by L.J. Shen
“Cat,” I growled, “the goddamned pregnancy is now a kid. Maybe you should consider taking care of him.” But I knew what Cat never said out loud. She resented Sam, because Sam was the final straw between us. I couldn’t take her back after that betrayal.
“This could have been us. Married. Happy,” she pleaded. “I belong in your bed, in your house, in your mind. I’ll do anything. Tell me what to do to bring you back to me.”
“You’re a wreck.” I turned around and started walking to my car. I hated that she barged into my time with my dad.
She stalked after me, crying hysterically, stumbling to the ground and then lurching back to her feet. Stiletto heels weren’t exactly the best footwear for a muddy graveyard. But Cat had always liked putting on a show. Twenty-something-year-old Troy admired that. Thirty-something Troy knew this shit got old.
“Don’t do this,” she warned. “I’ll ruin this for you.”
I sighed. “Catalina, baby, you can’t even ruin your own fucking life successfully, let alone someone else’s. You’ve never been the overachiever type.”
“Go to hell.” She shoved me and then flailed at me with her fists.
I dodged her girly jabs and captured her wrists, walking her backward into the high stone fence that surrounded that graveyard and pinning her back to it. It felt so vacant to hold her between my arms. For a moment, I wondered if I ever really did love her.
“Enough,” I said. “This stops here. Now listen to me carefully, and get it into your head, because I won’t say it twice. You had your chance. I gave you everything. Worked my fucking ass off so you could afford your fancy shit. Took risks. Built a business, opened a French restaurant just ’cause it was your favorite food—all for you. But you betrayed me. You got coked up on my money, snorted through the majority of it, and I had to send you off to rehab, where you fucked up more. We had our fun, and now it’s time to let go. Got it?”
Catalina threw more aimless punches at me and screamed, “Stop saying these things!”
I knew she had a hard time hearing this, but the funny thing was, I no longer had a hard time saying it, admitting this to her and me. I’d sent Cat to a Malibu rehab shortly before we broke it off. The most expensive fucking rehab in the States. Sauna rooms and twenty-four-hour spas. Only the best for my girl. She came back pregnant with her counselor’s baby. With Brock’s baby.
I still remembered the day I found out my initially unpregnant girlfriend had come back after two months in rehab with a new addition in her belly. She tried to convince me the baby was mine. Hell, I fought hard to believe it myself. But then I went with her to her check-up and the OB-GYN had spilled the dates. Cat was six weeks pregnant, and not with my child.
“No, no, no, no.” She shook her head violently, raking her long fingernails down her face, streaking her cheeks with bloody scratches.
“Don’t mistake my sympathy then for feelings.” I said, surprised that the rage was gone. “When you were pregnant, I didn’t throw your ass out of my apartment because I didn’t want this shit on my conscience, not because I still loved you.”
“Troy!” she pleaded, throwing her bloody fists in my face and crying like a tortured animal. “Stop this now!”
But it was true.
I’d felt guilty. Guilty because I couldn’t give her what she’d wanted. What we both wanted. Our engagement didn’t mean shit, and we both knew that. I was going to marry Sparrow Raynes, the poor little girl down my street. The money, the clothes, the restaurants, the fancy-ass vacations. Lies, lies and more lies. A pile of distractions to make us forget we were never going to get married. In a sense, a part of me—the puppy-love part—thought Cat screwing someone else was my punishment. I couldn’t be hers exclusively. Why should it be any different for her?
I remembered after we broke up, going back to the apartment Cat and I used to share. I’d wanted to take some of my shit, mainly clothes. I wasn’t surprised to see the guy who knocked her up had taken a trip to Boston just so he could have another dip.
She was beautiful, broken and willing to do anything the man at her side wanted. It was a lethal combination for most men, something that was too hard to turn down. I fucking knew that first-hand.
Brock ended up staying in Boston, and I let him work for me. Gave him a job a few months before my father’s murder, thinking I’d help her—and him—build a family. I’d thought it was my way to compensate. We were done, but I still had a chance to redeem myself in the eyes of the only girl I’d ever fallen in love with. Even if I couldn’t have her.
