“Yeah. Karly here’s gonna come back in the back with us.”
“Yeah,” Karly chimed in, grinning and twirling a lock of her hair. She giggled, and Jenny thought she might be sick.
“Be good for you,” Riley declared. “Learn a few things from a professional.”
The rest of the guys burst into raucous laughter.
Shit, Karly wasn’t just a groupie, but one of the porn stars Riley was auditioning for his newborn studio business.
“Come on,” he urged, glazed eyes tracking across Jenny’s face, looking for signs of resistance. “Let’s go.”
Keep things together, Candy had said. Don’t get him angry, don’t tip him off that anything was about to happen.
She needed to slide up under his other arm and go back to his favorite dorm, have a three-way with her abuser and a porn star…
She was going to gag.
And apparently it showed in her face.
Riley frowned. “What?” He reached to tangle a hand in her hair.
She winced.
Oh no…oh no…
His hand tightened. “What?” Harsher now, anger burning away some of the alcohol haze.
All she had to do was cooperate. Just do what he wanted, and maybe he wouldn’t hurt her so badly.
But the idea of one more violation, when her brother was on the way, when help was so close…
He spotted her phone on the bar, and that was when she knew it was all over.
She made a grab for it, but Riley was quicker, even drunk, even holding onto a porn star. “Who you been talkin’ to?” he demanded, thumb gliding across the buttons. The harsh blue light of the phone illuminated his face, all the lines and wrinkles and mysterious little bruises.
“Riley, please. You wanted to go in the back, right? Let’s go.” She made an unsuccessful reach and he stepped back. “Riley…”
“Candy,” he said, and the whole room fell silent. “You talked to Candy?”
“He’s my brother. We talk.”
Riley shoved the blonde away from him – she yelped – and closed the gap, bearing down on Jenny with a black-eyed glare. “About what?”
She tried to catch a breath. Wet her lips. She hated him right then, almost as much as she feared him. “I – I–”
“What?”
“He’s on his way. He knows everything, Riley, and he’s coming.”
The first slap knocked her off the stool. The second took her consciousness.
~*~
Now
That night boiled around her now, bringing with it the old rising tide of panic, the taste of blood in her mouth, the high whine of dread in her ears. How was this happening again? At Riley’s mercy and Candy on the way, but too late, always too late.
She choked on a few breaths before she finally drew a decent one down into her lungs. Held it, concentrated on it, let it out slowly through her mouth.
Through the course of their marriage, Riley had slowly, systematically stripped all the Snow from her, chipping away her identity until her parents wouldn’t have recognized her had they been alive to witness the horror of her unmaking. It had taken seven years to find herself again, scrape off the film of Riley’s wife and lock her hands around Jennifer Snow once more, the true parts of her he hadn’t been able to break.
She wasn’t going back. Not on her life. Not even on her baby’s life.
She opened her eyes.
Voice calm, solid: “It’s not very original you know.”
He’d found her second knife, and laid it on the table beside the first. “What’s that?”
“Taking back your club. Candy already did that. You can’t do anything else but copy him?”
He smirked and sat down on the coffee table across from her. “What he did was treason. You know that, right? He didn’t take any votes. Didn’t explain himself to anybody. He oughta been buried in the desert, with the black dogs burned off his arms.”
“Except that’s what happened to your boys, isn’t it?”
The smirk vanished. “You turned into a real mouthy bitch.”
“From one bitch to another, huh?”
He stood suddenly, with a familiar, impulsive violence.
Crockett made a startled sound.
Riley reared back with his hand, a big theatrical slap, and Jenny ducked, threw herself down on the floor at his feet. Above her head, the whoosh of his hand through empty air.
He snarled. “Jesus, you stupid whore.”
Her wrists were bound, but her hands were not, and she managed to wriggle one down into the top of her boot before he grabbed her arm and hauled her upright.
She tilted her head back, so she could see his face, as she staggered to her feet. He was glaring at her with all the old hate and anger.
