16. Jax
16
JAX
M y waking hours merged into a semblance of starlight and rising suns one after the other. By the time we pulled up in front of my father's house – the ostentatious Romanesque mansion was never what I ever considered a home – I stared at the line of European pasta rockets through likely bloodshot eyes.
Crush didn't look much better than me, sleeping sitting up on the drive from the east to the west of the state after an already sleepless night. He gestured to me in a slightly defeated motion.
“We’re here,” he said in a monotone.
“We are.” I held my breath and killed the ignition, flexing stiff hands on the leather steering wheel. Behind us, Cooper and Valen groaned as they woke up from my driving stint, cramped in the backseat.
I shoved my way out of the sports car while Crush unfolded himself with a too-easy grace I envied, still feeling everyone of my bruises.
“Let's get this done. Then we can fuck home,” Valen muttered from the backseat.
Neither of them commented for the entire drive about the scent of my blood soaked into the seat. The in itself spoke about the seriousness of this mission.
I should’ve snorted my derision. But the chances of any of us walking out of this unscathed with my father and control was unlikely.
How he would memorize each emotion I couldn't control flitting across my face before I learned to kill them the way I killed the car seconds ago. Become the blank, unaffected toy, unplayed with unless I gave him something he wanted. Something to punish me for what I gave away.
I learned early in life to give my father what he expected from me, not my real truths. And then I could get on with doing whatever I wanted in my life. He thought he’d won, and then he left me the fuck alone.
An echo of the precious sentiment a moment before.
“Let's do it.” I kicked the door to the coupe shut.
Crush groaned on the opposite side of the car. “Gentle,” he revoked me.
“I'll get you a new one.”
“I like this one,” he protested. “I don't go around graffiting shit like you usually do, destroying stuff.”
I braced my arms over the top of his car, coming up just below nipple level with my teeth bared, unsure where the fresh burst energy came from. Pain split along my spine, and I wondered how many stitches I just busted with that move. The back of my mouth tasted metallic but I didn't get a fresh surge of blood, just manic energy. I didn't waste it on the wrong person.
“I don't care if I'm going alone. One of us will need the police or an ambulance before I'm done.”
His shoulders settled into a straight line as he considered me with a strategic outlook. “Him or you?”
THe tension in my back relaxed. This is not my enemy.
“Jury’s still out.”
I led the way stiffly up the path, my body aching with every step in every muscle group. The twins really had worked their stresses out on my body. I was just glad they hadn't gotten their hands on Waverly.
Who knew what that would've looked like after the way I saw Cash playing with her like she was their personal toy on an unboxing video. Actually, I had a fine idea of what that sort of punishment in their eyes might look like.
Instead, she had been sold to the worst of the worst.
What does that make me?
Swallowing hard at the thought of her seated beside my father at his debaucherous table and determined to ensure I got to him before he took her, I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other as I approached the doors. Golden and guilt like they’d been pulled straight from some eighties’ porn flick.
I didn't look at either side of the waiting doormen to push open the display of wealth and power that was my father all over.
Except for me. I could never understand his need for control over everything around him.
Hopefully I was the wildcard at her back, but freeing her would cost me a whole lot more than two hundred thousand.
No one challenged us as I walked into my father’s surreal cocktail party full of the West Coast’s dirtiest. I knew almost every face, grew up with a majority of them. Hell, I was surprised so many were still alive for the amount of drugs around. Statistics said that these people should have passed over this life and yet I saw at least one octogenarian in my father's social ranks.
Perhaps money did matter, after all. But not in the right way. His face had been rescued by plastic surgery but his nose and teeth were still distorted from snorting the wrong sort of drugs. High class cut they might be, but nobody could take that abuse for that many decades and not show the trauma of it.
It didn't take me too long to locate my father. I skirted the edge of the large foyer and the circular staircase that soared above the grand entrance. Beyond that lead into a large, open ballroom with black-and-white tiled flooring. I took the shot of vodka from a coat-and-tails dressed waiter who passed me a small, silver tray bearing a single drink.
My preference was handed to me by default, despite my absence of the last year. Less than thirty seconds I’d been in the old man's house and already the whisper had spread. He was prepared.
Fabius Palmer wasn't in the ballroom, but the dining room where I should have expected him to be. That table was where he made his best deals. He signed away lives on that slab of ebony wood. Ate at it, fucked on it. Hell, I was surprised he didn’t get a teddy and sleep on the fucking thing.
I strode toward him, expecting him to register some flicker of surprise on his face for my actions. Not for being here; he clearly knew that. But he didn't even acknowledge my appearance despite being bruised and on a two day hike from Rippton, around California and back again to collect reinforcements while turning every shade of purple and black imaginable. My teeth still tasted of my own damn blood. Another shot of vodka hovered on my right hand side. I took it without breaking my stride, swishing it around my mouth before I swallowed, and wished I hadn't.
Because I’d been concentrating on my father alone, knowing this would be the last showdown I’d ever have with him, I ignored the rest of the people around the table. Sure, they packed enough hardware that if I took the wrong step they’d fill me with enough holes to play pin the tail on the dead man . But it wasn’t me who held my father’s attention.
It was the girl in the red dress and the chain wrapped around her throat, dangling down the back of her dress like a leash. The girl with the perfectly made up face who should never have been there at all.
