by Cole McCade
THE
LOST
Cole McCade
A CROW CITY NOVEL
Copyright © 2015 by Cole McCade
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher / author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author at the address below.
Cole McCade
C/O Rockstar PR & Literary Consulting, LLC
191 Ox Bow Drive
Nora, VA 24272
[email protected]
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:
L’Oreal, IKEA, Djarum Blacks, Starbucks, Pretty Woman, Redbox, iPod, iPhone, Melanie Martinez, Osh-Kosh, Thomas the Tank Engine, TracFone, Amstel Light, Playboy, Amazon Kindle, Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Marilyn Manson, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Chevrolet Impala, Pontiac Firebird, Twizzlers, IHOP, Harlequin, The Dollar Store, Camaro, Sony, Michelob, Wal-Mart, Black Devils, Dodge Neon, Zippo, Djarum Blacks, Brillo, McDonald’s, Lolita, Barbie, Ken, Spiderman, Batman, BBB, Yelp, CNN, A Crazed Girl, Camels, The Ten O’Clock People, Wild Turkey, Aspirin, Mac Trucks, Jansport, Saran Wrap, Lush, Ziploc, Books of Blood, Polaroid, Clan of the Cave Bear, The Mammoth Hunters, Romeo and Juliet, Dora the Explorer, Tina Turner, I Can’t Stand the Rain, Johnny Depp, Garbage, Only Happy When it Rains, Bud Light, Gerber, Charlie Brown, Raggedy Ann, Colt, Chiclets, Massive Attack, Black Milk, Hallmark, Mercedes-Benz, Spaghetti-Os, Godzilla, The Day the Crayons Quit, Cheerios, BMW, Shalimar, Cover Girl, Band-Aid, Keurig, Neosporin, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Where the Wild Things Are, Maytag, Underoos, Thor, Google, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Bic, Taser, Dumpster, Vicodin
For everyone who’s ever wanted to tear it all down…
…and leave it all behind.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Trigger Warning: A Word from the Author
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Afterword: I
Afterword: II
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Cole McCade
TRIGGER WARNING: A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR
THIS BOOK CONTAINS MATERIAL THAT may be triggering for some readers.
That’s it. Plain and simple. There are topics in this story, graphically depicted scenes, that may be titillating to some and may be deeply harmful to others, when they detail emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, domestic violence, non-consent, and incest in both a fantasy context and as traumatic events with very real repercussions. I make no excuses for that. It is what it is, and I acknowledge it; I also acknowledge the dysfunction of many of the relationships in this book, and would never want anyone to see them as a model for a relationship or an attempt to normalize, trivialize, or glamorize acts that can be deeply scarring and extremely dangerous to people in real life.
Let this be your trigger warning. This story will not be a comfortable read. If there are scenes you can’t read because they trigger you or make you uncomfortable, that’s okay. Stop reading. Skip ahead, skip back, close the book; do whatever you need to do. You have the right to not be exposed to things that hurt you—and to not be judged for that, or have your feelings dismissed because “it’s just a story, just a fantasy.”
Someone else’s personal fantasy may well be your personal nightmare. If scenes in this book are hurtful to you, I’m sorry for that. And I respect that, and respect your right to walk away. Self-care is important, always.
Be good to yourselves.
-C
PROLOGUE
“STATE YOUR NAME.”
Cold, clipped words, blending into the noise of the police station. Leigh lifted her head from a fixed study of her clenched fingers. Colors whirled around her in a lurid carnival nightmare, too bright, too blurry. On a bench on the far side of the room, a wasted and broken scarecrow woman picked at a scab on her wrist with a certain habitual listlessness, oozing diseased red-brown blood over liver spots. Her tendons were rails under her skin, and the dull gleam of cuffs chained her to the bench. She raised her head and stared at Leigh with yellowed eyes that captured her with a sort of empty, terrifying promise.
Across the desk a policewoman waited, with that compassionate impatience only a half-step from pity and shoulder-to-shoulder with disgust. Her flat blue eyes said she’d been trained to care, but couldn’t be bothered anymore. Leigh swallowed and tugged her hoodie close against the tinny air-conditioned chill. Her mouth had dried to a tacky, sticky mess, gummy pills of lipstick beading on her lips, and her tongue was a bloated and useless organ, this swollen pink thing pushing pointlessly against her teeth.
“Leigh,” she ground out. “Clarissa Leigh…” Her married name scratched sandpaper syllables against her throat. “…van Zandt.”
“And Miss van Zandt, do you know why you’re here?”
She nodded, her neck a creaking wooden puppet-hinge. “I do.”
“Your family’s been worried about you.”
“I know.”
