by Ella James
He keeps shaking—unable, in his pain, to answer.
His shirt is torn, so I can feel his skin under my palm. It’s cool and clammy. Wet in some places.
“Harder.” He grits, “Nails.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” I whimper.
“Harder.” He lifts his head a little more. I can feel his eyes roll over me. His mouth slackens, and his teeth begin to chatter. “A-are you an angel?”
Tears quiver in my eyes, blurring his face. I shake my head, and they spill down my cheeks.
“I saw your car. I called the cops.” With my hand still on his back, I move, in a crouch, around in front of him. I want to hug him, so, so much, but I’m too scared.
His eyes are more focused now, ardent on my face. “Are you…sure…you’re not an angel?”
I nod.
He tilts his head back, his mouth moving like he wants to say more, but can’t. He grips the chair he’s still strapped into with both hands and makes a low, pained sound. And that’s the first time I notice, blood is dripping down the ruined leather seat.
“Oh shit, I think you should be still.”
He shakes his head. “Belt.”
When I don’t move, he reaches out and grabs me. He pulls a little, and I’m so close, on the right side of him, my knee is touching his leg.
“My belt,” he grates.
He wraps his hands around his thigh, which gleams in the moonlight. He must have been cut badly there, right through his jeans.
“Eighteen… Please! The belt…around…my leg.”
My hands flutter over him, unsure where to start, terrified of hurting him.
“Please. I hate the smell of blood!”
“Okay, baby. It’s okay. Hang on a minute.”
I lean down and unbuckle his black leather belt, then slide it off. He raises his unhurt arm over his face and makes an awful moaning, half-sobbed sound.
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”
I get the belt around his thigh, just above his knee, and slide it up to crotch level. Then I pull it tight.”
His hand grips my shoulder, his fingers tightening as I tighten the belt around his thigh.
“Oh,” he gasps.
“I’m sorry!”
I get it tight, and take his hand. I can feel his body struggling. Feel him shaking.
His eyes are shut.
I look him over.
He doesn’t look like he’s bleeding anywhere else except his nose and mouth. His face is starting to look swollen, though.
When he mutters, “Fuck,” his face seems stiff, and the word sounds like it’s being said around a retainer.
Inside my mind, I’m screaming, sobbing. Telling him he’s doing great, asking him to just hang on a little longer. But I’m under a blanket of terror. I can’t move. Can’t say any of my wild feelings.
I can barely even stroke his hand.
“Can you stay by yourself for just a second? I need to check on your friends.”
“Guy,” he hisses.
“Yes. Just hang on, Ricardo. Hang on—I’ll be right back to you.”
I run back to where the other bodies are, reaching first the one who I now can tell is Brody Royce. He’s dead. He’s dead. The angle of his head—I cover my mouth. I start to cry again, but I can’t let that slow me down. I dash to the girl. Uma. Cal’s friend Uma Thornton. She’s so still, so quiet, so thin. No breaths.
My legs seize up. I stumble to the third one. Blond. Guy. He’s lying on his back, his legs sprawled out, arms resting limply on the road as if he just decided to lie down there. His face is plastic, wide eyes still staring at the black sky. Still breathing.
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “Help will be here soon!”
I look up at the stars, as if they can help me, then I hear a noise from Cal’s direction and sprint back to him.
I find him unbuckled from his seat and on the rocky ground just under the car, which I notice is still burning slightly in the back. He’s lying on his side, pushed up on one arm. His eyes are wide. Unfocused. Except when they land on my face.
“Angel,” he whispers.
He lowers his torso down to the ground. His throat works, and for a second, we just stare into each other’s eyes. Words tumble from his mouth, as if they’re being forced out. “Eigh’teen. Can you…hold onto me? I’m…floating.”
I sit down beside him, then stretch out behind him. His back seems okay, so I wrap my arms around him gently.
“Tighter.”
I squeeze.
“Don’t let go.”
