What he found now when he focused was a dark, deep, ugly mess of pain, guilt, and rage. A lot of rage. Even for Quinn, and Quinn was almost always pissed about something. “What’s going on, Quinn?”
“I fucked up, man. Fucked it up all to hell and back.” Quinn was quiet for a moment and when he spoke again, his voice throbbed, shook. “Too late to fix it now.”
A sliver of unease settled inside Luke’s heart, blooming into a ugly, raw mess. Shoving off the bed, he started to pace. He rubbed at the knotted muscles in his neck as he said, “There’s no such thing as too late, Quinn.”
Quinn laughed. The ugly, bitter sound hit Luke like acid, burning, eating away at him. “Ever the optimist, aren’t you? With your nice, normal job; nice, normal woman; nice, normal life; it’s easy for you to think there’s no such thing as too late.” Quinn was quiet for a second, and then in an ugly, hard voice, he asked, “How’s that nice, normal woman doing, Luke? Your nice, normal life treating you well?”
“Go fuck yourself, Quinn. You calling to give me shit or because you wanted to talk?”
“Talk.” Quinn gave a bark of laughter. “I don’t call you to talk, do I? I call you because you’re feeling sorry for yourself, or because somebody got you to thinking you needed to worry about that head case brother of yours. Hell, you didn’t even want me around your pretty lady for Christmas. Nobody—” Abruptly, his voice ended.
The line went dead.
But Luke heard the words loud and clear: Nobody really wants me around.
As far as Quinn was concerned, that was a fact of his life. Their mother sure as hell hadn’t wanted Quinn. She told him, often enough, that she should have left him in the hospital. Although Luke hadn’t met the woman, he knew she probably regretted the impulse that had made her grab one of her newborn sons and disappear.
She hadn’t wanted a son; she’d wanted to make her husband suffer. Then she passed that on to Quinn, and by the time she died, Quinn was already convinced of his complete lack of worth.
Those first few months had been awful, the two of them trying to adjust to each other. Hell, having this other half you didn’t know existed dropped into your life. It had upended Luke’s happy, care-free existence, but he hadn’t cared. He’d loved his brother from the first. It had been like pieces of some unknown puzzle had fallen into place.
But loving his brother meant hurting for him, because Quinn had been a mess of pain, anger, and grief. Over time, a lot of it had lessened, the pain fading away, the grief dying once he figured out there was really nothing worth grieving about, and the anger becoming a bitter cynicism that had made the boy seem much older than he truly was.
Nobody really wants me around. It wasn’t something that Quinn had ever given voice to, but Luke had heard those unspoken words loud and clear. He’d thought he’d managed to convince his twin that wasn’t true.
Obviously not. He’d made the right choice—he knew he had—not dropping Quinn on Devon at Christmas. She’d been too fragile, and Quinn was an abrasive bastard by nature. Luke loved him, but he was under no illusions as to how Quinn came off to people in general.
Devon hadn’t needed that.
But Quinn hadn’t deserved to be shut off from his family at Christmas, either. Even if he hadn’t ever seemed to give a damn one way or the other. Luke had called Quinn on Christmas, but a damn phone call didn’t mean much.
The two most important relationships in his life were seriously fucked up. He’d failed Devon, and he’d failed his brother.
“Fuck this shit.” He punched in Quinn’s number and held the phone to his ear. Yeah, he’d screwed up with Devon; he’d failed her. He couldn’t fix that, and he couldn’t undo the damage he’d done to Quinn over the past few weeks, either. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t reach out to his brother.
Quinn didn’t answer the first time. Or the second. On the third call, Quinn finally answered, his voice a rough, hoarse growl. “Just lemme alone, Luke. I’m all fucked up right now, and you clucking over me ain’t going to do a damn thing to help me.”
“If you didn’t need to talk to me, why did you call?” Luke demanded.
“Beats the hell out of me. Look, I’m drunk, I’m exhausted, I’m pissed—but none of that is really anything new.”
There was a pause, and through the connection, Luke could hear his brother swallowing. “Since when did you start drinking?”
