by A. L. Woods
Shattered
Copyright © 2020 by A.L. Woods
All rights reserved.
Photography: Boyko Viacheslav
Cover Design and Interior Formatting: Ana Beatriz Cabús Rangel, instagram.com/_yumenohana_
Editor: Bettye-Lynn Underwood, Red Pen Edits
redpeneditsbyblu.com
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
ISBN-13: 979-8577832285
Playlist
“Naïve” by The Kooks
“FEEL NOTHING” by The Plot In You
“Fragile” by Cooper & Gatlin
“Numb” by Linkin Park
“Calm Snow” by I See Stars
“Bloodlines” by Hands Like Houses
“Woman” by Mumford & Sons
“Legacy” by Motionless in White
“Mr. Highway’s Thinking About the End” by A Day To Remember
“To Live and to Lose” by Silverstein
“Hero” by Blossom
“Masochist” by Polaris
“Only One” by Yellowcard
“Breaking the Habit” by Linkin Park
“Doomsday – Piano Reprise” by Architects
“Keep On” by Sasha Sloan
“Me Against Myself” by Wage War
“Hypochondriac” by Sasha Sloan
“The Attendant” by Make Them Suffer
“Cherry Flavoured” by The Neighbourhood
“Mirror Box” by Silverstein
“Chemical” by The Devil Wears Prada
“Figure You Out” by Citizen
“Like a Shadow” by Holding Absence
“Always a Wish” by Armor For Sleep
“Drop Dead” by Driveways
“Cactus In The Valley – Acoustic” by Lights
“Empty Thoughts” by Glass Tides
Scan this code to access the playlist on Spotify
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
Was this actually happening right now?
What the fuck was Cash doing in the parking lot of The Advocate at this hour of the night?
No, that was a dumb question. I suspected his appearance had something to do with my refusal to solidify the details of our yearly hate-fuck arrangement. It had been going on for years. I’d let six calls from him go to voicemail and hadn’t replied to any of his text messages after the initial one he’d sent:
Leave me alone.
In Cash’s world, that meant “Come and find me.” Knowing the shithead as well as I did, I imagine he’d gone to my apartment after I hadn’t acknowledged any of his efforts to connect with me, and when I wasn’t there, came here in search of me.
And now he was getting a hell of a lot more than he’d bargained for.
“I want you to do everything I tell you to do, got it?” Sean said without looking at me, his voice dangerously even as he put the car into park. His eyes were trained on the hooded body I would recognize anywhere that was leaning on the hood of my car.
Nerves I had never experienced over Cash’s spontaneous presence nearly consumed me. I had been crystal fucking clear in my request, but in Cash’s world, that didn’t make a damn difference.
Curls of smoke wafted from the lit cigarette pinched between his forefinger and thumb. My own nicotine craving purred to life at the mere sight of that cancer stick, my jaw flexing for a fix.
“I can deal with this,” I muttered in Sean’s direction, my tone mired with annoyance. I reached for the release on my seatbelt but stopped when he blanketed my hand with his own. Shifting my eyes to his, I was alarmed to find tempered ire percolating in his dark eyes.
“The last time you dealt with something, you got into a car with that piece of shit and disappeared on me,” Sean gritted between clenched teeth. “You’re not dealing with this. I am.”
It was clear that despite our conversation and my supplementary explanation, he was still bitter about that night. I couldn’t fault him, either. Especially coming off the heels of what had ended up being a really great evening. We had talked about doing the relationship thing together at the diner, and I found myself fantasizing about trying to work at giving in to the undeniable chemistry we shared.
I equally didn’t want anything to threaten the possibilities for us.
And yet, in typical Cash fashion, he was ready to sweep in like a storm and rain hell upon Sean and me.
Sean tilted his head in Cash’s direction, and if death had a look, that was it. His eyes riveted to Cash as if he was drilling holes through his skull.
The apprehensive part of my psyche that quietly rustled in my mind wanted to argue with Sean that I didn’t need him to be a hero, not for me. But then he shifted his gaze back to meet mine, and suddenly I realized what this was really about. It wasn’t that he thought I couldn’t take care of myself; it was that he wanted to take care of me.
My heart thumped loud and steady in my chest as my head rocked with assent, and just like that, I was hands-off in a situation I would have otherwise made go away.
“Sit tight.” He left the engine idling, which I suspected was intentional. I was quickly learning that his thoughts were always two steps ahead, and if shit got out of hand, he’d want me to book it…a concept that seemed outlandish and gratuitous. This was Cash, and he was a lot of things, but would he…? I swallowed, not wanting to consider what he was capable of, given the opportunity. He had never played fair before.
This wouldn’t be any different.
