Chapter 8 Zeth
Zeth
I’ve got fifteen minutes to get home before Lacey officially freaks the fuck out.
I’ve been gone all day today waiting to speak to Charlie—the first time I’ve seen him since Matty laid me up with a gunshot wound—and my codependent houseguest became even more codependent during that time.
Like, forget the co. She’s just dependent.
I’m only just starting to graze the surface on the girl’s backstory.
She’s told me some dark shit that went down in her household as a kid, but I know there’s more.
She had it way worse than me. Fucked as it may sound to me now, she didn’t get lucky like I did.
Charlie is a hateful, evil son of a bitch every day of the week that ends in a Y, but he saved me.
I’d be dead right now if he hadn’t taken me from my uncle when I was six.
You know your problems are bad when you wish a psychotic, drug-pushing Englishman had come to your rescue as an impressionable youth.
I don’t know if Lace does wish for that, though.
All I know is that she gets fucking crazy when I leave the warehouse for too long.
Jesus, if I could go back in time, say, fifteen months and have a conversation with past me, past me would shank me in the ribs for going so damn soft.
I mean, shit. I’m rushing home for a woman. And I’m not even fucking her.
Lacey’s phone rings out every time I call, and that makes my palms sweat like a rapist sent down the line at Chino.
I did a stint in Chino one time. Let’s just say I saw firsthand what happens to guys who force themselves on others.
Women, kids, animals, doesn’t matter. A rapist in a prison like that is a man living on borrowed time.
“Come on. Fuck, Lacey. Pick up the goddamn phone.” She doesn’t pick up the phone.
Why the fuck did I even bother giving her the damned thing?
I break every speed limit and run every red on my way home, gunning the Camaro’s engine to the hilt.
It’s raining when I finally arrive. The warehouse is a two-story fortress, silhouetted and daunting in the storm-colored evening.
The huge steel doorway, covered in blistered red paint, is locked and chained like I left it, but Lace has a key.
She could have left if she wanted to. The thumping music coming from inside tells me she hasn’t gone anywhere, though.
Maybe that’s why she didn’t hear her phone.
Hope. Hope is a nasty little bitch.
I know I’ve fucked up as soon as I step through the door.
The place is trashed. Broken furniture lies discarded like kindling on the floor.
The TV is smashed but still works well enough to produce skull-splitting white noise and a fuzzy, distorted screen.
There are shattered beer bottles all over the place and clothes absolutely everywhere, both mine and Lacey’s. Shit.
“Lacey! LACE, WHAT THE FUCK?” I charge from the main living space into my bedroom.
She hides in my bed sometimes when she’s really struggling.
I’m never in it, you feel, but sometimes she says it makes her feel safe.
She’s not in my bed, however. She isn’t in hers, either.
It’s full-blown panic stations when I find her in the bathroom.
She’s gone and done it a-fucking-gain.
Her skin is blue and waxy. She floats, fully stretched out in the tub, the overflowing water a deep, offensive shade of crimson. I jump in feet first, dragging her limp body out with me. She weighs nothing at all, so lifeless in my arms.
“Fuck you, Lacey. Fucking fuck you.”
She’s fucking mangled her wrists. I wrap her up in her blanket and dump her ass in the passenger seat of the Camaro, and then I drive. I drive her to the one place on the face of this planet I really don’t want to go. The place I refused to go when I was in trouble myself.
St. Peter’s Mission of Mercy Hospital.