Linc played his fingers together, holding her gaze for a long moment before letting his eyes fall.
“ ‘Cause I’m not real sure…” She fingered the handle of the suitcase when she realized he wouldn’t answer, pressing her lips together as hot tears threatened to fill her eyes. She fought them back, sucking in a breath and meeting his eyes once more. “I’m not real sure what I’d do without you around here.”
After studying her face, and the tears building in her eyes, Linc took a deep breath. “Gage…”
Veda held her breath because—finally! A response!
Linc’s brows pulled. “I think he might be my—”
Veda’s cell phone rang in the pocket of her jeans, cutting Linc’s sentence off at the knees, filling the air with its pleasant jingle even though, at that moment, the interruption was anything but pleasant.
Veda jolted at the unwelcome invasion. “No, keep talking, Linc. Just let me… turn this damn thing off…” Veda cursed softly as she fumbled to get her phone out of the back pocket of her jeans, knowing any small distraction could kill the chatty mood Linc had suddenly found himself in. “I’ll just turn it off, Linc. Keep… Talking…” But just as Veda was about to turn her phone off, she got a look at the name on the screen, and her mouth fell open. “Shit.”
Linc acquiesced. “Answer it.”
She gave him an apologetic look. “Linc, I’m so sorry, it’s Coco.”
He shrugged. “Answer it.”
Veda did answer, putting the phone to her ear while holding out a finger at Linc. “To be continued. Hold that thought.”
He smirked at her sheer desperation to retain the conversation, shaking his head and looking toward the sun shining into the living room window.
“Coco,” Veda breathed into the phone. Her eyes danced back and forth as Coco spoke in rapid fire on the other end of the line, growing wider with each word she said. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down. Say that again. What do you mean he’s stabilizing? That’s not possible.” I gave him a thousand times the recommended dosage! When Coco’s voice rose on the other end of the line, so quickly Veda began wondering if she was speaking another language, she jumped in. “Okay, calm down, love. He’s not going to wake up. And even if he does, he’ll be a vegetable. He couldn’t say your name even if he wanted to. He won’t even know where his own nose is, okay?”
Veda crossed one arm over her body as Coco continued to rant, nodding, listening, and offering words of encouragement for as long as she needed to. She waited until Coco had calmed down. Until she finally believed Veda’s promise that, even if Todd did wake up, he would be in no condition to name her and put her in prison for life. Only when Veda was sure Coco had calmed down did she end the call, staring down at the phone long after she’d hung up.
A moment later, she realized Linc was still sitting before her, calmly awaiting an explanation for the phone call he’d just overheard.
Veda held her arms out, voice hitching. “Todd’s stabilizing.” She let her arms collapse back to her sides in defeat. “I swear to God that bastard is like a roach. No matter how many times you clobber him with the heel of your shoe, he just keeps coming back to life, playing dead until you turn your back so he can scurry under your stove and procreate. Not even the apocalypse could take that fucking roach down.” She drew in a deep breath, eyes falling to the floor as she trapped her bottom lip under her teeth.
She had half a mind to go down to that hospital and give Todd three thousand times the recommended dosage of opioids. Not even a roach like him would survive that. But she knew, after the “accident” that had gotten her thrown off the hospital floor for the rest of the week, it was too risky. No one in the hospital would let her near Todd again. And even if she did manage to sneak in long enough to kill the bastard for good, it would look too suspicious. Too obvious that she wanted him dead. That the first “accident” hadn’t been an accident at all, but a decision. A decision that—with the kind of money and power Todd had behind him—would have her under arrest before the day was out.
“Is there a reason he shouldn’t be stabilizing?”
Veda gasped and reclaimed Linc’s eyes. Releasing her bottom lip—which she’d been in the process of gnawing within an inch of its life before Linc had spoken and reminded her he was still in the room—she sputtered.
Linc blinked slowly up at her. “What have you done?”
She continued stammering, noting that Jake had asked her that very same question, with the same judgmental undertone, the day she’d poisoned Todd.