“I won’t. I swear.”
A cold breeze blows over the flat land all around us. I’m shivering now—or is it him?
His teeth chatter. I push my face into his back.
“Do you…believe in fate?” His breaths are fast. I’m scared.
I try to keep the fear out of my voice. To keep my arms around him snug and gentle. “I’m not sure. Do you?”
He doesn’t answer.
Minutes later, long after I fear he’s passed out or died, he mumbles, “I…believe in…punishment. And…you.”
It’s a long time before I learn the prescience of his last coherent words.
CHAPTER 6
Annabelle
September 2014
Seven years, eleven months later
“If you don’t sit down right now and stop touching the TV, I’m going to turn Dora off, Adrian.”
“But Anna—”
“Sit down.”
I hold my hand in front of the little TV/DVD player on the dresser inside Adrian’s small bedroom: a silent threat.
She sinks down into her bean bag chair and blows her bangs out of her face.
I straighten my skirt and catch her big brown eyes angled my way. “When are you coming back, Anna?”
I exhale slowly and try to free myself from the sharp claws of my anxiety. “I don’t know yet, Ad. But it shouldn’t be more than four or five hours.”
She points to her little digital clock, sitting beside a Beauty and The Beast lamp on the dresser. “You’ll be back at five o’clock?”
“Yep.” I tug at my skirt. “Something like that. Would you like some pizza tonight?”
She nods. “Absolutely!”
I don’t even try to hide my smile at her enthusiasm. Since the August morning Mom gave birth to Adrian four years ago, I’ve been completely and totally in love. Since Mom got sick a year and a half ago, Adrian’s been mine. She’s all I have. She’s all I want. I transferred from UCLA’s main campus to a branch to finish my psychology doctorate, and when it became clear that Mom’s brain cancer wasn’t going to be cured, I switched into the master’s program so I could find a good job and support them.
Unfortunately, that part of my plan hasn’t been going so well.
That’s the reason for my errand.
“What sort of pizza would you like tonight?” I ask as I step across the small hallway to my room, so I can get my blouse. I step back into Adrian’s princess paradise. “Pepperoni, ham and pineapple…?”
She shoots up from her seat. “I want the supreme!”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I like onions!”
I laugh. “You like to breathe on me with onion breath.”
I pull my blouse over my head, and from the inside of the soft, red fabric, I hear her soft voice say, “Does Mom have breath?”
I push my head through the collar and try to guess at what she’s asking, even as my insides go a little cold.
“Mom’s in her bedroom, with Nurse Casey. Remember?”
She shakes her head. “Does she have breath?”
It’s a battle to keep my face neutral and my tone pleasant. “You mean, like onion breath?”
She nods quickly, like she’s been thinking this over, and she’s worried about it.
“No, honey. Mom doesn’t have onion breath. She doesn’t like onions.”
“How do you know that?” Adrian whispers.
“Because s
he told me.”
“When?” She scratches her neck.
“When you were a little baby.” That isn’t exactly true, of course, but I want her to know that at one point when she was alive, Mom wasn’t like she is now.
I step over to her, pick her up, and sit on the edge of her bed to cuddle her in my lap.
“Sometimes it’s sad when Mom is sleeping a lot, isn’t it?”
She nods, and buries her face in my neck. I stroke her hair. “I’m sorry, honey. Mommy loves you so much, and so do I.”
I rub her back for a few minutes, hating that this is all I can do. All I can say. I’m so much older than Adrian—I’m her stand-in Mommy—and still, I have no answers. As I hold her, she gets the hiccups, and somehow we start singing “The Ants Go Marching,” to get rid of them. We’re on eleven by eleven when Holly arrives.
Holly lives in the condo complex next door. She’s only seventeen, but she’s great with Adrian, and besides, the two of them are never alone. Mom and one of the nurses are always here.
