SEVEN
“I’m not sure you should come up,” I whisper. The apartment is in a state—I can’t remember the last time we decorated, and the woodwork hasn’t been cleaned in an age—the thought of bringing anyone into my home is mortifying.
“I think it might be a good idea if I explain why you’re home so late,” Aiden replies softly. He offers reassurance but doesn’t notice that his insistence terrifies me. He has no idea of what he’ll face, but I do, and the décor is the least offensive thing in my home. At this hour, Dad will be in a vile temper. There are two ways it might go. One risks me catching a fist to the gut and the other involves sleeping in the hallway outside the apartment door.
I turn my downcast eyes to look up at Aiden. The street lights flash golden across his face as the car draws ever nearer to the Tower. I feel the rumble strips that mark the entrance to the bridge. They rattle through my body as the wheels judder over them. I only have seconds to convince him to change his mind. There is no simple way out of this night, not for a while, and especially not if Aiden insists on getting inside my house in the early hours of the morning. How do I tell him that coming upstairs is a bad idea? The worst kind of idea.
It crosses my mind that he already expects the reception I’ll get. He watches me with interest as I fumble with my clothes, avoid eye contact, and open my mouth to say something, only to close it again. It doesn’t matter what I say, he will unravel any excuses I give him.
The car stops right outside the cracked glass doors of Olive Tower. He gets out and walks around the car to let me out as though I’m some kind of lady and not this dishevelled mess. It’s not like I wait for him to do it either; I simply can’t bring myself to move.
I’ve never felt more ashamed of where I live. We cross the foyer in uncomfortable silence, and I make my way straight for the stairs, but Aiden stops at the elevator and rattles the button.
“It won’t do you any good. Elevator’s out,” I call over my shoulder and then, to my total surprise, the doors ping open.
“Since when?” he asks, holding the doors wide. He doesn’t even struggle when they try to close, he just thrusts his hand back further and the doors obey. He does this twice while patiently waiting for me to get my act together.
We wear similarly suspicious expressions.
“Since today,” I mutter, staring at the lift like it betrayed me.
“Before you left for work?” Aiden quizzes.
“Yeah. It was the reason I came down the stairs in the first place and saw Tom,” I explain, though he’ll have figured that out for himself already.
“I see,” he replies, but his furrowed brows tell me he’s confused, and I can’t blame him. This raises questions. The possibility of someone coming out to fix the elevator in a day is unprecedented, but not impossible.
Still, it makes me feel like a liar; as though the working elevator makes me a suspect. Still, if it was working earlier, why would Tom be in the stairwell? Why would I bother trundling down twelve flights when I was already late for work? I wasn’t wrong. The damn thing had been broken. Hadn’t it?
“Thank you, Jules, that’s good to know.” He motions for me to hurry and get in. As soon as I do, the doors shut, penning us in the cramped space. He pulls out his phone, his fingers flying over the screen in determined taps until he puts it away again.
“Ready?” His voice cuts across the silence and he nods motioning to the wall panel. I hit the button for twelve and step back again.
Fiddling with my buttons and hair, I rub my eyes and discretely run a finger under my nose, hoping nothing hangs there from my tears earlier. None of it really matters. I just need something to do. I stare at the back of the door. The thick metal walls seem too close, and the pattern stamped into the sheet metal blurs from staring at it too hard.
The elevator’s slow juddering stop turns my stomach, but not because of the motion. When the doors pull apart, showing me the scene I take for granted on a normal day, my heart beats so hard against my chest I expected it to explode with the effort.
I need Aiden to leave. I can’t let anyone see what happens next.
Aiden’s head turns left and then right, scanning the desolate corridor, before indicating that I should lead the way. I try to walk in front of him, but he keeps pace, remaining at my side. Only when I hesitate at my door does he finally take a step back.
“I’m good now. They’ll be in bed and the kids will be sleeping. I really don’t want to wake everyone and if my dad sees a strange man…he’s a little strict.” Understatement. He’s a tyrant, but it won’t be my morals he’s protecting, it’ll be his pride. I won’t let Aiden see just how low we are. I can’t. Even if I never see Dax Nagano or Aiden Driscoll again, I’d rather they not think of me as scum of the earth. Maybe I am like my father after all; my pride seems as important to me as his is to him.
