Chapter 5 #2
‘The glasses and self-medicating,’ that taunting little voice offers, but I refuse to let it stick. My need for sleeping aids is an issue I’ll save for some poor therapist down the line—no point rehashing problems I can’t solve. Future Cara will have to take one for the team.
“My new beginning, a fresh start,” I say aloud before another intrusive thought can materialise.
I straighten my spine and roll out my shoulders as a show of strength, my body believing in the sentiment before my brain has a chance to play catch up.
With my hands on my hips, I spin and take in the whole room.
This space feels so light and yet so impossibly dark all at once.
Every fixture and fitting from the chandelier overhead, the dresser vanity table, to the scuffed-framed mirror on the wall has the same tinge of vintage bronze.
It’s easily the most opulent room I’ve ever been in and nothing like where the online tour had suggested I’d be housing.
An honest person would fess up that they had likely been put in the wrong room,
‘Enjoy the ride, bitch. Where did honesty ever get you?’ Suzy’s voice rings out in my head, and I smile at the thought, abruptly deciding to follow her lead because why the fuck not?
Claiming the space as my own is a resolute move forward in my journey to becoming the new and improved Cara Morgrieves.
This is my fresh start, a new beginning I get to mould for myself.
Why shouldn’t I enjoy it? There was nothing for me in Hollow Hills.
As though on cue, my phone rings, Suzy’s name lighting up the screen as a reminder that there is one thing I’ve left behind—the all-consuming wrath of my best friend when she’s in protective mode. I can practically feel her tension before the call has even connected.
“I read your horoscope. How bad is it? Are they being nice to you?”
“Hello to you too, Mum,” I chuckle with my phone held between my ear and my shoulder as I haul my suitcase up onto the bed with a grunt, pulling my hand back and hissing as the busted lock nicks my gloved finger, blood seeping out and staining the cotton.
“Fuck,” I spit, pulling off my glove with my teeth and sucking my finger in between my lips.
“Are those sex noises?” she asks accusingly, the video call notification blaring in my ear when I don’t immediately answer her.
I answer the chat with a curt smile, blowing a curl of hair from my face with a huff when it connects.
Only she would suspect i’m having sex and immediatly jump in for visual confirmation.
“No, those were noises that tell me I am severely unfit, and I need to invest in some new luggage.” I hold my finger up to show her the split skin.
“I’ve not been here long enough to entice a man into my bed,” I retort playfully, my eyebrow elevated.
I push aside the image of Ezra laying shirtless on the cotton sheets because I know even through the phone, Suzy can detect arousal a mile off—it’s like her superpower.
“Liar. What’s his name?” she clucks, eyeing me suspiciously with pursed lips.
What did I say—superpower.
A garbled yowl and a succession of gruff pleas reverberating through the speaker from her end have my interest piqued.
“Are those sex noises?” I counter, mimicking the same parental tone she threw at me.
Disappointed, she replies, “Hardly,” as she turns the phone so the view of a dank basement room with a dirty cement floor, crude hanging lights, and a water hose system snaking around the ceiling comes into the shot.
I wince when I see Jax take a hall-of-fame-worthy swing with a metal bat against a man’s chest. He rocks in the chair bolted to the floor with the force of it, wheezing as a shirtless Jax circles him, rolling it in his bloodied fist as though he’s gearing to step up to the plate rather than using it for the purposes of torture.
“Hi, Jax,” I call out, and he turns to flash me that swoon-worthy lopsided smile, two fingers tipped against his forehead as he salutes me in greeting.
Pulling back his bat, he resumes his business as usual with his victim of choice; this time the jab isn’t nearly as hard, but it doesn’t stop the man from screaming any less as the metal makes contact with his ribcage.
The mighty crack of splintering bones makes me wince.
“Just another day in the office,” Suzy states.
The man chained to the chair breathlessly continues to plead with Jax, knowing it’s pointless.
Jax is Hollow Hills’ reaper, and the lore of the underground is that no one gets out alive if you are on his list. I’d feel sorry for the guy if I didn’t recognise him as one of Doc’s highest-bidding clients.
He had left plenty of marks on Suzy’s body, and that’s likely why he’s a bloody mess at Jax’s mercy right now.
