by Hart, Callie
“Shut the fuck up, Hawk.”
“Ooookay. Shutting the fuck up.”
“Get rid of him,” Cam growls.
“Oh, you guys just dragged me out of my only crash pad in Raleigh,” Hawk says. “You’re not just dumping me on the side of the street in the snow and ditching me like an unwanted child. I’ve already been through that shit. I’m gonna have to object pretty fucking strongly if you—”
I slam my fist into the steering wheel. “God, can you just please be fucking quiet!” Breathe, passarrotto. That’s it, mi amore. In…and out. In…and out. See. You control your temper. Your temper does not control you. Va bene. “Either tell us what you were doing in Jacob Weaving’s pool house, or keep your goddamn mouth closed while I try and figure all of this out, Zander.” I’m going to fucking kill him in a minute.
Zander makes a familiar bored sound. “All right, all right. Jesus. Q sent me here to try and find Caleb Weaving’s safe. He wants reparations. We’ve had to turn down shipments now that we’re down three guys. As far as Q’s concerned, Caleb was the one who sold him out to the cops, so now he owes him. Big time.”
“So Caleb’s just letting you stay in the fucking pool house while you snoop around, searching for a fucking safe?”
In the rearview, Zander rolls his eyes dramatically. “Stupidity is not a good look on you. Caleb has no idea Q knows he snitched on us. He thinks everything’s copasetic between the Dreadnaughts and the Weaving operation. We have a huge deal going down at the end of next week. Like, huge. Caleb’s sitting on a monster delivery at his place until then. He asked Q to provide a little extra protection until the trades are ready to be made. He essentially invited a Dreadnaught into his home. Dumb motherfucker.”
This can only be the same deal Monty mentioned to me in his office. The deal that the DEA are going to bust. The one that will lead to Jake subsequently being arrested for raping Zen, and his life finally ending as he knows it.
I grunt as I swing the car through the narrow switchback turns that guides us down the mountainside, toward the town of Raleigh. The Christmas lights in the trees twinkle merrily down in the bottom of the valley, and for a moment I just stare at the little knot of glowing yellow light. Eventually, I say, “What has any that got to do with Raleigh High? Why the fuck have you shown up there, pretending to be something you’re not, when the Caleb Weaving’ll be behind bars by the end of next weekend.”
“I’m on loan.”
“What?”
“From the Dreadnaughts. I’m on loan to Monty for the foreseeable. Apparently, I am the glue that’ll cement ties between Montgomery and the Dreadnaughts for good.” He flashes me a fake-ass grin in the mirror when he catches me glaring at him. “S’nice to be appreciated every once in a while. Monty told me he wanted me enrolled at Raleigh, so off I went and enrolled. The preppy get-up was his choice, too. He wants me to fit in. I’m supposed to make friends and report back on what I learn from them.”
I shake my head. “You? Make friends with Raleigh kids? Pssshhh.” I can’t imagine anything more ridiculous.
“Some chick, Winters, I think her name was…she was dealing coke for Monty on the quiet. Got banished to some stuffy prep school in Seattle. Now her Raleigh High clients have been bringing in their own supplies, trying to distribute them right under Monty’s nose. He wants to know exactly who’s trying to cut in on h—”
“Kacey Winters?” Cam says incredulously. “Kacey was dealing cocaine at school?”
I’m equally surprised. I never saw Kacey at the Rock. Not once. The first time I met her was at Raleigh, long after I’d decided I needed to have Silver Parisi as my own. Monty’s never mentioned the girl’s name, not even when I wound up getting shot because of her. If Zander’s telling the truth, then obviously my boss isn’t being as up front with me as I’ve previously assumed.
Cam closes his eyes, shaking his head, as if the action will dislodge the information he just heard. “Look, I don’t really give a shit about the why of you being in that pool house. I don’t know who Q is, or who the new dealer is at Raleigh High, and I don’t particularly fucking care about any of that either. All I care about is Jacob Weaving. If you know where he is, then spit it out so we can finish what we started.”
Zander studies Cam blankly. After a long second, he leans forward, arms braced against the backs of our headrests, and whispers loudly to me, “This guy’s not important, is he? ’Cause he’s got collateral damage written all over him. I’ll willingly put money on him not lasting the night.”
