2. Chapter Two
Chapter Two
“Marcie, sweetheart, put the bat down.”
Marcie didn’t move a muscle. She stared bloody murder at Jessamyn, the baseball bat still raised high over her head.
She looked like she was trying to figure out whether or not to bludgeon our guest with it—or maybe she’d already decided, and was just judging whether she could get away with it or not. Either way, I had to do something.
I moved towards the stairs, a hand held before me. The first step put me between Jessamyn and Marcie. The lights were still too bright, but my eyes were starting to adjust.
“Babygirl. Babygirl. I’m fine. Look at me.”
Marcie didn’t look at me. She was looking past me, at the blonde in the white coat standing in our home.
The bat didn’t move.
“Uncle Jack.” I wasn’t really Marcie’s uncle—Marcie had confessed to me that the pet name made her feel protected and safe, and I figured that was probably what she needed right now. “What is she doing here?”
Jessamyn cleared her throat. “I came to speak with your husband—”
“Don’t you say a goddamned word,” I snapped without turning around.
“Jack.” Marcie blinked, rapidly coming to her senses. “What the hell is this woman doing in our house!?”
She took a step, shifting the bat to her shoulder. For a moment, I could see Daniel Ramsey in Marcie’s face—the look he got on very rare occasions when things were going catastrophically wrong and he needed to step in. It made Marcie look as tall as a giant as she stared Jessamyn down.
“The Ring camera woke me up,” I explained. “I didn’t invite her here. She was standing outside on the front porch like she wanted to try and sell us vinyl siding…”
Another figure made their way down the stairs.
It was Yukiko, descending as fast as she dared in her condition, one hand protectively holding the swell of her pregnant belly.
Somehow despite me taking my dress shirt with me she’d found another one to throw on, and she’d buttoned it just enough to keep herself from being topless.
Her eyes took in Marcie with the bat first. They widened.
“Marcie? Jack? What happened—?”
Yukiko went silent. She’d just seen Jessamyn Fawkes.
“Mrs. Avery.” Jessamyn’s voice stayed calm and businesslike, for all the world like we were meeting at our offices instead of in the living room of my family’s home. “Please, I mean no harm. I want to retract my podcast statements—I’m willing to try and make things right—”
“Stop.” I’d never seen Kiki so pale. “You need to leave. Now.” Her gaze flickered towards the ceiling. “If Samantha sees you…”
Maybe it was the look on my princess’s face that sealed the deal. Whatever it was, Jessamyn suddenly seemed to realize exactly how much trouble she’d just put herself in.
“Your husband has the details,” she said with a curt nod. “He’ll tell you everything. I only came this late because she’s having me followed. I’ll leave now—there’s no trouble…”
But suddenly, there was.
Because a third set of footsteps could be heard coming down the stairs.
I saw Samantha’s shadow on the far wall a moment before she came around the corner.
She’d thrown on her old Delta Rho sweatshirt and was clearly wearing nothing underneath it—the panties she’d had on when she went to bed were still somewhere on our floor.
Her hair was an even bigger mess than Marcie’s, sleep-mussed and sticking out in different directions.
One hand loosely clasped the banister for balance.
“I thought it was morning,” she muttered, rubbing her eyes with her free hand. “Kiki, what’s going on? Where’s Daddy—?”
Yukiko turned. “Go back upstairs,” she said, something desperate edging into her tone. “Sam, please, turn around right now. You cannot be down here.”
She was persuasive. Her voice held that trust-me edge it always had in a crisis when she rallied the troops. For a second, I thought it was going to work.
But it was two AM, Samantha was half-asleep, and this was our home.
My babygirl might have sensed the danger somewhere else, but not here.
“Huh?” She took another step down the stairs, nearly bumping into Yukiko. “Kiki, what—?”
Her hand came down.
And Samantha saw Jessamyn Fawkes for the first time since the Zoom meeting.
The worst part wasn’t the anger. That came a few moments later, and was every bit as strong and searing as I’d expected.
No, the worst part of it was that, as I watched Samantha’s hand freeze on the banister and her expression begin to change, there was a moment before reality came rushing in where she looked almost happy to see Jessamyn.
Like she was a friend she hadn’t seen in a while who’d showed up on our doorstep in the middle of the night in distress, instead of her worst enemy.
And then she remembered, and the hurt hit her all over again.
She used to think the world of Jessamyn Fawkes. She’d been her best friend, before the betrayals piled up one on top of the other. The podcast. The expulsion attempt.
