by Simon, Misty
Helpless and hating it, Dory hung from her spot and watched as Morgan tore off Garrett’s T-shirt. His chest was well defined and marked with ink in various places from his stomach to his neck. Dory had put her hands on that chest, feeling his heart beat beneath her palms as she tried to ease his pain. She couldn’t bear to watch this mad woman make him bloody again.
Morgan took a step closer and Garrett exploded off the ground like a bomb. He came out swinging, but Morgan’s men were too fast to let him get near their employer. She backed away, letting the men take the fury of his knives and blades, the sting of his mace and the long slender shaft with an extremely wicked-looking tip. He swung each in succession, roaring blindly through the men until none remained standing. Thankfully, they all appeared to still be breathing. Dory didn’t want death in here at all if possible.
Garrett had torn through his adversaries like a cyclone, but to Dory he had looked less like he was in the grip of insanity and more like a well-trained weapon. Standing and breathing hard, he picked up each weapon, absorbing them back into his body as he stalked closer and closer to Morgan. So far the woman was holding her ground, but Dory didn’t think it would be long before she broke and ran. Though she had never wished death on anyone, she certainly wanted this woman to be given justice for what she’d done. Selling drugs and killing people for the fun and profit of it was terrible enough, but terrorizing the tenants in their building just to get Garrett to come out and hunt for her was dastardly. The bitch deserved something for her evil.
Garrett used an ax that was black as night to cut Dory down and caught her in one arm, never taking his eyes off Morgan. “Run, Dory. Don’t look back. My car’s down the street and the keys are in the ignition. I don’t want you here. I have to finish this.”
“No, Garrett, please.” She clung to his arm. “Don’t do this. She’s not worth it.”
“I’m worth everything!” Morgan screamed and ran at Dory. Garrett stepped between them, hooking his hands around Morgan’s arms.
But now that Garrett had his hands on the woman, she went berserk. Pulling a knife from behind her somewhere, she flashed it out and stabbed Garrett right in the chest. He went down with a crash.
It was too much to watch and yet it wasn’t enough to permanently keep him down. Garrett got back on his feet in seconds. No blood seeped from the wound around the knife, but it didn’t come loose when Morgan tried to pull it out of him. An inky black shadow raced across Garrett’s arm and up to his chest. It writhed over the blade’s handle, keeping it from killing him while another tattoo raced from his palm to form a huge manacle. As the cuff clamped onto her arm, she started screaming and didn’t stop until she fainted.
Garrett stood over her, his chest heaving and his eyes darker than Dory had ever seen them. She tried to get into his line of vision but he turned his head away from her.
“I told you to leave. Go now and don’t come back. You can call the police if you want.” His guttural tone scared Dory, but she couldn’t just walk away from him and this excess of pain.
“Garrett.” She stroked her hand down his arm. When he flinched away from her, she repeated his name and grabbed his arm, holding on even as he tried to shake her off. “She’s been provoking you. She wants you to kill her so that she’ll be at peace and you’ll suffer for the rest of your life. Why are you going to let her win in the end anyway? She doesn’t deserve your misery.”
He hung his head. “Now that I’ve caused all this, I have to end it, Dory. It’s the only way.”
That sounded an awful lot like he wasn’t planning on coming back, and that scared Dory more than hanging from the ceiling had.
“No,” she whispered as he pushed her away. “No, you can’t do this.”
He shoved her away from him with an open palm. And then she was blindfolded with cloth so dark she couldn’t see a sliver of light. The cloth also became earplugs. She was deaf and blind and could do nothing about it. He’d done this to her with one of his tattoos.
Chapter Nine
“So is this how you want it to end?” Garrett asked the question softly but with a deadly inflection he hadn’t heard from his own mouth in years.
“Yes, I want you dead, Garrett. I’ve wanted that for so long. You left me there to rot. I got picked up by a pimp, who kept me in his basement in chains. And while you were learning to control your powers, I was becoming an animal. I killed him eventually and took over his drug trade, but it will never be enough. Where was your hero complex then? Why weren’t you looking for me? Who saved me?” Morgan smiled, but it was more a baring of her teeth.
“I had no idea you were alive. I came back for you after Franco pulled me away, but he said the police picked up your body. There was no one to ask unless I wanted to get pinned with your murder. I didn’t kill you but they would have thought I did. The first person I punished and put behind bars was the guy who knifed you. Jesse Santanos was doing time for your murder until some criminal took him out in the shower.”
“What a pretty story. Unfortunately, it’s bullshit. Don’t lie to me. After I stuck by your side for a whole year, you flitted off without a second thought of me. You think the guy who held me captive didn’t enjoy telling me every time your name was mentioned on the street? He wanted you to come to him, so he could trade me for your loyalty. He even put the word out on the streets. You never did show up. And then I put a hole in his head.”
Garrett took an involuntary step back. “I never heard anything. No one would even talk about you. I was told your funeral was way over, and they burned you to ashes before scattering you to the four winds. That’s the only story I heard.” And he’d believed every word of it, never knowing she had been out there alone. He couldn’t regret turning into someone good instead of continuing down the path he had been on, but he could regret her suffering.