Sean lifted my knuckles to his mouth, pressing a firm kiss onto them while holding my stare in what I recognized was a fatal amalgam of fanfare and a giant “fuck you” to Cash, who from the corner of my eye, looked like he was ready to crawl out of his skin at the display. Sean let me go, and then pushed on the lever of the driver’s door, shutting it with an emphasized thud that isolated me with my own thoughts inside the cabin.
His hands balled into his fists at his sides as he approached the figure seated on the lip of my car. I wanted to kill the engine to hear what was being said in its entirety, but instead my finger found the button for the window, and I cracked it open a sliver.
“Cash, right?” Sean uttered dryly, folding his arms across the expanse of his chest.
“I don’t give a shit about you, man. Get out of my face,” Cash spat in Sean’s direction, skipping the formalities and polite platitudes, his stare settling on mine, seeing right through me. “Cherry, let’s go.”
Sean’s brows ar
ched upward, amusement touching the corners of his mouth. “She’s not going anywhere.”
Cash laughed, shoving the hood of his sweater down from over his head. The tick in his jaw made me nervous. I knew that pulsation better than anyone, and what it meant.
“You must be hard of hearing,” he said, his inflection rolling as he slid from the hood of the car to stand. Sean dwarfed him by at least four or five inches, but they were as close to being nose to nose as they were going to get. I swallowed the razor blades that felt like they lined the tract of my throat, squinting to get a better view of the inside of the parked Mercedes, searching for any signs of Terry or Dom.
It wouldn’t matter that Sean was bigger than Cash if the other two were with him. They weren’t above playing dirty. They played to win—how they won was an inconsequential detail.
“I heard what you said just fine. I just didn’t give a fuck,” Sean growled back, that amusement expunging as his expression grew sullen, probably from his failure to make headway with the situation by initially taking the “nice guy” approach.
Nice guys finished last in our world.
I wasn’t the only one who had drawn that conclusion. Cash’s chuckle made my skin crawl, my palms growing clammy draped in my lap. This wasn’t going to be good. Not for Sean. He might be taller and leaner, but Cash had spilled the blood of bigger beasts before, and I feared this wouldn’t be an exception.
This was fucking awful.
Anxiety buzzed through my body, my heartbeat filling my eardrums as I watched the two men who represented my past and my future in a standoff for my present. My thumb found the space where my radial artery lived in my wrist, my pulse pumping wildly.
I wasn’t worth this.
My trembling hand reached for the lacquered door handle, and as though reading my mind, Sean sent me a look of warning over his shoulder that advised me otherwise. I stilled, leaning back against the seat, drawing short anxious breaths through my parted lips and exhaling through my nose.
Why wasn’t I allowed to have one night without any drama?
“Cherry,” Cash called, a malevolent grin curling his lips, “where the fuck did you find this clown?”
I couldn’t get an answer of my mouth if I tried. It was like my larynx had betrayed me, my frontal lobe packing up for a vacation, leaving me with nothing but an Out of Office response that I couldn’t do fuck all with.
“You should go,” Sean said emphatically, jerking his head at Cash’s car. “Leave her alone.”
“Fuck you,” Cash spat, closing the short distance between them. He attempted to shove Sean forward, but to his dismay, Sean’s hulking frame didn’t even so much as sway, as if he had forecasted the move.
That just pissed Cash off further, that withering look igniting something in his bottle green eyes. It edged the thin boundary that was the threshold of his stability and his malignant tendencies.
His fist reared back, and he swung.
My shout of surprise cut through the silence of the night.
CHAPTER TWO
Cash’s fist cracked hard against the side of my jaw, white pain invading me, my vision fritzing in protest like an open palm had been struck against a CRT TV with enough force to unseat its hand-soldered joints.
It was a fucking cheap shot. I knew it, and based on the self-satisfied smug smile that touched the bastard’s lips when I staggered back winded, so did he.
My leaded eyes blinked, my sight coming back online just as he wrenched his fist back once more.
But I was ready this time.
Bending at the waist, I rushed at Cash, my shoulder colliding beneath his ribcage, an audible ‘oof’ escaping him as his body slammed back into the hood of Raquel’s car, the sound absorbed by the dense trees that flanked two sides of the building and the blackened, starless sky above us.
I pinned him down with one hand flattened against his sternum, my other pointing a finger in warning at him. The fucker grinned at me, his crazed eyes glowing like the innards of a bubbling cauldron that belonged in the cabin of a sorcerer. The Jeep door creaked open, but I couldn’t afford to look back at Raquel. I had heard her shout when Cash had gotten in what would be his one and only shot at me.
