Chapter 7
SEVEN
Tony
I DIDN’T EVEN FEEL the shopping bags slip from my numb fingers and hit the polished wooden floor.
I took a hasty step back as images from the past crowded into the present.
My foot slipped on a plastic bag stuffed with clothing, and I nearly tumbled down the steep stairs for the second time in less than two minutes.
“No,” I said, a bit desperately—then I turned and half-ran, half-fell down the staircase, clutching the intricately carved banister to keep myself upright.
The stairs seemed to telescope outward, taking me ten times as long to go down as they had to go up, even as I leapt down two and three steps at a time.
The elegant, well-lit hallway on the main floor flickered in and out of my vision, the image of a damp and dingy basement bedroom superimposed over it.
My palms slapped against a heavy front door, stopping my forward momentum. I scrabbled clumsily at locks and deadbolts until I could tear it open and stagger outside, sucking in great lungfuls of humid midday air.
Even with the sun shining through patchy gray clouds overhead, I couldn’t get the dark afterimages of my childhood out of my senses.
Angry footfalls pacing overhead... the floorboards creaking beneath them.
A door opening at the top of the stairs.
.. a silhouetted figured stalking down, step by deliberate step.
A doubled belt held between two fists, the leather snapping with a threatening crack.
I stumbled toward the old Volvo station wagon parked in the circle drive, with the vague plan of getting in it and driving away fast enough to outrun the memories.
Maybe my legs were smarter than my brain, because they threw in the towel before I got the door open—saving me from getting behind the wheel and immediately causing an accident.
My knees buckled, and I turned as I fell in slow motion, ending up slumped against the driver’s side front tire.
My heart felt like it was trying to pound its way out of the cage of my ribs. I couldn’t catch my breath properly. Jez could not be here, in this house, more than a year after I’d last seen her.
“She’s the one who tried to kill Knox,” Gage had said.
Jez can’t be a killer, my mind tried to tell me, despite the fact that my last memory of her involved struggling out from under the dead weight of my stepfather’s corpse as she backed away, her eyes huge in her bone-white face.
Jez already was a killer.
She’d killed to protect me from a monster. The monster who’d followed me out of my youth, tracking me down in a new city, in my new, painstakingly built life. And then she’d run away, leaving me alone to deal with the aftermath.
I still remembered the way my hands had shaken as I unlocked my phone, scrolling down to a number that had only been added a few weeks previously.
“Yeah?” Heath’s gruff voice had picked up on the other end.
“H-hi,” I’d told him in a shaky voice. “It’s, um... it’s Tony Scalise. Sorry—I know I’m nobody to you. But I’ve been helping your pack out with some stuff lately, and... I need help. I really, really need your help.”
By all rights, he should have hung up on me without a word. Instead, there was a long pause.
“What kind of help?” he’d asked, and it had been all I could do not to spill out the whole story over the phone like an idiot.
I’d bitten down hard on the torrent of words.
“Trash disposal,” I’d managed, past a clenched jaw. “It’s too big for me to move myself.”
The memory rose up, as fresh and visceral as the day it happened.
Half an hour after I got off the phone, a brisk knock sounded at my apartment door.
I gasped, my spine jolting me straight up from my slumped huddle on the couch as fresh adrenaline sloshed through me.
My first, irrational thought was that it was my stepfather, despite the fact that his disfigured corpse was cooling on the rug in front of me.
Like I’d been sucked into some kind of twisted Groundhog Day, doomed to repeat the attack over and over.
My second, equally irrational thought was that the police had found out somehow and were here to arrest me for murder.
That was stupid—even if I’d been the one to smash in David Scalise’s skull, it would have been clear self-defense. He was sexually assaulting me... I had a fucking restraining order against him, for Christ’s sake.
A muffled Irish drawl jerked me out of my paralysis.
“Oi. You’re the one who called me out to this shithole! Open the damned door.”
I got up on trembling legs, skirted the disgusting sack of meat on my floor, and opened the damned door. Sharp green eyes played over me before focusing past me, inside the room. Heath Dawson’s gaze caught on the dead body before I could get my tongue to cooperate well enough to form words.
“Oh,” he said. “That kind of trash.”
I let him inside and shut the door, feeling as though my arms and legs weren’t properly connected to my body.
His piercing gaze fell on me again. “Self-defense?”
I debated the merits of protesting that I hadn’t even been the one to kill him. Instead, I just nodded.
“My stepfather,” I said hoarsely. “He’s the reason I got emancipated minor status when I was fifteen. The reason I moved here, to Chicago. I... I have a restraining order.”
Heath grunted. “Uh-huh. Fat lot of good that did you.” He gave the crappy studio apartment a quick once-over before returning his attention to me. “You hurt?”
