by Ellie Parker
I nodded, excited. “Yes, yes, in my room in my purse.”
“Well, more than likely it’s in evidence by now. We can only hope the cops let you get your hands on it.”
He pulled his hands down his face and shook his head.
Whether he believed me or not, there was a kind heart under all that grizzly skepticism in Gomer.
“I’m gonna have a talk with the judge and see if I can get you out on bail. Won’t be cheap, I can tell you that much. You just sit tight, keep to yourself and don’t talk to anybody who isn’t me.”
I nodded, cheered by the idea that someone on the outside was working on my behalf. “Got it,” I said.
Gomer stood up, tapped on the door to alert the guard he was ready to leave.
26
Jessa
The judge was merciful. He recused himself, not because he was prejudiced, but because he was scared to death of Walden Stark. It was a popular decision. The remaining judge in the county did the same thing. At least before he left, he granted me bail for $10 and I was allowed to go home until a new judge could hear the case. Naturally, with the size of the Stark enterprises, no such fool existed so I was to be perpetually on bail.
And so, my life returned to some version of normal.
Naturally, I was on foot. I tried the bus, but the kids all looked away and filled the seats with books and coats. The bus driver would have to holler at someone to move over since she couldn’t move the bus as long as I was standing. So, I did the only thing that made me feel better. I stayed home. I hid quietly in my room until my parents were gone. I slept, I wrote the horror that was my life in my journal, and I went mad enough to look up how to make voodoo dolls on YouTube.
The days when Mom was home and would know I skipped school, I wandered through town. I felt like I was lost in a system—which made it all the harder to clear myself. I simply didn’t exist. It was like I’d found my place on a carton that held expired milk and always sat at the back of the refrigerator case. It just kept getting shoved aside and no one wanted to take care of it once and for all. Yep—that was me. My life on a milk carton.
Of course, staying out of school didn’t last for more than two weeks. When I got back, my first class turned into a visit to the Principal’s office.
“If you have one more absence, just one more day, between now and the end of the semester, you won’t graduate,” Principal Lenley had warned.
Not graduating would mean spending another year in that shithole. I couldn’t really risk that. The Juniors would, no doubt, carry on what the seniors had started and it would be the same game all over again, just with different characters to fight against.
At lunch time, I headed straight for the cafeteria, filling my tray slowly and getting the feel of the place. People avoided looking at me and there were no welcome back comments. I at least appreciated that.
By the time I lifted my gaze to pick a seat, I saw them.
Chase saw me before the others did. At first, he didn’t look at me like I wreaked of poison. Instead, there was a flash of the old Chase there. But as quickly as I had spotted it, it was gone. In its place was the mask of the displeasure. His lips move and Stone’s face swung in my direction. I got the same reaction from him; the suddenly unaware greeting and then the memory that I was blacklisted made his face sour and angry. He looked away.
Then, there was Sven. His look was slower, lingering and almost wistful. There was a barely perceptible nod and then his face went bland and he left the cafeteria.
27
Stone
“Did you see her?” Of course they saw her.
Outside of making plans to land Jessa’s ass in jail, we refused to talk about her. The photograph dad put on our bed, of him on dragging her pants to yonder, it was enough to actually fucking break us. The video – that was guilt based on suspicion. The picture – that was fact. A fact that made it so much fucking easier to not have to watch the goddamn video.
The sledgehammer Jessa took to our hearts was something none of us wanted to fucking talk about. Every bit of hell we put her through, she deserved it. She deserved so much more than that.
And dad…he deserved what was coming to him too. Yesterday, it was all we talked about. Two days ago, we came up with a plan. The death penalty used to exist for a reason. It no longer exists in some places, sure. But until recently, I hadn’t really figured out why it needed to be brought the fuck back. Until recently, I didn’t think I would ever be a part of making someone pay with their lives. And better yet, that I’d follow through with a plan to murder my own father. But the bastard deserved to rot for what he did. This wasn’t just about him and Jessa. This was about him and all of those other girls. Him and Lucy. Lucy who we knew for certain died by his hands.
I sucked in a deep breath, not letting it go until it burned like fucking fire in my chest. I tried to feel the regret. For the past few hours that was all I was trying to do. But it never came.
Sven got the number for someone who could take him out. None of us questioned how and why he knew someone who could be hired to kill. But I guess this family was just one big boat of secrets. So, here we were, about to make that phone call.
The three of us were sitting on the boulders that lined the channel on the edges of the pier. People kept shouting and pointing. I knew what they wanted. It was posted that no one could sit on the rocks. The narrow channel created a suction and push effect and it was easy to get sucked into the water and immediately thrown back onto the rocks. I felt it a couple of times. It was a rush. I loved it. Another man shouted, pointing to the sign. I gave him a finger and turned back to the conversation.
“Chase?” He was out of it today, staring at the water like he wished it would just consume him.
“I wish to hell we’d never found that room,” Sven gurgled with distaste.
“And just continued on with Jessa while she banged our fucking father. Conquering all the Stark boys like it was some kind of fucking joke.”
