“Come with me,” Pike says again, pulling up his pants. “Please, Mic. Come on.” He extends his hand, and all I can think about is that if I take it, my sister is as good as dead.
“Mickey?” the voice asks again.
A tear spills down my cheek. “I just can’t.”
Pike stares at me, and I can see the hurt in his eyes until, suddenly, it’s gone and replaced with something else. I know, in this moment, I’ve said the wrong thing. Something I can’t take back. The shift in him feels permanent. A new reality of what’s to come, and I can feel the intensity of whatever he’s just decided in my very bones. “For what it’s worth, I wanted this. I wanted you. What happens now, you should know, it’s on you.”
He begins to lift himself up to the window, and I charge him, yanking him down by his shirt. I hold his face in my hands, stand up on my tip-toes, and kiss him with everything I have. It’s too short and brief, and when I pull away, I only have a second to glimpse the look in his eyes. A look that says goodbye because something tells me that after what he’s just said, this is it for us.
The end.
“Mickey! Why is this shit locked!” Percy calls out.
Pike gives me one last confused, burning look, then leaps out the window, shutting it behind him. I straighten myself in the mirror and hope that the properly fucked look I’m sporting can also pass as drunk and disheveled.
I unlock the door, and Percy practically falls into the bathroom. He walks in and checks each of the stalls before noticing the broken mirror and the blood. “What the fuck happened?” Percy asks.
“I drank too much. I came in here to puke and fell right into the mirror,” I lie, swaying a little for emphasis.
Percy looks at the mirror again, and I think he’s about to call me out on the impossibility of falling into a mirror above the sink without taking a running leap at it, but his stance softens, and he seems to believe me because his face turns from surprise to concern. “Come with me. Let’s get that hand bandaged up for you.”
I wrap some toilet paper around my hand and shake my head. “I’ve got it. I have a first aid kit in my room.”
“You sure?” he asks.
I nod. “Percy, where’s Mindy?” I ask, holding a piece of toilet paper over my hand, blood soaking through the white tissue instantly.
“I told you not to go poking around.” He glances at my bleeding hand again. “She’s safe, Mickey. Go patch yourself up.”
Feeling defeated and used and sated all at the same time, I barrel past Percy through the main doors and up the stairs toward my room, leaving a bloody trail in my wake…and so much more.
* * *
Hours later, I’m in my small bed, feeling the beat of the music shaking the walls of my small room from the party still raging below. The moonlight shines through the window and casts light on my face.
I never cried when my family died. Not real tears. They were for show for the benefit of Darius and my commitment to my act about not knowing he was the one responsible for their demise. I didn’t have time for real tears then, and I don’t have time for them now.
My tears and my grief are my own, and I refuse to give them to him. The time to grieve isn’t now. It’s when this is all over. And I fear the grief on that day more than the killing that needs to be done by my own hands.
I’ve always been a loner. Even when I was living in a house with my sisters and my parents. I’d always find time to be by myself and my own thoughts. I crave and function well in solitude. That’s what’s gotten me through this. By myself. Making plans. Scheming. Calculating. Trusting no one. I’d spend hours in the middle of the night dreaming on how to bring my plans to fruition and now those dreams, although still there, have company. New dreams.
Of Pike.
Now that I know him, now that I have felt his body against mine, inside mine, now I know he exists in this world, my solitude has become stifling. The air is thick and hard to breathe. The air is hotter and more humid than usual. I don’t just miss him. I crave him, body and soul. I find myself scratching at my own skin, trying to relieve an itch that isn’t on the surface and can’t be soothed by running my nails over my arms again and again until I draw blood.
Missing someone who is dead and never coming back doesn’t go away but dulls over time as acceptance settles in. Missing someone who is alive is a pain that only grows with each tick of the clock.
I didn’t cry when my family died. Not real tears. Just an act for Darius’s sake to prove I didn’t know what he’d done.