“Zander, just sit back and button your mouth shut,” I snarl. “Cam’s Silver’s dad, and you’re lucky he didn’t just shoot you in the fucking head back there. You’re only making it through tonight because he managed to pull back at the last second.”
“Hoo-rah. I’ll pin a medal of honor onto the fucker for not accidentally murdering me, then.”
Cam turns a bright shade of crimson. If he were a cartoon character, there’d be steam blowing out of his ears. “Pull over, Alex. I’ve changed my mind. I am going to shoot him.”
“Just both of you, calm the fuck down. Tonight’s already a big enough mess as it is, and none of this is making it—”
DING!
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
DING! DING!
And again.
Another round of chimes fills the car, this time from someone else’s cell. Cam pulls his device out of his pocket at the same time I reach for mine. The car lights up as we both check our screens, and a thick, painful silence fills the vehicle. Never one to respect other people’s personal space, Zander peers over my shoulder.
“Looks like the infamous Silver Parisi’s been blowing you both up. There’s no reception up at the Weaving place. I always have to drive halfway to the Rock to find out what’s going on in the—”
Zander rambles on about cell phone reception. Cam and I both ignore him, trading a hard look. “Get to the house, Moretti,” he says. “Run every red. Mount the fucking curb. I don’t care what you have to do. Just get us there right fucking now.”
* * *
I know as soon as we come screeching into the Parisi’s driveway that we’re too late. The front door is yawning wide open into the night, the house in darkness. Silver’s Nova is sitting in the turning loop underneath the live oak where she always parks it. Icy, cold dread pools in my stomach. My heart, surging and pumping like some kind of manic, careening machine up until now, stutters to a jarring halt.
“Holy Mary, mother of God,” Cam hisses under his breath. He primes the gun in his hand, ripping at the door handle, trying to get out of the car, but he can’t seem to open the door. I don’t have the same problem. I’m out and tearing up the driveway so fast my feet struggle to keep up with the rest of my body.
“SILVER!” The door crashes against the wall as I fly through it. I haven’t seen the glass on the hallway floor. Skidding on the broken shards, I go down, landing hard on my side. Sharp diamonds, like teeth, bite into my forearm and my hand, stabbing through the material of my shirt.
The pain is quite something; I only manage to take a breath because I need it to scream Silver’s name again. “ARGENTO!”
No reply.
I find my feet. The house is silent as the grave as I hurtle through the ground floor, slamming my way through closed doors, through the living room, through the dining room, into the kitchen.
Empty.
The place is fucking empty.
“ARGENTO!” The walls and abandoned hallways echo with my roar as I hit the stairs, taking them four at a time. I check her bedroom first, hoping against hope that this is all some sick misunderstanding and the girl I love is sleeping in her bed, unaware of the fear that’s bleeding through my veins. Her bed is neatly made, though, the comforter undisturbed. Her clothes are folded neatly on the end of the mattress, ready to be put away…
“FUCK!”
Where is she? WHERE THE HELL IS SHE? I barrel down the hallway, checking each roo
m as I go, not finding her, not finding her, not finding her, until…
Cameron’s room. His bedroom door’s wide open.
Inside: destruction.
There are boxes everywhere. Shoe boxes. Their contents—sneakers, postcards, papers, knick knacks, pens, receipts, even more shoes—are strewn all over the bedroom floor. A small table has been toppled over, and a fern type plant lays on the hardwood in the remains of a ceramic pot, clods of dirt scattered all over the place. By the door, the mirror hanging on the wall is cracked, a spider’s web of fractures shooting out from one point in its center, where it looks as if something hit it really, really fucking hard.
In the dark, it takes a moment to notice to streaks of blood down the wall.
My body wants me to keep on searching, to keep on charging forward, but there’s nowhere else to go now. The house is empty. Silver isn’t here. Jacob Weaving broke into the house while I wasn’t here, and he took her. That motherfucker took her. It looks like she put up a fight…
What the fuck am I supposed to do?