“Since I stopped being able to sleep at night,” Quinn replied. “You should give it a shot, man. Maybe then you wouldn’t keep me awake at night feeling sorry for yourself over whatever petty shit is wrong in your life.”
Luke narrowed his eyes. Petty shit? He lost the one woman he’d ever loved, and it was petty? “Kiss my ass, Quinn. You ain’t the only man in the world with problems.”
“Yeah, well, what in the fuck kind of problems can you have? You got a woman who loves you, you got a nice, normal job, and all sorts of nice, normal people in your life that respect the hell out of you.”
“You’re talking out of your ass, Quinn. Wake up, sober up, whatever in the hell you need to do, but I got plenty of problems of my own, and they are all centered around that woman.”
Quinn snorted. “Uh-oh, trouble in paradise?”
“You know what? I don’t need this shit right now. When you decide you want to talk instead of just rip into me, call. Until then, you keep crying into that bottle.” Swearing, he disconnected and lowered the phone, staring at it.
For the longest time, he didn’t move. When he did, it was to settle his back against the wall and slide down to the floor, staring off into the darkness as he wondered who else he was going to fail in the near future.
At this point, it seemed like he was batting a thousand.
FIFTEEN
HER head hurt.
Devon climbed out of bed on shaky legs. It had been a bad night, the worst yet, and the nightmares had seemed to drag on forever.
She shivered as the fading memories danced through her mind. An evil, ugly whisper in her ear as cruel hands touched her body, something over her face cutting off her air.
“I could kill you without leaving a mark.
“You think getting raped is bad? You have no idea the things I can do to you.
“Go ahead . . . try to scream . . . Nobody would hear you anyway. And if they did, nobody would care.”
It lasted forever. No wonder she felt like shit, after a night like that. No woman could come through that and feel anything close to human.
But as her legs continued to wobble and quake under her, she wondered if maybe this wasn’t more than a case of a bad, no . . . make that a horrible night. She stumbled into the bathroom and hit the light, flinching at the brightness. It made her eyes hurt, added to the agony inside her skull.
Out of self-defense, she reached out and smacked the light off. In the dim bathroom, lit only by the early morning light filtering through the curtains, she could see that her face was far too pale and her eyes were glassy.
Shit.
This was so not what she needed. Getting sick on top of everything else.
The only comfort was that it was Saturday. At least she wouldn’t have to call in sick to work, not that she’d been much good there the past few days. She shuffled and stumbled and wobbled her way back to bed, falling facedown lengthways across it. Her body didn’t even feel like her own, her arms and legs clumsy, slow to respond to her commands. Needles of pain jabbed her skull from the inside, threatening to split her head wide-open.
Too weak, too tired to move around, she just reached out a hand and tried to snag the blanket at the foot of the bed. Her hand touched something soft and fluffy, but as she dragged it up over her, she knew it wasn’t the blanket. It smelled of Luke. A thick fleece robe. Every day she’d stopped and reached out, touched her hands to it and wondered if she shouldn’t put it up.
When he’d left a message on her machine a few days ago about picking up his stuff, she hadn’t been able to return it; she
didn’t want him coming to get his things. But she hadn’t been able to call him and tell him not to come, either.
Just the sound of his voice on the machine had been enough to turn her inside out.
She didn’t want him taking his stuff. Made it seem too final, and she didn’t want this to be final. So when she’d gotten home Tuesday and seen one of his jackets still hanging on the hook by the door, a rush of relief had left her weak-kneed. And she’d welcomed the message on the machine, too, listening to it a good five times, feeling a little more lame each time.
“I’ll just wait until I hear from you before I do anything, okay?”
Okay? She was pretty sure nothing was okay. Nothing ever would be . . . unless it included him calling her, showing up at the door, and insisting that this was a mistake.
A mistake—yeah. She’d been slowly coming to that conclusion for the past week. She wanted him back. Right here with her, right now.
Get up. Call him. She started to do just that, but her throbbing head, the weakness in her arms and legs, kept her from doing it. “Later. Get some sleep. I’ll call him later.”
