Gun Shy
Page 28
EPILOGUE
CASSIE
“Sweet creature!” said the spider. “You’re witty and you’re wise!
How handsome are your gauzy wings, how brilliant are your eyes!
* * *
I BET you thought that I was the fly, didn’t you? All wide-eyed and frightened as the spider closes the gap.
But I am a girl with a darkness inside me.
Carefully placed. Cleverly concealed. A darkness that could devour you.
* * *
I AM NOT the fly in this story.
Pray you do not wrong me. Pray you do not stick in my carefully threaded web.
I am a girl with a darkness inside me.
But I think you knew that already.
THANK you so much for reading GUN SHY. If you’d like more of where that dark and depraved mindfuckery came from, turn the page for a taster of my next story: a modern, bloody, violent and terribly dark retelling of Romeo and Juliet.
* * *
THE CALIFORNIA BLOOD SERIES, set in the criminal underbelly of San Francisco, follows two warring families who are ruled by blood, power and twisted desire.
* * *
READ an exclusive excerpt of VERONA BLOOD, the first book in the series, over the page…
ABOUT VERONA BLOOD
BOOK 1 IN THE CALIFORNIA BLOOD SERIES
These violent delights will have violent ends…..
- William Shakespeare
Avery Capulet is missing.
Taken by a madman. Kept in the dark.
She might not survive.
He’ll use her body. Destroy her mind. All before he ever lays a hand on her.
* * *
ROME MONTAGUE IS A DRUG DEALER. A criminal. A thief.
Rome Montague is missing – but nobody will miss him.
Not that it matters; after the things he’s done to this girl, he doesn’t deserve to be found.
* * *
THE CALIFORNIA BLOOD SERIES, set in the criminal underbelly of San Francisco, follows two warring families who are ruled by blood, power and twisted desire.
ROME
There is a girl on her knees in front of me. A beautiful girl. I don’t know her name, or her age, or what she loves or who she aches for; but I know her better than anyone has ever known her. Better than her mother, who grew her from a tiny seed and birthed her and fed her and nurtured her. I know her better than her father, who held her newborn feather-weight body and loved her so fiercely, it probably caused him physical pain; the knowledge all fathers of girls are burdened with, that one day their baby daughters will grow up and become things for men to inflict their own anger upon.
I know her better than the family she grew up with, the people she knew, the people she adored.
I know her better than anyone, because I know her sorrow. I have kissed my cracked lips against her hurt. I have seen inside her soul, every time I hold it between my palms and squeeze until it bleeds, and what a pretty soul it is.
I know everything about her, but she knows nothing about me. She thinks I’m a madman, and that slams into me like a knife every time she raises those doe eyes to me and begs. I see the cogs in her brain turn as she tries to outsmart me, to outthink me, to outplay me.
But what move could a naked girl on her knees ever have? What weapon? What thing that could save her? That could save us both?
She has nothing of power in this place, and we both know it. Her only power is her obedience. Her silence. Her ability to endure.
She is slipping. She is losing her mind.
I don’t dare tell her that I am losing mine, too. Because there are three things I know for sure. Firstly, that we will die in this room. I think she’ll go before me, because I’ll have to choke the life out of her with my own hands; but I won’t be far behind her. My death will be far more horrible. I’ll need to preserve her beauty in death, but my role in this story is not a beautiful one. I am the monster. I am her torturer. Whatever my final moments entail, there will be rivers of my blood as I cut into my own guilty flesh and try to dig out an eleventh-hour salvation.
The second thing I know is that I’m going to hurt her so much before this is over. Brutally. Sadistically. She knows it, too, her big eyes shining with unspilled tears and terror. There’s still hope inside her—a hope so thick I could almost plunge my hand into her chest and pluck it from her ribcage, along with her heart.
The third thing I know is that this is not my fault. She thinks I’m crazy. Everybody will think I’m crazy. I am not a good man – I am a very, very bad man. I have lied, I have cheated, I have killed – I am a monster, but I am not this monster. I only hope that in her final moments, I might be able to tell her this. As I drain the life from her, I pray that I can send her off to sleep one last time with the knowledge that I only ever wanted to save her.
* * *
BUT I DIGRESS.
There is a girl on her knees in front of me. A beautiful girl. She whimpers as I squeeze her cheeks, as I force her mouth open and glimpse her wet, pink tongue. I don’t know her name, or her age, or what she loves or who she aches for. I only know that in a moment, she will ache for me.
AVERY
The man I’m kneeling in front of looks pretty ordinary for a psychopath. I’m ashamed to admit that when I saw him across the bar at The Cleopatra Club in downtown San Francisco, I would have even called him handsome. Cheekbones that could cut glass and a gaze so intense a less confident girl would have looked away. I didn’t look away. I was a stupid girl, and now I am being punished. I caught his eye across the bar and my cheeks flushed. Moisture pooled in my panties, a damp spot that he found later, in this place, with rough fingers and a desperate need to sate himself while my bound arms went numb underneath me and my tears pasted his cruel red blindfold to my eyelashes.