Aiden doesn’t look happy about it, but I’ve said something that strikes a chord with him, and he changes his mind about coming in. “Okay. You have keys?”
“Yeah.”
“Then I’ll go. You should probably give me your number for Mr Nagano to contact you. He’ll need to talk to you again.” Aiden’s right, but I can’t help him.
“I don’t have a phone…not even a house phone,” I add before he bothers asking.
Aiden nods. “Then we will visit you here tomorrow.”
Shit. I really want to keep all this as far from my family as I can. “No. Umm…I work at Butchers Bakers on the corner of The High Road and George Street. I start at four-thirty a.m. and finish at nine.” Charlie asked me to come in half an hour earlier on Fridays to help with the deliveries. Shame because I could really do with some sleep tonight.
“Okay Jules, I’ll be there to collect you.”
Not ideal, but better than them coming here. “Okay. Night, Aiden. Thanks for the ride.”
“No problem. I wouldn’t want your boss having to hunt me down now, would I?” He says it with a smile, but I can see he took the threat seriously. Dax’s men seem like they’re afraid of nothing. They work as a seamless unit, observing everything like shadows pressed up against walls and all in the interests of Dax Nagano.
It begs the question, who is he?
As soon as the elevator doors close, I reach for my key. It turns in the lock easily enough, but the door opens less than an inch before a loud bang and a jingle of the security chain rings out along the corridor.
It isn’t the first time Dad’s made me sleep in the corridor and it won’t be the last either, but that doesn’t stop me hating the bastard for leaving me outside. He knows the skin traders roam the corridors at night, that I need to be up by four, and that I’d never stay out this late without a damned good reason. He just doesn’t care and, let’s be honest, he’s itching to pay me back for earlier.
Perhaps I got off lightly?
I hunker down with my back to the door and pull my bag closer. It’s too heavy and angular with the books inside to make a good pillow, but it will come in handy as a weapon if I need to swing it at somebody. The luminescent digits on my watch confirm I have an hour and twenty minutes to catch some shuteye before I drag my carcass to work, but there’s no way I’m getting any sleep tonight.
Not when Dax Nagano fills my thoughts.
Smooth and disarming. He moved with the confidence that comes from success or a bucket-full of ego. The personal army means he is important and loaded, but it also means he is dangerous or, at least, he expects danger to pursue him. He’s blunt in his honesty, considerate, unafraid of emotional outbursts, can lie if he needs to, and trusts absolutely nobody around him. Except maybe Aiden, but even I trust Aiden more than most people I know, and I’ve only spent fifteen minutes with him.
I’ve ended the night with more questions than answers, more punishments than rewards and only one certainty; I’m attracted to a man I can never dream of having.
There are so many reasons stacked against me. The Vale, my education, my social standing, my age, my job, and the worst reason — my family. I could surpass all the other things if I work hard to escape the environment I’ve been born into, but I’ll never be able to escape my family— my father. Even if Dax was just another guy from the Vale, my dad would shoot him down before he got through the door. People like Dax, people with any culture or ethnicity different to his own, aren’t acceptable sorts to my father. Considering he is the worst of the low, he has a goddamned cheek to accuse anyone else of being less than.
Thanks to him, I learned a long time ago not to judge people by the colour of their skin, or the country they came from, or even the family they were born into. People are just people. What you need to separate are the good people from the bad people. Dax resonates with me. Despite the trouble surrounding him, he feels like a good person.
I close my eyes but keep my ears trained on the corridor. If I nap, perhaps I can get Mum to hand me out a change of clothing before I go to Butchers? She should be up by the time I’m due to leave.
Darkness and silence swallow me up. The ever-present chill forces me to wrap myself tighter and the thin linoleum does little to cushion my backside from the concrete floor. I allow myself a second of indulgence, and make-believe it’s someone else holding me tight. I imagine a soft sofa, a beautiful view, and a warm embrace. Though I can never pin a face on the man in my dreams, tonight I catch the sharp outline of hazel eyes that occasionally morph and reform to rounder eyes of honey-amber. Sometimes his whispers are fierce and determined and sometimes they are soft and gravelly.