“We should have stopped this fucking years ago,” I told Cat, who was struggling for breath, her face blotched with tears and older since I’d last seen her.
“I love you. He was always just a plaything. I love you, Troy.” Trying another strategy, she arched her back away from the stone fence, her hips meeting my groin.
I pulled back immediately. Jesus, she thought I was going to take her right then and there. How could I have loved someone so weak?
I sucked in a breath. “You don’t love anything other than danger and cock. There’s an abyss between us, and it swallowed every positive feeling I’ve ever felt toward you. Because even after I tried to help you and your husband, you had the nerve to go and spill every secret I ever told you to him.” I let go of her wrists in disgust. “And that was the ultimate betrayal.”
Catalina told Brock everything.
About the promises my dad made me make.
About Sparrow.
About fucking everything.
She put me in a vulnerable position, and jeopardized everything I’d ever worked for.
I wished Cat had never told Brock about it. I wished he’d never told me that he knew. On a drunken night when the two of us got back from the cabin after detoxing one of my client’s daughters, Brock had revealed that Cat had spilled every single secret I let her in on. Brock had promised to keep mum.
Because it wasn’t a friendly promise—it was a threat.
“So here’s the deal.” I rested my arm above Cat’s head as I locked eyes with her. “I’m going to walk away from here. Next time I see you, it’ll be on Brock’s arm, playing the dutiful wife. You will never speak to me, mention this, or try and reach out to me again, got it?”
I admit I’d taken my revenge too far. Fucking Catalina under her husband’s roof just to feel better about myself? About everything I had lost? Making her one of the endless women on my speed dial? Reducing her to nothing but a warm pussy to bury myself in occasionally? Below the belt, but I’d needed to rebuild my ego. I’d needed to make sure I was leaving her just as broken as she’d left me when she cheated, married someone else and spilled my secrets in his ears.
“She knows,” Cat said, smiling a crazy, hateful smile. “I told Sparrow about us. Your wife knows.”
“Go near her again, and I will kill you with my bare hands.” I took a step back, watching her slide down the wall and collapse on the grass as she wailed.
I’d played this scene over and over in my head for years. Me leaving Catalina for good. Stepping away from this mess while I had the upper hand.
I’d imagined feeling triumphant and elated as I dumped her, breaking her heart, but as I left the graveyard, all I felt was incredible emptiness and an unbearable fury about her talking to Red.
I hoped Cat wasn’t coked up again. Poor Sam didn’t need two fuck-ups for parents.
And as thunder cracked the sky open above me, another downpour on its way, I slipped into the Maserati and turned on the stereo all the way up. “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me” by The Smiths blasted through the speakers. I knew that this time the rain would wash away most of my memories with Cat.
We were done. Through.
I couldn’t wait for my next chapter.
TROY
FLYNN WAS DEAD.
He was still among the living when I left him at the cabin with Brock on Saturday. The detox after Miami hadn’t stuck—not much surprise the
re. I’d received a call from George Van Horn, complaining that his son had relapsed big time. I’d hauled Flynn to the cabin again and put Brock in charge over the weekend.
As planned, first thing Monday morning, I drove up to check on them.
Flynn was sure as fuck dead now.
Guilt ate away at my insides. It wasn’t that I was particularly fazed by death. I was even responsible for the horrific ending of two men, finished them without even blinking. But Flynn was innocent, and he’d died because his dad was too proud to seek professional help for his son at the hospital.
He also died because I cared more about the paycheck than doing the right thing.
Flynn was Sparrow. Everyone failed him. His parents. His family. His friends. The only difference was that Sparrow had me now, and I wasn’t letting anyone harm my little lovebird. If she was going to be ruined, it would be by me.
The smell around Flynn told me he had given up the ghost, but not so long ago that he stank. Which also made sense, because if Brock left him alone, it wouldn’t have been too long ago.
I rolled him from his stomach to his back with a shove, placed two fingers on his neck and checked for his pulse again.
Yeah, the kid was gone.