I do not think he is handsome right now. The word for the man looming above me, his jaw so tight his teeth might shatter inside his mouth, a long-stemmed red rose clenched in one fist? Definitely not handsome.
No, the word I would use to describe my captor is terrifying.
From his back pocket he pulls out a length of red fabric. More blindfold. Fresh. I bled too much over the last one. I flinch as he presses the new material to my eyes and knots it behind my head. He’s turning my world red, one blindfolded torture session at a time.
“Stick your tongue out,” he says. His voice is always quiet, barely a gravelly rasp. He sang to me the first night I was here; fractured nursery rhymes and Christmas songs, the only words he claimed to remember. His voice is beautiful. He was nice to me then. Nicer, at least. He begged me to forgive him in those first hours as he dragged a washcloth over my broken and battered body. And when he pressed my thighs apart and entered me for the first time, I couldn’t see him crying, but I felt every single one of his tears fall upon my naked chest as I drifted in and out of consciousness. And then the singing. He held me to his chest and sang to me as I drifted back into the inky blackness.
That was before I woke up with the collar around my neck. Now, he doesn’t hold me. He doesn’t sing to me. He stays as far away as possible from me — unless he’s trying to break me with the pain.
FOR CALIFORNIA BLOOD pre-order links and more, visit
www.lilisaintgermain.com/CaliforniaBlood
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
* * *
Lili is a USA Today bestselling author who has sold over a million books since January 2014. After the success of her self-published Gypsy Brothers series, she was approached by HarperCollins Publishers, who signed her Cartel series in a three-book deal.
The Gypsy Brothers series focuses on a morally bankrupt biker gang and the girl who seeks her vengeance upon them.
The Cartel series is a trilogy of full-length novels that explores the beginnings of the club.
Lili is also the author of psychological thriller Gun Shy and the California Blood series.
Aside from writing, her other loves in life include her gorgeous husband and
beautiful daughter, good coffee, Tarantino movies and spending hours on Instagram. She loves to read almost as much as she loves to write.
Sign up for Lili’s newsletter
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Join Lili’s exclusive reader group
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Follow Lili on Instagram
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Keep up-to-date with Lili’s releases:
www.lilisaintgermain.com
ALSO BY LILI ST. GERMAIN
Gypsy Brothers series
Seven Sons
Six Brothers
Five Miles
Four Score
Three Years
Two Roads
One Love
Zero Hour
* * *
Cartel series
Cartel
Kingpin
Empire
* * *
California Blood series
Verona Blood
Burn in Your Blood
In Cold Blood
* * *
And now, a sneak preview from one of my all-time favourite authors, T.M. Frazier….
ABOUT THE OUTSKIRTS
BY T.M. FRAZIER
The swamp is about to get a whole lot HOTTER.
After a tragedy, Finn Hollis escapes
into the swamp to be alone.
That is until Sawyer Dixon shows up,
all SCORCHING HOT innocence,
claiming she owns the land less than
fifty feet from his front door.
Sawyer gets under his SKIN, but even worse?
She makes him CRAVE things.
Things Finn hasn’t thought about in a very VERY long time.
Finn WANTS Sawyer gone.
Almost as much as he wants her in his BED.
SNEAK PREVIEW FROM THE OUTSKIRTS
BY T.M. FRAZIER
Fear & Love
Fear and love are very much the same. They both make your heart race and your body shake. They make you tremble and anticipate. They make you frantic with thoughts that consume. Embracing fear is the same as embracing love.
It hurts.
It ends.
All is lost.
All can be found again.
PROLOGUE
FINN
You can tell a lot about your life by the sounds around you. It’s damn frightening how quickly they can change without warning.
One day it’s the roaring and cheering of a crowd at the local game. The clinking together of beer bottles. Flirty feminine laughter.
The next day it’s the sound of a radio being hastily shut off.
Gasps.
The dull thud you’ll never be able to rid from your nightmares.
The screams are followed by the worst of it all. Silence. If you listen very closely, you’ll be able to hear some-
thing else. Something more. A sound so distinctive it can’t be mistaken for anything other than what it is.
The sound of your own heart breaking.

ONE
SAWYER
I didn’t cry. Not one single tear. What kind of person doesn’t cry at their own mother’s funeral?
I don’t know why I was asking myself the question when the answer was a relatively obvious one.
I was all out of tears. Just like my mother had been. What I did do was fixate on how much Mother
would’ve hated the entire service. Men sat in front while the women stood in the back, as was our church’s custom.