What the fuck…
“Where is she?” Cameron storms the bedroom like a whirlwind, fists raised, ready to fight. His rage almost eclipses my own.
“We’re too late.” The words are razor blades, slicing their way up my throat. They eviscerate me from the inside out. Hanging my head, I stand, immobile, as Cameron roars and proceeds to pound his fist into the already broken mirror.
“Where?” he snarls. “Where would he have taken her?”
There is only one place Jacob Weaving would take Silver. The one place he feels most powerful. The place where people worship and adore him. I know exactly where he’s toying with her right now…but there’s no way I’m telling Cameron Parisi that.
“We should split up. I’ll take the Rock. You head out to the Wickman place.”
“The—why? Why the Wickman place?” He rounds on me, eyes narrowed. He doesn’t suspect, though. His eyes are vacant, staring off into a void. He’s too afraid to see the truth: that I’m sending him off on a wild goose chase.
“That’s where he attacked her the first time. The building’s empty. It makes sense that he might take her there, where no one will bother him.”
“Right. Right…” The poor bastard’s in a daze.
“Give me the gun, Cam.”
Fire flares in his eyes. “No. Fucking. Way. The moment I set eyes on that piece of shit, he’s fucking dead,” he growls.
Just as I thought. He’s got no hope of reining in his anger right now. I’m angry, too. Angrier than I’ve ever been in my entire life. But anger and I are well acquainted. We’re the very best of friends. I know how to think around it. Breathe around it. Anger can be burning through me, eating me alive, but I can still take action without letting my blind rage get the better of me.
Cameron’s Silver’s father. He has every right to protect her. More of a right than I do. I’m a selfish son of a bitch, though. May the universe and all of my mother’s Catholic saints have mercy on me, because there’s no way in fucking hell I’m gonna let him risk her life in his madness.
“The gun, Cam,” I demand, holding out my hand.
He looks like he wants to shoot me with it as he resentfully slaps the weapon into my palm. “Fine. If I find him, I’ll just kill him with my bare fucking hands.”
We’re both heading down the stairs and rushing for the door when Zander emerges from the shadows, carrying a small, bundled up, bloody towel in his hands. His usual swagger is gone. His eyes are solemn as he looks down at whatever he has swaddled in his arms. “Uh. We need to stop by a vet, guys. Like right now. I think it might already be too late…”
27
SILVER
Drip.
Drip.
DRIP.
Drip.
My head’s pounding.
So, so cold.
Something smells…wrong.
Groaning, I try to crack my eyes open, but a jolt of pain lashes through my head, startling and terrible enough to make me whimper. I sink back down onto the freezing cold floor beneath me.
Where the hell am I?
What…what the hell happened?
It comes back in flashes—brutal snapshots, so violent that I curl myself up into a ball, shrinking from the assault of memories. Jake, in my father’s bedroom, standing over me as I cowered in the closet. A cruel, satisfied smirk on Jake’s face. His hands on me, ripping and dragging me out from my hiding place.
Pain.
Fear.
Screaming.
Pleading.
Laughter.
Anger.
Hate.
Hatehatehatehatehatehatehatehate….
In my head, Jake picks me up and hurls me into the mirror hanging on my father’s wall. I recoil away from the echo that rattles my bones. I almost bit straight through my lip when my shoulder hit the glass. I can still taste the blood.
“Looks like you and the Moretti freak are the real deal, huh?” The voice sends a thrill of terror up my spine. He’s here with me—though I don’t know where here is—and more than that. He’s close. The sound of his shallow, even breathing pierces my whirring thoughts, reminding me of the all too real, very present danger at hand.
I don’t want to, it hurts to even contemplate, but I need to open my eyes. I have to see…
Explosions of color twist and dance across my vision as I peer into the darkness. My pulse beats against the insides of my ears like a frantic war drum. And then there he is, sitting on a bench in front of a wall of lockers, his face cast into blue highlight and shadow as he stares down at the screen of a phone.
“I thought I knew everything there was to know about Alessandro Moretti, but looks like I was wrong. Turns out the guy’s covered in all that ink and puts on a good show when he feels the need, but underneath the bravado and the stone-cold façade,”—Jake lowers the phone, looking me dead in the eye—“he’s basically just a fucking pussy.”
