I probably should have worn the white jacket and pants, but I was so pissed off at her that I couldn’t bring myself to touch them. I settled for dark jeans and a cream-colored blouse, hoping it would make me look like the kind of person who knew what she was talking about.
I’d never been to the police station before. When the cab driver stopped the car in front of the cold, grey, one-story building I almost chickened out.
Razor wire looped around the top of the twenty-foot fence and a lot of official-looking cars were parked in the lot.
I was sharply reminded that this was a small town. The single police station doubled as a jail and three prisoners in orange jumpsuits were clipping the hedges under the watchful eye of a bored-looking deputy. I swallowed hard, clutching the door handle.
“You all right?”
The driver’s voice startled me, and I jumped a little.
“Um. Yes, I’m fine. Would, um—would you wait here for me?”
He shrugged. “Meter’s running.”
I nodded and slid out of the car. My heart thundered in my chest and worry snaked through me like I was about to do something wrong. It wasn’t that I had anything to feel guilty about, I told myself firmly. Julianne did this. These were the natural consequences of her actions.
I started walking toward the building.
But I was fine, right? I’d survived. I was in one piece and I hadn’t even been hurt that badly.
Hell, maybe she hadn’t been trying to set Chris up for my murder. Maybe she left those things in his locker so that he would find me before it was too late.
But what if he hadn’t made the connections?
What if he hadn’t bothered to look?
Chris didn’t exactly have a reputation for being a knight in shining armor. He was more likely to kick a damsel in distress while she was down than try to save her. At least that was the face he showed the world—Julianne in particular.
In order for me to believe that she’d been looking out for me, I would have to believe that she was stupid enough to trust my safety to the most sadistic Seymore brother. Julianne was a lot of things, but she wasn’t stupid.
Besides, did her intentions really matter? She’d arranged my kidnapping! She could have killed me!
My steps quickened as anger made up my mind for me. I pushed into the station, head held high, and made for the front desk.
The guy who sat behind it looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him. He was bald, somewhere between 35 and 45, a little heavyset and a whole lot sunburned.
He squinted at me, his grey eyes sharpening with suspicion before relaxing into something that looked a lot like boredom. I decided not to take offense.
“Help you?” He asked like he was hoping I would say no.
“I need to file a police report,” I said in a rush of breath. Insecurity was starting to creep up the back of my brain again. “I was kidnapped.”
He blinked at me.
I waited.
He narrowed his eyes. “Is this some kind of prank?”
“What? No! I was kidnapped and shoved in the trunk of the car. And I would like a report filed…an investigation started…” I crossed my arms and glared at him, forcing the doubts back with my words.
Damn it, I knew what happened to me better than he did and it was a crime and someone needed to be held accountable for it before they came after me again.
He sighed. “Do you know who kidnapped you? Lemme guess. Three black guys in ski masks? Or was it the Mexican Mafia?”
My jaw dropped. I sputtered for a second, then said, “Neither. It was my ex-friend and her boyfriend.”
He rolled his eyes. “Uh-huh. And did the friend and ex-boyfriend make a ransom demand? Give me my prom dress back or the girl gets it?” His mouth curled up in a sneer and he wheezed. The cretin thought he was funny.
“No,” I said icily. “They just stuck me in the car and left me there. They didn’t want anything except for me to be gone.”
He snorted. “What’d you do, sleep with her boyfriend?”
“No,” I growled, clenching my fists in frustration. “Look, is there a form I can fill out or something?”
“Oh, sure,” he said, sounding overly friendly. “Let me just go grab one of the high school drama bullshit forms and you can fill it right out.”
I ground my teeth. “You aren’t listening! Julianne Bird and her boyfriend Thomas kidnapped me from the school parking lot, locked me in the trunk of his car, dumped me out behind the Crunchie’s parking lot and left me there to die!”
All of the amusement drained out of his face and he regarded me with a cold, flat, steely gaze. “You said Julianne Bird?”
“Yes!”
His lips pressed into a tight, thin line. I suddenly realized where I’d seen him before. He looked different in uniform, but if I imagined him in blue swim trunks with a lei around his neck, he snapped into focus.
This was one of the people who had been at Julianne’s pool party—the party that Chris had trashed spectacularly.
“The Seymore kids put you up to this?” His voice was cold and dangerous. “Because I’m telling you right now, I don’t much appreciate the way those assholes have been going after my niece. She’s a sweet kid. What you’re accusing her of is a felony offense. Filing a false report is a misdemeanor. Which do you think I’d rather follow up on?”
It was clear to me that I wasn’t going to get anywhere with him. I didn’t think that asking to talk to someone else would go much farther—the Bird family had contacts all the way up to the Mayor. Julianne bragged about it all the time, but I’d sort of assumed that she was full of it. I kind of assumed that about her a lot. I guess this time she was on the level.
I gathered as much dignity as I could muster and walked out. I held my head high, but I was trembling all the way down to my toes.
