Brutally Beautiful

by Christine Zolendz

  If the case went federal, and the U.S. Marshalls got involved, she would be uprooted and hidden away from me forever, and I couldn’t chance it. That was why I had gone straight to George and Bobby with what I knew. We needed to build a case while she was here, a case that was tight, so he could go to prison for a long time. I hated it. I hated that he was still breathing, and that he had somehow hurt her. I hoped that one day she would trust and love me enough to tell me everything.

  There were still two brands of his name on her body. I planned on taking her to get tattoos over them, and I knew she would agree… I hated thinking his name was permanently etched onto her. It made me want to end his life every time I saw her naked.

  But, could I actually take another’s life?

  How?

  What would I become after?

  Did it matter? I needed to protect what was mine.

  And if he found her again…

  I would end his life, because I knew there was so much more to the story than she was telling me, so much more he had done to her. And I would kill him for it. It was only a matter of time; only a matter of time until my Hyde came out and the part of me that was Thomas would come out and play. Doctor David Stanton has until then to breathe, and until then, she was mine, every brutally beautiful inch of her.

  Epilogue-The Love Notes

  Letters written between Kade and Samantha in their two months apart.

  Brutally Beautiful Playlist

  Whiskey In The Jar – Metallica

  Leaving Earth – Clint Mansell (Mass Effect 3)

  Simple Man – Shinedown

  Paint It Black – The Rolling Stones

  Raise Your Glass – Pink

  Radioactive – Imagine Dragons

  Acknowledgements

  To my writing bestie Carol Ann Albright Eastman, thank you SO FUCKING MUCH for all the pep chats and awesome advice you’ve given me. Especially all the lessons on the correct way to write crap. May we meet one day for real, although I am sure we’d definitely get arrested. But, no worries, I happen to know a guy…

  Thank you to all the talented writers that have touched my life in some way: Angelisa Stone, Deena Bright, and S. L. Jennings, you girls rock. And a huge thank you to Triple M Book Club – a place to honestly share all the angst I have for the books I read, and the once in a while dirty talk, minus the elephant penis picture. I’m still scarred from it.

  The biggest thank you goes to my family. To my mother Rita who has been my loudest cheerleader since the day I was born. You made me feel like I could do anything in this world, and then let me. Thank you for letting me - be me.

  To my husband, Danny, the one I could keep up all night with my ideas and characters, thank you for all the support and encouragement.

  To my daughters, Hailey Grace and Emily Marie, thank you for all your crazy, and for all your laughter and silliness. I love you both so very much.

  I could name a hundred different people who I want to thank, but this last acknowledgement is strictly for YOU, readers. Thank you. Thank you for believing in me and reading my stories. Thank you for contacting me, friending me, and supporting me. I love you all!

  Books by Christine Zolendz

  The Mad World Series – Paranormal Romance

  Fall From Grace

  Saving Grace

  Scars and Songs

  For more information about Christine Zolendz, please visit:

  https://www.facebook.com/ChristineZol?ref=hl

  https://www.facebook.com/christine.zolendz

  http://christinezolendz.blogspot.com

  https://twitter.com/ChristineZo

  https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6448939.Christine_Zolendz

  Continue on to read a preview of Cold Blooded Beautiful

  Coming in Winter/Spring 2014

  Preview of Cold-Blooded Beautiful

  Chapter 1

  Samantha

  I had just finished my trauma ICU rounds, sneaking in a Snickers candy bar with the cool wall of the staff lounge against my back, when the overhead call came through for an incoming trauma. “Trauma One. Trauma One. ETA five minutes.” Savoring the sweetness of my first mouth-watering bite, I learned the paramedics were in route, and there was a fifteen-year-old girl who was ejected from her family’s car in a head-on collision, with an 18-wheeler, on the Henry Hudson Parkway. God, that made my stomach plunge, and the burning bits of chocolate-nougat-caramel bile teased the back of my throat. In this job, you never knew what was going to come through those emergency room doors: gunshot wounds, stabbings, motor vehicle collisions, but the worst was when any of them had anything to do with kids.

  Shoving one more bite of candy into my mouth, I tossed the rest of the unfinished chocolate bar into the trash and rushed out, sprinting down the corridor. Icy blasts of sterilized air, mingled with the dark bitter smells of disinfectant and hospital food, permeated around me—through me.

  I was running through a crowd of people, toward the trauma bay to scrub up when a stunningly gorgeous woman stepped in front of me, tripping me up and almost hurled me into the wall. She grabbed my arm with icy cold hands, and yanked me to a stop just before I landed.

  “You know,” she whispered in my ear, digging her perfectly manicured fingers into my skin. “He says my pussy is perfect. He calls me his ‘Triple P.’ Perfect Piece of Pussy.”

  Oh, crap. Did the Freud Squad lose another patient?

  “Excuse me?” I laughed a bit out of breath, thinking she must have me confused with someone else. Either that, or someone left a bag of nympho-crazy-women open on the wrong floor of the hospital.

