Better (Stark Ink Book 2)

by Dahlia West

  Dalton hadn’t gone to college, this was true, but he did not consider himself a stupid man by any means. He’d made choices based on what was best for everyone around him, or at least he used to. So while he didn’t have a degree, he could have earned one. That said, it took several moments to piece together exactly what he was looking at. Once the picture was fully formed in his mind, he felt a rage like no other rising inside him. Instead of speaking, he reached into his front pocket and pressed the coin between his thumb and fingers. Thankfully it wouldn’t break or bend since Dalton needed something solid to ground him right about now.

  God grant me serenity, he thought to himself.

  After a long, incredibly tense moment, he said, “I didn’t know you were in town.”

  Zoey worried her bottom lip nervously. “I just got here tonight,” she finally said quietly.

  He looked down into the basket again. “Guess you left in a hurry.”

  She shivered under the weight of his gaze, even though she was wearing a heavy wool coat and they were all indoors. Dalton carefully took the basket from her and handed it to Ava. Then he reached into his back pocket and dug out his wallet. He counted out several bills and handed them to his sister. “Go pay for this,” he ordered. Ava nodded and scurried off.

  Zoey watched her go and bit her bottom lip again. "Dalton-"

  "You want to talk about this here?"

  “No,” she whispered.

  His tone had been sharper than he meant for it to be with his anger threatening to boil over at any moment. He took a few seconds to calm down before holding out his hand. She hesitated. "I'm not him," he reminded her.

  It was tempting to say, "I'm not me, either." He'd changed and he wanted her to know it. In fact, he’d come here with the sole intention of telling her this, but seeing her now made it obvious that it wasn't the right time. Making anything about him right now would be a douche move. He gently took her arm and ushered her past Sienna and toward the front doors. Once in the parking lot, he walked her toward his truck and the street lamp that was next to it. In the dim light, he stopped, turned, and raised his hands. Zoey didn’t fight him as he took off her sunglasses.

  The bruise was pretty dark and Dalton judged it to be a few hours old.

  “Where is he?”

  “Home. I... left.”

  “You left,” he repeated.

  She didn’t elaborate.

  “And you didn't bring anything with you,” he surmised.

  She shook her head. “There wasn’t time. I was going home. To mom and dad's, but...” She gestured to her face as a tear slid down her cheek. She shivered again and wrapped her arms around herself.

  "I'll take you to my place," he told her.

  “Dalton-”

  "Just until you calm down, maybe fix your face." Dalton knew he'd like to fix the asshole's face, but there was a time for that as well and it wasn’t right now. Zoey needed him more, but she hesitated at his offer.

  He sighed. "You don't have anywhere else to go, Z."

  D and Z. Adam used to tease them all the time about it. For a while Dalton pretended to be irritated by it, but he’d grown to like it. Hearing it now, she took a deep breath and seemed to relax just a little. She finally nodded and he surprised her by reaching for the door handle of the truck. He helped her climb inside.

  "Give me your keys. Ava can drive your car to my place. Which one’s yours?"

  She pointed out a Mercedes near the door and handed him the keys. He shut the passenger door, sealing her off from the cold. Ava and Sienna came out with a plastic sack and his change. He took the makeup, but left the cash with Ava.

  "Take her car," he said passing her the keys. "Fill it up and bring it to my place, okay?"

  Ava nodded.

  "I thought I saw her in the parking lot," Ava told him. "We came in to say hi." She glanced at Zoey sitting in his front seat. "What happened?"

  "I don't know, but I intend to find out. Take your time filling the tank, okay? And have Sienna take Pop’s car."

  Ava nodded and he knew she understood. "Okay."

  He watched Ava get into Zoey’s Mercedes and waited for her to start the car before he turned back to the truck. As he rounded the front and headed for the driver’s seat, he fumed silently. He’d been wrong, he thought bitterly. There was another, even worse way, to drive a woman out of your life, though Dalton couldn’t understand it at all. How could a man raise a hand to his woman? To Zoey? It was unbelievable.

  As he reached for the door handle to his own truck, he knew two things for certain: that he would find out exactly how something like this had happened and that he would do whatever it took to make sure it never happened again. He slammed the door, harder than he meant to, causing Zoey to jump.

  “Sorry,” he muttered as he stuck the key in the ignition, but only because it was a thing you said. Zoey wasn’t afraid of him. She’d never had to be. He wanted to reach out and touch her now, to comfort her, but he couldn’t and that only made him more pissed off. With his left hand he patted the pocket of his jeans and reassured himself with the coin. He needed it all right now: Serenity, Wisdom, and Courage. Everything but Acceptance. This, he would never accept.

  Chapter Six

  As they drove, Zoey looked around, confused. “What happened to the Ford?” she asked.

  “I don’t have it anymore,” he replied curtly. He really didn’t want to get into how Adam had been forced to sell it over the summer to pay for Dalton’s stint in rehab and Pop’s day program at the nursing home. Once Dalton had gotten out, he’d bought the Toyota outright because it was cheap and he could pay cash for it. Every dime he made now went to his modest rent and to pay back Adam who’d been forced to sell his own Harley, too, when a marker had been called in on a debt Dalton owed. Dalton had borrowed a considerable sum of money from some bad people, the kind of people you didn’t want to piss off by not being able to pay it back in a timely manner.