I had no idea. I thought I remembered blood in my mouth from where my tooth had cut into my cheek after his slap, and there would probably be bruises from the struggle.
“No,” I said.
He huffed out a sigh and reached into his pocket, pulling out a roll of bills. “Go to a bar and don’t come back until closing time. Do not get drunk. Do not talk to anyone. If someone asks, your girlfriend just dumped you.”
“Boyfriend,” I muttered—not that I’d ever had one, or likely ever would.
“If someone asks, your boyfriend dumped you,” he corrected smoothly, pressing a couple of twenties into my hand. “You haven’t seen your stepfather. You had no idea he was even in Chicago. After all, why would he be here when there’s a restraining order against him?”
Even with my brain spinning circles, the heavy irony on the words came through. And he was right. My stupid piece of paper had done fuck-all to protect me, in the end.
“Okay,” I said faintly, clutching the cash in a sweaty hand.
I went out to a bar that I’d never been to before. I bought a beer and nursed it for hours, while completely failing to listen to the succession of local bands crooning on the stage. When the place kicked me out, I went back home with no idea of what I was likely to find there.
What I found was... nothing. No corpse. No dropped pizza congealing on the floor. Just my familiar apartment, cluttered and grubby as ever, except for the new table lamp by the couch and the new rug sitting innocently on the floor, as though it had been there for years.
Several days later, a pair of police detectives showed up at my door, asking if I’d seen or heard from David Scalise recently.
“No,” I said. “I haven’t had contact with him for years. We’re estranged because he abused me as a child. I have a restraining order against him... so, I doubt he’d show up here, if he even knows where I live now. Why do you ask? Is he in trouble or something?”
“He’s been reported as a missing person,” said the female detective. She handed me a card with her information on it. “If he attempts to make contact, please let us know.”
“Okay,” I said, and that was the last I ever heard on the matter.
Back in the present, footsteps crunched on gravel. I peered up as a tall figure loomed over me, blocking out the sunlight. A faint shiver trembled down my spine, but then Gage crouched down in front of me, a couple of steps away, his forearms resting on his bent knees.
“You know her, then?” he asked.
I blinked myself back to reality with difficulty.
Knox, in the hospital.
Jez—my former friend who’d apparently decided, after her first taste of it, that murder suited her.
“Yeah,” I rasped.
“Who is she?” Gage asked.
I swallowed hard. “I... don’t even know her last name. She was living on the streets, I’m pretty sure. But we busked together sometimes. We were friends.”
Gage digested that before speaking again. “Kind of a funny reaction to seeing a friend.”
“She... killed someone,” I said reluctantly, before hurrying to clarify. “But it was self-defense! Or, I mean... it was actually me she was defending.”
“Go on,” Gage said, when I didn’t immediately continue.
I took a centering breath, relieved that my panic seemed to be abating. As much as I hated talking about my past, I owed it to this pack if Knox’s attempted murder was involved.
“My stepfather abused me when I was younger. I got out... got some help and moved here from St. Louis to get away from him.”
“He came after you?” Gage guessed.
“Yeah. Found out where I lived... showed up one night and shoved his way into my apartment.” The words were hard to get out, even now.
The memory of hands yanking at my clothing, tearing my jeans and underwear down to expose me, made my skin crawl.
“Jez was coming over with a pizza. I thought it was her when I opened the door. But she showed up while he was attacking me. The door was still unlocked. She came in, saw what was happening, and bashed his skull in with a table lamp. He died instantly.”
“Huh,” Gage said.
“She ran away afterward.” The words escaped without my conscious decision to say them aloud. “Panicked, I guess. I never saw her again after that... until just now.”
“How long ago was that?” Gage asked.
“A little more than a year,” I told him.
“Guess that’d give you a shock, for sure.” Gage rose from his nonthreatening crouch, dusting himself off.
“Yeah,” I agreed in a whisper.
The alpha’s mouth curled unhappily.
“We need answers, after what she did to Knox,” he said. “And she ain’t giving them. You could talk to her. Maybe find out who the hell she’s working for.”
The instinctive need to say no bubbled up in my throat. But after everything, I did owe them this. Heath had cleaned up Jez’s mess for me without even knowing it, and then she’d nearly gone and killed his pack leader. Or, at least... Gage thought she had.
If there was any chance this was a terrible misunderstanding, I needed to find out.
And, more selfishly, the urge to ask why she’d abandoned me so completely itched beneath my skin.
She had to have known that I wouldn’t blame her for what she’d done in my own defense.
She had to have known that by running, she was leaving me in the shit, with a dead body on my floor.
Gage wanted answers. So did I.
“Okay,” I said, steeling myself to walk back up those stairs and confront the woman who’d turned all of our lives upside down.