  “Your husband,” she explains. “After I ride him hard and fast, it’s what he says, ‘Triple P,’ that’s what he calls me.” She smiled triumphantly through blood red lipstick and sashayed away on a pair of loud, deep-red clicking heals that were the exact shade that was smeared heavily across her lips.

  “I believe you have the wrong person, Miss,” I called after her, standing straighter, one hand dropping over my stomach.

  The stunning woman pivoted on the balls of her feet, flinging a handful of golden bouncy curls over a shoulder as if she was starring in one of those perfect hair dye commercials. The hospital corridors spiraled out behind her; bright florescent lights casting blurs of bleeding rainbows inside my tired eyes. “Oh, I don’t think so, Doctor Samantha Matthews. No, I don’t think so at all. He, David, even showed me a picture of you.”

  She knew my name. And my husband’s.

  Was my I.D. badge showing?

  No, it was inside my scrubs.

  Behind the woman, at the other end of the hall over the loud hiss and clink of the emergency room doors, chaos erupted with the incoming rush of EMTs rolling in the injured girl, and for a moment, a brief one that I still am so ashamed of, I froze in complete and utter anguish. Rusty metallic smells hit my senses so forcefully I stumbled back a step, caught off guard. The blonde haired woman smiled widely and winked, and then my vision caught the body of the fifteen-year-old trauma patient rolling towards me, and I was on the move, trying my best to detach and store the hurt and anger for later. That bleeding fifteen-year-old needed me more. I barely had time to snap on a pair of latex gloves.

  My stomach twisted, tightening every organ on its way up to my throat, filling it with a pool of vomit. I had to gag before swallowing it back down. Detach. Just do your job. Focus, before your knees buckle.

  The patient flailed about on the gurney, covered from head to toe with blood as panting paramedics screamed the rundown of what had happened. Deep crimson gauze was wrapped around the patient’s thigh, head, and midsection, and I had to work fast and stay sharp to try to save the child’s life. Dear God please, please help me save this child, let me forget about David for a minute, let me do my job.

  Removing the dressings, I started going through my checklist, barking out orders. Thankfully, Samantha Matthews, the sideswiped wife, disappeared, and Doctor Samantha Matthews, head trauma surgeon,
took over.

  Despite the thousands of hours of surgical training, horrifying years as a military surgeon overseas, and even all the brainwashing I endured in my early medical career, I still struggled with all of the human emotions that go along with harsh trauma. You don’t get desensitized to it, not when it’s a kid lying on the table, fighting for her life; anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Yet, as I always do, I try my hardest to project confidence and grace, strength and complete control in front of my trauma team. Mentally, as my hands crawled along the poorly bandaged girl, I felt through her injuries with the tips of my fingers.

  Holy shit, under the bandages the kid was ripped to shreds. It was as if her skin, the entirety of it, split down her center on impact; the stark white of her bones stood out against the angry red of her torn flesh. The deafening sound of my own pulse rushed through my ears, engulfing my entire universe into one focal pinpoint. Exact. Simple. Save the life.

  I immediately shoved my index finger into her bloodiest laceration in her thigh, plugging up the source of the most lethal area of the hemorrhage.

  “Let’s secure an airway!” I turned my attention to one of the trauma nurses, “I need an IV, and an operating room…and get me two units of O-negative.”

  “Vitals!”

  “Eighty-two over fifty-two! Heart rate one twenty!”

  “Let’s go. Let’s go,” I barked and within minutes, my trauma team flew into the operating room, rolling in the patient with my fingers still deep inside her leg. The child’s femoral artery was completely severed. In a matter of minutes she could be dead; I needed to work fast.

  My team worked like one fluid person, perfect and precise. No one noticed my bones were warring with gravity to move, or that my muscles were braided with thousand pound weights, trying to pull me through the floor.

  Within a few hours, I meticulously repaired whatever damage I could; I dressed her wounds and said a tiny prayer for the girl in my head. Praising my flawless operating staff, I trudged out of the operating room and headed straight to scrub the mess of blood and fluids from my body.

  Emotionally exhausted, I made my way back to my office where I’d left the small lamp on and the door wide open. The outside sky had turned almost black with the moonless night and only one street lamp shone through my small window.

  I’d done my best to save that girl’s life. She was finally in stable condition in ICU, after four intense hours of surgery, piecing her back together. But there was no more family for her to be comforted by; they were all down in the morgue. There wasn’t even any family to inform of the surgery or condition of the patient. They all perished in the crash.

  With my adrenaline rush depleted, my body crashed, and I collapsed heavily into the chair behind my desk. I was beyond exhausted, and I still had two hours left of my shift. Dropping my gaze, I noticed a stark white envelope lying in the middle of the desktop, my name written in bold red letters across the top. I could’ve left it there, unopened and untouched, and then my story would have been so very different, but I didn’t. The tiny flip of a paper, a small tear in the flap, and life could change completely, endings and beginnings meshed together and formed circles like the little hamster wheels I never knew I ran in. My bones turned rubbery as I opened it, hesitantly and fumbling. Unfolding the letter that was hidden inside, written on elegant pale pink stationary, I leaned my head back against the cold leather of the chair and read the words that would change my entire fucking life.