She knew what she should do here. Bow her head in shame and contrition, maybe even sniffle. But she looked for the emotions and they weren’t there; just scraps and tatters, clinging to the empty place where they belonged. She had no feeling left, hollowed out and lost and wondering how she’d ended up here. This didn’t feel real. Instead it was a dream where everyone leered in fisheye close-up, their smiles all teeth and stretched red lips and manic glee. She wanted to run, but somehow she’d gone too numb to do anything but sit here surrounded by the stink of fear-sweat, stale beer, and that particular police-station smell of urine soaked into concrete for decades on end.
“What happened to you?” the officer asked. Leigh didn’t answer, and the officer’s pen tapped against the forms on her desk, rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat, Morse code for I’d rather be anywhere but here with this spoiled little runaway princess. “It’s been four years. You were declared legally dead.”
“That’s all right.” She closed her eyes with a laugh that ripped her guts up into her mouth, and buried her face in her hands. Dead. Dead.
Yeah, that was about right.
“Miss van Zandt?”
Stop calling me that.
“Miss van Zandt. I need you to focus on my voice.”
Stop calling me that!
Leigh took a measured breath and opened her eyes. Her shoulders squa
red. The bolts on the back of the hard, ass-biting chair dug into her shoulder blades. “I am focused. I can hear you just fine.”
“Eyes are dilated.” The officer—her nametag read Maroni, could there be a more clichéd name for a Crow City cop—leaned across the desk, peering at her face. Then she beckoned to the aide hovering over them like a mannequin. “I’ve seen this too many times. Drugs and prostitution.” She talked about Leigh like she wasn’t even there. “We’ll have to clean her up before her husband gets here.”
“I’m not on drugs. I’ve never been on drugs.”
Maroni’s pen-clicking stopped. Her disbelief was a heavy thing, push-push-pushing until Leigh nearly laughed.
“You’re not on drugs.”
“No.”
“Then what happened?”
There it was. The first hint of exasperation. Of frustration, stitched into knitted brows and the purse of lips in just the right shade of I can’t be a woman, I’m a cop mauve. Because like anyone normal, anyone who wasn’t fucking broken to pieces and liked being that way, Maroni needed to make sense of this. Needed to quantify it in a world where the rules worked as normal and everyone wanted to chase that dream of happiness that wasn’t anything but desperation painted over of a frantic tally of things. Things of plastic, things with value created by people whose upper lips curled when they looked down at little girls like Leigh, and demanded she account for herself in sane, rational ways that made proper sense.
Sorry, Officer Maroni.
I’m not the kind of thing that makes much sense.
Maroni pushed a harsh sound through her teeth. “You had a job, a husband, a newborn son. You had a life other people would kill for, and we find you here on the streets. Were you pressured? Kidnapped?”
“No. None of that.” Leigh shook her head.
“You’ll have to explain, then.”
“I left.” She trailed off, lips parted; no words came for long seconds, until she managed, “I…I was afraid.”
“Of what?” Maroni tried to catch her eye, but Leigh looked down at her hands, at her chipped pink fingernails dipped in the sparkles of shooting stars. “Miss van Zandt. If someone was hurting you, you need to tell us now so we can take appropriate steps to protect you.”
“No. No one hurt me. Not like that.”
“I’m afraid you’ll need to be more clear. What were you afraid of?”
“Of…”
She struggled for an answer. Struggled for something this woman would accept, something that would make her sigh with sympathy and pity and relieved disdain that said there, but for the Grace of God…
But again, she found nothing. Nothing but the truth, and Leigh shrugged as she looked up at the policewoman and wondered if she had daughters who might one day be like Leigh, daughters who would cut stark red lines of fingernails in the walls of flesh that caged her in the shape of pop culture’s perfect woman.
“Of the inevitable monotony of it all,” she said.
And smiled.
CHAPTER ONE
SHE ALWAYS LOVED THE ONES who hurt her, and the ones who threw her away.
She didn’t even know this one’s name. His hair fell over her in lank straggles of dark brown, brushing her cheeks like seaweed wafting against a drowning swimmer. That was how it felt, she thought as his cock slid deeper and the hard thick ridges of it stretched her cunt until her breaths hitched tight and the seams of her threatened to snap. Like drowning. He slammed into her, the wet slick pain of his cock head cleaving her and filling her up inside with a liquid burn, and every time his hands clutched hard at her thighs and her back slammed against the dirty damp concrete of the alley wall, she sank a little deeper into the undertow and away from the light.
And when everything inside her wound tight and her thighs quivered and her back arched, she exhaled her last gasp of air and let the tightness in her lungs carry her into the dark.
Overhead, someone’s air conditioner groaned and shuddered. Wet cold droplets of condensation fell from the coils and plunked on her, pattering little raindrops of ice soaking the shoulders of her hoodie. She opened her eyes and looked up at the tangle of electrical wires and the hard-curving edges of cheap satellite dishes scaling the side of the building, and listened to his low hoarse grunts as he finished. She’d gone numb, and his cock was just a tickling scrape, a vague irritation slithering into her, slick with the plastic feel of the condom and the soft sweet sucking sounds of her own wetness.