Soft, slippery click of the switchblade opening in her hand.
He froze, eyes widening. “Wha–”
And Jenny used the momentum he’d given her to straighten in a rush and drive the knife up into the soft underside of his jaw.
Candy had forced her to stab sandbags when she was younger. Stabbing a man was harder than it seemed, he’d reasoned. She needed to know what kind of resistance she would face. She thought of that afternoon now – the bright sun, the sound of sand pouring down onto the ground – but the feel of flesh was so different. The sudden spurt of blood nothing like the clean patter of sand.
An awful, animal sound tore out of Riley’s throat, and he staggered back from her.
Blood splashed her hands, her arms; she felt its wet viscous touch sliding down her face.
Riley pitched forward and blood poured out of his mouth, thick red ribbons. He gasped like a winded horse. Groped madly at the handle of the knife.
“You forgot about the third one,” Jenny said, tipping her bound hands so the blood ran out of her palms and dripped down onto the rug.
Glass shattered behind her, and she whirled.
Riley’s crew, coming in through the front windows, the door, blocking the fall of sunlight. She counted four.
“Oh shit.”
A gun went off, and she closed her eyes, waited for the pain…
Another shot, another. Curses, swears.
Her eyes popped open and…Pup??
One of Riley’s men fell facedown just inside the window and Pup stepped over him, gun in hand. He was still pale, still skinny, still shaking, even, but he turned and fired at the others.
Crockett heaved himself out of his chair, roaring, and threw himself between her and the unfolding firefight. He had a gun in his waistband, and pulled it, bellowing obscenities at the intruders.
Jenny glanced at Riley, and her stomach heaved. The knife had gone up through the soft tissues in his bottom jaw, just to the side of the bone, up through his tongue. The silver point flashed in his gaping mouth. The blood loss was incredible, a vivid splash down his chest, but she hadn’t hit the carotid, hadn’t killed him.
Yet.
He met her eyes, briefly, his cloudy with pain, as vacant as an animal’s.
He made a move for his gun.
Jenny snatched hers up off the table and put three rounds through his heart.
He fell, boneless, eyes still open, and his neck snapped when he hit the carpet. She heard the dull crunch.
Silence.
It had its own faint ring, like running a finger around the rim of a wineglass.
Jenny turned slowly to find Pup and Crockett standing over the bodies. Pup very much not dead, and Crockett staring at her with tear-bright, completely lucid eyes.
“Jenny,” he whispered, his big booming voice broken with grief. “Jenny, sweetheart, I forgot. Oh damn, honey, I forgot.”
It’s okay, she started to tell him, but she couldn’t get the words out.
She turned and bolted. Jumped Riley’s body and burst through the back door. Landed on her knees in the dirt and vomited.
Thirty-Five
Jenny
It seemed an eternity that she knelt in the dirt a
nd retched. After it was empty, her stomach kept squeezing tight, terrible dry heaves that burned her throat. Just as they started to subside, she sat back and saw the blood on her hands, and it started all over again.
She was still gagging and gasping for breath when a shadow fell across her. Pup knelt down at her side and carefully slit the tape at her wrists with a knife. He had flecks of blood on his face, and his eyes were serious. Meeting his gaze was finally what allowed her to take a huge breath, stop puking, and sit down hard on her butt.
“You’re not dead.”
He shook his head. “They shot at me, alright, but I slipped past ‘em.”
“And you came back,” she said, stupidly. Her throat was so raw it hurt to talk.
Pup shrugged. “Wasn’t gonna let my VP’s sister get killed, was I?”
“Shit,” she said, because there were no other words, and flopped back, the loose soil of the yard catching her.
The sky arced blue and hard as a marble overhead, dome-shaped from her vantage point. Cloudless. Infinite. A sign? A reflection of her conscience?
No. Not that. Because she’d just killed the man she’d shared her life with for twelve years. Whether or not he was a monster had no bearing on the situation.