  But Dalton had pissed them off. He’d been too far inside the bottle to realize he hadn’t made a payment in a while, and although he’d technically still had some time to pay back the loan, every day that he spent drunk on his couch and not at work saw the possibility of getting clear of it slip further and further away. They’d come looking for the cash, but they’d gone to the wrong address. They’d roughed up Adam instead, tore up Stark Ink, and threatened to do worse if they didn’t get their money. Dalton had a long list of people that he’d screwed over when he was screwed up, and Adam’s name was at the very top. Dalton was steadily working his way down it.

  Tonight he was starting a new list though, a shit list, and the only person on it was named Patrick Grant.

  “You sure he’s at home?” Dalton asked, glancing in the rear view just in case.

  Zoey nodded. “I’m sure.”

  Dalton gripped the steering wheel tightly. As fast as he’d driven to get to her, now he kept it slow and steady, for her sake. “What happened?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He sighed. God forbid that fucker had cheated and God help him if he had and then hit Zoey over it. Dalton thought he might actually kill the man. Even as he thought all of this, in the back of his mind he was totally aware how hypocritical it was to be so pissed off if Grant had stepped out on her. Either way, whatever had happened, they had to be done. Zoey wouldn’t stand for this. She might not have been capable enough to stop it from happening in the moment, but he knew she wouldn’t put up with this bullshit.

  “So,” he said cautiously out of concern for her, “does this mean the wedding’s off?”

  Zoey’s head turned and she stared at him.

  “What?” he asked. “Zoey, he hit you. You can’t stay with him. You can’t marry a guy who’d-”

  “We are married,” she said quietly.

  Dalton’s jaw dropped. He shook his head, unable to come up with anything to say.

  “We got married in June.”

  June. He would’ve been in that little
white room at that point, puking and shaking and asking God or the Devil (whoever would answer faster) to make it all stop. Mom had already been put in the ground. Zoey’d gotten married and he hadn’t even known it. Every day felt as though she had just left, he guessed because he hadn’t ever really moved on. When he thought back, he realized she’d been gone nearly a year. Ten months and twenty some odd days. He’d counted the days, weeks, and months of his sobriety meticulously, but had never done the same with their breakup, it had just… existed— past, present, and future all rolled into one.

  Zoey had been gone, was gone, and would be gone forever. Except she was here now, but for all the wrong reasons. Feeling overwhelmed, he decided to just focus on driving instead. He turned twice and waited for two lights in silence before he finally pulled into his own driveway. Zoey seemed nearly as distracted as he was. She suddenly looked up and out the window.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “My place. My new place. It’s closer to Pop’s house,” he replied. And I don’t have any memories of you making pancakes in the kitchen. He briefly wondered if he’d have to move again after this. Even one night with her under this roof would be tough on him, to tell the truth, especially since nothing was going the way he wanted it to.

  He unlocked the front door and let her inside. He turned on the lights revealing his (mostly) bare apartment. He had a couch and a television and a dining room table. The table he’d made— before the accident— and it was his favorite piece of furniture. He was building a coffee table in the garage with plans for an entertainment center to match, but it was slow going these days because it was just him, though, he didn’t mind.

  Zoey looked around, not saying anything. He’d tossed a lot of stuff in the move: an old chair that had seen better days, barstools he’d gotten on sale but had grown to dislike. He was down to just the bare essentials now, having decided it was better to build his own furniture, slowly and with care, than to keep wasting money on cheap particle board.

  “There’s a guest bathroom down the hall,” he told her. “First door on the right. After that’s the spare bedroom, if… if you want to stay.”

  Zoey didn’t move. She simply stood in his entryway looking tired. There were dark circles under both eyes that nearly matched the bruise.

  Dalton wasn’t sure exactly what to do in this situation, so he stuck with the obvious. “Do you want to call the police?”

  That seemed to jolt her back to him. “What? No!”

  “I think you need to. You need to file a report and-”

  “Dalton, no!”

  “I know an ex-cop,” he told her. “I can give him a call. It doesn’t have to be hard. He can-”

  “I can’t do that,” she insisted. “I don’t want that.”

  “What do you want, Zoey? What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I just don’t know how things got this bad.” Her voice broke at the end as her bottom lip began quivering. Dalton didn’t know how things had gotten this bad, either. Zoey was strong and sassy, not this withered, worn out woman before him.

  “Why don’t you stay?” he finally suggested. “Just for tonight. I have the extra room. You can get some sleep. Maybe things will look different in the morning. It’s late. You don’t want to deal with your parents right now. You look tired.”

  “I am tired.”

  “Alright,” he said, as though that settled it. “Take off your coat and I’ll make you some tea.” He still had her old teabags, unable to throw them out in the move. He hoped they didn’t go stale.

  She put her hands on the buttons of her coat, but they remained there, unmoving.

  “Zoey, it’s late. You’re tired. I’m not… nothing’s going to happen tonight. You’re safe here.”

