by J. R. Ward
“I’d like to tell you I’m sorry,” she said.
“No sympathy, remember?”
“I didn’t express any.” She briefly took both hands off the wheel and held them up. “I only said I wanted to tell you that. I also wish I could tell you that you’re anything but a joke, and that I’m grateful you talked with me. Somehow, I don’t think you talk much about yourself and I can see why. I’m very sad about your past.” As he opened his mouth, she shook her head and cut him off. “I didn’t say any of that, though. I’m just expressing what I wish I could say.”
His mouth twitched on one side, like he was trying not to smile. “You’re exploiting a loophole.”
“Next time define your terms better, then.”
“Aye.” He looked over at her. “I shall do that.”
After a moment, he reached over and gave her a little squeeze on the knee. When his hand stayed put, she covered the back of it with her own.
“I’m truly sorry,” she whispered softly.
Syn pulled his arm back, removing the contact, and then he cleared his throat.
“So where are we going?” he asked brusquely, as if he were closing a door.
And throwing a dead bolt on the thing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Outside of the Brotherhood’s downtown garage, Butch grabbed onto his dead sister’s friend’s arm to keep her from collapsing onto the dirty sidewalk. Mel McCarthy was badly beaten, in a way no woman ever should be.
“What the hell happened to you?”
Mel grabbed onto the lapels of his leather jacket with torn-up hands. “Oh, God, Butch…”
As she looked up at him, blood dropped out of her nose and landed on the bodice of her pale pink bustier, widening the bright red stain that had formed over her left breast. There was also a nasty abrasion on the side of her face that was likewise leaking, and around her throat, ligature marks were a ruddy band in her pale skin. And the injuries continued from there. A dull scratch ran from her collarbone into her cleavage, and below the waist her black skirt was off-kilter and her black fishnet stockings were ripped, more blood running down the bare skin of her thighs from cuts and scrapes.
“Come here,” he said, holding her up. “Let’s get you out of the cold.”
Opening the door into the garage, he helped her inside, holding her up as she limped on the one stiletto that still had a heel. There were a pair of stuffed armchairs off in an alcove, next to the refrigerator and the space heater, and he took her over to one of them. As she eased down onto the padded cushion, her wince told him more than he needed to know about where else she’d been hurt.
Leaning to the side to turn on the heater, he opened his mouth to say something, but struggled to put together anything coherent. Too much of him was focused on wanting to find whoever had done this so he could kill them.
Mel put her head in her hands, her tangled hair falling forward. “I am so stupid. So stupid to have been alone with that guy—”
Butch crouched down and took her palms from her face. “Hey, hey. Stop that.” He brushed a strand of her long, brown hair back behind her ear. “We need to get you to the hospital.” And to a rape kit. “And we should call the police—”
“No!” She wiped a tear off her cheek and winced. “I’m not going to do that—”
“Mel, this was a crime.”
“I don’t know his name—”
“That’s okay, we’ll give a description to the CPD, and we’ll make sure they have a DNA—”
“I’m not going to the police.”
Butch gripped her hands. “Mel. I can’t imagine what you’ve just been through. But I know for certain there are people who can help you—people who can also make sure that the piece of shit who did this to you will get what he deserves.”
Her eyes were luminous with tears that trembled on her lashes. “I can’t. I just want to forget this ever happened—”
“Caldwell has a SART program, and I can put you in touch with them. They’re really good and they—”
Mel sniffled. “What’s a SART?”
He thought of his shellan and how much he had learned from Marissa as she’d studied how humans deal with violence against females. “It’s a sexual attack response team. It’s a multidisciplinary approach that is all about the survivor. It’s medical people, law enforcement, social workers, all coming together to support you as you seek justice. I promise you, they’re good folks, and—”
Mel’s eyes went down to their linked hands. “I can’t go to the police.”
Butch frowned. “I know that it will be hard. But I swear, you’ll be taken care of—”
“You don’t understand.” Her stare came up to his own. “It’s really not an option for me.”
And that was when her meaning sunk in. As the implications became obvious Butch released her hands and sat back on the cold concrete floor.
“I don’t want you to think any less of me.” She sniffled again and cleaned her tears with the back of her arm. “But yeah… it’s not going to happen.”
“I don’t think less of you.”
“You sure about that.”
“Absolutely, I am. I just… it’s not where I expected—” Butch cut himself off. “But enough about that—”
“You didn’t think I’d end up an escort?” She held out her short skirt and moved around the hem, as if she were looking for tears in the fabric. “Neither did I.”
Getting to his feet, he got a roll of paper towels off the top of the refrigerator. After spooling free some sheets, he folded them and knelt back down again. Gingerly patting her cheeks and under her nose, he grit his teeth at the fucking animal who had done this to her.
“It doesn’t matter what the circumstances were when the two of you met up,” he said. “This is an assault. It’s illegal.”
“I’ve already been popped twice down in Manhattan. That’s why I had to come up here. I don’t want my family to find out how I’m making my money. I’m more afraid of that than going to jail for solicitation. Prostitution. Whatever they call it in this jurisdiction.” She took ahold of his hand as he tamped her tears. “And I don’t work the streets or anything. I’m expensive.”