Looking around the cabin, I sighed and raked a hand through my hair. Brock was supposed to save him. He may have been a shithead, but he was also a badass when it came to detoxing. Why the hell has he abandoned ship without telling me, and how the fuck was I going to explain it to George?
I brushed my thumb against Flynn’s eyelids, shutting his eyes. His lost-puppy eyes were staring at me, and I needed a breather from feeling like shit.
I made the call to George Van Horn, breaking the news in code. The parcel got lost in the mail. Can’t be retrieved. What does he want me to do next. I was hoping not to hear what he answered.
“I see the post office is still overpriced and unreliable.” He took a dig at me. “Just make sure nobody else finds the parcel.” Then he hung up.
Van Horn wanted me to get rid of Flynn’s body discreetly. Didn’t even have it in him to stage an accidental overdose and give his son a proper funeral, a service of some kind. Of course, the latter would kill his political campaign. But the thing about the George Van Horns of our world, the ones who compromised their morals—who did nasty shit they don’t feel at peace with—was that they woke up one day to discover they’d became a monster.
I myself didn’t feel like a monster. Wholeheartedly believed that the people who killed my father deserved to die. I was cruel, but I wasn’t unjust. I wouldn’t off someone from my family, or deny them a respectable burial, just to get ahead in the game.
Other than Sparrow’s mom, I reminded myself. She was still very much on my conscience, and I knew that Sparrow would never forgive me if she knew.
I dragged Flynn’s body outside and deeper into the woods. Far enough from the cabin so that in the unlikely event that he was found, no one would make the connection, but not too far, because dragging a body was fucking hard, even if he was a scrawny little junkie.
Driving him to another spot in the woods was pointless. I couldn’t get him into the Maserati and would never be able to get rid of all the evidence if I did.
After I placed him near a tree trunk, I walked back to the cabin for a shovel, then walked back into the woods and dug his grave for him. I dumped his body into the hole and buried him as best as I could, knowing I’d be better off burning the body, but somehow not being able to bring myself to do it. It was stupid. He was already dead. But my fucked-up, twisted morals kicked in.
I buried him next to her, so I would remember where he was in case I ever needed to dig him up. Everything was calculated, as usual, but it no longer felt right.
Especially not the fact that she was there, buried just a few feet away from him. Her daughter needed to know. Her daughter had to know.
When I got back to the cabin, I took a shower and threw my clothes into a small pit at the back. Looking down, I flicked a lit match between my fingers and into the pit, watching the fire race from the twigs to the fabric, the flames licking at the edge of the pit, swallowing the evidence of my sin.
Sweating away my guilt, I dragged the sofa out to the patio, doused it with gasoline and lit that too. Stinking fire rose from the old sofa, a long cloud of black smoke climbing up to the gray, cloud-covered sky. I scrubbed the cabin clean, everything Flynn touched, until my skin peeled and my knuckles bled. It took me a good few hours, but I couldn’t take any chances.
On the drive back to Boston, I tried not to think about the Van Horns. It was that part of the job that I didn’t care for. Normally, I was a bad guy messing around with bad guys. But every now and again, a Flynn would slip onto my radar, an innocent person who was just at the wrong place, or more often than not, born into the wrong family, and that’s when things got messy. Fucking people over who didn’t deserve my wrath wasn’t my style. I had my own version for justice, and I applied it whenever I saw fit. I tried to tell myself that this was life. That sometimes you were Batman…and sometimes, the Joker.
Flynn didn’t deserve to die, and I could have prevented it, but it would have cost me a client and caused trouble for me. Simply put, covering my ass was more important to me than Flynn’s life.
Trying to push this thought and the looming confrontation I’d have to have with Brock about it away, I dialed Sparrow’s number. I knew she had a shift, but an overwhelming urge to hear her smartass voice took over. She answered after the fourth ring.
“Why are you answering your phone? You should be working,” I barked. She took her job seriously, and I knew she wasn’t happy at Rouge Bis. Sparrow was born to be free. She wasn’t built to function under the realm of the likes of Pierre. Or me. She also didn’t care for fancy food. She was the opposite of Catalina. Her style was oily, homey, comfort street food. She was a pancake kind of girl.