“Let me get you some help, Morgan. Maybe a stay in a psych ward will help you heal.” He heard her mention drugs but even that was something she could come back from with time.
She began to cry, and he reached down to pick her up by her elbow.
At the last minute, she grabbed the knife out of his chest and stabbed herself in the stomach, angling the weapon up to hit her heart.
“Son of a bitch! Morgan, stay with me. Morgan!” He caught her before she hit the floor, cradling her while she bled out in his arms.
Dory was beside him a moment later, the blindfold hanging around her neck as she gripped his shoulders. “Garrett. Garrett.” She shook him hard enough that he came out of his trance. He was full of poison and the need to hurt someone, anyone, right now before hunting down a very specific person. But whoever had taken Morgan’s soul and sanity was already long since dead. How the hell had she gotten out of his blindfold? His concentration had been split, that was how. His anger burned darker.
“Get away from me,” he growled, not brooking any argument from her this time. “Don’t you fucking touch me.” He wanted to hold on to his fury.
“Garrett, look at me.”
“No, Dory, get the hell out of here like I told you to, or I’m going to call Jackson to come and get you. I don’t want you anywhere near this whole mess. It’s bad enough that you got dragged into it at all. I’m not going to let it get any worse. Just go.” He finally looked at her. “Please.”
She must have seen something in his eyes that frightened her, because she backed up, then got to her feet and turned to flee, leaving him behind with Morgan still in his arms.
* * *
Dory did not feel the slightest bit bad for breaking into Garrett’s apartment and looking for Jackson’s number. Once she got him on the phone, she told him everything. Though he had grumbled, Jackson had gone after his friend.
“You can’t save him if he doesn’t want to be saved, Dory. He hasn’t let anyone in but me for almost eighteen years, and even that’s tenuous at times,” he had told her before hanging up the phone.
But Dory didn’t believe that. Sometimes you neede
d someone to tell you that you were worth saving before you asked for help.
She baked, keeping one ear cocked toward the hallway. She had thought about just staying in Garrett’s apartment, but with little furniture and an empty refrigerator, there had been nothing to keep her occupied. Instead, she had kept her door cracked open to the hallway. There was no way he was going to make it past her to that damn chair.
By the time her very plain and strictly by the recipe banana nut bread came out of the oven, she was ready to crawl out of her skin. She wished she had given Jackson her cell number with explicit directions to call her as soon as he found Garrett. She would never be able to live with herself if something had happened to him. She’d cried the whole way home, almost too much to see the road clearly. But now that sadness had morphed into anxiety and worry. If Jackson didn’t get here soon with Garrett, she would start tearing up the streets on her scooter.
A heavy tread sounded on the stairs right outside her door. She flew out without a moment’s hesitation. Garrett was bloody and his face was haggard. He’d never looked better to her. He was leaning heavily on Jackson, but he looked whole and alive.
When she ran up and hugged him, he turned his face from hers. She was through with that. Grabbing his chin, she made him look her right in the eyes. He tried to look everywhere but at her, but she dodged around until he had no choice.
“I can do this all night.” And she meant it. Sometime between mashing up the ripe bananas and taking the fresh bread out of the oven, she’d realized that Garrett held her heart. No matter what he thought in his despair, he was worth so much to her, and she was determined to show that to him—whether he felt the same way or not.
“I’m leaving tonight, Dory. Let me go.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“And this is where I head out, folks,” Jackson said, propping Garrett up against his doorway but making no move to open the door. He stepped back and kissed Dory on the cheek. “Good luck, chicky.”
She’d need it.
“Come over to my apartment,” she said, making it more of a command than an offer.
“No.”
“Is that your new favorite word?”
“No,” he said but with a tiny upward tilt at the corner of his mouth.
“I’m tired, Garrett. Of playing this game and of watching you hurt yourself. Now get into my apartment before I hurt you worse.”
He had to have lost a lot of strength, because he actually let her lead him into her space. But he refused to sit on the sofa given how dirty he was.
When she went to place her hands on his chest, he backed away.
“I can’t let you keep doing that when I don’t even know why it’s working. I won’t use you that way.”
“What do you mean?” She paused for long enough for him to escape into the kitchen.
“That thing you do with your hands. When you do it, I don’t need to get into the chair to purge myself. But it has to be affecting you somehow, and I won’t let it happen again.”
“You don’t let me do anything. I do what I want, when I want. Now tell me about this hands thing you think I’ve been doing.”
“Well, like I told you, when I take in darkness, I have to get rid of it with light, and I do that with the chair. It’s not foolproof, but it works. The two times you’ve put your hands on me, though, I haven’t needed to use the chair. Something in you or about you is cleansing me.” He slid down the wall to sit on the floor, cradling his head in his strong hands.
She stood her ground, but it felt a little shaky under her feet. This strong man looked so defeated. It made her want to cuddle him, even though she was aware that would probably freak him out. “Why in the world would you turn that down? Do you prefer to be electrocuted?”
“No, but I won’t use you.”