If I didn’t cry then, I’m not going to cry now. Even though I feel like my insides are broken. Even though I can’t breathe without feeling sharp pangs of regret. If only we were different people leading different lives. Maybe, I would be that summer tourist that catches his eye. Maybe, he’d be the bad boy who owned the pawn shop that I wouldn’t be able to help but to swoon over.
But none of that matters now. Not my aching heart or my empty soul. I came back to the Fourth Reich to fulfill my revenge alone and now I stay because of my sister.
That look in his eyes before he left. The warning of his words. It was all so…final.
For a second, with Pike at his shop and in his bed, I was happy. I laugh at myself. What is happiness anyway but a mixture of chemical reactions inside the brain? A splash of dopamine, a smidge of serotonin, and a little oxytocin for flavor. It’s a formula, not a feeling. The same effect can be achieved with a pill. It’s an illusion.
But knowing that happiness is an illusion doesn’t make my chest feel any less tight, or my throat any less dry, or my entire body feel less like it’s being slowly lowered into a dark fucking hole never to come out again. I take a deep breath to steady myself.
I. WILL. NOT. CRY.
Pike is the only person I ever saw myself in. Which sounds fucking delusional because we are so different, opposite in almost every way, except where we are the same. Our determination, our pain, our loneliness, the way we try to fill the gaps in our lives. Him with things in his shop, me with my research and revenge.
We’re both just filling a void. If it wasn’t for my sister, I would have taken his hand and went with him. Revenge doesn’t fill my heart the way Pike does. He’s the key.
And I just changed the fucking locks.
5
Pike
There’s no shittier feeling than knowing you have to kill someone whose pussy you can still taste on your lips.
Numb is all I want to feel, but every time I close my eyes, I imagine the look in Mickey’s eyes…right before I end her life.
It’s not a nightmare. It’s the fucking future. Maybe, I was dumb enough to believe, to hope, that she’d come with me, and I wouldn’t have to deal with the rest of this shit. A big part of me never thought she’d stay there, but she did. Again, she chose them.
Mic will be dead. Gone. Not of this fucking world.
It’s as if all of my ribs have been broken.
Nobody can see the injury, but it’s there, and it’s very real.
My face twists in agony with each memory of her. I hold my hand to my chest, rubbing the skin as if it could somehow ease the ache beneath, but it does nothing to help because there is no cure for the kind of sickness I’m suffering from.
Drowning myself in whiskey is the closest I’ve found to relief, but only because I drink enough to render myself unconscious, but the second my eyes open, I reach for her. I think of her. I still smell her on my pillowcases. Even after washing them several times. I know her scent isn’t there, but it’s as if my mind wants to remind me that it was there once. To remember it.
To remember her.
Like I could ever fucking forget her.
I feel like I’ve been in a terrible car accident, and I’m bleeding internally.
I reach for the bottle of whiskey on my desk, only to find it frustratingly empty. I throw it across the room, and it shatters against the door just as it opens.
This feeling is temporary, I tel
l myself. It isn’t real because the person you’ve lost isn’t real. I’ll be done wallowing soon, and when I do, if there is a god out there, may he have mercy on Mickey.
Because I sure as fuck won’t.
Thorne looks at the shattered glass on the floor and rolls her eyes. “You done throwing yourself a pity party? Because we’ve got fucking work to do.”
I groan. “You can run the pawn shop by yourself. Let’s face it. You’ve been doing it for years anyway.”
“True. But that’s not the kind of business I’m talking about.” She stands above me next to the bed and smacks a rolled-up newspaper onto my chest.
I shift to a sitting position. “Thanks, but I was born in a decade where my generation reads these things online.” I slide the paper to the floor.
“Uhhhh.” Thorne picks up the paper and unrolls it. She turns it upside down, and a note drops from between the pages.