“If you know that I’m working, why’re you calling?”
“To piss you off, of course.”
“Mission accomplished.” I heard the amusement in her voice, and then a sigh and the rattle of pots. “Pierre’s giving me shit.”
“Sausage fingers?” I rolled a fresh toothpick in my mouth. I hated that she had a shit time at my restaurant, but loved that she hadn’t given up. “You’re doing a good job.”
“I know,” she said evenly. “That’s why it kills me.”
“Deal,” I prompted her.
“Oh, I fully intend to. I’m going to raid your liquor cabinet the minute I get home.”
Home. This wasn’t the first time she’d called it that. In the beginning it was always your apartment, your sheets, your kitchen. I liked that it had become ours, even if I had a feeling it was a temporary thing.
“Wait up for me. I could use a drink or six.”
“Another bad day at the office?” she asked.
“The worst.”
“Maybe you should change your profession.”
“Sure,” I snorted. “To what, exactly? Social worker? Maybe an environmental specialist?”
“Perfect. I was thinking along the lines of saving polar bears or wild birds. Somewhere far from civilization would suit you.”
“I’ve already saved one wild bird,” I reminded her. “And she keeps me damn busy.”
“Saved, huh?” She laughed, the sound an unintended accusation. “Pick this wild bird up some Chinese takeout before you come home. I’ll open up a bottle. See you there.”
I was almost tempted to come clean to her, on the phone, out of nowhere. Luckily, I came to my senses quickly. I knew it wouldn’t do me any good—that she’d never forgive me. Or my father. Her mother. Any of us.
I turned up the volume on the radio. “In My Head” by Queens of the Stone Age blasted through the speakers. Was I pussy-whipped? Yeah. Literally. Spending time inside my wife had become my favorite hobby. I had finally found my weakness, and sure enough, it was between Red’s legs. That’s where I wanted to live, and tha
t’s where I wouldn’t mind dying.
But it wasn’t just that. The thought of spending time with that little smart mouth tonight made me feel weird. Not exactly happy, but oddly excited. I hated liking her. In a sense, it was like handing her the keys to the pit of my soul while she was tanked as hell and telling her to drive carefully. No one fucking promised me that she would.
Our “arrangement” of fucking around without having any sort of relationship had me confused as fuck. There was nothing romantic in what we were. We didn’t go out, share gifts or watched fucking Netflix together. We didn’t make love, we made war. When she was pulling, I was biting. When she was scratching, digging her nails into my flesh, I slammed harder, faster. Our sex was furious, it was raw, untamed, wild…but it wasn’t selfish.
It wasn’t about who Red was that I liked—it was about who she wasn’t. She wasn’t a woman who wanted me because of my power, status, job or bank account.
Buying her shit only pissed her off, and trust me, I’d had my people filling her wardrobe with designer shoes and dresses. She gave them all away to the homeless shelter down the street like they weren’t worth a dime. In fact, there’s a crazy homeless woman in downtown Boston walking around in a Stella McCartney suit and a pair of Jimmy Choo’s, yelling at traffic lights that she was the real Messiah.
Yeah. Red either ignored my flashy gifts like they were contaminated, filthy, unworthy, or worse, tucked them under her slim arm and gave them all to charity. I wanted to kill and kiss the shit out of her in the same breath. It pissed me off and delighted me all at the same time.
She wasn’t a woman who cared for superficial shit, someone who was motivated by the wrong things. She was a blank, clean, white sheet for me to scribble on.
And I scribbled.
On her lips, on her jaw, her neck and collarbone. I jotted my hunger for her in vivid colors as I sucked on her pink nipples, grazing my teeth over them, at first slowly and very carefully, and then with more force, when I realized that inside little Sparrow, lay a wild bird waiting to be untethered. I rubbed her until she almost bled, until her moans became growls. I scrawled my initials all over her as I licked her up and down and made her cry my name. Again.