The more he smiled that Cheshire grin, the more my insides fumed, and for some reason, I thought about my school bully, Peter Filch. The similarities between him and Cash were uncanny, save for their physical discrepancies. They were both egomaniacs with a power trip to fulfill at all costs. And if history replicated itself, Cash would go down the same way—I just wouldn’t need Dougie to do it. With my shoulders pinched together, I fisted his sweater into a ball in one palm to secure him into place.
“Do you want to do this the hard way or the easy way, you piece of shit?” I snarled.
Cash attempted to throw his weight up at me, trying to shrug me off of him. I shoved him back down, the hood of the car groaning as Raquel’s shadow appeared in my peripheral vision.
“Sean.” Worry edged the one word. At the sound of her voice, Cash’s face lit up like it was the Fourth of fucking July.
“There you are, Cherry pie,” he crooned, shooting a simpering smirk in her direction that made me see fucking red. That stupid nickname. The way he looked at her like she was his possession…something to be possessed and dominated like she was an inanimate object.
I would never treat her like that, and damned if I’d let anyone else do it.
All it had taken was one face-to-face interaction with him for me to decide he was the worst of the three. I could handle Dom’s kind of crazy, I could manage Terry’s dangerous reticence. But Cash? He was a fucking liability of the worst kind, an unavoidable landmine. He was the matador in my psyche, flailing his muleta in my face, testing me, taunting me, beckoning me forward.
Against my better judgement and rationale, all I felt compelled to do was charge. My fist soared in his direction, connecting with his nose in one fell swoop. He grunted in surprise, his hands rising to cover his nose, but I struck him again.
“Please,” Raquel implored, steeling her voice. “Stop.”
I wasn’t sure who she was talking to, me or him. Hell, it didn’t fucking matter. This was a fight that would have been inevitable the moment he pulled into this parking lot and decided he had every intention of waiting to spar with whoever got out of the car first.
Raquel creeped toward me, her shadow dancing across the hood of the car next to Cash.
“Get back in the car, Raquel,” I barked over my shoulder. The last thing I wanted was for him to get anywhere near her. Her eyes were rounded, a clenched fist pressed against her pursed lips, face crinkling with concern. I caught the wobble in her legs as she shifted backward, staggering away from us. I didn’t like the firestorm that was burning in her eyes, alarmed and tentative—as if for a split second she wasn’t sure who I was.
Hell, in this moment, didn’t that make two of us?
She was gasoline in this situation, and her palpable fear speared something deep in my gut that unnerved me. My hold on Cash relaxed the longer she stared at me, messing with the communication neurons in my brain. She drew all kinds of fucking shit out of me, like a catalyst. She pissed me off. She fascinated me. She irritated me. She made me want after years of not wanting anything, because that hadn’t been an option allowed to me. I had been asleep all of these years, and suddenly her presence was like the start of the next chapter of my life, a beacon of hope when there had been none for so long.
Except this piece of shit struggling against me now was marring the start. He was like an oversized gray cloud dimming the light that shone throughout Raquel, and I would never let anyone who threatened to snuff that out of her exist in her orbit again.
Cash’s cheeks puffed out, pushing air out through his lips. His spit was warm as it landed on my cheekbone, making my ego bristle at the clear display of arrogance. I wiped it off with my wrist, the concoction of his saliva and blood smearing into the cuff of my jacket.
Wha
t a brazen, pathetic piece of shit. He should have never been allowed to so much breathe the same air as Raquel, let alone touch her.
My fist cocked back, and I struck him again. It was impossible for me to explain what came over me every time my fist pummeled through the air and connected with his face. It was as if I was pouring a decade’s worth of anger, resentment, and rage into every swing. I hit him again and again until his resistance against me wavered and he cried out in defeat like the poor excuse for a man that he was.
“Sean, enough,” Raquel shouted, the night swallowing her cry as she reappeared at my side, her fingers sinking into my bicep, stilling me.
“Let him go.” She jerked my arm back, forcing me to release my hold on Cash, who sagged to his knees, bracing himself on the ground with palms splayed, his face bent low. His breaths were ragged as he struggled for oxygen. It was when Raquel went to his side, sinking to her haunches and pushing him onto his ass, that had my body lurching me away from him.
What the fuck had just happened here? Why was she at his side?
“Tobias,” her voice wobbled, her hands on either side of his cheeks. I had never heard his given name before, and these weren’t exactly the circumstances in which I had intended to learn it. “Can you hear me?”
I bristled at the caring she displayed, at the worried attention she gave him as she pulled at his lids, examining his chartreuse-colored eyes. Cash groaned in response, his head lolling to the right. His face was a damn mess. It looked like I had rearranged his features; he resembled Mr. Potato-Head. Blood streamed from his nose and one of his eyes was already swelling to a close, blue and purple circling its perimeter. His split bottom lip gushed, a stream dribbling in a pitter-patter over his chin and staining the oversized gray hoodie he wore.