Because she was my girl, and she barely seemed to recognis=ze me.
“Why don't you say hello, my dear," Fabius said, tapping Waverly's wrist.
No, not tapping, caressing. His fingers massaged a gentle circle on the inside of her wrist as she turned a vapid Stepford wife smile at him in a show of twisted perfection.
I swallowed back my horror at whatever the fuck he’d done to her, but neither I could I take my eyes off her.
She rose with a grace I’d never seen on hers but recognized from my father’s women. They all had it, from his drugs. Like it took away all their inhibitions and ignited some sexual beast inside them. Or implanted it.
Fuck it, I wanted my real Waverly back.
But I didn’t get that. Right now she sashayed towards me with the grace of any of the women my father collected at his side, turning them into sluts and bimbos and trained assassins, given enough time and natural tendencies.
Waverly was none of those and everything at once. But my father always had a purpose and intention. My insides burst as I watched her glide toward me. There wasn’t a wobble in those high heels as high stepped it in my direction like she’d been born to it.
And I knew she hadn’t.
“The fuck happened to her?” Crush breathed over my shoulder.
I held a hand out at hip distance and hoped he saw the movement.
My father chose that moment to smile happily at his little display, clapping his meaty hands. "Put your dog on a leash," he hummed in a sing-song tone like a toddler with a new toy.
“The fuck,” grated one of the boys behind me.
Crush made a shushing noise, and I prayed the brawn took notice or this would be a real short trip.
My father smiled when no one attacked from our side, stuffing sliced bread dipped in rare meat juices that dripped off his chin as he shoved more food into his gaping mouth.
Waverly almost made it to me before two figures appeared at the side of the room in my peripherals. All white suits, white hair… I didn't need to ask who they were or turn my head to identify them.
The twins brought her to my father and they would fucking answers for this once I got her back.
Once she was mine again.
Whatever the fuck you fed her will wear off. She has no idea what she's doing.
But my father was brilliant in selecting the most moldable of subjects.
I should know.
He took my fears and fed them to me daily.
He did the same thing to my mother until the day she died.
And then he fed them to me. Her face became my fears and my fears kept me alive until the day that I walked out of the house and onto Rippton’s campus.
And everyone of those gym sessions with Crush at three in the morning gave me another reason to exist. To be something more than a skinny kid who barely existed here.
In this house of nightmares with all its collections of ruined creatures and abuse.
And here was Waverly in thick of it.
The hand I held back to Crush twitched at waist level. “It's okay,” I murmured, willing my voice not to shake.
It didn't buy me the miracle I needed. Waverly smiled at me, one hand extended, wrist facing up. My heart leapt in my chest as she gave me the lightest touch right before she went for the solid silver blade inside the dress.
I watched the action in slow motion as she moved in a graceful arc while I stood still, half a step too far away when that blade came down across her upturned wrist and parted the skin in a hideous slash.
Blood bloomed over the wound in less than a second, pouring out the contents of her life in a show that left me staggering on my feet while she smiled at me the same way she smiled at my father.
I don't know who screamed louder–me, Crush, or the boys behind us. Maybe one of the other girls seated around my father at his table. In my periphery I registered that he, alone, didn’t react.
That told me everything.
The cacophony reverberated inside my skull, pressure pulsing outwards as I collapsed with Waverly to the checkerboard flooring when she fell.
Propping a hand to her elbow to hold her, I tried to prevent her head from hitting the hard tiles. My hand closed around her wrist to stem the scarlet river flowing from her pale skin as she sank beneath the weight of gravity and my father’s sins. Her other hand worked against her, and I fought the blade that slashed repeatedly as she tried to do it again.
I screamed horsley at my father through my eyes locked only on her. “Fuck you, you old bastard. The fuck have you done to her?”
My voice faded the entire time as I screamed and screamed and screamed, barely registering Crush’s hands wrapping around me and pushing mine away as he wrapped strips of his shirt around Waverly’s wrist.
“An ambulance. Get me a fucking ambulance,” he shouted, his captain’s voice startling silence and then action into the panicked hoards gathered around my father’s table.
Volume and activity swirled around me as I remembered my prediction to Crush before we walked into this hellhole. I wanted to smile but I couldn't, looking down into the eyes of the beautiful girl so ruined and broken she might never get to see the drawings in my portfolio I made for her.
If she didn't…
I squeezed her other hand gently, talking to her about inane things and stroking my thumb along her palm, so ice cold as people rushed about, screaming about things that didn't actually matter. None of it would ever matter if she didn't open her eyes again.
Blood drenched my hands and my clothes, but I wasn't sure if it was hers or mine. With the sour tang of vodka in my mouth, I helped her onto a stretcher, but I couldn't bear to let go of her wrist for a second, just in case one more drop fell out of her pale, still body, making it one drop too many.
So I held on as the ambulance rocked beneath us, held her in my arms and cried unashamedly for the still girl who had so much life I’d broken. Eventually, the people pestering and pandering at me stopped trying and focused on her, instead.
The black and white tiled floor changed to a steady red, and after a while that changed back to blinding white again, reminiscent of death though it smelled far more sterile.
After all I got to was a regular bleep. That was when my screaming finally stopped, and I waited for her to take one more breath.