Tears burned her eyes, and she buried her face in the robe, whimpering as his scent surrounded her.
“I miss you.”
IT was a low, ugly laugh, the first sound she heard when she opened her eyes. She could see nothing, could hear nothing beyond that laugh.
But she could feel. The soft, warm weight that had covered her as she slept was gone. Cool air drifted across her flesh, and Devon realized she was naked. She tried to lift her arms, but she couldn’t move.
She wasn’t restrained, at least she didn’t think she was, but she couldn’t move her arms, her legs—she couldn’t even lift her head to look down at her body.
Not that she would see a damn thing in the thick, oppressive blackness.
A hand touched her, and she couldn’t so much as cringe away.
Devon opened her mouth to scream, but all she managed was a pitiful whimper. The sound was obscenely loud, all but echoing back at her, bouncing off the walls.
“Cry, little girl,” a voice whispered—that voice. Deep inside, she sensed there was something different this time about this dream. Totally paralyzed, unable to move—that hadn’t happened before.
This felt too real, but then, these crazy dreams had always seemed too real, dreams that terrified her even as they faded away with the morning light.
“Cry all you want; nobody will hear you . . . Nobody will believe you.”
Oh, dear God. That voice. Hated, nearly forgotten memories rushed back at her. All the time Boyd Chancellor had touched her, how he’d laughed when she cried the first times and said that she’d tell.
“Nobody will believe you.” The voice came again, and this time, she recognized it. It was Boyd’s voice.
“De—” She tried to say, You’re dead, but she couldn’t speak, either. It was like whatever held her body immobile had also paralyzed her vocal cords, and those pathetic little whimpers were all she could manage.
But he knew. Somehow he knew. “Dead. Am I dead?” He laughed, and laughed, and laughed—and all the while Devon lay there unable to move, cold and terrified.
Abruptly the laughter stopped. “Am I dead, too?” But the voice was different this time. This time, it was Curtis Wilder, and when he touched her, it was to put his hands around her throat and squeeze. “I spent too much time playing with you. Should have just given you the fuck a cold-ass bitch like you needs—and then snapped your skinny neck. You’re a sad, pathetic waste of space, bitch. Just like that whiny kid of mine. Useless.”
He squeezed, squeezed . . . Devon gasped for air, still unable to move. But finally, she managed to get her tongue moving. She rasped out, “What do you want?”
“I want you—dead. That’s where you belong.”
The hands fell away, and a dim light appeared from nowhere. She screamed when she saw the face only inches above hers. It wasn’t Boyd; it wasn’t Curtis; it was Luke.
Luke, with cold, hard eyes and a mouth curled in disgust as he stared down at her. “Cold-ass bitch. You just going to lie there and whimper? Or do something? Scream for help. Go ahead.” He dipped his head a little closer and licked her cheek. Then he pressed his lips to hers, a macabre mockery of a lover’s kiss. “Scream—and if anybody cares enough to do anything, what are you going to say?”
A strange smile, one that didn’t look like Luke’s smile at all, curled his lips, and he added, “Nobody will believe you.”
His face changed. Once more, it was Curtis. “Nobody will give a damn.”
And then Boyd. “You’re worthless. You were then. You are now.”
“Leave me the hell alone!” she tried to scream. But the words lodged in her throat, choked her.
He laughed and grabbed something from beside her. The robe. That warm, soft weight she had curled up with as she drifted back to sleep. He pressed it down on her face, blocking out her sight, and pushing.
Through the thick fabric, she could barely suck air into her lungs. She struggled, using up what little air she had. Her strength dwindled, and her chest felt like it was going to explode, desperate to breathe—and then, everything stopped. In her sleep, she moaned and rolled over, still holding the robe clutched in her arms.
As she settled into a deeper sleep, tears slid out from under her lids to soak the blankets beneath her.
SIXTEEN
AFTER a restless night, Luke rolled out of bed and spent a good ten minutes in the shower trying to clear his head. Lack of sleep had his thoughts muddled, but as tired as he was, as much as he needed to just lie back down and try to get more rest, he couldn’t.
