gauging its weight, its suitability for the job at hand then she hauls back her arm and rifles it at the courthouse. The stone sails right over the heads of the police officers standing between the crowd and its prey to clatter against the stepps, mere feet from Simpson.
And the entire crowd, everyone standing there… The twenty or so protestors. The police. The security. Even fucking Dale Simpson…everyone stops.
Shocked. Stunned.
“It came from over there.” The cop closest to us says, pointing our way and I turn to the girl to tell her to run. But she’s gone. I’m alone by the garbage can.
And then an energy rolls over the crowd. Almost like a scream, like a wave and people are running to the steps of the courthouse. I see Simpson get whisked away by security over the heads of the mob. I’m shoved forward even as I try to step backwards. I turn to run. But it’s too late.
“That’s him!” someone yells and it’s only seconds, I swear it’s barely a heartbeat, later I’m tackled by a cop. My breath knocked out of me. I feel the knife slide in my pocket and I wonder if I’m cut.
“It wasn’t — I don’t —”
“Jesus. He’s got a fucking knife,” the officer says, his knee in my back his arm across the back of my head, shoving my face into the cement. My glasses crack and my eyes burn and I want to tell him it is a mistake. I shouldn’t even be here. I’m supposed to be studying for my AP physics test.
I made a mistake.
I didn’t throw the rock.
Simpson’s daughter did.
His fucking daughter.
But none of it matters.
This is my ruin.
TWO
Seven months later
St. Jude’s Home for Court-placed Juveniles
Simon
IF YOU’RE WONDERING what kind of place they send an honor-roll kid with no prior record — not even one skipped day of school — who has “suffered an unimaginable emotional loss who in his grief and anger” (my lawyer’s words — she was a good lawyer) carries a ten-inch kitchen knife to a courthouse, it’s this place.
St. Jude’s Home for Court-placed Juveniles.
A place of healing, I was told in the courtroom. Of reflection.
But at night the doors are locked from the outside. Like prison. Like we’re rabbits in a cage.
Nice, huh? Trust me, the brochures don’t say a word about that little detail. I mean, my Yelp review is going to be scathing.
The keys for our rooms hang from the Pastor’s belt and they jingle when he walks. An advanced warning system all of us are attuned to. A sick Pavlov’s dog situation, except instead of making us salivate, we shit our pants out of fear.
I joke. Kinda.
The windows don’t open.
The fridge is locked.
They don’t call it a jail. In fact, they call this place a second chance for kids who would normally go to jail.
But, it’s no second chance.
It’s a barrel, we’re fish and the Pastor is the fisherman with a cruel streak and giant hands.
Stop, Simon. Work, Simon.
My mantra. But tonight, it’s not working.
It’s late, the house should be sleeping, but I can feel everyone’s tension through the walls.
Something bad is going to happen. And I know this feeling, I don’t want to brag. But me and this feeling go way back.
Some kids have imaginary friends, I have dread.
I have low-level anxiety. An ulcer I named Fred. I have the firm and true knowledge that happiness, nine times out of ten, is a trick for the foolish.
Happiness is a warning. A cloud covering the sun. A change in the soundtrack.
And Tommy, my stupid roommate, has — against the odds — been happy lately. Ever since Beth was placed here. Beth with the freckles and the hair and the secrets.
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