“Nothing,” she lied.
Linc raised his eyebrows.
She huffed. “Not so much fun, is it? Having your questions dismissed when the person asking is just concerned about you. Doesn’t feel so good, does it?”
“You’re so vengeful. How have I never noticed it until now?”
She rolled her eyes. “I guess you’re seeing me in a whole new light.”
“Understatement of the year.”
She played her phone between her fingers. “The new way you see me… is it… bad? Do you look at me and think terrible things?”
This time, he didn’t dodge her question, even as the frown between his brows deepened. “No, Veda.”
“You’re not disgusted by the things I’ve done?”
“No.”
Her eyes fell. A moment later, however, his voice rang in, causing her to look back up with a gasp. It was the first time that morning that he’d picked up a conversation she’d allowed to fall away.
“When I let you go in the O’Dair guest house, I did it because…” He ran a hand down his face. “Because I’d put my mother in your place. I could see her in your shoes. I could see her… on her knees on the other side of that plastic. Shaking like a leaf. Hands raised high with a gun pointed at her head. I look at you now, and I see her. So, no, Veda. I don’t look at you differently. I’m not disgusted by you. I’m disgusted by them.”
One of the tears that had been bubbling up in her eyes finally spilled down her cheek as she shook her head rapidly. “I wasn’t always like this, you know.”
“I know.”
“Before the attack… I was… soft, and happy, and kind, and… free.”
“You’re still all those things.”
She sniffled with another shake of her head. “No. It changed me forever. They changed me. He changed me. Number ten… he was… the most savage out of all of them. I always believed he was the one that really drove it home. With ten, it was like I could feel all those parts of me, all those good parts, slowly slipping away. Every time he slammed my neck down on that railing…”
Linc’s frown moved to a cringe.
Her voice lowered. “Every time he ripped my hair straight from the root. Every time he ignored me when I told him I…” Her words trailed off, eyes shifting away from Linc and moving to a faraway place as she finished, absently. “When I told him I couldn’t breathe…” Her eyes shot back to Linc, stunned, a grimace crossing her face as her voice grew faint. “How did he know that…?”
He shook his head softly, his eyebrows nearly as taut as hers. “How did who know what?”
Her wide eyes began to dance back and forth as her mind raced like a scanner.
“You want your baby safe… more. Right?” Jake asked, gently, searching Veda’s gaze, hand still over her stomach. “‘Cause you have to mean it. You have to mean it from your soul. You have to mean it even when you think about everything ten did to you. Every time he slammed your neck down onto that white stone railing. Every time he ripped your hair straight from your skull. You have to mean it, Veda, every time you think about the way he ignored you… every single time you told him you couldn’t breathe…”
“I never told him that,” Veda breathed as she thought back on her and Jake’s conversation in the pharmacy, just days earlier. Her heartbeat picked up so quickly she felt like it had leaped into her throat and built a wall, refusing to let another breath of air pass through. But still, she
managed to gasp, her horrified eyes flying to Linc. “I need to see that footage.”
Linc cocked his head back, clearly taken aback at the sudden shift she’d made in the roller coaster that was her mind. And, in an instant, the two of them switched places. In an instant, it was Linc looking at her with concern clouding his eyes. It was Linc fighting to bite back the invasive questions on the tip of his tongue—questions that were still present as day in his eyes. It was Linc who appeared worried, confused, and at his deepest depths, curious, as to what had caused her sudden about face.
But, unlike Veda, Linc had the self-control to bite his tongue. He didn’t antagonize her about her “addiction”—her addiction to the chaos. An addiction that, just days earlier, she’d vowed she was ready to fight. He didn’t antagonize her for asking to see the footage from that party. The very footage she’d sworn up and down she didn’t want—or need—to see.
Something in her eyes moved him off that couch without question.
“My laptop’s in the bedroom…” He pointed to the door of his room as he stood, his eyes so firmly locked to hers that he wasn’t watching where he was going as he moved, causing him to jam his knee into the table beside the couch. If it caused him pain, he didn’t show it. Didn’t even break his stride as he pointed to the bedroom door again. “I’ll go and get it.”
