by Lane Hart
I slap myself with both palms on the top of my head, trying to knock the pounding of my skull. I can’t think in a straight line, my thoughts are just a jumbled swirl chasing each other around one central point, my NEED. Without even making a conscious decision, I rise from the bed, grabbing at whatever clothes are close at hand, and begin getting dressed. I’m not even sure where I’m going, but I have to move, have to do something to try to escape these feelings.
Cedric
“Evelyn?” I call out when I walk through the door and she’s not in bed. “Evelyn?” I yell again as I move to the bathroom to search for her.
She’s not here.
Rushing back to the apartment door, intending to see if she’s upstairs, a piece of paper flutters off the bed and lands on the floor.
I already know what it is going to say before I read it.
Cedric, I’m so sorry. Love, Ev.
“Fuck!” I shout as I slam my fist through the wall, leaving a jagged crater in the white plaster.
She’s gone.
She actually left, sneaking out right under my nose while I was ironically monitoring the security cameras. I can’t fucking believe that I didn’t see her.
After all the weeks of torture she’s endured to get better, and just like that she’s gone, no doubt looking to score something, anything, and throw her sobriety in the garbage. Just because she can’t handle the possibility of losing her mother.
And she’s right. It’s all my fault for being so selfish, wanting Ev no matter the cost.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Evelyn
I don’t really remember making the decision to walk to my mom’s place to take her car, driving it to her old apartment that Lowell was paying for. Part of my brain tells me that, of course, he wouldn’t be there. There are plenty of other places he could stay…but the junkie knows. The junkie has a sixth sense, a true north, if you will, a magnetic pull towards their next fix.
At least, that’s what I’m thinking as I stand in front of my mother’s old apartment, watching a hand I don’t think I can fully control reach up and pound on the door.
The door cracks open as far as the chain lock will allow, and a bloodshot swollen eye that I don’t recognize peeks out at me. The door slams shut as I stagger backwards in confusion, before it’s suddenly thrown wide open.
“Well, well, well, look at this,” Lowell’s voice sneers from a face I barely recognize. He’s been beaten horribly, his eye swollen grotesquely, his nose displaced, and at least two teeth that I can easily see missing. He’s standing before me in a ripped pair of jeans and an oversized wife-beater that hangs sickly off his frame. His denim cut, which he was never without before going to jail, is nowhere to be seen. “I knew you’d be back. But I have to say, this is freaky-fast even for my most devoted customers.”
When I just stand there staring at him, Lowell spreads his arms and backs into the mostly empty apartment. There’s a sleeping bag thrown on the floor, along with some fast food wrappers and empty beer bottles, but nothing resembling furniture. “Don’t stand on formality, wife of mine. Mi casa es su casa, and all that. Get your ass in here!”
My feet are moving forward of their own accord, my tongue licking at my dry, cracked lips as I step into the dim apartment. The anxious pounding that is setting every nerve inside me on fire has reached a new, agonizing, crescendo, overwhelming any sort of coherent thought.
“This what you want?” Lowell asks as he slams the door behind me, dangling a plastic baggie full of colorful pills right in front of my face.
“Yes.”
“I don’t think you deserve a single pill from me after what you did, you cheating whore!”
“Please! I’ll do anything,” I beg, even falling to my knees in front of him. I don’t have any dignity left. It was too painful to carry, so I abandoned it at the Savage Asylum. I ran from Cedric, the only man who has ever loved me, to come back to the meanest asshole I’ve ever met because he always has a constant supply of the one thing I crave more than love.
“You betrayed me,” he says. “You fucked someone else, and now you think you can just come crawling back?”
“I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. I won’t see him again,” I say. The words burn in my throat, and I only vaguely recognize the woman speaking them. The person I was, who I want to be, overdosed and died somewhere along the way. What was left behind looks like the old Evelyn, but this creature’s thoughts and needs couldn’t be more different. The addict in me needs the pleasure, the release drugs can offer, more than my heart needs Cedric. I hate it. I hate myself for thinking such a thing, but it’s true.
And that’s when it finally hits me.
I’m on my knees, begging a horrible man for something that will make me hate myself even more.
Every day of the two years we were together, I hated myself. I tried to numb the feeling with the pills, but the hatred always came back eventually, growing stronger each and every single day I was with Lowell using whatever drug cocktail he cooked up that day. No matter how good the high was, the low was always worse.
I’ve officially hit rock fucking bottom.
“Pull out my dick and suck it,” Lowell tells me when he unzips his jeans. “Maybe if I shove it down your ungrateful throat until you gag a few times, I might feel generous enough to give you a hit.”
He’s lying. He’ll never forgive me for betraying him no matter what I do. My mouth could be glued to his cock for the rest of my life and he won’t stop punishing me. It’s one of the only things he truly enjoys.
But Cedric, even after I broke his heart and left him that night we were together, he forgave me. He still loved me even when I hated myself. He never gave up on me or on us. I did, though. And even now, after I left him because I was weak, I know he would forgive me in the blink of an eye because he’s such a good man. That hasn’t changed. Under his leather cut and tattoos, he’s still the same sweet boy I fell in love with.
