6. Lilah
6
LILAH
I was disoriented when I woke, the room dark and quiet. It took me a few seconds to remember where I was and how I’d ended up there. Then it came to me all at once: the run through the woods, the big house, the Bastards.
Shit.
I put my hands on my chest and took a few slow deep breaths. My heart felt good, steady, so I turned my attention to my fingers and toes and was relieved when they moved on command. I didn’t know if they were permanently damaged, but it was hard to imagine I’d lose fingers and toes that seemed to be in good working order.
I looked around the room and savored the cocoon of morning. With the drapes drawn, it might have been any time of the day or night. The house was well insulated, as quiet as a mausoleum from the room on the second floor, the world outside muffled the way it only was after a snowstorm when all the windows were closed and the birds and crickets were silent.
I remembered the prayer I’d heard in my mind when I’d been trying to outrun Vic and the other men on snowmobiles. My mom would say God had heard my prayer, and even though I didn’t believe what she believed I had to wonder if she would be right, because here I was, alive and well and with functioning fingers and toes.
That was how it was being my mom’s daughter. She’d been preaching at me since I was a baby, had locked me in the downstairs closet to pray, sometimes for hours, when I misbehaved. According to her, when good things happened it was because God had seen fit to show me favor and when bad things happened it was because I was being punished. I’d worked hard to overcome it, moving out of my small childhood home as soon as I’d saved the money from the three jobs I’d worked after getting my GED, but I was always a little paranoid, always a little scared that if I put a foot wrong, I was going to be struck down by a thunderbolt from above.
But really, the why of being alive didn’t matter. I was still breathing. Now I just needed to get away from the Bastards.
I threw back the covers and sat up. My fingers looked normal. They still stung when I moved them, but they worked.
I hesitated over my feet, still in the double layer of socks, because the truth was, I was kind of scared to look at them. Finally I reached down and pulled off the socks, then breathed a sigh of relief. I’d half expected them to be dead and black, but they looked normal even though they stung a little too.
This was the last place in the world I would have chosen as a safe haven, but it had saved my ass.
And apparently, my fingers and toes.
I slipped the socks back on my feet, used the bathroom, and brushed my teeth with the toothbrush on the counter, praying it was a new one put out for guests. My face was a mess, small red lines crisscrossing my skin and a bigger gash across my right cheek. Nolan had been so worried about my hands and feet he hadn’t even mentioned the cuts on my face, so I assumed they would heal.
I didn’t look like myself. It wasn’t just that my dark blonde hair was tangled and matted or that my face was scratched to shit. The green eyes staring back at me looked vacant and haunted. Maybe that was what it looked like when you stared death in the face and lived to tell the tale.
I splashed water carefully on my face, wincing as it hit the worst of my cuts, and patted my skin dry with one of the thick towels on the wooden shelf. Then I used the hairbrush (it was hard to imagine the Bastards having guests, but they seemed prepared for them) to comb through the knots in my hair. It took a long time to untangle, and my stomach was growling by the time I left the bathroom.
I crossed the bedroom to pick up the key to my door and used it to step into the hall.
I noticed things that hadn’t caught my attention the night before, when I’d felt like I was being led to the guillotine by Nolan. The hall was wide, the warm wood floors covered in thick patterned rugs that complemented the dark green paint on the walls.
Modern sconces lined both sides of the hall, although the lights were out now, and it had the same muffled quality as my bedroom, the hallmark of a well-built house, which stood in pretty stark contrast to my drafty apartment, where I could barely get Tony, the landlord, to return my calls when a pipe had burst under my sink during an ice storm last year.
There were three other doors in the hall and I wondered if they led to the Bastards’ bedrooms. It was weird to think that we’d slept in the same house, that they’d been only a few feet away from me while I’d been in bed.
My face got hot. And okay, I’d be lying if I said the rest of me wasn’t a little warm at the thought too. Yeah, they were bastards, but what could I say? They were also undeniably hot and I was a twenty-one-year-old woman who’d hadn’t been touched with anything but a vibrator since the night the Bastards had ruined my life.
I passed the closed doors to the other rooms, then heard the rumble of deep male voices from the first floor.
And they were obviously arguing.
I hesitated at the threshold of the loft that looked down at the great room.
“What did you want me to do?” Nolan asked. “Throw her out into the snow?”
“If that’s what it takes to get rid of her.” That was Rafe.
Of course.
Even from my perch on the second floor, I could hear the disgust in his voice, and I wondered, not for the first time, if he’d always hated me or if that had come after he, Nolan, and Jude had texted my nudes to the whole school.
“You’re being an asshole,” Jude said.
“And?” Rafe asked.
“And you should stop being an asshole.” Jude’s voice was so calm, I could almost picture him sitting there with a cup of coffee, looking at his phone while he talked to Rafe, who clearly didn’t want me in their house.
“I’ve always been an asshole,” Rafe said. “Why stop now?”
“Someone was after her,” Nolan said. I heard running water, the slam of a cupboard or drawer in the kitchen. “We’re not monsters.”
“Speak for yourself,” Rafe grumbled.
My breath was coming too fast and shallow and I forced myself to slow it down, something I’d learned to do over the years when my heart condition flared.
“Maybe you should think about why you don’t want her here,” Jude said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rafe asked.
“Why do you care so much?” Again the calm voice from Jude. “It’s temporary. What does it matter?”
“Fuck you.”
I flinched at the heat in Rafe’s words and I had a flash of memory: Rafe, Nolan, and Jude, peeling off my clothes, touching their lips to my heated skin while I writhed under them, my head fuzzy from the massive amounts of alcohol — and whatever else had been in my red plastic cup — I’d consumed at the one and only party I’d ever been invited to in high school.
I didn’t even remember them taking the pictures.
“Are you mad at me or mad at yourself?” Nolan asked.
“And fuck you too,” Rafe said.
I’d had enough. My heart was beating too fast, my pulse pounding in my ears. I didn’t want to hear any more. Didn’t want to be reminded of the night that had changed my life — that had changed me — forever.
I didn’t try to be quiet as I crossed the loft area to the stairs. I wanted them to hear me coming, wanted them to shut the fuck up — about me, about that night, about everything.
They were silent when I walked into the kitchen, the air heavy like it was when a group of people had gotten caught talking about you. On one wall, a TV on mute broadcast political news, some guy running for Senator in the next election.
I slid onto one of the chairs at the island and looked at Rafe, leaning against the counter with his arms folded over his chest, the universal symbol for stay the fuck away from me .
His gray eyes made me think of stormy seas and summer rain.
For a long moment, no one said anything, the air charged with electricity the way it was right before lightning cracked the sky.
“Jude’s right,” I finally said to Rafe. “You’re being an asshole. It’s not like I want to be here.”