Four Score Read online

  Jase’s eyes light up at that, his eyebrows practically touching the ceiling above us. “He broke up with you because of me?”

  “I kept calling out your name in bed,” I explain. Jase laughs a low, throaty sound that makes me blush as I realize what I’ve just said. “Not like that.”

  Jase is still laughing and choking on a mouthful of vodka at the same time. “Are you sure?” he manages in between laughing and coughing.

  I roll my eyes. “Nightmares, Jason. Not the other thing.”

  His smile vanishes and he straightens again, any bit of humor or lightness completely wiped from his face. Idiot! I fervently wish I hadn’t said what I said.

  “Aw, fuck,” he says, frowning again. “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop saying sorry,” I admonish him with a small smile, trying to diffuse the tension that’s once again settled on us like a pillow held forcefully to the face. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

  Only me, and my lies on top of more lies.

  He doesn’t seem convinced. “I do.”

  I shake my head. “No, you don’t. You almost got killed by your own family trying to save me. There’s no shame in that.”

  There it is again. We’ve been dancing around that day, that day when I almost died, that afternoon of horror and pain.

  “I should have fought harder,” he said, his shoulders slumping. “I go over it in my head all the time, you know. I could have taken the gun and shot him. I could have gotten us out somehow.”

  I place a steady hand on his knee. He’s wearing thick denim jeans, but I can still feel the warmth of his skin radiating underneath.

  “There was nothing either of us could have done differently.” It’s taken me years and many breakdowns to realize that neither of us were to blame for what Dornan orchestrated that day. I’ll forever regret that I couldn’t somehow save my father and the woman he loved, but I forgave myself for being powerless in the wake of our collective destruction around the same time that the doctor was sucking the remnants of a product of rape from my womb.

  I’m momentarily transported back to the past, to the moment the mask was lifted from my face a little under six years ago, the moment the doctor smiled underneath her surgical mask and told me it was done. I’d been emptied of their sins, painfully absolved, but it was still many years before I’d been filled again with the hope of my vengeance against them.

  So when Jase clamps his grip on my hand and squeezes tightly, it’s almost as if I’m falling, tumbling back into the present to sit beside him, my hand at his knee, an angry film covering each of his eyes.

  “I should have killed them all the first chance I got,” he says, his face twisted into a mask of rage and pain.

  I lean forward, placing my hand on his hot cheek, and when he doesn’t recoil, I smile.

  “There’s still time,” I whisper softly, to the first boy I ever loved.

  The roles reverse sharply—Jase is completely fucked, both physically and mentally. He hasn’t moved from his spot on the floor in hours. About an hour ago, I found a frozen pizza and shoved it into the oven, guessing it was cooked when the cheese started to bubble furiously on top. I gave it to him, and he ate it mechanically, until it was all gone. Then he resumed his listless staring into space.

  Which brings us to now.

  I’m lost. Up until now, I’ve always had a plan. A destination. People to fuck and people to kill. But now? I’m wandering around Jason’s apartment like a lost soul¸ wondering if I should go, or if I should stay. Finally, I decide to busy myself with cleaning up the glass from the vase and cell phone.

  Three thoughts on repeat in my mind.

  Dornan’s in a coma.

  I just kicked Elliot out.

  I think Jase hates me.

  I crouch in front of Jase, who’s polished off half the bottle of vodka and all of the pizza I left for him. He’s still staring into space.

  “Hey,” I say gently. “Earth to Jase? What’s going on in there?”

  I’ve never seen him like this, and it’s freaking me out. Because I know I’m responsible for turning his life into a living hell. At least, today I’m responsible. Dornan brought him into hell with the rest of us the moment he killed Jase’s mother all those years ago.

  He raises his watery brown eyes to meet my gaze and I have to force myself not to flinch underneath the weight of his stare. His jaw is clenched so hard I’m surprised his teeth haven’t started cracking. His fingers are curled around the neck of the vodka bottle like it’s a life raft and he’s afloat in an icy sea.

  “What’s going on in here?” he echoes, tapping the side of his head. “You really don’t want to know.”

  Probably not.