My fingers find the seashell bracelet on my wrist, reminding me of all the good things in life. That’s what gives me the courage to surge to my feet and start for the door. Some distant spark of the woman I used to be, the Evelyn Young I know I can be again, suddenly flares to life inside me, chasing back the shadow the addict has cast over my mind. I am better than this, better than Lowell and his poison.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?” he bellows from behind me. Grabbing me by my elbow, he slings me around, slamming my back against the wall and then pushing down on my shoulders. “Get on your fucking knees.”
“No,” I tell him with a shake of my head, refusing to kneel.
“Get. On. Your. Fucking. Knees. Cunt!” he snarls in my face.
“No,” I repeat more forcefully. “I’m leaving.”
“Like hell you are.”
“I am. You and I are done. I’m through with the pills and with you treating me like a dog!” I scream directly into his face. This voice, I recognize. This is the voice of the woman Cedric loves. My voice.
“Think again,” he growls, reaching down to rip open my jeans and shove them down my legs.
“I’m not doing this!” I tell him when he starts lowering his own pants while flattening me against the wall, pinning me with the weight of his body. “Do you hear me, Lowell? Get the fuck off me! Now!”
He slaps his palm over my mouth to shut me up and then proceeds to try and line his dick up to get inside of me.
Lowell isn’t going to stop. He’ll never stop taking from me what he wants. And I’m tired of letting him get away with it!
I would rather die than let him have me again. But why should I have to be the one making that kind of sacrifice when he’s the asshole here? The asshole who barely even dropped his pants to get his cock out, the one who has a knife on his belt that my fingers graze as I struggle to push his hips away.
Before he realizes what I’m doing, I snatch the long, straight blade from its sheathe on his belt and shove it right int
o his side.
“What the–” Lowell exclaims and then freezes. He glances down at the knife sticking out of his shirt and then to me as if he can’t understand what’s happened.
I stabbed him and he’s not dead, which was pretty fucking stupid of me. He was only going to rape me. Now, he’s going to carve me into pieces.
Before he can hurt me, I pull the knife out and then shove it in again, this time going as deep as I can, wrenching it back and forth in desperation.
“Ev…” he chokes out before he staggers backward and falls on his ass while reaching for the knife. When he pulls it free, blood comes gushing out of his abdomen, staining his shirt and the front of his jeans. Lowell looks up at me, eyes pleading for me to do something, to help him.
“You made me do it!” I shout at him as tears roll down my face, blurring my vision. “You made this happen!” I scream hysterically. “You turned me into this! Never again, Lowell, do you hear me? Never again!”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Cedric
I’m sitting on the edge of the bed with my head in my hands, trying to figure out where the fuck to start looking for Evelyn when there’s a knock on my open bedroom door.
“What?” I ask without looking up to see who it is.
“You’ve got a call upstairs,” Eddie, one of the retired Savage Kings, informs me.
“Who is it?” I lift my head to ask him.
“Some guy named Malcolm…”
“Malcolm?” I repeat with my brow furrowed. It sounds familiar, but I can’t place the name right off the top of my head.
And then it hits me where I’ve heard it before.
“The Dirty Aces,” I say as I jump to my feet. “Lowell’s out, and that’s where she is,” I mutter aloud before I race past Eddie and run up the stairs to grab the phone at the bar. “This is Cedric.”
“Yo, man. Just wanted to give you a heads-up that Lo posted bail. His ass got released last night.”
“I should’ve fucking known,” I mutter. “Where is he?”
“He showed up here last night, and we informed him that he had been voted out for stealing from the club. We went through our books and took a look at those documents you sent over to us. The evidence was overwhelming, and the vote was unanimous. After we whooped his ass and took back his cut, he left on foot.”
“Goddamn it,” I huff while raking my fingers through my hair. “Do you have any idea where he would go?”
“Nope.”
“Well, thanks for letting me know,” I tell him.
“No problem, man,” Malcolm replies before he ends the call.
“Everything all right?” Reece asks when he comes up from the basement and leans his forearms on the bar.
“Evelyn’s mom is in the hospital, and now Evelyn is gone,” I tell him. “I think she went back to the asshole.”
“Why the fuck would she do that?”
“She’s an addict. He has a supply, although now he’s probably rather limited since he’s been exiled from the Dirty Aces.”
“No shit? They booted his ass?”
“Yeah. And now I have no clue where he would be hiding out.”
“Does he own any properties?” Reece asks.
“What?”
“Properties? Houses, condos, an apartment? Anything in his name where he could crash?”
“Holy shit,” I mutter. “Rita’s old place! It’s only been a few weeks, so maybe he’s still under a lease there.”
I start around the bar heading for the door when Reece pushes his palms against my chest to stop me. “Not so fast, buddy. You can’t show up there by yourself.”
“I’ve got my Ruger on me, I’ll be fine.”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” he responds. “But you need to take some backup just in case.”
“I didn’t join the MC to hide behind them,” I scoff.