“Shut the fuck up, Stone.” Chase’s jaw was clenched, his eyes filled with something I wasn’t sure I wanted to decipher.
“What? You’re telling me you just don’t give a fuck anymore?”
“You don’t know just how much of this is her fault.”
I almost laughed at that. Almost.
Sven, however, couldn’t find an ounce of humor in it. “There’s a video of her in dad’s little fuck room. Dad put a picture of them together on my bed. I don’t know, Chase…seems like at least fifty percent of the fucking blame belongs to her. And just in case you’re wondering, it’s a big fucking fifty percent.”
I was with Sven on this one. As much as Chase was typically the most rational triplet, this wasn’t rationality talking. This was him trying to hold onto something that should be burned to the goddamn ground.
Sven pulled his phone from his pocket, staring at it like it had fallen from an alien ship.
“Once we do this, there’ll be no turning back,” he said.
I swallowed hard. He wasn’t wrong. If you’re gonna call a hitman you better make sure you’re one hundred fucking percent serious about it. Mess around with people like them and it’ll be your head on the line. I wanted to keep my head despite how much it fucking pounded with pain and hurt and regret.
I pulled the phone from Sven and turned to Chase, watching him. For a moment, it was all I did. Something was wrong. Something that had nothing to do with us wanting to off our dad and something that didn’t have to do with how much Jessa hurt us.
“Chase?”
He moved his eyes to look at me, but kept his head in place. “We’re not making that phone call,” he said.
Sven huffed and kicked at a loose rock. “We fucking talked about this, Chase. Once a killer, always a killer,” he said.
“Which is exactly the fucking point, isn’t it? We take him out and what the hell do you think that will do to us. This isn’t who we fucking are.”
I sat back for a li
ttle and watched the two of them argue it out. The decision wouldn’t lean in dad’s favor in the end – that much I knew. The score right now was two to one, with me fully being on Sven’s side.
“Jesus Christ, Chase! What part of this don’t you get? Do you know how many people he’s fucking killed. How many girls who became just another Lucy. And let’s not fucking talk about Jessa. Chances are, he started shoving his cock into her before she even hit eighteen.”
“He did,” Chase said, with a certainty that threw me for six.
“What do you mean, he did?” I asked, careful to hold on to just as much of my composure as I could manage.
“You fucking watched the video, didn’t you?” Sven was on his feet now, fingers raking through his hair in an anger that he didn’t quite know how to release. “Tell me you didn’t watch the fucking video, Chase?”
“I watched the video, Sven.”
I felt my blood boiling. It felt a hell of a lot like betrayal. We’d agreed not to. We’d agreed to fucking snap the damn thing in two. Some secrets were better left in the tip of a worn down condom.
Sven turned around, grunted a string of curse words at Chase and marched off.
Chase looked up at me, his eyes tinged with what I was sure were tears. “You need to get him,” was all he said.
“Why, Chase?”
“Because we’re not murderers, Stone.”
The thing is, no one is just one thing or the other. And what about the greater good? Did that not fucking exist anymore. “Go get your brother.” I did. Not because I agreed with what Chase had done, but because we needed the full story and Sven needed to be here to hear it too.
As soon as Sven was within an inch of Chase, his hands were on him, shoving him toward the water, kicking out at him.
“Sven, calm down,” I barked.
“It was either this or go to jail for murdering the asshole, Sven. Whether we hired a hitman or took care of him our fucking selves, I promise you, it wouldn’t have ended well for us.”
Eventually, Sven stopped throwing punches. Eventually, Sven sat back down. There were tears in his eyes when he looked at Chase. “What the fuck did you see in the video.”
“He didn’t fuck her,” Chase said. “They’re clips from her getting dressed in our room. Clips of her showering in your bathroom. There’s one of her in her room, rubbing her pussy to a picture of Stone.”
I swallowed so damn hard I was sure I swallowed my tongue.
“She didn’t do anything, Sven. There’s no fuck room. There’s no, her and dad, there’s none of that. It’s just a mass of fucking footage from him spying on her.”
“What about the picture he put on our bed?”
Chase shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. But after seeing the video, I kinda think we need to give her the benefit of the doubt.”
“Sick fuck,” Sven groaned and buried his face into his hands. When he looked back up, there were no longer tears in his eyes. Instead, those tears were down her fucking cheeks. “We need to fucking apologize to her. Jesus fucking Christ. We treated her like shit, Stone.”
The both of them were a mess both on the inside and out. As hard as it was, I tried like hell to hold it together. “I’ll give her a call,” I said. “See if she’ll meet us at the house.”
Chase shook his head. “Not the house,” he said.
That took me by surprise, though I kinda got it. Dad was home and even though we’d be there to protect her, Chase didn’t want the bastard to even catch a glimpse of her.
“Why not the house?” Sven asked, accusatively.
“Because right now, the cops are probably tearing the place apart.”
28
Sven
From brother to traitor in a matter of seconds. I never thought I’d see the day.
“What do you mean, the cops are tearing the place apart?” I spat.
“I told the cops, Sven. Gathered everything up that looked like it could work as evidence and hand delivered it to the police station.”