He was edgy. Uneasy, although he couldn’t explain why, just that it had to do with Quinn. But whether it was from the weird call last night and Quinn’s unexpected, unexplained anger or something more, he couldn’t tell.
It was almost a relief to have his brother weighing so heavily on his mind; kept him from brooding over Devon. Hell, maybe that was why he’d fixated on Quinn; maybe all this restless, edgy energy was brought on in some unconscious attempt to think about something, anything, other than Devon.
Maybe. And Luke didn’t give a damn, either.
Focusing on his brother, he thought, I need to talk to you. It usually worked. Neither Luke nor Quinn would consider it any kind of psychic gift, their ability to sense each other. Luke suspected it came from their being formed from one single embryo, two halves of a whole.
From the time they’d first met when they were eleven, they could do this, and Luke suspected even before that. There had been times when he awoke from nightmares, times he stopped doing whatever he’d been doing, absolutely certain, absolutely convinced somebody had called him. Without saying a word, or name, but looking for him nonetheless.
Quinn hadn’t ever totally ignored Luke, but he was doing it now. Whatever he was doing, wherever he was, Luke couldn’t pick up on anything more than Quinn’s general state of mind, which was pissed.
When Quinn failed to contact him, Luke spent most of Saturday morning trying to get hold of his brother. His calls were ignored, rolling over to Quinn’s voice mail. The e-mails and instant messages went unanswered.
A few minutes on the phone ascertained neither their dad nor Jeb had talked to Quinn for a couple of weeks. Quinn may as well have dropped off the face of the earth. After spending an hour wearing a path on the gleaming hardwood floors, Luke found himself standing at the counter in the kitchen and staring at the phone.
Something was wrong. It wasn’t just his imagination, and it wasn’t some fucked-up distraction conjured up by his bruised, battered heart.
Something was wrong, and it could only be connected to Quinn. Luke wasn’t attuned this way to anybody else but his twin.
Everything had just gone straight to hell. Devon, there wasn’t much he could do about that. She had to decide whether she wanted him back in her life, or maybe she already had, and this I need some space line was
just that. A line. A gentle send-off.
But whatever was going on with Quinn, Luke was going to find out. Find out, and fix it. He wasn’t going to fail somebody he loved again.
He thought back to Jeb’s weird call back in November, the bad vibes he’d picked up on, and his own internal alarm that things were seriously messed up with Quinn. But then he’d talked to Quinn, and Quinn had seemed fine—or at least he’d seemed his normal self: edgy and caustic. Nothing that had added to Luke’s mental alarms. When he’d called him at Christmas, Quinn had seemed level, steady.
Then the call from last night . . .
“I fucked up, man. Fucked it up all to hell and back. Too late to fix it now.”
What exactly had Quinn fucked up?
Voices started to whisper inside his mind, words of possible warning that he’d heard, then dismissed.
Quinn’s own caustic voice: “That head case brother of yours.”
Elsa, the woman whom both Luke and Quinn had spent four days with, living out lurid sexual fantasies, letting her touch and the endless flow of liquor dull the ugly memories from an op that had taken their unit straight through hell. Elsa had come to him, warned him: “Watch your brother—he’s got a darkness inside him. Something close to cruelty.”
Jeb: “Everything okay with him? He ain’t answering when I call him. He ever tell you why he got out?”
No. Quinn hadn’t ever told him, and for some reason, in that moment, Luke realized he needed to know. Had to know. His mind kept churning as he reached out and grabbed the phone.
Luke had defended Quinn, like he had always had: “It got to all of us, Jeb. No way it couldn’t.”
Jeb’s calm, compassionate reply: “You know that ain’t what I’m talking about, Luke.”
Luke was certain—or at least he had been—that everybody was getting worked up just because Quinn had that effect on people. He unsettled them and didn’t give a damn. He had a mean streak in him, but not a cruel one. Luke had always been so certain of that, so convinced.
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