Protected By Razor (Sons of Ruin: Tucson Chapter #7)

1. Darcie

DARCIE

The alarm goes off at six, and for a split second I consider staying in bed and letting my life fall apart on schedule.

I don’t, obviously. I never do.

I swing my legs out from under the covers and press my feet into the floor.

My apartment is the size of a postage stamp and it’s always cold in the mornings because the building is ancient and the heating is a suggestion.

I pad through to the bathroom in bare feet and stare at my reflection while the water runs warm.

Twenty-six years old. Top of my class at veterinary school.

Three months out of a relationship with a man named Daniel who was perfectly nice and perfectly kind and perfectly incapable of making my stomach do flips when I saw him, in the way that loved up couples are supposed to have.

Daniel wanted to get married. Daniel wanted a dog and a Tuesday night curry tradition.

I don’t know what I want, but I know it wasn’t him.

Kate called me a coward for ending it. Kate is allowed to call me whatever she wants. She’s been my best friend since we were fourteen and she’s seen me through worse than a breakup.

The truth is I’m not a coward. I’m just efficient.

I knew by month four that Daniel wasn’t going to rearrange my internal furniture the way I needed someone to rearrange it, and I stayed for another five months out of politeness.

That’s not cowardice. That’s the exact opposite, actually. That’s my entire personality.

Do the thing. Do it properly. Don’t make a scene.

I brush my teeth. I twist my hair up off my neck. I pull on scrubs and a jumper and check my phone for the weather and for the fifteen texts from my mother I haven’t answered. I will. Later. Probably.

The kettle goes on. I eat half a piece of toast standing at the counter because I don’t trust myself to sit down this early. My placement starts at seven-thirty and the clinic is a ten-minute walk if I try.

I grab my keys. I lock the door twice, because I always lock it twice. I go down the stairs instead of taking the lift, because the lift smells like someone’s been living in it.

Out on the street, Tucson is already waking up. Dry air, that particular desert smell that never quite leaves this city, the sound of a bike somewhere in the distance. I don’t let myself think about the bike. I never let myself think about the bike.

I put my head down and walk.

The dog comes in at eleven.

I’ve been on my feet since half seven, and I’m halfway through a mug of cold coffee when Marissa sticks her head round the door of the back office and says, “Darcie. Up front. I need you.”

Something in her voice.

I put the mug down.

The waiting area has one client in it — a man in his mid-thirties, stocky, wearing a grey hoodie with the hood up even though it’s warm inside. He’s got a pit bull on a short lead at his feet. Young dog. Muscle across the shoulders, narrow at the hips, short brindle coat.

I clock the dog before I clock the man.

Fresh stitches down one flank. Badly done, pulled tight, the skin puckering where someone’s used fishing line instead of sutures.

A healed tear on the left ear, another one that hasn’t healed, weeping at the edge.

Scars on the muzzle, on the chest, on the inside of the forelegs where you wouldn’t see them unless you knew where to look.

My stomach turns over.

“Hi,” I say, and my voice comes out level. I’m proud of it. “I’m Darcie. I’m going to be helping Dr. Patel today. Do you want to come through?”

The man gets up. The dog follows him on a tight lead, and I can see the way it’s holding its back leg, barely putting weight on it. The dog’s name on the chart is Bruno. The man’s name is Mike.

I ask Mike what happened.

“He got into it with another dog,” Mike says. “At the park.”

“Which park?”

“Down the way.”

“Uh huh. When was this?”

“Couple days ago.”

I nod. I kneel down and hold out the back of my hand for Bruno to sniff. Bruno sniffs and he licks my knuckles once and then lowers his head against my palm like he’s been waiting his whole life for someone to touch him gently.

I want to cry. I don’t.

“Can I have a look at him?” I ask.

“I just need antibiotics,” Mike says. “That’s all.”

“Right. I’ll need to examine him first, though. Standard.” I keep my voice easy. I keep my hands on the dog.

Dr. Patel is with another client. I am technically qualified to do the examination. I’m also technically qualified to know what I’m looking at.

I run my hands over Bruno. He lets me. He trembles when I get near the fresh wound and I murmur reassurances at him and keep going because I need to see it, all of it, and because Mike is watching me and I don’t want to give him anything to react to yet.

The tear along Bruno’s flank is about six inches. It’s now even more obvious how it’s been crudely stitched. What I didn’t see from across the room is that it’s one of four. Three older, healed raised. One fresh. All roughly parallel. All on the same side.

Dogs don’t fight each other and come away with four parallel wounds on the same flank in different stages of healing.

I stand up.

“How long have you had Bruno, Mike?”

“Since he was a puppy. Why?”

“These injuries are consistent with a specific kind of trauma.”

Mike’s expression doesn’t move. “He gets into scrapes.”

“These aren’t scrapes. These are—”

“You giving me the antibiotics or not?”

I look at him. I look at Bruno. Bruno is leaning against my leg with his eyes half shut, and I have never in my life been this furious and this frightened at the same time.

“I need to flag this with my supervisor,” I say. “Standard procedure when injuries are inconsistent with the history. It’ll take five minutes.”

Mike moves fast.

He doesn’t touch me. He just snaps his fingers at the dog and yanks the lead, and Bruno is up and moving before I can get between them. Mike is halfway to the door when I call after him.

“Mike. Mike, please—”

“Stay out of my fucking business.”

The door bangs shut.

I stand there for a long second, my heart hammering, my hands shaking.

Then I walk into the back office and I write down everything.

The man’s name. The car he got into — I saw the plate through the window, six digits of it anyway.

The description of the dog. The pattern of the injuries.