There was no help for me in this town, not against Julianne—not from the cops, at any rate. It killed me that I had been right to get Rudy away from me. I just hadn’t expected the blowback to be that immediate, or for him to be the cops’ very first target.
“The Seymore kids put you up to this?” The cop’s words rang in my head. Sure, there wasn’t much that happened in this town, but for Seymore to be the first name on his lips… I guess a part of me thought the adults here didn’t really get involved in bullshit high school drama. My guess was wrong.
The cab was still waiting for me when I left. I almost wished it wasn’t—I could have used a good long cry. But it would have taken me two hours to get home on my own and the sun was sinking low in the sky.
With the way things were going, I thought it a good idea not be caught out alone at night. I’d just have to wait and cry at home, I supposed.
“Get what you needed?” The driver asked as I slid into the back seat.
I shook my head. “They didn’t have it in stock.”
He didn’t ask any more questions.
I started feeling claustrophobic as the town slid by the windows—the same buildings, same streets, same everything. Spread out and contained, an island of civilization surrounded by deadly desert, the same few thousand faces everywhere.
For the briefest of moments I understood why my parents were always gone. Starline was the kind of place you got bored of easy. The kind of place where you couldn’t avoid the drama, the gossip – if you had secrets, even the trees were privy to them.
When the cab driver pulled up to my house I got the sinking feeling that something was terribly wrong. After a moment, I realized what it was. Rudy’s car wasn’t there anymore.
Even though I’d sent him away, my vulnerable feelings wished so hard for his presence that it was a shock when he wasn’t there.
I would just have to tough it out, though. If the cops showed up to follow up with me or something and found him here, it would only feed into their Seymore paranoia.
I wasted some time puttering around in the kitchen trying to cook, but couldn’t focu
s and ended up burning everything.
After a microwaved dinner and a whole lot of time to listen to my brain run circles around itself, I walked out to the garden and sat by the little waterfall pool.
The pinwheels Julianne bought for me spun lazily in the evening breeze, their little tin faces grinning at me.
“What are you looking at?” I asked them petulantly.
I stood and stormed over to them. I wanted to rip them out of the ground and throw them away or set them on fire and watch them melt. But when I looked down at the pretty colors, all I could think of was the night the four of us had sat out here and chosen our bug-themed Halloween costumes.
How close we’d been, how happy I’d felt. I guess that’s why I had clung to Julianne and Macy and Joan all along. When you fit in nowhere – when you’ve never fit in anywhere – you gobble up the first drip of acceptance you’re offered. I know that sounds pathetic. But there’s a reason why even seasoned criminals go bat-shit crazy in isolation.
Julianne had been kind to me when no one else was. Even if she had been kind for nefarious purposes, she had still been kind. And then she tried to kill me…
With a noise of disgust at myself and Julianne and life and bugs and pinwheels (just for good measure), I left the decorations where they were and stomped back into the house.
I locked the door behind me and checked all the rest, then went upstairs to get ready for bed. After all, I needed a good night’s sleep if I was going to go to school tomorrow.
I ignored the fact that the idea of “school” nauseated me and made my spine tingle and my knees weak.
I could handle school, damn it. I’d done it my whole life. Of course nobody had been trying to kill me before, but that was beside the point.
The point was, I could do this. There were a hell of a lot more witnesses at school, for one thing.
For another, I wasn’t about to let somebody intimidate me out of getting my goddamn diploma. I’d worked too fucking hard to earn it. I was feeling pretty good about myself when I finally crawled into bed.
That good feeling died a few minutes later.
Chapter Eleven
RUDY
“I don’t like this,” Chris said later that night.
We were hanging out on the deck, looking up at the stars. Jason had gone to bed already, along with the two little fosters who had arrived earlier that week. I hadn’t spent a lot of time with them yet. Introduction to the clan was usually Bradley’s department.
“What don’t you like?” I asked. Not that there was anything to like about the situation, but I needed specifics.
Chris sighed. “If she goes to the cops and tells them everything, they’re gonna try to nail us for it. You know that.”
I shrugged one shoulder and tossed a baseball in the air straight over my face, then caught it again. “She was in Thomas’ car.”
“Yeah,” Chris said bitterly. “He reported it stolen the day we found her.”
I closed my eyes and groaned. That was bad. That was really bad.
Chris had been caught joyriding at the beginning of summer. He’d gotten away with community service, but the point was the cops already had him tagged as a car thief.
Not that he’d ever really stolen any cars—he always took them back when he was done—but the damage was done. Kennedy’s phone and hair and stuff in his locker would be the nail in the coffin.
And all we really had on Julianne was a whole lot of coincidences and suspicion that no one but those who had been on the receiving end of her toxicity would share.
She was the very image of the innocent little rich girl. Blonde, creamy white, perky smile, big blue eyes—people would fall over themselves to excuse any bad behavior.
I huffed out a breath and launched the ball in the air a little harder.
“We need to take her down ourselves,” I said.
Chris shook his head. “As soon as they start suspecting me, I can’t do shit.”
I scowled. He was right.