Veda watched him hurry into his room, her heart still in her throat, the flutter in her stomach intensifying every second, making her feel like it was ripping itself to shreds. If she was an addict, and that video footage was a hit, then she was seconds from enduring one hell of a relapse.
20
“I’ll never forget the day I played this video at the precinct, telling my co-workers the woman in the footage was The Chopper. The way they all laughed their asses off,” Linc grumbled, moments later, leaning on the gleaming black surface of his kitchen island while tapping away on the laptop he’d just sat on top of it. “What I wouldn’t give to see the looks on their faces now.”
Next to him, Veda barely heard the words Linc said. Barely felt the sparse hairs of his arms tickling hers from where she stood next to him at the counter. Her soul was too consumed with panic, wide eyes locked to the screen of his computer, gripping the edge of the counter so hard she knew something was close to crushing—either the granite or her bones. Her breathing escalated as Linc typed his passcode to wake the computer from sleep. The desktop appeared, scattered with multicolored folders with names written in uppercase letters. Most of them involved cases he’d been working when he’d still had his job. With a quick swivel of his pointer finger on the trackpad, he bypassed most of the folders, hovering the arrow over a bright red folder titled CHOPPER.
He double-clicked to open the folder and then double-clicked again on a QuickTime video titled PARTY. The video opened and filled the screen. It showcased a grainy black-and-white freeze-framed picture of the master bedroom in the Blackwater estate. The timestamp in the top corner showed the video was taken ten years earlier.
Linc navigated the cursor to the “play” button.
Veda hadn’t realized her heart was beating a mile a minute until the mouse froze on the screen, bringing it to a grinding halt. She snapped her eyes to the left and up at Linc, her chest rising and falling rapidly.
He raised his eyebrows when their gazes locked. “You sure about this?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Play the video.”
Linc searched her eyes, licked his lips, and then looked back at the screen with a soft shake of his head, eyebrows still high. “A’ight,” he whispered as if releasing himself from the guilt. Freeing himself from the responsibility of whatever agony this video might cause her. He’d given her an out, and she’d refused it.
Veda’s nostrils flared as Linc pressed play and the grainy video commenced. The boulder at the pit of her stomach grew heavier for every second that elapsed, waiting for the moment she knew was coming. It came quickly, and she gasped when Todd Lockwood appeared on the screen—with her in his arms.
At her gasp, Linc paused the video, shooting her a look with his teeth grinding. “Why are you doing this, Veda? Why are you doing this to yourself?”
She couldn’t pull her tear-filled eyes from the screen, speaking through her own clenched teeth. “Play. The. Video.”
A long silence passed with Linc’s eyes burning into her cheek, and she wondered if he was going to start an argument, but instead, his heavy sigh fell in, and he slammed his finger back on the trackpad, resuming the video.
Veda drew in a breath as it continued playing. Lip curling and nose wrinkled at the sight of her eighteen-year-old self, clearly inebriated. Stumbling in her tiny white dress and high-heels. Unable to hold her drink. She couldn’t see her face in the video, but she didn’t need to. The memories were as fresh in her mind as if it had all happened yesterday. She could hear the words being said through the screen as if watching the same movie for the millionth time. A movie she loved so much that she’d memorized all the words. Except, in this case, it was a movie she hated that was burned into her brain. Impossible to forget no matter how hard she tried.
“I want to go back downstairs.” Veda tried to pry her arm from Todd’s painfully tight grip, wondering when the room had started spinning. Her vision blurred, her drink dropped from her hand, and she only distantly heard it crash to the floor as she clapped a hand over her burning forehead, slurring, “I don’t want to go in there.”
Her breathing filled the kitchen, louder every second, as she watched Todd pull her into the room. The first tear fell when Eugene Masterson appeared shortly after she and Todd disappeared. Followed by Jax Murphy. Liam O’Dair. Brock Nailer. Every animal who had entered that room, all ten of them—five of whom had yet to endure her wrath—came and went in the video.