I don’t respond. I can’t. My jaw feels like it will shatter if I try to open my mouth. Jake hums quietly, turning his attention back to the phone in his hands. My cell phone. “You’re the most important thing that’s ever happened to me. I was a broken shell before I met you. I can’t picture my life without you, Argento. I could lose everything and still feel like the luckiest bastard alive if I still had—” He cuts off, rolling his eyes. “I mean, the guy’s a fucking dickless punk. What kind of loser says this stuff? I’m struggling to understand what the hell you see in him. He’s already had you on your back. That’s obvious. So why the fuck is he spouting all of this sappy bullshit?”
I swallow, wincing at the raw pain that burns in my throat. I screamed myself hoarse back at the house; it feels as though I’ve been eating glass.
“Moretti’s got a lot to learn. Girls never respect a guy if they wear their bleeding hearts on their sleeves.” Slowly, he gets to his feet, grunting. I force myself to move, shoving myself away from him, even though every bone and muscle in my body protests at the effort. It’s all for naught, anyway. My back hits a wall behind me. There’s nowhere for me to go. Jake smiles wickedly as he steps toward me. Crouching down, he purrs to himself as he strokes a sticky strand of hair back out of my face. “You…you’re not most girls, though, are you, Silver? You’re damaged goods. You’ll cling to even the weakest man if you think he’ll keep you afloat. God,” he says, shaking his head. “I mean, look at you. You’re a fucking mess. Face all busted up. Blood everywhere. I hate to tell you this, but I doubt even a guy as desperate for affection as Alex Moretti is gonna be interested by the time I’m through with you. I hope you got some rest, Silver. Tonight’s gonna be a long night.”
The whisper that I push past my lips sounds pathetic. “You can…hurt and…bruise me all…you like, Jake. But you…you won’t break me.”
Jake’s smirk sours. He lets his hand fall away from my face. “I already broke you. I broke you in that bathroom, when I shoved my dick inside you. You’ve tri
ed to fight it, but you knew it was a losing battle, didn’t you? I saw you in that basement at the Rock. I watched you. I saw your need to hurt when he fucked you. You looked like you were trying to tear each other apart. The truth is that you see me standing over you whenever he’s inside you. You want the pain. You want the humiliation. You want to be degraded, hit and kicked and spit on. It’s all you know now. It breeds inside you like a plague.”
I shrink from the words. They’re not true. At least not all of them. When I’m with Alex, he is all I ever see. But the violence I’ve tried to instigate, when we should have been trading nothing but a gentle touch… “You’re sick,” I whisper. I don’t know if I’m referring to him, or to me.
His eyes shine brightly in the dark, brimming with amusement. “Maybe. That doesn’t make me wrong, now, does it?”
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Of course I do. I showed you the only real love you’ve ever known in that bathroom.”
“That wasn’t love. That was hate.”
Unfazed, Jake sits back on his heels, shrugging. “Hate. Love. They amount to the same thing. They’re built on the same foundations, aren’t they? Both are seeds planted in our hearts. You can try to feed only one of them, but it doesn’t make any difference. One will flourish right alongside the other. Doesn’t matter which you bring to the light and which you keep hidden in the dark.”
“You’re wrong,” I wheeze. “No one’s ever loved you. How…could they? It’s impossible to love something so twisted and…dysfunctional. Your own mother couldn’t even bring herself to give a shit about you.”
Talking about his mother isn’t going to do me any favors, but…when he was pinning me down and raping me all those months ago, I didn’t think he was going to kill me. Hurt and humiliate me, yes. He was going to force himself on me and laugh about it afterwards. I knew I was walking out of that bathroom at some point, though. Tonight, he has something different in mind. He’s planning on brutalizing me, and then he’s going to take my life. He told me so much in those text messages. It’s plain to see in his eyes, here in the shadows of the boy’s locker rooms, where he carried me when I was unconscious. I won’t be leaving this cold, damp room, reeking of sweat, so fuck it. I’ll bait and antagonize him. If these are my final moments on this earth, then I won’t waste them cowering like a frightened, injured little bird.