A human pin cushion poked full of holes and baring swipes of a blade across his chest as Jax enacts a rightful show of vengeance in his woman’s honour.
Romance comes in many forms in our world—carving up and murdering the men who have wronged us is right there at the top with sending flowers and obsessively stalking us until the time to pounce and profess their undying love.
I didn’t say it was a Hallmark-healthy romance, there’s no marshmallows and small-town carnival rides in our stories, but there’s plenty of aged whisky and red flags a plenty.
I’d kill for a love like Jax and Suzy’s.
The sigh that falls from my lips lets Suzy know that I’m getting lost in my head, so she moves for a change of subject, closing a metal door behind her as she shuffles us into another room. There are less people crying out and begging for their lives in this one. I’m grateful for the quiet.
“Enough about me. What’s new with you? How are you really settling in?” she sings-songs, jumping onto a bed with black satin sheets and getting comfortable as she tucks a pillow under her chest.
“Too early to tell, I think. My boss has a stick wedged so far up her arse, she must taste tree sap at minute intervals, there are patients that don’t really seem like patients that appear to have free reign, and then there’s—” I abruptly stop talking, unsure of how to describe my encounter with Ezra.
“There’s what? Who? Dear God, woman, share with the room.”
“Ezra Wolfe…” His name is barely a whisper on a soft exhale, but Suzy catches it regardless.
“Have you consulted your cards?” she asks excitedly, reaching over and pouring herself a shot of tequila from where it sits on her bedside table.
I’m about to say something when she beats me to the punch.
“It’s 8 pm somewhere in the world, lose the judgement,” she squawks with a grin.
“Come on, Mystic Meg, break out the fortunes, and let’s see what your future holds.
” She downs her shot without reacting, welcoming the burn of the alcohol and claps her hands together, waiting expectantly as she glances at my suitcase on the bed beside me.
Suzy’s beliefs are limited to Karma doling out justice where it sees fit, but she’s never balked at my beliefs of a more spiritual path.
She’ll poke fun, and I welcome it, but deep down, I think she misses my daily horoscopes and the soothing art of a rose quartz crystal or two.
I scramble for the stack of romance books she’d neatly tied together with rope before I left home and carry them and the phone over to the dresser, propping it up against them so she can get a better view of the room.
“How’s the monster porn coming along?” she asks when she catches sight of the book she loaned me with a bookmark protruding from the centre.
“I can’t get a guy with one dick, let alone a seven-foot blue alien with four. I mean how would that even work?” I immediately regret my question.
“Well…” she chuckles heartily, getting comfortable for story time. “So there’s an angle—” she continues, but I cut her off with an ‘are-you-fucking-kidding-me’ eye roll as my hands slide down onto my hips in the ultimate I’m-not-mad-I’m-dissapointed mother pose.
“I wasn’t asking for an otherworldly Kama Sutra play-by-play, Suze.”
“Killjoy,” she sasses. “You need to be more clear with your questions.” She laughs, pouring herself another drink. “8:04,” she reiterates smugly with a raised authoritative finger, swallowing back that one too.
Being open with Suzy is as easy as breathing.
She’s my one and only true friend in this fucked up world.
But I know she’s hurting right now, hence the pre-emptive tequila shots before noon.
She can put on a face that keeps the world at bay.
We’re inherently skilled at it after what we’ve been forced to endure, but she will never be able to hide her pain from me.
That man that Jax has tied up in the other room had seared his maliciousness into her very soul the night he’d paid for her company, and although he deserves everything he is getting in there, the reminders of that night still warrant a shot or two of something stronger than a glass of Sauvignon Blanc.
Trauma is funny that way—it pretends it’s been dealt with, only for you to realise it was just hiding this whole time, lurking in the shadows of your psyche to offer one last jump scare when you least expect it.
Before she can spiral, I distract her. “He towers over me, sinfully good looking, tattooed extensively from what I could see of him, and I’m in desperate need of an underwear change because my hoo-ha is a traitorous bitch that is now hungry and desperate for the forbidden psychopathic patient,” I reel off my initial thoughts of Ezra and see her visibly relax as she brings the phone closer to her face.
Her rosebud lips hover up close over the camera when she replies, “Don’t be shy. Tell me everything. Sounds like day one has had a far more interesting start than you were letting on.”