She thought she’d let it go. The hurt, the anger, and the debilitating need for vengeance. She’d thought she was on the path to healing.
Until that very moment.
Until she laid eyes on every monster who’d destroyed her, ten years earlier, one after the other, as they entered that bedroom.
Until she laid eyes on the black-and-white jigsaw puzzle sneakers that stepped into the frame last.
She gasped. “Pause it.”
Linc jolted, then did as he was told without argument, staring at the paused screen for a long moment before sneaking a look at her from the corners of his eyes.
But Veda didn’t look back, the tears bubbling up in her eyes, finally jumping over the rim of her eyelashes and spilling down her cheek.
“What is it, Veda?” Linc breathed.
She dug her nails into the counter, even her toes curled inside her black flats, eyebrows lowering as a sour taste stung her tongue. “Can you zoom?”
Linc pressed his thumb and forefinger together on the trackpad and spread them apart, causing the black-and-white picture to zoom in—closing in on the face of the man wearing jigsaw puzzle sneakers.
There he was, number ten, back turned to the camera, face invisible.
Veda’s cringed deepened.
“That hair kills me every time,” Linc said. “Looks like a—”
“Mohawk,” Veda breathed.
“Your hair is fucking stupid,” Dr. Wong spat before giving a sharp nod and disappearing down the hospital hall.
Jake laughed softly with Veda as he pushed his blond bang, cut into an asymmetrical fringe, away from his eyes. “She thinks my hair is stupid now, she should’ve seen the lime green mohawk I rocked when I was a kid.”
The hair on the back of Veda’s neck stood on end, her skin crawling like it was coming disconnected from her bones, piece by piece. Like a million insects had taken up residence underneath it and were eating away at her from the inside out.
Another tear raced down her jaw, her cheeks puffing, every breath coming shorter until she was sure they’d stop coming altogether. One chill after another raced down her spine, and her body rolled with each one as she heaved against the nausea g
urgling in her stomach. When Linc spoke her name, she barely heard it. When he placed a soft hand on her arm, she barely felt it. When he took both her arms and forced her to face him, she didn’t even notice, her head still craned toward the screen, glistening eyes locked to the grainy picture, heart and mind still in another galaxy.
“I’m sick that Gage fired you, Jake. I’m sick to my fucking stomach, and not just because there’s a kid rolling around inside it, reaping havoc.”
“Don’t worry about me. It feels really gross right now, but this might be a blessing in disguise. Like that time I sampled vagina, and realized I’d hate it for life.”
Veda jolted at the memory of Jake saying those words to her on the phone, months earlier, when Gage had been on a firing spree at the hospital. During a time that she’d been convinced Gage was her worst enemy. That Gage was the heartless bastard, who’d assaulted her ten years earlier. That Gage was her number ten.
“Veda!”
This time, she faintly heard Linc scream her name—his pleas for her to snap out of whatever world she had devolved into. She even faintly felt the soft shake he gave her as the grip he had on her arms tightened. She felt him. She heard him. But not completely—her mind still in another place. Too far for Linc to reach her. A place she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to escape again.
Veda eyed Jake. “Why have I never met your folks?”
Jake eyed her too. “I’m sure you’ll meet them one day.”
Veda drew in a sharp breath, her tear-filled eyes zooming to Linc as she filled her neglected lungs with the air they’d been vying for since the moment he’d pressed play.
“I need you to take me somewhere,” she said to him, her eyes searching his face.
Still holding both her arms in his hands, his eyebrows pinched, confusion eating his face alive, Linc shook his head softly, whispering, “Anywhere.”
21
Veda stared at the door she had yet to knock on. A door she was terrified to knock on. Terrified that the people on the other side would confirm her worst fears. Fears that had been working overtime to bring her to her knees. She was terrified the people on the other side of that door would effectively kill the only thing keeping her going at that moment.
Rouse (Revenge Book 7) Page 15