Both Dax and Aiden feel safe.
But as always, my safety is short-lived.
The chain rattles on the slide and then clicks as it’s pulled out. I shoot up, readying to face my dad while hoping for my mum. What I don’t expect is TJ.
“Why are you still awake?” I whisper fiercely.
“Dad said you were bad. But Dad is bad too.”
“Did he hurt you? AJ? Casey?” He shakes his head with each guess. “Mum?” I try, fearing the worst. TJ nods. My stomach sinks. He hit her. Probably because of me. It explains why she isn’t waiting up to let me in. “Okay, kiddo. Thank you for letting me in. Go back to bed, but tiptoe, okay? And don’t tell anyone you helped me.”
TJ steps back, sliding his little plastic stool against the wall, and lets me in, then turns and takes big exaggerated steps toward the room he shares with the other two. I stand in the entry for a moment, wondering if being here will only make things worse. If he’s already punished Mum for my lateness, then there’s no chance he’ll hit her again before her shift at the factory. She’ll be hurting, but he needs that money. If I stay, I can kiss my shift at Butcher Baker goodbye today. He thinks they pay me half of what I earn at Carlito’s, anyway. He’d rather I just pick up day shifts at the bar instead. Staying means kissing college goodbye too, because he’ll beat me so I can’t get up until tonight’s shift.
He’s done it before. Last week the fucker literally stood on me all damn day to make sure I couldn’t go anywhere until he allowed it. I’m still nursing the bruised ribs he left me with.
I can’t go through that again.
I pull off my shoes and tuck them between my arm and the books I’m still carrying, then sneak to my room. I’ll grab a change of clothes and leave early. If I explain the whole melodrama of a night to Charlie, my boss, then she might let me shower in her apartment before work.
The runners on my drawer rumble like a goddamned rockslide. The harder I try to stay quiet, the louder everything sounds. I grab the only other pair of jeans I own and snatch up the shitty moth-eaten t-shirt sitting right at the top of the drawer, rather than pulling it out any further and risk waking Dad.
Fuck it. I don’t much care anymore. It’s not like I have nice things or pretty clothes to impress Dax or Aiden. They’ve already seen me covered in blood. Moth holes won’t matter.
I repack my bloodied backpack, shoving the books in the bottom, then the clothes on top. I make sure the envelope is still shoved deep inside my back pocket and make my way out of the house.
TJ pops his head around his bedroom door.
“You okay, kiddo?” I whisper, flicking glances back and forth between my brother and my dad’s door.
“You going out?”
“Yeah. I’ve got to go to work.”
He rubs his bleary eyes with his fists. “Already?”
“Uh huh.”
“I’m so hungry, Juju. Can I come too?”
Fuck. “Didn’t you get any dinner?”
He shakes his head. “AJ found peanut butter, but the fuzzy bits tasted funny. We let Casey lick Daddy’s gravy. He gave us bread, but it was too hard to eat.”
Dad likes to laugh at the kids, making them eat out of his plastic microwavable containers like animals. Especially Casey. That bread was only a couple of days old but he likely left it sitting out on the side after making himself a snack, leaving the kids with hard, stale crusts. And I can’t even remember the last time we bought peanut butter. I have no idea where they found that, but clearly it was mouldy.
Fuck my father. Fuck this life.
“I’ll be back real soon, and I’ll bring in cakes, and sandwiches, and pastries, okay? Just hold out a little longer.”
“’kay.”
“Love you, Rugrat.”
“Love you, Juju.”
I slip into the corridor and quietly snick the front door closed behind me. I’m surprised by the rattle of the chain sliding back on, though I shouldn’t be. The twins are too damn smart for their own good—way too smart for the Vale—and already emotionally superior to Eric-fucking-fat-ass-Feelan.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand, clearing the tears. My fucking heart is breaking just leaving them there in that state. Hell, I’m not any better. I’m not even sure how I’m still standing.
With no other choice, I do the only thing I can and rush to the store before the adrenaline I’m using to function wears off and I come crashing to a halt.