“Pinch your nose with this.” He gave her the paper towels. “We need to stop the bleeding.”
She did as she was told, her words coming out muffled. “I feel like if I tell you that you won’t think I’m a common whore.”
“Don’t use that word.”
“It’s what I am. What I’ve become.”
He thought back to what he remembered of her and Janie, and the center of his chest hurt. “You’re still exactly who you’ve always been.”
“I sell my body, Butch.” She took the paper towels away and stared down at the red stain on the white twist. “What else would you call me.”
“If you’re trying to get me to judge you, it won’t work.”
“I feel like I should be judged. Ten commandments and all.”
“That doesn’t matter.” He looked up into her face. “You matter. Your choice of what you want to do with your body is not an issue. It doesn’t change a damn thing.”
Mel touched her cheek where it was abraded. “How badly am I hurt? Do you think any of this is permanent?”
“No,” he said. “You’re still beautiful.”
The defeat in her eyes aged her. And the bruises and cuts, the blood and swelling, made him furious and despaired by turns.
“Listen, I know a doctor.” He cleared his throat. “She could come and check you out. She’s totally discreet.”
Mel shook her head and squeezed one of his hands. “I’ll take care of myself.”
“You really should have a doctor—”
“You think this is the first time something like this has happened?”
Butch closed his eyes briefly. “Shit.”
Releasing his palm, she pushed herself to her feet with a wince and lurched to one side. As she looked down at her shoes in confusion,
she mumbled, “My heel broke off. I didn’t notice.”
“Let me take you home, at least? And is there someone we can call? Someone who can sit with you?”
“I shouldn’t have come. I just ran out of the club, and the next thing I knew, I was here. I just wasn’t thinking right.”
“Will you let me drive you home?”
She looked at the R8. “This is not how I imagined seeing you again.”
“Fate has a strange way of working things out.”
* * *
Behind the wheel of the Golf, Jo kept driving along, leaving the strip malls and the car dealerships behind, and proceeding into more open spaces where cemeteries, the community college, and part of SUNY Caldwell’s campus was. Things had been silent inside the car for a while now, and they were closing in on their destination. She couldn’t decide whether this was a good thing or not.
A part of her just wanted to drive around until dawn. As if everything on his mind, and all that was on hers, would maybe run out of gas before the VW did.
“So what about you?” Syn asked.
Jo cleared her throat and found it hard to know what to say; her thoughts were still bouncing around the details he’d shared about his own life. So it was on autopilot that she ran through her dossier.
“I was adopted. I grew up in Philadelphia in what would be considered an old family. I’m not close to either of my parents, I have no clue where my birth parents are, and I came to Caldwell for a job after I got out of college. Not married. Wouldn’t mind it, but it’s not a priority. Just moved into that apartment after living with some frat boys. Um… I’ve only just started reporting on things at the paper. I was hired to be the online editor. And I have a feeling I’m going to be out of work again soon.”
“Are things not going well for the Courier Journal?”
“You could say that.” She took her foot off the accelerator and let the Golf coast to a stop in the middle of the street. “And there’s one other thing.”
With a strange feeling in her heart, she looked up at the dilapidated entrance to the Brownswick School for Girls.
“Oh?” As Syn noticed where she was staring, he sat forward in his seat. “And what’s this?”
Jo tried to find the right words, but there were none. At least none that could guarantee him not to jump to conclusions about her mental health.
“I… ah, I’ve got a hobby, I guess you’d call it. I investigate supernatural things in Caldwell.”
When he just nodded calmly, she thought of his cosmetically altered teeth.
“But you maybe get it, right?” she said with hope.
“Does this place have something to do with your hobby?”
Jo let her eyes roam over the off-kilter wrought iron gates and the broken-toothed fencing that stretched in both directions, separating the shaggy grounds from the sidewalk, the road, the tended-to environs of the rest of the area.
“My mother went to school here. Back when it was a going concern.”
“Are you looking to speak with her ghost? Has she passed?”
“She was never really there in the first place.” Jo shook herself back to attention. “Sorry, I mean, she’s alive. She and my father still live in the house I grew up in.”
“Do you see them often?”
“No. We don’t have anything in common except for the first eighteen years of my life. They’re very nineteen fifties, if you know what I mean—traditional sex roles, old money, stiff upper lip. It was like growing up in a Spencer Tracy–Katharine Hepburn movie, except my parents weren’t actually in love, and I’m not sure they even like each other.”
Jo hit the gas, as if she could drive herself out of where her thoughts went. It didn’t work.
As they passed under the archway, she pictured the campus and buildings not as they were, everything ill kept and decaying, but as they had been, with rolling lawns, brick buildings with bright white trim, and trees that were picked and pruned, not left to nature’s seasons. It was not hard to imagine the students in their Sloane Ranger attire, pearls paired with muck boots as they went to ride their thoroughbreds at the stables.
“My mother is still all about the sweater sets. You know, shoes always match the bag with Sally Field-in-Steel Magnolias hair.”
“What’s that?”