Crockett’s face appeared above her suddenly, eclipsing her view, his broad features touched with an almost childlike grief.
Jenny sat up, and he sat down, so they were both cross-legged and shoulder-to-shoulder, staring out across the featureless stretch of his backyard. Pup watched them, but it didn’t feel awkward, all of them too exhausted for propriety.
In a slow, careful voice, Crockett said, “Candy came home…came home…a while back.”
Jenny knew he meant seven years ago, so she nodded. “He did.”
“He was in New York.”
“He was.”
“And you…you…” He took a deep, shaky breath. “Riley hurt you, didn’t he?”
The tears in his voice caused her own eyes to film, and she turned to face him, biting back the sob that welled in her throat. “He did. Every day.”
“God, Jennifer, how did I forget?”
She put an arm across his wide shoulders and pressed her face down into his shirt. “It’s alright, it’s not your fault,” she whispered, as the tears slipped down her nose.
~*~
Colin
An early autumn night was stealing over the landscape when Crockett’s house came into view. The driveway and front lawn were full of cop cars and county vans. The street was lined with bikes. Whatever had happened…it was just that: happened. Past tense.
His stomach cramped, and worry cycled through his bloodstream, hot and furious like adrenaline. Since the news had come through, they hadn’t stopped long enough to check anyone’s phone for an update. Candy had gone white when he’d taken the call from Talis a few truckstops up the highway.
“Something’s happening with Jenny.”
There was no more impotent a feeling than being a hundred miles away from your woman when she was in danger. Unable to help, unable to put himself between her and whatever threatened her. His child. Jesus Christ.
He’d prayed and cursed alternately the whole way here.
What if she…
What if someone…
And what if he…
He scrambled off his bike at the end of the driveway and ducked under the crime scene tape, Candy hot on his heels.
“Hey!” someone shouted. “You can’t cross the line!”
Candy intercepted. “Try to hold us back, asshole, just try it!”
“They’re relatives,” someone else called. “Let ‘em through.”
So the local cops weren’t anti-Dog. Good to know.
The front door was open and flashbulbs were going off inside with bright flares. Men in black windbreakers crowded the living room – techs. But he glimpsed a shimmer of blonde hair through the doorway of the kitchen, and that was where he headed, breathing frantically, heart pounding against his ribs.
The sight of Jenny nearly took his knees. She sat in a chair with someone’s jacket draped across her shoulders, her face streaked with dark, dried blood. It was on her shirt, in the ends of her golden hair, traces of it caught in between her fingers.
“Jen!”
Her head lifted, and he watched the tears come up in her eyes, saw the rapid flit of a whole spectrum of emotions move through them. “Baby,” she said, voice trembling. Then she took a deep breath and stood. “It’s not mine,” she said when he continued to stare at her, vision blurring at the edges. “Colin, sweetie, it’s not my blood.”
“You–you’re okay?”
She nodded.
“And the baby?”
“I think so. Hopefully.”
He reached her in one stride and crushed her in his arms.
The familiar shape of her pressed to his chest, the silkiness of her hair against his face – it was home. It soothed him, replaced all the fear and worry with a bone-shaking relief. She smelled like blood. When she tucked her face into his neck, he felt the warm wetness of tears.
“What happened?”
Pup answered him, and that was the first time he noticed she wasn’t alone in the room. The prospect and old man Crockett stood on either side of her chair.
“Her ex,” Pup said. “She killed him.”
~*~
Candy
“I wanna see him.” Candy put his hands on his hips and silently dared the scrawny uniform to make him move.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to either go in the kitchen with the others, or be escorted outside.”
“Who’s gonna escort me? You?”
The kid gulped, petrified by the idea.
An older officer pushed past the techs and into view. “Leave him be, Derek. You know how this has to work. Go wait with Jen.” Officer Jaffrey, veteran of the force and a realist who understood that the Lean Dogs were a part of life in Amarillo.