All were dressed in black. Mother detested black. “Family is why God put us here on this earth. Family
can build us up and family can tear us down. It’s a sad day when we lose a member of our own community, a mother. A wife. One of God’s devoted children,” Reverend Desmond proclaimed.
As many times as he’d met my mother over the years he didn’t know a thing about her. Which made sense because he’d never actually spoken to her. Father always did the speaking on behalf of our ‘family’, while Mother and I stood behind him, obediently, with our heads bowed and our hands folded. Eyes to the ground.
And it was because he didn’t know my mother that the Reverend’s sermon was generic at best.
Cold. No personal details of any sort. What the Reverend did say was that my mother was
where she was always destined to be. Happy and safe in the arms of our Lord and Savior.
A burst of uncontainable laughter flew out of my mouth and when heads turned in my direction, I played it off as a sob of grief. Which, although better than laugh- ter, was also unacceptable.
Without even looking up I could feel my father’s fury from the front row, but my outburst couldn’t have been helped. The hypocrisy was hilarious.
Safe in the arms of our Lord and Savior?
The Church of God’s Light believed that suicide buys you a one-way ticket to hell. Sure, they all played it off like it was an accident, but I knew the truth.
Mother wasn’t accidentally hit by a car.
She knowingly, and with purpose, walked in front of traffic that day.
My father either didn’t know, didn’t care, or just didn’t acknowledge the possibility that it wasn’t an accident. But I wasn’t surprised. He had a way of believing what he wanted and expecting others to believe the same. Even if it was all lies.
Even if those lies were about himself.
Like the one about him being an upstanding citizen. A leader in the church. A devoted and loving husband and father. A man of God.
Father played the part well. He looked just like a widower in the throes of grief with his head bowed. When in reality, he was probably trying not to nod off after downing a large portion of a new bottle of whiskey that morning.
“She was an obedient woman...” the Reverend continued his sermon of half-truths.
Obedient? That was the best he could come up with? Obedient?
My head spun at his sermon.
The whole truth was that my mother, Caroline Dixon, was someone who rarely smiled. She lived under a roof ruled by constant fear. She rarely left the house. She apologized a lot and often. If anyone was keeping a running tab, ‘I’m sorry’ was the sentence she spoke most often during her life, and even then, it was only said in a barely audible whisper to the floor.
A realization hit me so hard I felt like I’d been kneed in the stomach. I doubled over and stumbled backward, muttering apologies to the women I’d knocked into who hopefully thought I was having some sort of fit caused by my overwhelming grief.
Father glanced back, and although to anyone else he appeared sympathetic when he flashed me a sad smile, I knew better and could see the fury forming behind his cold eyes. There was no way my outbursts were going to go unpunished.
I kept walking backward until I was clear of the tent and the crowd. I dropped to the ground and slid all the way down until my back was flat on the grass and the top of my head was pressed against a shiny granite gravestone.
The revelation I was having would turn out to be the thought that launched a thousand ships. That day my life was changed forever, turning down a path there would be no coming back from.
If I kept on living the way I was. The same way Mother had lived. Subservient. Submissive. Abused. Battered. Then that sermon, those very same generic words and lies about a life she never lived, would be spoken at another funeral someday.
Mine.
TWO
SAWYER
Restless was the understatement of the century. My right knee bobbed up and down so quickly it was a blur of dark denim skirt. I sat on the edge of my bed tapping my heel so hard I was sure if I stayed there long enough I’d make a hole and fall right through to the
first floor below. Restless wasn’t allowed in his house. Neither was wearing any article of clothing that
showed more than an ankle or elbow, cell phones, or any internet access that wasn’t being used for his pre- approved purposes.
Mother’s funeral was hours ago. Father was attending the gathering following
the service that only men were permitted to attend.
I caught my reflection in the small mirror above my dresser. My hair might have been brown with a tint of red where my mother’s had been a sunny shade of blonde, but underneath the obnoxious number of freckles that ran across the bridge of my nose and cheeks, there was no doubt it was her face staring back at me.
I pushed down my cuticles and glanced down at my hands, turning them over and inspecting each side.
I had her hands too.
And since stillness was the enemy I stood up and paced my small simple bedroom. The only picture above my bed on the white wall was a little painting of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus.
My father had suggested I handle my grief by prayer, and if that didn’t work, some old fashioned hard work. Like cleaning.
Cleaning.
He’d actually suggested that in order to get over the death of my mother...I should clean.
The suggestion was the real problem. Grief wasn’t. Little did my father know I’d yet to experience it. I felt numb. Frustrated. Angry. But grief was late and I’d decided I wasn’t going to keep the lights on and wait up for it to arrive.
In all my pacing around the room, I managed to knock over a pencil cup from my desk. I knelt on the floor and began to collect them. Reaching under the bed to get the ones that had rolled under there my hand brushed against something hard.