When Adrian and Holly are settled, playing with dolls, I slip into my room and stand in front of the full-length mirror to assess myself. Shoulder-length hair, curly as always. Brown eyes. Small nose. Full lips, with red lipstick. I’m five-foot-seven, and I look it in my black skirt and red blouse. I’m wearing some cute black heels I got on sale a few weeks back. I look okay I guess.
Not that it matters.
It really doesn’t matter, Annabelle.
I check out with Nurse Casey, who’s reading a paperback while Mom dozes in her railed bed.
“Be back around five,” I say. “See you soon, Mom.”
She doesn’t lift her head, and it’s been so long now, I’m not surprised. I don’t feel anything about the state of things with Mom. Nothing but a snake of fear coiled in my gut.
My heels clink on the brick walkway as I walk to the stairs, then down to my red Honda Accord. Like most things in my life, right down to the money for childcare and nurses, the Accord was a gift from Dad.
I sink slowly into the driver’s seat and take my time pulling out of the lot, because the truth is, I don’t want to do what I’m about to do. The thing is, I don’t have a choice. I’ve been job-hunting for four months, and I’ve found nothing in driving distance of Mom’s house that will pay more than the cost of daycare for Adrian.
Dad has been more than generous. He doesn’t care that Adrian isn’t his any more than he cares that I’m not his biological daughter. He cares about Adrian because I do, and he must be making bank as Warden, because the well never seems to run dry.
Which makes it strange that I haven’t been able to get in touch with him lately. We keep playing phone tag, and last time I text’d him about a counseling job at La Rosa, he didn’t even text me back. That was almost two weeks ago.
As I drive, I fret over whether he’ll even be there. What if he got fired? But surely not. He’s worked at the prison as long as I can remember. I don’t go there often, but he talks about me so much that when I do, all the staff know my name.
The drive from our place in La Placita is a little over an hour if you drive like I do: fast. And on the way, I pass the spot.
That spot.
It’s not the first time. Not the second, third, or fourth, or fifth. But every time, it gets me like a steak knife in the sternum.
I know exactly where the wreck happened, because part of the therapy I sought out in college involved placing an “In Memorial” sign on the side of the road.
Three lives were lost that night. Four, if you count Ricardo’s. And I do. I definitely do.
The last half of the drive, I’m consumed with memories of that night.
For the years I saw Miranda, my therapist at the UCLA student mental health center, we talked about odds. The odds that I would plan to lose my virginity to Cal Hammond—a crazy plan any way you slice it. The odds that I would actually encounter him at the party. The odds that things would go the way they did. And then the odds that I would take the drive I took, when he and his friends were taking Uma Thornton home.
What did it mean, I used to ask.
Why do such things happen? The universe conspires… And why? I see no greater purpose to our strange night than maybe my own outcome: I decided to go into psychology because of the PTSD sessions I had with Miranda. So what? I’ll help people? Will I? Maybe with a PhD, but I don’t have that, do I? Like for most of my life so far, I’m just drifting. Wondering what my purpose is, other than loving Adrian.
I roll some chap stick over my lips and then refresh my lipstick. I pass a sign, letting me know there’s a prison ahead, and I shouldn’t pick up hitchhikers.
I hate coming here.
Not because of the prisoners.
Because of him.
Ricardo. Cal.
I rode with him to the hospital that night, using my ID to pose as his cousin, and I was there when the police officers arrived. I listened from a bench in the hall as they whispered about toxicology reports and manslaughter.
I avoided testifying in court with Miranda’s help, but I wrote a statement that was read before the judge. How Ricardo was concerned about his friends. How it was clearly just an accident.
He realized in the helicopter that only Guy was being airlifted, and Guy was D.O.A. I leaned there helplessly against the railing of his bed as he put his arm over his face and cried.
I’m not sure what was harder on my heart: leaving him there at the hospital that night, knowing he was going into surgery and I’d probably never see him again, or witnessing the deaths of his friends.
Miranda thinks my leaving him there was harder on me.