  I kneel in front of him and rest one hand on his bended knee. “You should still tell me.”

  He smirks, an expression I never want to see on his face. It makes him look like his father, which is a comparison I never, ever need to be reminded of. But he can’t help who his father is any more than I could help who my father was. Born into treachery, raised among darkness so vile, so toxic, our souls are unlike any others.

  He might have escaped the first seventeen years of his life in blissful ignorance of the Gypsy Brothers’ life, but I’m pretty sure he’s all caught up and then some.

  “I’m thinking about you and my father,” he says, and my heart sinks. “I’m thinking about all those times you were—” he struggles to get the next part out, “— with him, and it makes me want to kill you both.” He reaches up his spare hand and places it on my cheek. I don’t dare move, frozen to the spot, as he lets his hand trail down ever so gently to rest around my throat. He doesn’t squeeze, just lets it rest there as a not-so-subtle gesture.

  “Let me guess,” I say, blood roaring in my ears as anger joins the shame already blanketing my being. Anger that we were ever put in this situation by our fucked-up families and the club that controlled us all. “You want to strangle me? Go ahead. I probably deserve it. Just promise me you’ll kill him as soon as you’re done with me.”

  He drops the attitude and his hand from my throat; my skin burns where his hand rested, craving his touch once more. Which is all kinds of screwed up. But still. I’d much rather a threatening hand on my throat from Jase over a violently possessive lust-grip from his father.

  Dornan. Why won’t you just die, motherfucker?

  “I’ll never be done with you,” Jase mumbles, taking a fresh swig of vodka and grimacing as it no doubt burns his throat. “Even when you were dead, I wasn’t done with you. You haunted me for six fucking years. I’m still not sure you’re really here.”

  I reach out my arm and trace the black circle under his uninjured eye. “When’s the last time you slept?” I ask, echoing the question he asked me a few days ago.

  He shrugs.

  “At least get off that floor and come sit on the sofa. I cleaned the glass off it.”

  I stand and offer him my hand, which he takes, getting to his feet. He keeps ahold of his bottle of vodka but quickly drops my hand, reverting back into his own little universe. I frown, biting my lip.

  “Do you want me to go?” I ask. There’s no malice in my tone, no hurt. If he needs his space, I’ll happily give it to him. There are a thousand fleabag motels in the greater Los Angeles area where I could hide out while I wait for Dornan to either wake up, or die.

  God, I want him to die so badly.

  Jase shakes his head. “No. Stay.” He doesn’t look at me, but his words are forceful enough that I believe he’s being genuine. I can forgive the dude for not being able to deal with all the shit I’ve stirred up in a very short time.

  I wait in the hallway as he wanders around, robotically closing windows. At the wall just inside the front door, he punches a code into a small keypad, and a red light flashes. I remember the security system from when I used to come here before.

  I remember a lot of things about before.

  Memories of days long gone, of innocence and fir
st love, curl around my mind like tendrils, whispering softly, making me hurt. Part of me wants to get lost inside them for a while, but as Jase slams the remaining window shut and stalks into the living room, I’m jolted back to the present.

  I follow cautiously, unsure if my presence is wanted. I hover awkwardly as Jase kicks back onto the end of the sofa that has a chaise extension. He crosses his legs and stares at his bottle of vodka, forlorn. A vibrating sound buzzes from his jeans pocket and he pulls out his phone, closing one eye to read it.

  His face falls.

  “What?” I ask quietly.

  He throws the phone down on the sofa beside him. “Someone found Jimmy.”

  Jimmy. Of course. In the commotion of everything, I’d almost forgotten the dead man whose blood had covered me from head to toe only hours ago.

  “Dead?”

  He looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Yes, dead. That’s generally what happens when you blow someone’s brains out.”

  I almost say, That’s generally what happens when your motorcycle blows up, too, but I bite that back. It’s not helpful right now.

  I think about Jimmy, and it bothers me. At first, I’m not sure why, but then I realize … It was the casual, instinctive way that Jase placed his gun to Jimmy’s temple and pulled the trigger. No hesitation.