I write it all down and I log it into the system and I mark it for Dr. Patel to review, and then I go into the bathroom and lock the door and put my hands flat against the tile and breathe until my chest stops feeling like a fist.

Dr. Patel finds me ten minutes later when I come out. She reads the notes. She looks at me over her glasses, and her face is very still, in that way it gets when she’s angry on someone else’s behalf.

“You did this exactly right,” she says. “I’ll call the county. It’ll probably come to nothing. You know how these things go.”

“I know.”

“If that man comes back here, I don’t want you alone with him. Okay?”

“Okay.”

She squeezes my shoulder. She’s about my mother’s age and she has the kindest hands of anyone I’ve ever met. I hold it together until she walks away.

I did the right thing. I know I did the right thing.

So why do I feel like I’ve just stepped in front of a bus?

Two days later I find a note on my car windscreen.

Folded once, tucked under the wiper. I see it before I get to the car and I know. I don’t know how I know, but I do.

Mind your own business.

No signature. Block capitals, black ink, pressed hard enough into the paper that I can feel the indents on the back.

I look around the car park. It’s nearly empty. Late shift, nearly dark, the lights just coming on. My hands are shaking again. I stuff the note into my bag and I get into the car and I lock the doors before I’ve even got my seatbelt on.

I drive home.

I don’t realise the car is behind me until I’m three streets from my apartment.

It’s a dark blue sedan. Could be anyone. I tell myself it could be anyone. I take a right I don’t normally take, and the sedan takes a right. I take another right, making a full square around the block. The sedan takes another right.

My chest goes cold.

I don’t go home. I don’t even slow down. I drive past my building and I keep driving, down into the grid of streets I’ve known since I was nineteen, and I end up outside Kate’s apartment with my heart in my mouth and no memory of the last ten minutes.

The sedan isn’t behind me anymore. I don’t know when it peeled off. I don’t know if I imagined the whole thing.

I sit in the car for a full minute before I can make my legs work.

Kate pours me a glass of wine before I’ve finished taking my coat off.

“Sit,” she says.

I sit.

Kate’s apartment is a mess in the way that makes me feel better about my own life — scarves draped over the backs of chairs, a stack of books teetering on the coffee table, a candle burning that smells like a forest. She’s wearing an enormous hoodie that was definitely a boyfriend’s once. Her hair is twisted up with a pen.

She looks at my face and her whole expression changes.

“Darce. Start from the beginning.”

So I do. The dog. The man. The note. I leave the car until last because I’m still not sure if I imagined it, and when I get to that part my voice wobbles and Kate puts her wine down very carefully on the table.

“You were followed,” she says.

“I don’t know for sure—”

“Darcie.”

“It might have been a coincidence.”

“Three turns?”

I don’t answer. I know she’s right. I knew she was right when I was doing the third turn.

Kate gets up. She paces to the window and back. She’s in her bare feet, and her mouth is pressed into a hard flat line, and I can see her thinking about it, putting it together, cycling through the options the way she cycles through every problem she’s ever solved for me since we were fifteen.

“You need to go to the police,” she says.

“And tell them what? That I got a note? That a car was behind me on the way home?”

“That’s a pattern, Darcie. That’s harassment. That’s—”

“They won’t do anything. You know they won’t do anything until something actually happens.”

“So we just wait for something to happen?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then what are you saying?”

I don’t have an answer. I take another sip of wine. My hand is still shaking.

Kate stops pacing. She looks at me. And I watch her face do a thing I’ve seen it do maybe twice in my entire life.

“No,” I say immediately. “Kate. No.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“You don’t.”

“Kate. Please.”

She picks up her phone.

I stand up. I put my hand on her wrist. “Kate. I’m serious. Don’t.”

She looks at me for a long second. Her eyes are soft. Her jaw is not.

“Darcie,” she says. “You’re being followed. You’re being threatened. You’ve got a note on your car from someone who knows where you work and knows what you drive, and you don’t want me to call the one person in this city who can actually do something about it?”

“He’s your brother.”

“Yes.”

“He won’t want to be involved. He doesn’t—” I cut myself off.

I don’t know how to finish the sentence.

He doesn’t like me? He’s spent ten years looking through me like I’m a window?

He once looked at me like he wanted to eat me alive and then never did it again and I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to forget the specific shape of his mouth?

“He’ll want to be involved,” Kate says quietly. “Trust me.”

I let go of her wrist.

She turns away from me and scrolls to his name.

I sit back down on the couch. I pick up my wine. I drink it in one long pull that burns on the way down, and I listen to my best friend call her older brother and tell him that someone is hunting me.

“He’s coming over tomorrow,” she says when she hangs up. “Seven.”

I close my eyes.

Ten years. Ten years of telling myself I imagined it. Ten years of walking into rooms knowing exactly where he was without looking. Ten years of every man I’ve ever dated coming up short against a memory I’m not even sure is real.

And now he’s coming over.

“Darce.” Kate sits down next to me and puts her hand on mine. “It’s going to be okay.”

I nod. I can’t speak.

“He’ll figure it out. That’s what he does. That’s his whole thing. He’ll find the guy, he’ll sort it, and you’ll go back to your life.”

“Yeah,” I manage.

“He’s the best person in the world to have in your corner for something like this. You know that, right?”

“I know.”

What I don’t say is that having him in my corner is the exact problem.

Having him in my apartment. Having him close enough that I can smell whatever he smells like now — engine oil, leather, whatever men like him smell like — and look at his hands and his mouth and remember that once, when I was sixteen, he looked at me like he wanted to ruin me, and then he never looked at me like that again.

I’ve spent ten years being fine. I’ve spent ten years being good.

Outside, somewhere in the distance, a bike rumbles past. I don’t flinch.

But my whole body listens.