“Fuck, baby,” he gasped, and she closed her eyes and hoped he would wrap this up soon. He smelled like old pot, that sour-feet reek that got into a pothead’s hair and was as hard to get out as cigarette smoke from carpet. She hadn’t minded the smell when he’d bought her a drink, and she doubted she’d remember it when she picked herself up off his couch in the morning and moved on her way.
But right now, it was a cloying thing that curled up in her lungs and made it hard to taste the night.
He stiffened, shuddering. She felt that subtle throbbing and swelling deep inside, his pulse and rhythm in the veins of his cock; she felt the come filling him up and thickening his shaft on its way to puddle and gather in the well at the tip of the condom. It wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted the slick flooding rush of wet heat surging into her and coating her hot and dirty inside, but she didn’t know this guy—and she didn’t want his babies, or his STDs.
He slumped against her, heavy, just a sack of clay with no bones, his breaths clammy against her neck. When he went soft inside her, she squirmed her hips and pushed at him. He grunted, then pulled back and left her with that sliding empty feeling that pooled inside her and flowed down to leave her panties sticky and warm and rubbing against a delicious soreness that would be the only thing she’d want to remember about him.
He finally let go of her thighs. She shifted to stand on her own two feet and settled her little pleated skirt, then studied the round purpling marks he’d left where his fingertips had dug into her skin, livid against her paleness. She liked it, she thought. Like art. A constellation on her skin, making something beautiful out of something ugly, just like graffiti on a squatting toad of an abandoned building.
“So…” The rrrp of his zipper sounded like a burp. “You ever gonna tell me your name?”
“Leigh,” she answered absently, and traced a line from one bruise to another and another. These. She liked these best. The lines that connected in the same path as the constellation Leo. She was a lioness, fierce in her roar.
“Leigh.”
He grinned. There was that gap in his teeth. He probably wouldn’t like knowing that cute little imperfection was how she’d ended up here under his straining grunting weight, while somewhere down the street the deep bass throb of distant music mimicked what they’d just been doing. That little imperfection had won her over, and the way that hard ridge had slewed left against his jeans, sliding down the inside of his thigh. Not his cheesy lines, and not the kind of body that came from a few days of hard labor a week at a job that probably didn’t require a GED. She didn’t need perfection, or suave one-liners.
She just needed those little differences that made people real, and just as flawed as her.
He ran a hand through his hair. “I’m—” he started, but she cut him off with a finger pressed to his lips.
“Don’t tell me,” she said, and smiled. “Just take me home.”
* * *
His car was a junker. So was his apartment, a studio with a futon on the floor and stained towels draped over the stove, almost as much of a fire hazard as the wires sprouting from the electrical outlet splitter and looping to a wreck of video game systems. Dime bag on the kitchen counter. Bong on the chipped IKEA entertainment center. Predictable.
He tried to talk. She silenced him with a kiss, his mouth tasting of the White Russians he’d been sucking down like candy, the kind of milky sourness just right for man-children like him. She liked his sweetness, his stupidity, his simplicity, and she let him take her on t
he mattress, on her hands and knees with his fingers snared hard in her hair and her head pushed down into the lumpy pillow and her voice raised high in hard hungry screams when he did it hard enough to hurt her, just the way she liked. His cock was thick and burning, and fitted into the curve of her until she thrust her ass back toward him and begged him to spread her open.
If she’d known his name, she’d have panted it into the pillow with wet and needy lips. That was why she didn’t like to know.
She did this for herself, and didn’t like to share.
But for just a few moments, while his cock was inside her, she closed her eyes and loved him. Loved the idea of him, until her hips locked hard and her thighs drew tight. That sick wet pulling started deep inside, and she forgot he even existed as she dug her fingers into the futon cover and bit her tongue until she tasted blood.
Cooling sweat clung to her in a filmy patina, and when he stretched out next to her and tugged at her clothes, she pushed him away and curled into herself and hurt, deep down inside. This wasn’t love. She’d had love once, and she’d run away from it because it wasn’t the kind of love she wanted. Wasn’t the kind of love she’d dreamed about in wordless whispers, formless ideas in the back of her mind. Just a deep tugging feeling, as if someone had tied a string to her heart and was always pulling, pulling, ever pulling her toward something she didn’t know but would recognize when she saw it.
She was starting to think that kind of love didn’t exist.
He snored, while she watched headlights pass by in arcing stripes through bent and broken venetian blinds, lashing shadows across the walls and sometimes painting them blue and red when the piercing keen of police sirens soared in a receding banshee cry. She’d read once in a bent-edged and worn library book that the banshee, the baen si, was an Irish fairy who would wail when someone was about to die. Seemed about right, for Crow City cops. Wailing out a death cry for someone who didn’t know yet that their blood would color the streets and run in the gutters and wash away in the next rain, as if they’d never existed.