  “Why’d you need Jimmy’s gun?” I ask suddenly. It’s not the question I really want to ask, but it, too, has been bothering me. Why did we have all that fanfare with the guns and Jimmy being offered a ringside seat to the Juliette rape and murder show? Why didn’t Jase just use his own gun? I mean, the likelihood of his gun—of Dornan’s gun—being registered is almost zero. They’re bikers, not members of the NRA. Now that my brain is functioning again, all of these questions are burning a hole in my brain, but it’s the unspoken questions that hurt even more.

  Why did you wait six years, and never do a damn thing to hurt your father?

  Why didn’t you kill him?

  Why is your body covered in Gypsy Brothers tattoos? In family patches and club insignia?

  Why are you even here?

  I can kill a man and watch him die, but I can’t ask these questions. Not now. I’m too afraid of what the answers might be. So, instead, I stick with the safer question.

  Why’d you need Jimmy’s gun?

  Jase eyes me for a moment before responding. “Dornan’s gun was damaged when his motorcycle blew up beneath him. I doubted it would fire. Imagine if I’d tried to shoot Jimmy with a gun that didn’t work.”

  My stomach roils at that image. Yes. Imagine indeed.

  “Imagine what they’d do to you and to me.”

  “You’re smart,” I say, feeling stupid that the thought didn’t occur to me in the parking lot. I was careless, and if it weren’t for Jase’s quick thinking and excellent acting, we’d probably both be dead.

  I’d definitely be dead.

  “I’m a details guy,” Jase says, leaning his head back and closing his eyes for a moment. I take a deep breath and sit on the other end of the couch, my thoughts troubling me greatly.

  Why is he still here?

  Elliot’s words come back to haunt me, a stab in the gut. I told him to go. I’m a horrible person.

  He’s Dornan’s son. His blood runs through his veins.

  I steal a glance at Jase, and my troubled mood turns into a barely muffled laugh as I see that he’s fast asleep, passed out sitting up against the couch, one hand still wrapped firmly around the neck of the vodka bottle.

  I can’t be mad at him now. He’s adorable when he sleeps. I push those disturbing questions away. They’ll still be there in the morning for me to ask.

  I stand and tiptoe over to where Jase is lying, gently unfurling his fingers from the vodka bottle. I return it to the fridge, and then pad silently into his bedroom. I grab the duvet from his bed and carry it to the living room, lightly covering Jase with it. He’s out cold, and for a moment I just watch him sleep, the lines on his face gone in sleep.

  He looks younger when he’s sleeping.

  He looks like the Jase I left behind six years ago.

  Blinking back tears, I head back to his bedroom. My entire body is tired and aching, and I figure I may as well get some sleep while Jase is unconscious.

  I crawl under the sheets, hugging a pillow close to me. It smells like Jase. Earthy, like fresh dirt and sandalwood with a hint of something spicy. It’s delicious. That’s the last thing I think of before I shut my eyes, and sleep drags me down.

  Pain and darkness. Terror and despair.

  My nightmare holds me under and pins me down. It leaves marks in me like a shark’s sharp teeth, even as I thrash in damp sheets, struggling to wake up.

  It’s nothing new. My mother once told me that I used to have night terrors when I was a baby. That I would call out in my sleep, eyes awake but blank, and she would have to hold me up to the lights and shake me awake.

  But when I was younger, my dreams were fluid, innocent, ever-changing. I might have looked panicked, but I always woke up and was fine. Whatever haunted me in my sleep never followed me through to my waking.

  Not anymore.

  Something completely disturbing, something that I have pushed away into the darkest recesses of my mind continues to trouble me as I lie panting, twisted in thin sheets, goose bumps and sweat lining my exposed skin.

  I didn’t have a single nightmare the entire time I slept beside Dornan Ross.

  All those weeks, the months I had lain beneath him as he drove himself inside me, enough to make me shatter. Then, afterward, the way he would lay a possessive arm over me, so that I couldn’t move away, pinned to the bed as his sticky fluid seeped from me and turned cold beneath us.

  I slept like a baby every single night.