  She looked up at him with caution in her eyes. Then, much to his relief, she finally nodded. Slowly her fingers worked the large buttons of her coat, but her bottom lip never stopped quaking. Dalton waited to take her coat and hang it up for her. Maybe she could go to the bathroom and pull herself together while he made her tea. She looked… brittle.

  The last button came undone and, ever so slowly, she opened her coat. She watched him carefully as she slid it down her arms. Dalton forgot that he was supposed to reach for it.

  “Oh, Zoey.”

  The quivering lower lip finally cracked. She burst into tears. Dalton had always hated it when she cried. It aroused every instinct he had to protect her and make whatever was bothering her go away. Despite their estrangement and the past that still haunted them both, he reached out and took her arm. He pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her. Her head rested against his chest and her hands gripped his hips, desperately holding on to him. Her heavy, rounded belly pressed against him.

  “Oh, Zoey.”

  Chapter Seven

  If Dalton hadn’t spent the last six months learning to fight off his urges before they overwhelmed him, he might very well have left Zoey where she stood, in his entryway, crying over her broken marriage. He would have driven all night to confront her sad excuse for a husband and broken him, instead. Before now, he hadn’t known it was possible to hate another person as much as he hated this man that he’d never met. It wasn’t hard to imagine a better world without him in it. Certainly Zoey was better off without him. Zoey and her baby.

  Jesus Christ, he thought as he held her and stroked her hair. Zoey’s baby.

  In a way he felt responsible for that as well. He’d apparently pushed her so hard that she’d met, gotten married, and gotten pregnant in the space of less than a year, probably all in an attempt to erase the memories he’d created for her. Perhaps she’d been so devastated at the loss of the future she’d wanted with Dalton, that she’d latched on to the first person who’d even come close to fitting the bill and tried to carve out that life with him, instead.

  While Dalton was being supported by people telling him to quell his destructive urges, Zoey had not had anyone to do the same for her. But where were her parents in all this? What had they done to stop this train wreck of a marriage before it had materialized? Before it had gotten this far, before it was too late to do anything when the absolute most amount of devastation possible would occur when it derailed? As she sobbed against him, he understood that she was in no shape to answer the million questions he had.

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” he told her, even though he honestly didn’t see how. He had not intended to ruin her life, only send her on her way to a better one. It seemed he was a poison that no one could get out of their system, even after he himself had been cured.

  “Alright,” he said, “let’s go to the spare room. You need to get off your feet and lie down.”

  He guided her gently to the extra bedroom, thankful that he had fresh sheets on it. He sat her down gently and put her sack of makeup on the nightstand.

  “I’ll make you that tea,” he said. It really was the absolute least he could do.

  She nodded and he closed the door behind him, feeling guilty about leaving her but not knowing what else to do. In the kitchen he found her boxes of tea and checked the labels for the one that made you sleepy. Surely that would be okay for the baby. He’d be sure to ask if it was as he set a small saucepan on the stove and heated some water.

  He heard the car pull up and made it to the door before Ava and Sienna had a chance to ring the bell. He swung the door inward, hoping to just grab the keys and send them on their way, but Ava marched in and looked around. Sienna followed her inside, giving Dalton a sheepish look. Dalton wasn’t put off or even surprised. Ava was Ava.

  “She’s resting,” he said pointedly.

  Ava glanced down the hallway, toward the closed bedroom door and shook her head. “I can’t believe he hit her.”

  Dalton grunted. For Ava, that was putting it mildly. “Well, she’s safe now and she has space to think things over.”

  “She going to the cops?”

  “Maybe in the morni
ng,” he hedged, making his way back to the kitchen. He still needed time to try and convince Zoey it was necessary. He doubted he could file a complaint for her. He didn’t mention the baby, though. Perhaps he needed some time to get used to the idea himself. Or perhaps he was making things easier on himself, because Ava was a loose cannon on her best day and Dalton didn’t need two women going off the deep end on him. Probably a little of both, he decided as he wiped the sides of the cup.

  “Thanks for taking care of the car,” he told Ava as he guided her back toward the front door. Sienna followed without a fuss.

  “Look, go home tonight,” he said finally. “I… I’ve got enough to worry about here for one night, okay?”

  Ava looked like she was about to argue, but instead she nodded glumly.

  “I appreciate it,” he said to smooth over the ruffled feathers.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Ava and Sienna left and Dalton picked up Zoey’s mug. He carried it carefully down the hall and knocked lightly on the door before letting himself in. He supposed the awkwardness of the situation kept him from getting too comfortable, even in his own place.

  She smiled at him weakly as he stepped inside.

  “Here you go.” He set the steaming cup down on the nightstand.

  “Dalton-” she said, voice hoarse from too much crying.

  He shook his head. “Not tonight. Nothing needs to happen tonight, including talking.” He wouldn’t lie to himself and say he didn’t feel a bit of a reprieve there. His own apologies could wait another day. “Just get some sleep.”

  He quickly shut the door behind him and walked back to the kitchen. He stood at the counter, staring at the used teabag, knowing he should throw it away but making no move toward it. Finally, instead, he took his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed. Jonah picked up on the second ring.