She looked at her hands and then at him. She didn’t know where this thing came from that calmed him, perhaps it was all the therapy she’d done or some talent from the father she’d never known. Anything was possible now that she knew superheroes existed. “You’re not using me if I give it to you freely. Let me help you. Don’t turn away from me.”
“You don’t understand. I told you I haven’t always been some good guy doing good works. I hurt people, Dory. I’ve never taken a life, but I’m sure I’ve made people wish to their god I had killed them. I have to atone for that by saving people. If the price for that is the chair, then so be it.”
“I could have sworn you weren’t an idiot, but I think I’m going to have to revisit that thought.”
He goggled at her from his place on the floor. He tried to get up, but she pinned him down with a glance while reaching her hands out to touch him.
“What do see when you look at me, Garrett?” He opened his mouth, but she barreled right over him. “Do you see a little accountant? A woman who lives on her own? One who wears her glasses and never calls in sick? Who makes food for all her neighbors and has appointed herself the official Welcome Wagon for the people of this building? Do you think I’m straitlaced because of my long skirts and high collars and my staid life?”
He didn’t open his mouth this time. Instead he nodded.
“And what would you say if I told you I’m a recovered drug addict? That I used to walk the streets every night in search of that next high? What if I told you that I was a breath away from becoming a criminal when I finally got picked up by the police and found by a mentor who cared about me?”
“No way, Dory. Don’t spin some fanciful story for me just because you want me to think it’s all going to be okay.” His voice was rough and a glint in his eyes told her he was fighting a touch of madness. She’d seen it many times.
“I’m not spinning a tale, Garrett. Do you want to see my certificate for making it through the detox program? You want to see my discharge papers from the mental hospital after I tried to kill myself? Or you could go downstairs and talk to Marta. She can tell you all about the legal battles she fought for me. I’ll even release her from client confidentiality. My ex-boyfriend was a drug pusher, and he used to beat the snot out of me if I didn’t come home with enough money. It doesn’t get more real than that.”
Disbelief was written all over his face. She waited for the truth to sink in, wondering what his next demand would be. She was willing to give anything to him, prove anything to him, so long as it would save him from himself.
* * *
Garrett thought his ears must be clogged or that he was hallucinating. Maybe instead of anger now, he would experience madness each time he used his powers. It would be better than the homicidal urges that usually struck him.
But Dory was standing over him, waiting for him to make some comment. “I have to go.”
“No, you don’t, and you won’t. You’re going to sit there until I either talk myself dry, or you finally get it through your thick skull that we all deserve a second chance. It’s time for you to give yourself a break. What more do you need to punish yourself over? Morgan didn’t die all those years ago, and she killed herself…you didn’t do it for her.”
“I made her what she was.” The sight of her sticking that knife into herself would never leave him, nor would the image of Dory hanging in an abandoned back room. How could she think he had nothing to atone for?
“No, you didn’t. God, Garrett, give yourself a break. You think I don’t have regrets? I did stuff I’m not proud of. And all I’ve done to make up for it is some pro bono tax work. Is that enough? Maybe not. But I owe it to myself and the people in my life to move forward without drowning in the past.”
“I can’t…”
She held up her hand. “I’m going to fix you, and then you need to fix yourself. I’d like to be around when you do.”
Her hands on his chest were like a balm to his soul. The first time she’d done this for him, he’d lost too much blood to really feel it. The second time, he’d been too far gone to appreciate it. But now he was truly present as sh
e sat on the floor next to him, her hands on his chest, her head bent over them. She murmured nonsensical things, phrases he would expect to find in some self-help book. But all of it cleansed him. He felt the darkness drain out of him, leaving behind not even an echo.
When she was done, he raised her hands to his lips and kissed her knuckles. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d kissed someone. A vague notion that he’d kissed Dory before niggled at his brain, but he would have remembered that in Technicolor, so there was no way.
Peering at her, he sniffed to see if he could detect any darkness around or in her. Where was the evil going when it left his body? He’d never known when he’d sat in the chair, but there, the worst that could happen was that it went into the wood. Here, it could go into her and damage her. “Are you sure you don’t feel any angrier or heavier?”
She laughed, a carefree sound that was more than a balm to his soul. It was restoration of everything he’d thought he’d damaged.
She brushed her hand against his cheek. “You must know you are never supposed to ask a woman if she’s heavier, Garrett. That’s like telling me my butt looks big in a pair of pants.”
This time his laughter felt more natural. “I’ll put that on the list.”
“I like to hear your laugh.”
He’d kept her hands in his after kissing her knuckles. Now he lifted them to his chest and placed them over his heart. “What did you mean about wanting to be here when I fixed myself?”
She rested her forehead against his, her breath coming out sweet and soft. “I like you, Garrett. I think you have so much good in you that you haven’t nurtured. I want to be here when you figure out you do deserve happiness.”
Taking her face into his hands, he stared into her eyes as he brought her closer and closer. When he laid his lips on hers, something zipped through him that felt like the old current yet so different. This was beautiful and comfortable, energizing and enlivening.