The awful thing Jessamyn did with her parents.
Samantha’s face contorted with rage. Then something shifted, and she went cold. Ice cold.
“Sam.” Yukiko’s voice came out a whisper. She took another step up the stairs, one hand reaching towards Samantha like she was a little worried what might happen if she touched her. “Please. Samantha. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Samantha’s eyes never left Jessamyn. When she spoke, her tone was completely flat.
“I won’t, Kiki.”
Yukiko relaxed a fraction. In my peripheral vision, so did Jessamyn Fawkes.
Looking back on it, I should have realized right then and there what my babygirl was planning.
Because Samantha didn’t do cold. She got loud, she got angry—she sometimes got a little bratty, if only so I could punish her for it later. That reaction should have set alarm bells off in my brain.
She should have been screaming.
Jessamyn missed it, too. Her shoulders dropped, the color returning to her face. Her gaze shifted to Yukiko, my head wife being firmer ground for her than her former flame.
“I am so sorry to have startled you all this way,” Jessamyn said. “Let me explain.”
Samantha took a step.
“I came here tonight because I want to retract everything I said on the podcast.”
Another step.
“Victoria Ruocchio put me up to all of it. I want to make this right—”
Samantha’s next step took her past Yukiko. To where she was no longer in danger of knocking her fellow wife over in her zeal.
And then came the scream.
Samantha charged down the stairs like a bull, practically foaming at the mouth.
The bat was halfway out of Marcie’s hands before any of us understood what was happening—Sam plucked it away with a precision I hadn’t realized my babygirl possessed, wrenching the Louisville Slugger from Marcie’s hands and bringing it over her head in the same motion.
In my mind’s eye, I saw that bat coming down on Jessamyn Fawkes’s skull.
I saw the four of us standing over a bruised, bloodied corpse, debating whether or not to call the police.
I saw Yukiko planning out how to hide body with the same attention to detail she used to manage everything from our business affairs to my roster of harem girls.
And I knew I could not let that happen.
I caught her wrist in mid-swing. I expected the bat to slip from her fingers, but she had a death grip on the damned thing.
She lunged at Jessamyn like a hellcat and I grabbed her off her feet, lifting her off the ground with one arm around her waist and the other locking onto the bat in her hand.
The momentum slammed me against the wall, rattling the photographs Yukiko hung there shortly after we’d moved in.
“She’s not worth it, babygirl,” I grunted into Sam’s ear. “Put the bat down!”
“LET! ME! GO!”
“You want to go to jail for her?” I held on tighter. “Don’t do this, babygirl. Not in the house. Not with a baby on the way!”
“I’m going to kill her! I’m going to fucking kill her—!”
God damn it!
I pried Samantha’s fingers off the bat and ripped it out of her hand.
It hit the floor and rolled towards the kitchen, coming to a stop against a nearby wall.
As soon as it left Samantha’s hand she stopped struggling, stopped screaming—stopped doing everything other than staring daggers at Jessamyn Fawkes.
Jessamyn looked absolutely horrified. I don’t think she’d known until that moment the true depths of how badly she’d hurt Samantha. I watched it wash over her in a wave—the realization that if I hadn’t stopped Samantha, she really would have tried to kill her.
“Samantha—” Jessamyn began.
“Do not. Say my name.”
The blonde’s mouth snapped shut.
And Samantha started to speak.
What came out of my babygirl’s mouth was nothing I’d ever heard before.
I’d seen her mad as hell, I’d seen her terrified—I’d even seen her grieving.
This was not any of that. In that moment, she wasn’t the ‘babygirl’ we all knew and loved so well—and she wasn’t the Queen Bee of the Stillwell chapter of the Delta Rho sorority, either.
She was something else entirely. Something we maybe didn’t have a name for.
“You.” Samantha started trembling in my arms. “Came to my fucking house.”
Jessamyn had backed up against the front door, her hand on the knob behind her back. Her face had gone as white as her coat.
“You drove to my city, to my neighborhood, at two in the fucking morning—after spending forty-three minutes and nineteen seconds of your useless fucking life calling me a sex cult victim to the entire fucking country—”
“Samantha—”
“Do not say my FUCKING name!”
Samantha’s nails dug into my shoulders like needles. Even now, I didn’t dare let up on my grip. Not a single ounce. She was so keyed up right now there was no telling what she might do.