“This was self-defense,” Candy said, firmly, giving the man a hard stare. “You know it was. Riley’s a sick fuck, and whatever my sister did, it was to protect herself.”
“We gotta go through the process,” Jaffrey said, but nodded. Yeah, he knew the truth here: It was only a matter of time before someone put a bullet or two in Riley.
Riley who, to Candy’s satisfaction, lay sprawled at an awkward angle on the rug, the coroner’s people poking, prodding, and recording things on notepads.
“Anyone let his brother know?” he asked, jerking his head toward the corpse.
Jaffrey snorted. “That’s none of your business and you know it.”
“Yeah.” He grimaced. “Alright. Thanks.”
In a feat of restraint, he’d let Colin go to Jenny first, had been snooping after the body to give them a moment. The guy might be kind of an idiot, but Jenny was having a baby with him, so they probably wanted to…hug or some shit.
When he propped a shoulder in the kitchen doorjamb, he saw that the hugging was still happening, Jenny’s face hidden in Colin’s throat, both of them shaking. Candy wanted badly to hug her himself, but he was the brother here, and not her lover; he would wait.
Crockett spotted him. “Candy! There you are! Where you been, boy?” His grin was wide and genuine, his gaze lost somewhere inside his memories, the way Candy had come to expect.
Jenny lifted her blood-streaked, tear-stained face from Colin’s shoulder and said, “He was only lucid for a little while, but it was long enough. God bless him.”
~*~
Colin
He cranked the hot tap as far as it would go and checked the temp of the water again. Steaming and just about perfect. He turned to Jenny.
She stood in the center of the bathroom, studying the dried blood beneath her fingernails.
The fallout. It didn’t matter what Riley had done to her, or how she’d felt about him at the end, she’d killed someone she’d loved once. There was trauma there; deep layers of it that would wear away in patches, new s
cales revealed when she least expected them.
“Jen,” he said, softly.
Her eyes came to him, distant with wonder. The blood on her face looked like war paint, and he recalled, for some reason, that he was part Cherokee. Some dim unconscious reasoning that they shared that now, he and his woman, the warrior legacy.
“He didn’t even suspect, you know?” she said. “That I could do that to him.”
“He didn’t? He must not know you as well as I do,” he joked, but it fell flat.
She didn’t respond. “The last night, before Candy got back,” she continued, “before he got put away. That last night.” She shuddered. “He knocked me out. When I came to, I was on the floor, and he was holding me down…while…while his prospects took turns at me.”
His lungs seized.
“I kicked one of them in the face. Broke his nose. God, he screamed…And Riley slammed my head into the floor until I blacked out again.”
He didn’t want to hear this. Couldn’t. “Jen…”
“I stabbed him.” She put a finger up under her jaw to demonstrate where the blade had gone in. “And I shot him.” She closed her eyes and exhaled in an exhausted rush. “And I’m so glad. God, Colin, I’m so glad…so glad…”
“Shh. Hush.” He went to her and put his arms on her shoulders, gave her a little shake. “Let’s get cleaned up, okay?”
She nodded, distant, doll-like, and compliant. “Okay. Yeah.”
He’d intended to leave her to it, but realized now that he couldn’t. He stripped off his clothes as she undressed, eyes searching her skin for bruises or signs of abuse. Instead he found the slight curve of her stomach, the first physical sign of the baby growing.
“Come on.” He put his hand at her waist and steered her into the shower stall, stepped in and closed the door behind them. It was cramped with both of them, but the hot water felt delicious and he was glad to see Jenny turn her face into it, slicking her hair back, wanting Riley’s blood off her, finally.
He stood behind her and reached for the shampoo in the rack. He squeezed a dollop onto the top of her head and massaged it into her scalp. He thought she might reach to swat him away, but braced her hands on the tile instead, sighed deeply and leaned into his ministrations.
Snow in Texas (Lean Dogs Legacy #1) Page 21