  It disturbed me greatly, so greatly that I didn’t think about it, forced myself to turn off, but suddenly I’m reminded of those nights, and now I know why I wasn’t scared.

  I wasn’t scared because I knew where he was. And I knew, that as long as I was with him, and he believed my lies, that I was safe. Not safe in the traditional sense—this was the man who beat me, who stabbed me for talking out of turn, who fucked me senseless, and choked me until I saw stars more than once.

  But I knew where he was. And I knew he was under my spell. And I was feeding off his pain and grief like an addict, getting hit after hit as his sons fell like dominoes, victims of my treachery.

  Now, I don’t know what’s going to happen. If he’s going to wake up. If he’s going to figure me out before I deliver his final death sentence.

  If it’s going to be him that dies, or me.

  If Jase really forgives me, or if he’s going to grow to hate me so much that maybe he’ll pull the trigger himself.

  Tonight’s nightmare is a classic. I’m riding in the back of the car, on the way to my death six years ago. Dornan is in the driver’s seat, Maxi in the passenger seat, and Chad sits next to me, a smug smirk on his demented face. I try to open the car door, but there’s no handle. I bang on the window and suddenly, all three men turn and stare at me, but they don’t have faces. Only rotted flesh and shriveled white blobs where their eyes should be. Chad stares at me with unseeing white eyes and underneath a fat worm burrows out, making a hole in his cheek. Suddenly the car is covered in writhing maggots as Chad slides closer, caging me against the door with his arms.

  I scream, and as I do, the maggots make a beeline for my mouth, crawling from everywhere to make their home inside me.

  I need to get out of the car. I’m not dead like them. I’m not dead! As Chad grins and leans down so our eyes are inches apart, he laughs and brushes a maggot-infested hand across my cheek.

  “What, Julie?” he asks, his breath smelling of decay and death. “You think you can escape us because we’re dead? You’ll never be free. You belong to us.”

  He comes closer, pressing his dead lips to mine, forcing his tongue into my mouth. I scream as my throat fills with writhing maggots, desp
erate for their next meal.

  “Juliette!” Rough hands are shaking me. I swat blindly in front of me, still half-trapped in my disgusting nightmare.

  “Julz, it’s me.” The hands leave me and suddenly the room is bathed in light, making me wince painfully at the sudden brightness.

  Jase stands just inside the door to his bedroom, one hand still on the light switch. He’s wearing black boxer shorts and nothing else, despite the cold night. His hair is all mussed up and his eyes are puffed from sleep. The swelling seems to have gone down a lot on the eye that Elliot punched, but I can see a cluster of broken blood vessels in his eyes, making a tiny spider web of bright red threads.

  “You sounded like were being murdered,” he says. “Nearly gave me a fucking heart attack.”

  I rub my bleary eyes, looking at the digital radio clock on the nightstand. One a.m. I’d barely even gotten to sleep when that nightmare took hold. Damn. I need sleep so badly right now, and even with Dornan in a coma, I can’t rest.

  “Oh,” I reply. “What was I saying?”

  “Nothing,” he says quickly. “Just general screaming.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  He hovers at the edge of the bed, still half asleep by the look of it.

  “Well, try to get some sleep,” he says stiffly, switching off the light as he turns to leave.

  “Wait,” I say, a little more desperation in my voice than I would have liked.

  He turns ever so slowly, a look on his face that could be a frown or amusement. I can’t decide which. My eyes adjust to the dark and with the sliver of moonlight coming in from the window above the bed I can just make out his features.

  He stands there awkwardly, looking around the room, looking anywhere but at me.

  “Can you … stay for a minute?” Suddenly, I don’t want to be alone. Anything but being alone with the memory of his dead brother shoving his tongue down my throat.

  He must see the fear on my face, even in the darkness, because his awkwardness disappears. “That bad, huh?”

  I nod. “Yeah. Pretty bad.”

  “Okaaaaay,” he says, perching on the edge of the bed. “Shove over.” I stare at him stupidly for a moment, until he gestures to the bed. “I’m lying down, Julz. It’s one in the morning and I’m tired as all fuck. Shove.”