Tonight. My studio. 8pm. -King
I read the words and rub my face in my hands. Fuck. He probably wants to discuss the raid of the compound. What night and what time Mickey is going to die. When I take my hands away, I see a foot tapping impatiently on the floor, reminding me of Thorne’s presence. I look up to where she has her arms crossed over her chest and a hip jutted out with her lips pursed.
“Thank you,” I say. Although he could have just sent a text to my burner phone. I guess he wants to be extra careful since digital trails can never truly be deleted. At least, that’s what Nine’s always harpin’ on about. Besides, when you’re planning a mass murder, it’s always best to veer on the side of caution.
“Get your head out of your ass.” Thorne leans over me and sniffs, then pinches her nose shut, fanning a hand in the air. “And for fuck’s sake, take a shower, man.”
It’s true, I could use a shower, but in my drunken state last night, it was the last thing on my mind. Actually, in my drunken state, I’m not even sure how I got back to the pawn shop. The last thing I remember is drinking whiskey with Nine at his place. I sit up straight, stretching sore muscles and proceed to pretend to be looking for something under the stack of paper and receipts piled up on my desk. “Is that how you speak to your boss? Because that’s what I am, in case you’re having problems remembering,” I snap. “Your boss.”
I feel bad for snapping at her and for pulling the boss card because even though I met Thorne when she came to work here, I see her as a friend before an employee. It doesn’t matter.
My words obviously don’t have the impact I intended for them to have because Thorne looks to the ceiling and cackles. She stops suddenly and glares at me with hard accusing eyes. She slaps both of her palms on the desk and leans in closer. “That’s how I speak to my boss when he was the most fearless man I’d ever known and suddenly morphs into…” She waves her hand over me and grimaces. “Whatever this smelly, cowardly creature is.”
Suddenly, rage boils within me, but what’s making me most angry is that she’s right. After all, avoiding the truth is the reason I’m drinking in the first place. I don’t need her cold dose of reality, I need more fucking whiskey. I need more fucking time.
I slam my fist on the desk.
Thorne doesn’t flinch. Because, well, Thorne doesn’t flinch.
I speak through gritted teeth and point an accusing finger that should be pointed at myself, at her. “Don’t you dare think you know what’s fucking going on with me right now. You have no fucking idea.” I turn to leave the room before I say something else to her that I’m going to regret later.
Thorne’s words stop me in my tracks. “Oh, please, Pike. Do you really think you’re the only one whose ever suffered from a broken heart before? You think you’re the only one whose ever lost someone? Well, in case that’s what you’re thinking, allow me to clarify. You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last. You’re not even the only person in this fucking room. So, do the world a favor, take a shower, and while you’re at it, get the fuck over yourself.”
I turn back around and cross my arms over my chest. Thorne’s confession throwing a cold wet bucket of truth over my rage. “Who have you lost?” I ask, curiously. Thorne’s never opened up to me like this, and as much as I consider her a trusted friend, there isn’t a whole helluva lot I know about her past. Her family, which only reveals to me that I’ve been a shitty fucking friend because I never thought to ask.
She shrugs, and folds her hands together. “My mother and my brother. It was a long time ago,” she says looking to the floor then to her nails. She quickly rebounds, straightening her shoulders and facing me once again.
“What happened?” I ask, taking a step toward her.
She sighs. “My mother died, and my brother, well, he’s alive, and I never really knew him, but it doesn’t make not getting the chance to grow up with him, to know him as a kid, feel like any less of a loss than my mother.”
“Where is he now?” I ask, years too late.
“He’s…” She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter. He’s not exactly the family type.”
My fists ball up. “Anyone who wouldn’t want to be your family needs their heads removed from out of their asses more than I need my own.”
She looks up and smirks. “You know, I couldn’t have said it better myself.”
I lift my arms to embrace Thorne, something I don’t remember ever doing before, for her or anyone else, but it feels like the moment this sort of thing is done.