“Sprayed into a football helmet.” As she followed the lane that rolled up a rise, she thought of her old roommate, Dougie, because it was so much easier than dwelling on her mother’s buttoned-up version of femininity. “Anyway, she’s not why we’re here.”
At the top of the hill, Jo stopped the car again, and this time, she shut off the engine. Turning to Syn, she said, “Look, I’ll be honest. I’ve been worried about myself for the last few months. I’ve had all kinds of weird symptoms, the worst of which being these headaches I keep getting, especially as memory problems seem to go with the pain. Like, all of a sudden, I’ll just… not be able to remember where I’ve been or what I’ve done.”
She looked out through the front windshield. “And there’s been other strange things that have been happening. For example, I’ve got this blog, and it keeps getting taken down. I don’t know why and I don’t know who’s doing it. But I have the rough drafts of all the posts and my research on the subjects. Tonight, because I couldn’t settle myself, I started going through my files, and I found an email Dougie, my former roommate, sent me at my old work. It was about him and this video about something that occurred on this campus… in the clearing down there. A dragon with purple scales. I have these vague memories of talking about it with Bill, my friend at the paper. So I thought maybe if I came back here, something would jog my memory. I mean, Dougie’s a druggie—hey, that rhymes—so he thinks he sees a lot of strange things. Like, during no-shave November last year, he was convinced one of our roommates was Abraham Lincoln. But he’s not good enough at editing videos to put dragons in them, you know? He certainly managed to misplace the original file and any copies of it, though. Like, where did it go? Where has all of it gone for me?”
Shrugging, she popped open her door, and as she stood up, she felt foolish.
“Or I don’t know.” She looked around the brush and the darkened windows of the building she’d stopped by. “Maybe this is all just the product of an anxious mind.”
Syn got out and came around the car. “Well, whatever it is, we’ll go together.”
As he offered her his hand, she hesitated. And then she took his palm.
“Come on,” he murmured, “let’s see what comes up for you.”
Jo smiled a little. And then she nodded, the pair of them starting off through the brambles, explorers of a landscape that felt utterly foreign and vaguely hostile.
Jo was not surprised as her headache came back and settled in.
But she was surprised about how much it meant to have this man by her side.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
As Mel stopped in front of what obviously was the entry to her place, she unlocked a dead bolt and there was a hollow echo in some kind of big interior space. Butch didn’t focus on either. He was too busy wondering about the damn door. The thing seemed to be made of the same cast iron panels that were used on Navy ship hulls, the bolt heads fat as a man’s knuckles, the horizontal and vertical reinforcements making him wonder just what the hell was on the other side.
And he frowned as she put her shoulder into the bulk to open the way in.
“You want some help with that?” he asked.
“I’ve got it.”
When she continued to struggle, he put his palm on the cold metal and pushed. The hinges, which were as big as his damn forearm, squeaked and groaned, and all that was revealed as the thing broke away from its reinforced jambs was a whole lot of pitch black. Like she lived in outer space.
Glancing over his shoulder, some instinct made him note the details of the basement hall—not that there was much to memorize, just blank walls, a low ceiling, and a black-and-white linoleum floor. Servicea
ble fixtures mounted at regular intervals were stocked with the new kind of lightbulbs that threw dull, listless light.
The building they were in had been a surprise. It was mostly commercial space, with this cellar underground just a bunch of storage areas with corporate names in plastic plates next to each unit. And P.S., none of the other doors were like Mel’s Game of Thrones prop.
“At least I know you’re safe here,” he said dryly.
“It is my sanctuary.”
On that note, she walked into the interior, her body swallowed down by the darkness’s gullet. Just as he was getting worried about her, there was a flicking sound, and then light bathed an interior that had a totally open floor plan.
Mel motioned with her hand. “Come in, please.”
Butch stepped over the threshold. “Holy… shit.”
The door closed of its own volition with a banging sound, and he almost jumped—but that would have been a pussy move. And then he was distracted by the crib. The walls and floor of the three thousand or so square feet were painted black, and four concrete pylons kept the ceiling from caving in, making him feel like he’d shrunk and was standing under a coffee table. A sitting area was delineated by a large area rug, with a sofa, three chairs, and a coffee table—in all white leather—arranged on it like a glamorous Hollywood meeting was about to happen. There was also a king-sized bed over against one wall, with black satin sheets and a throw blanket of some fur-like persuasion slipping off one corner of the mattress. The bathroom was likewise fully in view, a Victorian claw-foot tub set next to a sink and a toilet, all of which were white. Oh, and the galley kitchen was directly across the way, the refrigerator, stove, and sink running down the wall and fronted by a barrier of white countertop.
But none of that was what stunned him.
Clothes took up at least half the square footage. There were tall racks with evening gowns. Medium ones with slacks. Shorter sets of blouses and skirts. Shelves with forward tilts displayed stilettos, wedges, boots, and flats. Birkin bags, and Chanel purses, and Judith Leiber minaudières sat on Lucite tables, their cloth storage bags folded under them, the boxes they’d come in like thrones for their glory. A modern era, floor-length, store-worthy mirror—the kind with the wings on the left and right that you could angle to inspect the rear of yourself—was set upon a white shag carpet.