Chapter 4
FOUR
brIAR
I don’t relax until after I’ve made the drop and I’m inside the shitty motel room hours from the grand mansion hidden among rolling hills that was supposed to be my happily-ever-after.
My knees give way and I sink to the floor, my back against the door.
I changed after I left the flash drive at the drop point—and not just my clothes.
I’d dumped the piece of shit car I bought for two hundred bucks off Facebook marketplace on a secluded roadway after changing and ditching my clothes in three separate public garbage bins.
Except my boots.
Those are too valuable to trash.
Too expensive.
Too—
I lean forward and examine the smudge that’s oddly shiny and flecking off of the black leather, then lick the pad of my thumb and rub until it’s gone.
But when I start to shove my hand through my hair, the locks tickling my face, I catch sight of my thumb.
It’s stained a deep coppery red.
Bile burns up the back of my throat and I lurch to my feet, rushing across the shag carpet and barely making it into the bathroom before I throw up.
Hardly anything comes up, but that’s not a surprise.
I don’t eat much anymore.
Just enough to sustain my body—and sometimes, when things are really tough, not even that much.
Food is expensive.
Food is an experience.
I close my eyes at the sound of Brooks’s voice in my head, at the memory that brings only pain now.
And guilt.
Or maybe that’s because I just cleaned his blood off my boot.
I gag again, chest heaving but nothing further comes up. Not that my body seems to understand that, the retching taking long minutes to calm.
Finally, out of breath and my throat burning, I rest my forehead against the cool porcelain, not moving until my pulse has steadied and my stomach settled.
Only then do I push up to my feet and move to the sink, scrabbling with the cardboard box that houses the tiny bar of soap, trying to ignore the flashes of red out of the corners of my eye.
Then the soap is free and I wrench on the hot water, shoving my hands under the stream, lathering until bubbles are covering my skin, hiding the copper stain…
and then making it disappear, swirling down the scarred basin, disappearing into the scuffed silver drain.
I watch as the red turns to pink and eventually the water runs clear.
Or that faint soapy white color, anyway.
But I still can’t stop myself from keeping my hands under the water, not until it truly is clear, not the hint of a sud in sight.
That’s when I finally realize that steam is clinging to my hair, my face…
And that my hand hurts.
Gasping, I pull back, wincing at the bright red of my skin then carefully turn off the water, trying to push the sight of Brooks’s blood on my skin out of my brain.
He hurt me.
Guilt ripples through my body, turning my already shaky legs heavy and weak.
I could lie and say I didn’t want to hurt him—not like that. Not physically, not getting violent.
I’ve experienced a lot of violence in my life.
Too much, I know.
But I was never the aggressor, never a person to dish out pain just because. Escaping fists and pain? Sure. I’d done a lot to get away from it, had punched and scratched and kicked and screamed until I was free.
That wasn’t what happened in that dark, shadowed office.
No, that was me wanting to hurt Brooks.
I don’t want to hurt you.
A lie.
A huge gaping lie.
He hurt me deeper than anyone in my life ever had—deeper than my parents who dumped me with a grandfather who didn’t give two shits about me, whose only act of kindness was to not kick me out until I turned eighteen.
I had to earn my keep from the moment my parents screeched out of his gravel driveway so fast the rocks they kicked up left me bloodied.
And scarred.
I look in the mirror, touch the faint white line at my temple.
Brooks hurt me more than them leaving, hurt me more than a surrogate parental figure making me get up before dawn to work the farm and keeping me working until well after the sun went down.
At six years old.
He hurt me more than the loneliness that was those years, six to eighteen, living on the isolated farm, rarely talking to anyone, including my paternal grandfather.
No friends.
No real family.
No soft-hearted teachers to take me under their wings.
School was a stack of books left on the kitchen table—the mix of fiction and nonfiction tomes were all I had of history and English and social studies. Math came from watching my grandfather manage the farm’s finances.
After the day’s work was done, of course.
After I cooked and cleaned, repaired fences and rode horses. After I dealt with snakes and patched up cattle with rudimentary animal husbandry skills. Once, I even shot at a mountain lion who was stalking our calves.
I missed, but it worked.
He or she didn’t come back for another hunt.
There were long rides to wrangle loose heifers, broken bones and bloodied noses from panicked calves who didn’t want to be separated from their mamas.
There was bread made from scratch daily for my grandfather’s breakfast, sliced and toasted and paired with eggs gathered from the coop and fried, laid out precisely next to slices of bacon or ham from pigs I cared for and named… and then had to turn into a meal.
There were bales of hay to be dragged so the animals could have breakfast even before I did. And there were chickens to be slaughtered for meals, horses to be groomed—the work never ended.
Some might say it was good for me—that it gave me a purpose and taught me many skills.
They’re right.
And they’re wrong.
Because John Dulvaney wasn’t a good man. And neither were his friends.
There were many times a fist was used instead of firm words, many times I had to escape grasping hands and inappropriate touches and leering looks.
Many more times that shouting and insults overwhelmed quiet admonishments.
Kind words didn’t happen—and neither did birthdays or Christmas or Halloween or Easter.
Those were just another day in a long line of days.
It’s no wonder that I was so taken in by Brooks.
No one had ever shown me a lick of kindness and suddenly I was safe and protected and held close and spoiled.
Once he earned my trust—something he did with persistent, gentle confidence—I was lost.
He was so deep in my heart, my soul, it seemed as though I had never taken a full breath until he was standing at my back, telling me that everything would be all right.
It was so much more than all right.
It was a tutor so I could round out my education, it was space I could call my own. It was getting lost in books without having to worry about being up before the sun. It was gentle hands and patience and never having to worry about there being food in the kitchen.
It was a dream.
A fantasy.
Everything I never allowed myself to believe I could have.
And then it was gone.
So yeah, tonight I wanted to hurt Brooks Saxton, wanted him to hurt as much as I had these last years, to suffer as I had…
And that was what had me hurting him.
Not fear for myself. Not an attempt at escape.
Rage. Revenge. Venom.
Bile crawls up my throat again and it’s not just the guilt I feel for my actions.
It’s the look on my face as I stare at my reflection in the mirror, the anger and the frost-filled eyes and the expression that should have belonged to my grandfather looking back at me.
I promised myself.
Fucking promised from the moment I got out that I would be better than him, that my past wouldn’t make me the person I am today.
Yet here I am, reacting with violence, cold determination settling over my bones like a familiar blanket as I shove down any bit of lingering guilt.
I hoped for better, wished for more.
And what did that get me?
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
My phone buzzes and I exhale, steadying myself before I pick it up and glance at the screen.
Another job.
This time, thankfully, one that has nothing to do with my past.
I type out my reply, tell them to send me the specifics.
Then I turn the shower to scorching…
And I scrub myself under the steaming hot stream until my entire body is as pink and painful as my hand.