Thorne backs away and holds up a hand. “No. This isn’t the time for that bullshit.” She wrinkles her nose. “I’ll take a rain check on that hug. Maybe, wait until after your shower. Or when the time is right. Or never.” She releases her nose, and I drop my arms. “What it is time for is for you to go get your girl back without getting yourself killed.”
I’m not sure what Thorne’s not understanding. Mickey is gone. “Mickey left. She could have stayed, and she left. She chose to leave. She chose again to stay. I’m old school, but I’m not a caveman. I’m not going to drag her back here by her fucking hair. She chose them.”
“I can’t believe you can’t see it!” Thorne suddenly shouts with a stomp of her foot, her words echoing around the room like a thousand of her yelling at me. Or maybe, I’m not hungover, but still drunk, but at least, I’m only seeing one of her.
“See what?” I cry, pulling at my own hair in frustration. “There’s nothing to see. She’s fucking gone! It’s over!” I look at my friend, and I can’t understand what she’s not understanding. “At least…she will be soon.”
She purses her lips and steps close enough to me that I can smell her cherry shampoo and see the furry swimming in her eyes. “Greyson motherfucking Pike, you hear me, and you listen. Mickey left because she thought she had no other choice! She’s there because she still thinks she has no other choice!” She spins in a circle, then drops her hands to her thighs, bending at the waist. “She knew that if you went after the Fourth Reich that you and the people you care about could die. She wasn’t willing to take that chance because she’s lost people and didn’t want to lose you, too! She’s doing this alone because she thinks she has to in order to protect you, you dumb fucking ox!”
“Why? Why would she do that?” I ask, still not understanding why leaving was somehow the better choice. “I’m still going after the Reich. I always was. She knows this. They set me up to look like I was stealing from King and…” I snap my fingers, “Oh, yeah, they fucking killed Gutter. Plus, I did hold her hostage, and there was that whole sensory torture thing. So, Thorne, tell me, why would she try and protect me? Why would she want to save me?”
My chest is heaving. My questions are rhetorical, but still, I wait for Thorne’s answer, wondering what I missed that she sees so clearly.
Thorne stands straight and gently places her hands on my chest, She looks up into my eyes with both sadness and compassion. More emotion than I’ve ever seen from her in all the years she’s been around. “Mickey thinks she can take them down herself. She wants to
so that you won’t have to.” She pauses and searches for something in my gaze. “Is it so hard for you to understand? To see what I see?” She frowns. “Or, do you just not think that you’re worthy?” The way she asks leads me to believe that she’s asking herself more than she’s asking me.
I try to temper my frustration so that my anger doesn’t blanket my words. “What am I not seeing? Tell me, Thorne. Help me to understand because it may be obvious to you, but it’s not to me. I’m fucking lost here.”
More lost than I’ve ever felt. More than when my mother left. More than when Gutter died.
Thorne holds my face in her hands, forcing me to look at her. “Pike, people protect the people they love. And Mickey?” A tear wells up in Thorne’s eye and falls from the corner, trickling down her cheek. “She fucking loves you.”
Her words punch at my chest like a steel fist. I recoil and feel behind me for the desk for support. I shake my head. “No, she can’t. People who love you don’t leave you.”
“You think it’s that cut and dry?” She chuckles. Love is complicated.”
“Not in my experience. It’s pretty easy. You love someone, and they leave. It means they don’t love you back,” I answer honestly.
She drops her hands. “What you mean is that your mother left you, and you think that means she didn’t love you,” Thorne accuses, accurately.
I search my memory for the time I told Thorne about my mother, but I come up blank. “How did you—”
She waves me off. “You were drunk slurring your way through your past one night and let it slip.”
I’m a drunken confessor? Good to know. Maybe, whiskey isn’t the best breakfast choice this morning.
Thorne nudges my shoulder “Did you ever stop and think she left because she loves you?”
“Mickey or my mom?” I ask.
“Both.”
I answer honestly, “No.”
“Well, you were wrong.” She laughs. “So fucking wrong.”
Pawn: The Pawn Duet, Book Two Page 6