“No, you joined the MC because you’re not stupid and you know that there are some things you just can’t do on your own. This is one of them. We put a lot of time and effort into training you up because we give a shit what happens to you. It would be a total waste of time for all of us if we let you get killed within a year of patching in.”
“Fine!” I cave. “But I can’t wait forever.”
“Give me fifteen minutes,” he says. “It’s cold as fuck, so we’ll all pile into the van.”
Evelyn
“Call…call…help,” Lowell croaks as he lays in a pool of his own blood that keeps growing bigger and bigger with every passing second while I stand frozen, watching.
I know I should call 9-1-1, but I can’t move. I did this! I stabbed him, and now he’s going to die.
My mother is going to die a slow, agonizing death, and I’m going to be charged with murdering my estranged husband! This is not at all how I imagined my life turning out.
I was supposed to go to community college with Cedric. I wanted to be an x-ray tech, maybe even a surgical assistant or a nurse. I wanted to marry my best friend and have a family with him.
But that’s not what fate had in store for me.
Instead of having anything good, I became a subservient, drug-addicted whore to keep my mother alive, and now it was all for nothing!
“Ev…please,” Lowell begs. “Donor…I’m a…donor.”
“You’re a goddamned liar! A lying, raping, piece of shit! You deserve this!” I scream at him, only realizing that I’m sobbing as my voice cracks and my vision blurs.
“Go get…the file…in the kitchen drawer,” Lowell gasps. “Aces have to have wills drawn up…I got tested years ago…I’m a match for Rita.”
“What? Lowell, what the fuck are you saying?” I gasp as I rush into the kitchen, throwing open drawers until I find the small black folder of documents. There’s his social security card and some other paperwork along with a thick envelope with the word ‘WILL’ scrawled in handwriting on the outside.
“Call an ambulance, Ev” Lowell coughs. “If I bleed out here, I won’t be any good for anyone.”
Even as my eyes are taking in the contents of the document, my hand fishes my phone out of the pocket on my jeans and dials 9-1-1. When the operator answers, I give them the address of my mother’s old apartment, which I know by heart, and tell them that there’s a stabbing victim. Laying the phone down on the countertop while the call is still live, I go back over and kneel down by Lowell, first throwing his knife across the room.
“You knew you were a match for my mother?” I ask him. “How could you never say anything?”
“I wasn’t…going to give it to the old bitch…while I was alive, was I?” he grins, showing me a mouthful of bloody teeth before he turns his head to cough. He groans as he presses his shirt against the wounds in his belly, unsuccessfully trying to slow the bleeding. For a few minutes we simply stare at each other, him too weak and injured to struggle, while I search his battered features, trying unsuccessfully to feel…anything.
“You still won’t if you survive, will you?” I finally mutter. “This was just your bullshit ploy to get me to call an ambulance instead of watching you die,” I whisper, so low the phone can’t pick it up.
“God, you know me…too well, Ev. I don’t think that’s…going to be an issue, though,” he says as he forces another grin. “You know, I did love you…just not as much as I loved myself,” he pauses as a coughing spasm rips through him, spraying blood across the carpet. “I’m glad it was you, Ev…and not that prick Cedric. Figured it would be him…”
When I hear sirens growing closer, I stand up and rush over to the window. An EMS vehicle roars into the apartment parking lot, its brakes squealing as it spots the building number and pulls up out in front. As I walk over to the door to open it up and guide the first responders, I see Lowell’s ragged breathing begin to slow as his eyes follow me across the room. Once I’m outside, I wave the three men past me into the apartment, unable to think of anything further to say or do for Lowell. I simply clutch at the papers in my hand, only vaguely r
ealizing that the shock of what has happened has completely driven all the thoughts of drugs out of my mind.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Cedric
When we pull into the apartment complex parking lot, War suddenly slams on the brakes, causing Torin, Chase, Abe, Reece and I to jostle around violently in the back. “Whew, boy,” War mutters as we all struggle forward to look out the front glass. “Parking’s going to be a bitch up in here,” he adds.
The lot is filled with emergency vehicles. We had passed an ambulance speeding away back on the main road, but I hadn’t given it much thought until now. With the four police cars and firetruck sitting outside of Rita’s old apartment, the memory of that ambulance suddenly punches me in the guts.
“Evelyn,” I whisper. “Oh God, Evelyn. Let me out!” I yell as I hurry over to throw open the side door, leaping out and hitting the ground running.
I let out an explosive breath I didn’t realize I was holding when I see Evelyn wrapped in a blanket, flanked by two uniformed police officers. I run straight towards them, before another officer steps into my path.
“Sir, I’m going to need you to step back, please,” the officer tells me.
I come to an abrupt halt, and yell, “Evelyn!” to get her attention.
She raises her head, her tear-streaked face and swollen eyes a testament to whatever horror must have happened here.
“Cedric?” she calls back to me, starting to walk over towards me. The two officers flanking her come along, one of them nodding to me as he approaches.
“You said her name is Evelyn? We believe she is the one that called this in, but she hasn’t said anything since we arrived on the scene.”