  Continue on to read a preview of

  Therapy

  By Author Kathryn Vance-Perez

  Copyright 2013

  Coming March 2014

  Part One

  The Darkness

  “Depression is a sneaky, evil bitch.

  She creeps in when you least expect it and snakes her way through the corridors of your mind while feeding on the light of your soul. She shows up during your most difficult times, only making them harder to shoulder. Sometimes, I wish depression was a living, breathing, tangible being, so I could wrap my hands around her throat, and squeeze…’til all that’s left in her pools of darkness is nothingness, rendering her powerless to

  ever hurt me again.”

  -Jessica

  CHAPTER ONE

  “The small words hurt the most.”

  -Kris Harte

  Present

  Jessica

  Gripping my journal, I flip through the pages of my written pain. Putting pen to paper is comforting to me…my journal is the only place I can really be myself, releasing my demons and voicing my fears. Today’s the first morning of my last year in high school. Senior year. Finally. The fear I feel is almost tangible. Writing will help ease it, but I know it won’t be enough. I place my hand over my lower stomach and run my fingers across the scars. I focus on the blank page before me and start to write.

  Faces

  Familiar places

  Trapped within these walls

  Taunting me

  Trapping me

  Laughter filling the halls

  Not much longer

  It will soon end

  Can’t let them know

  They’ll win

  Broken

  Beat down

  Their derisions

  Circling all around

  Block it out

  Push it down

  Keep building these defenses

  Brick by brick

  My emotions bound

  Seeing a stranger

  When I look in the mirror

  Lost and alone

  My soul pleading

  Desperate to find a home

  ***

  I sit in my car, staring at the front steps of Winslow High School as dread washes over me. The drive here was nothing but minutes full of anxiety and fear.

  Only one more year, I tell myself. I can do this. Just one more year and I’ll be free of this hell on earth forever.

  The past three years were nearly unbearable, and I can’t imagine that this year will be any different. I grab my backpack and push my car door open. The parking lot’s filled with people milling around—chattering about senior year, eyeballing each other’s outfits, sizing each other up. One clique bleeds into another clique and so on. Keeping a low profile is important to me, so I’ve chosen to wear a plain pair of skinny jeans and a simple white T-shirt; I don’t belong to any of the cliques.

  Because I’m invisible.

  I barely exist.

  A loud engine rumbles as a huge truck pulls up in the parking spot beside mine, startling me. I look over to see that it’s none other than Jace Collins, superstar athlete and megapopular boyfriend to my worst enemy. His door opens and he jumps out, throwing his backpack over his shoulder. He might be with the biggest bitch in school, but God, the guy is like a huge magnetic force made up of sexual tension and dimples. By the time I realize I’m staring, it’s too late because he’s noticed me ogling him. A small grin stretches across his face and I blush, snapping my eyes away. I turn and start walking toward the school when I hear her.

  “Oh look, it’s Winslow High’s school slut. How lovely!” Elizabeth shouts loud enough to draw attention my way.

  I clench my backpack strap, keeping my gaze forward. I can feel her eyes gunning a hole through the back of my head. This is the only time of day when I’m visible. When I’m in the cross-hairs of Elizabeth Brant’s clique of mean girls I’m a huge blaring bull’s-eye. Engaging with her is pointless. She never gives in or lets up. Now, everyone within earshot stares and laughs at me. I take a deep breath blocking it all out. I can hear her spitting more venom my way as she gets closer, and her sidekick Hailey joins in the taunts.

  “How was your summer Jessssssica? How many guys did you add to your list, huh? Do you like it that everyone knows what a skank ho you are?”

  Elizabeth laughs loudly, and then I hear him. Jace. He’s been stepping in for the past couple of years to shut them up when they talk shit to me. The first time he did it, I was stu
nned. Why would he care what they said to me?

  I’m no one.

  I barely exist.

  “Okay, wenches, that’s enough. Leave her alone. Can’t you give the girl a damn break? It’s the first day of school. Do you both have to be such assholes? It’s ridiculous.”

  I don’t turn around or acknowledge his act of kindness. I’m thankful, but I can never tell him that. If she saw me talking to him, it would be a disaster. I don’t know why, but every time I make eye contact with him something happens that I can’t yet explain. Right at the moment when our eyes lock the air crackles around me and I instantly feel more alive. Of course, he’s never flirted with me like so many of the other guys do. I know why they do it, and so does everyone else, but he’s never treated me like a slut or piece of trash. Jace is different.

  Last year, when we were paired together in chemistry class, Elizabeth was beyond pissed off. She pinned me down with her stare for the entire hour, but Jace ignored her and rolled his eyes. When class was over, he got up and gave me a slight smile before walking away. It was the one time that I hadn’t felt like a nobody. For that one hour I’d felt present and not so closed down. It was easier to breathe—it felt like what I assumed school should feel like.

  Jace remains a mystery to me. I have no idea why he treats me like a normal girl, but every time he does, my heart beats a little stronger and a little faster. I hope one day I have the