To the casual observer, Kennedy was still part of Julianne’s friend circle. Chris attacking Julianne would only add fuel to an already stoked fire.
“There has to be something,” I muttered. “Some way to get her to slip up and confess. She’s already almost done it twice. She’s having fun with it. Gloating and shit. All we need to do is get her to gloat in front of the right people or record her talking shit or something.”
“How do you plan on doing that? It’s not like she’s walking around telling people what she did, and she won’t let us get close enough to have a conversation. Besides, if we start acting different she’ll know something’s up.”
“So we don’t act different,” I said. “We just egg her on until she slips up and record her every step of the way.”
Chris whistled. “Phones aren’t going to be able to handle all that. We’re going to need spy gear.”
He didn’t sound too upset at the prospect. Chris had been trying to find a respectable reason to buy a pen recorder since I moved in.
“Doesn’t spy gear cost money?” I asked.
I saw his teeth glint in the moonlight as he grinned. “You let me worry about that. You just worry about getting Queen Barbie Bitch to out herself.”
I tossed the ball in the air again, thinking. I knew I needed Chris’ help with whatever plan I came up with.
For one thing, he was better at terrorizing people than I was. For another, his ass was on the line if this went south. All the evidence pointed at him and I suspected Julianne had some tricks up her sleeve if the evidence didn’t turn out to be enough.
But—it was Chris. Chris had always been the most chaotic, the troublemaker, the one who liked to watch pretty blonde girls cry.
He’s my brother and I love him, but the boy had issues. I had to figure out how to let him help without unleashing his full violent potential on the situation.
Like I had room to talk. Chris wasn’t the one who pinned Julianne to the wall by her neck. But I would rather go down for all of it than let Chris go down. He might have been a little bit evil, but I saw a lot of potential in him. He could live a good life if he could just stay out of jail for a while. I didn’t see the same kind of future for me.
“Okay,” I said finally. “But just spy gear. That’s all you’re doing. Nothing else.”
“Nothing else,” he said mockingly. “Jesus, Rudy, relax. What do you think I’m trying to do, kill the bitch?”
I didn’t say anything, grinning into the dark even as his fist connected with my shoulder.
Chapter Twelve
KENNEDY
I had just gotten comfortable and was cozily drifting off into that fuzzy part before the dream when a sound in my backyard jerked me awake.
I sat up straight, then froze, listening. I heard it again—like plates shattering. My window faced the side of the house so I couldn’t see what was happening, and I was too scared to go find out.
My big empty house had never felt more like a tomb.
I listened to the smashing, crashing, thudding sounds for a solid minute before grabbing my phone. Fuck the police. They probably wouldn’t come anyway.
I called Rudy instead. He answered on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Rudy,” I whispered. “Somebody’s in my backyard. I don’t know what they’re doing but it sounds like they’re breaking things.” Something shattered—it sounded like plate glass—and I muffled a scream behind my hand. “I think they broke the back door. Please help, I don’t know what to do, the cops think I’m pranking them.”
“I’m on my way,” he said grimly. Not long after, I heard his car start. “Lock your door and get in the closet. Don’t hang up. I’ll tell you when it’s safe to let me in.”
“Okay,” I choked.
I was hyperventilating, but I managed to quickly and shakily creep across my bedroom floor to lock the door, then crawl into my closet and pull the door closed behind me.
I could see th
e moonlight dripping across my tousled bed through the slats in the door, and scrunched back a little farther into my jungle of clothes.
“Make sure your screen’s off,” he said, his voice echoing with that speakerphone quality. “And if anybody tries to come in your room, you hunker down and keep quiet.”
“Okay.”
I listened hard. There were still some thuds coming from the back yard, but I couldn’t hear anybody in the house. Of course, it was a big house, and I was sure there were plenty of places I wouldn’t be able to hear from my closet.
After a while, I thought I smelled smoke. Tucked into myself, I trembled. I didn’t want to die this way, burned to death in my own closet. My silent sobs shook me, muddling my hearing.
“I’m pulling up now,” Rudy said. “Stay put. I’m going around back.”
“Okay.”
I realized that was all I’d said for a long time, but for the life of me I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I was too scared. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to spend another night thinking I was going to die. I didn’t want to be cooped up in a tiny dark place with nothing but my thoughts for company and an unknown danger looming somewhere nearby. I couldn’t take it again.
I heard Rudy running. There were a couple more crashes from outside. Then a car started and sped away, its tires squealing. Rudy, panting, got back on the phone.
“It’s safe,” he said. “Do you want to let me in?”
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” I sobbed, breaking with equal parts relief and terror.
He let me cry for a minute, listening without a sound of judgment.
“Then don’t,” he said gently after I’d quieted. “Grab what you need and meet me downstairs. I’ll take you back to Jason’s. You’ll be safe there, I promise.”
While the idea of sleeping surrounded by Seymores seemed like an objectively terrible idea, the thought of sleeping in a house full of other people left my muscles weak with longing.
Something Wicked: An Enemies to Lovers Bully Romance (The Seymore Brothers Book 2) Page 6