I was obsessed. Love-struck and obsessed and shocked and hurt. I was awakened that night. In every way.
Miranda used to say a discussion of the odds was irrelevant.
“What happened, happened, and you’ll never know why.”
But things aren’t so cut and dry, to me.
Over the years, every time I visit La Rosa, my chest tightens. My scalp prickles. If the universe threw us together once before, what’s next?
*
Ricardo
“Why did you do it?”
I walk a circle around Holt’s office chair, where he sits backwards, his squat legs spread around the rolling chair, his fat stomach pressed against the chair’s padded back. His short arms are handcuffed behind him.
Never in the seven years that I’ve been doing business here have I had a problem with the warden. In the early years, I paid him to look the other way as I…reworked the system. Once I started turning a decent profit, I pulled him in, teaching him how to move discreetly through the internet’s black market, teaching him the art of investing, and even allowing him to choose the timing of shipments to hub cities. If I’m this operation’s king, Holt is my prime minister.
He leans his cheek against the scratchy, blue fabric of the chair and shuts his pale green eyes. When he opens them, they’re red and wet. He heaves a big breath and tears start rolling down his cheeks.
“Tell me why, Holt.” I drag the words out, as if I’m talking to an imbecile.
It’s all for show. For closure. I already know it doesn’t matter what he says. My lieutenants know of his betrayal. Everybody knows. My course of action is already set in stone.
Still, I stand in front of him and listen as he explains about his family. How his ex-wife has brain cancer and her daughter is only four years old. I allow myself to feel sympathy as he tells me how the little girl is under the care of her older sister, a wonderful young woman with a master’s degree—but one who can’t seem to find a good job within driving range of her mother’s cancer clinic.
“It was stupid. So stupid. I needed money,” he chokes.
“More money,” I correct. In the past few years, during the time he’s really been involved, I’ve made Holt a wealthy man.
He casts his eyes to the cement floor.
I step a little closer and catch his gaze. My
eyes bore into his. Intimidating him. Not because there’s any reason to, but because after eight years here, it’s the role I play. “You needed money, so you stole from me.”
“I didn’t mean it.” He strains against the cuffs, locking his jaw and jerking his chin up. “I was gonna pay you back!”
I drop into a crouch, so we’re at eye level. “When?”
“When Annabelle finds a good job,” he says in a scratchy voice.
“How long do you think it would take for Annabelle to make $800,000?”
He shakes his head. “I’m a fucking fool! I’m sorry, Ric!”
I stand up. “Don’t call me that. You’re not my friend. You’re not even my associate. Do you know what you are, Holt?”
His mouth trembles.
“You’re dead.”
He struggles against the cuffs, his torso flopping against the back of the chair, his face a mask of indignation, followed instantaneously by fear. “No! Forgive me, please! All these years, I’ve never betrayed you! Never once—”
“Until you did.” I look down into his small, green eyes. “You could have asked me for a loan. You could have trusted me to take care of you. But you didn’t. You decided it would be better to take what’s mine.”
His voice cracks. “I’ll make it up to you! I can get your sentence shortened! I can get you women! I can get you—”
“Things I already get myself?” I shake my head. “I don’t need anything from you. I don’t even need to kill you. If I had it my way, I’d cut you off and make you sell that big house you built. But it’s not my decision. There’s a system here, and you’ve left me no choice.”
“No, Ricardo. Please.” His voice cracks on the word, and I listen as it fades away to silence. And then the silence is overtaken by a roar.
I turn slowly, my palms already lifting up and out—a fighting stance from the martial arts I’ve learned here.
I walk to the door of the warden’s office, wondering which of my soldiers has failed me. I’ve got men all across this prison, and every one of them knows what I’m doing in this office right now.
I glance at Holt, then step into the narrow hallway with the faded blue floor. All along the walls, men’s hands protrude through bars. The roar is the sound of dozens of men chanting, “SNATCH!”