I felt rage. Pure and hot. “And you didn’t fucking think to tell us first?”
“I thought about it and decided not to,” Chase countered. “You’d still want to go through with your plan,” he continued, answering the question I hadn’t yet had a chance to voice. “I know you better than to think you’d be satisfied with him being behind bars.”
I wasn’t satisfied with it. Like hell, I was not. But I wasn’t going to admit that to him right now. “Let’s just go find, Jessa,” I huffed and pushed myself onto my feet again.
The series of events that followed, were exactly what nightmares were made of. We rushed over to Jessa’s house, Stone sitting behind and the wheel and Chase and I acting as his passengers, like we’d done on the way here. The only difference was, we were biting our nails down to the quick. Apologizing for all the shit we’d put her through was one thing. A hard thing, at that. But even if she raised her middle finger and told us how far to shove it, we still needed to do the right thing.
We needed to tell her what the fuck was going on. Explain to her why we did what we did. Everything was in her hands now. If I were her, I wouldn’t fucking forgive us.
Stone pulled the car up to front of the house, not giving a damn about how unwelcomed we most definitely were. In an instant, we were all out of the car, rushing to the front door with our tails tucked between our legs. I took a deep breath, steadied it against my lungs and regarded my brothers as I pushed a finger against the doorbell. A series of chimes rang through the inside of the house and we listened as feet scattered and voices roared. A curtain pulled back and Jessa’s father peeked through, the look on his face less appetible than ten day old cabbage.
It took Jessa’s dad a good five minutes for him to decide to open the door. He didn’t have Jessa behind him, which I guess was expected. If a group of boys sent my daughter to jail, I sure as shit wouldn’t want her having a damn thing to do with them.
“Can I help you?” he said, one hand on the doorframe, the other holding a baseball bat. Jessa’s mom peeked in from the background, not trusting herself to come closer. Chances were, if she did, she’d have grabbed the bat from Mr. Renshaw and started swinging it at us.
“We’d like to have a word with Jessa, if that’s okay with you,” Chase said, stepping forward.
Mr. Renshaw pursed his lips and shook his head. “It’s one thing to play the games you play with kids. It’s another thing to try to run a goddamn adult for a fool.”
I shook my head. What the hell was he going on about?
“You have some nerve showing up here, you really do?”
“Mr. Renshaw, what happened…with the car…It was all a misunderstanding,” Chase continued. “Can we just please have a word with her.”
He tightened his grip on the bat and stepped forward. “What kind of sick fucking game are you playing,” he grunted.
“We just wanna talk, that’s it,” I said.
“Aren’t you supposed to be close to dead?” he choked out. “I swear to fucking God, you better have my daughter here within the hour, or else-”
We were missing. Clearly, we were missing something. I just couldn’t put my damn finger on what that ‘something’ was.
“Getting your father in on your sick fucking games. This town needs to light every last one of you Starks on fire, I’ll tell you that much.”
“What do you mean we’re getting our father in on our games?” This time, it was Stone who asked the question.
He clenched his teeth and spun around, marking the end of the conversation. My heart thundered in my chest. I shot a hand out and grabbed his wrist, spinning him around to face me. Wrong move. Wrong fucking move. Without a hitch, Mr. Renshaw threw his fist against my nose. I heard it crack, but despite the pain that shot through me, despite the stars that twinkled behind my eyes, I knew it wasn’t broken. Needless to say, my grip on him loosened.
Mr. Renshaw rubbed at his fist. Then held his hand back to warn his
wife not to come closer. She steadied her feet behind him, coming to a halt.
“We’ve never been anything but respectful to your family, she said. What you’re doing to Jessa, it isn’t fair.”
“Which is exactly why we’re here,” I said.
She shook her head. “You’re here to play games, Sven,” she said, distinguishing me from my brothers without a hitch. “Your father called to say that you’d overdosed. Jessa went running like a fool. Because that’s all she was when it came to the lot of you. A fool who couldn’t see past the way her heart lit up whenever she was around you guys. So no, Jessa is not here. But she needs to be here. She needs to be out of your trap. And honestly, it really is a shame. Not only what you’re doing to her, but the fact that you show up here, trying to drag us into one of your games.”
The words felt like they were being spoken into a barrel. They echoed and thundered in my brain, crashing into all of my senses like a hoard of beasts.
He took her. He fucking took her.
“You tell my daughter to get the fuck home right this minute,” Mr. Renshaw barked before turning his back to us and slamming the door in our faces.
The three of us practically sprinted away from the door, our hearts in our throats as we locked ourselves inside the vehicle. Chase hit reverse and sent the car sailing back, bumping over two massive, black trashcans before speeding forward.
“You said the cops are at the house, right?” Stone asked in that way people do when they’re calculating risks.
Chase didn’t look as bothered by this whole mess. If anything, dad had managed to set himself up just in time for the cop’s arrival. Somehow, I didn’t feel very convinced by that. Something wasn’t sitting well with me at all. I punched Jessa’s number into my phone, my heart pounding fast and hard as it rang and rang and rang before finally landing on her standard voicemail.
