by Stasia Black
But then he had to go and open his big mouth again.
“Tell me how big I am,” he finally gasped, his hips thrusting awkwardly underneath hers. “How I’m better than any you’ve had before.”
If it would get this over, sure. He was close, she could tell. She squeezed around him as tight as she could. “You’re so fuckin’ big.” She ground her clit against him and let out a low groan. “Best I ever fucking had, baby.”
And that was when Jason roared in fury and yanked her up and off of Juan. Shay barely had a second to get her wits about her before she realized Jason was holding a gun.
What the—
He aimed it straight at Juan’s forehead.
Her scream was drowned out by the BANG.
Juan’s face was frozen in shock, bullet hole right between his eyes. Blood pooled around him, soaking the carpet.
Brenda was screaming.
When Jason’s furious eyes came to Shay, she fully expected him to turn the gun on her next. “Best you ever had?”
Shay’s mouth dropped open. Her first impulse was to plead for her life. To say wait, he didn’t understand. She was only doing what he’d ordered her to! On the threat of her baby son’s life. That she found Juan disgusting!
All of which was true.
But she knew instinctively that the sociopathic maniac in front of her wouldn’t hear any of it. All he would hear would be excuses.
And weakness.
So, fully naked, with blood spatter on her legs and torso, she just stood taller. Then she shrugged. She’d pretend to be like him. Maybe the only way to survive this nightmare was to play his game.
That spur of the moment decision would set the course for the rest of her life, a course she was still on to this very day. It meant she’d survived when so many that Jason found ‘boring’ had died.
For whatever reason, she’d managed the seemingly impossible. She’d continued to hold his interest. For nearly a decade now. Sometimes she wished she’d chosen differently that day. If only she’d fallen at his feet and groveled like so many others did, maybe then he would have put a bullet in her head too. She’d seen him do it enough times in the intervening years.
But one thing always stopped her.
Well, eventually, two things.
Matthew.
And his sister Nicole.
Nicole, who was Jason’s child.
The two suns her life orbited around.
Because another thing that had happened that fateful night all those years ago? Jason realized he could make her do anything—anything—by threatening that which she held most dear.
Her children.
Chapter 15
JONAS
Jonas had caught just a glimpse of Shay sprinting down the end of the long street and turning left. He’d immediately taken off after her. But it had been a few years since his track star days… okay, a decade. And being stoned all the time hadn’t exactly helped his motivation to work out in the intervening years.
So it took him far longer than he would have liked to turn the same corner Shay had. And it was just in time to see her stumbling off the road into the woods by the old stone bridge.
What was she doing? Going down to the river?
When he finally got to the bridge, he looked down and searched the riverbank below.
He wouldn’t have seen her if he hadn’t really been looking. She was wearing a brown t-shirt, and with her tan skin she blended in with the bushes and scrub brush along the riverbank. She was crouched down, knees to her chest, right beside the river, staring at the water.
There was mud all over her legs and leaves in her hair.
Had she fallen on her way down?
Jonas’s chest went tight.
How could she be so reckless? What if something had happened to her? The embankment was so steep. She could have fallen and snapped her goddamned neck.
His jaw clenched as he marched around the side of the bridge and made his way down the same way she must have gone. He walked sideways, balancing carefully and still almost lost his footing several times.
And every time, his chest got tighter and tighter until it felt like a goddamned vice was squeezing all the breath out of his lungs.
What the fuck had she been thinking?
The moving river was loud enough that Shay only noticed him when he got close and stepped on a dry branch that snapped underfoot.
She looked back and her mouth dropped open a little, obviously surprised.
But she didn’t say anything. She just went back to watching the river.
Jonas let out a long, slow breath.
He didn’t know what to do with the mix of feelings swarming him.
He wanted to yell at her. He wanted a joint.
More than any of that though?
He wanted to take her over his goddamned knee.
The impulse was so strong he took a step back, startled. What the fuck? He hadn’t thought about… not in years.
Yes, there had been a time—
Before Katherine. Before he’d been ‘saved’ or whatever. Before he’d become a Christian and decided to be a preacher. There was a six-month period where he’d… well, experimented with certain things.
He hadn’t let himself think about that time in years. But standing here looking down at Shay, so obviously already in pain, all the old impulses came rushing back.
It had started off innocently enough.
He was in college and noticed all the porn he’d been drawn to lately had a similar theme. And his sometimes booty call, Marissa, liked it when he tied her up.
So one time, he took her to this club and… to call it an eye-opening experience would be an understatement.
Shit got crazy after that.
They went too far too fast.
He’d been killing himself with school. All that discipline and drive he’d had his whole life—he’d been pouring it into college with a vengeance, determined to graduate in two and a half years instead of four so he could start his law degree early. He was hell bent on becoming a hot shot defense attorney and making millions.
Notably his dad, the honorable Judge Bernard Gallagher, hated defense attorneys.
So he was studying and staying up crazy hours, living off Red Bull and cigarettes, barely eating—and it was like he just needed a goddamned release valve.
Which he found in taking a flogger to Marissa’s ass. Or his belt. Or one time, his law textbook. He’d make her cry and then they’d fuck like animals on the floor of his dorm room.
Until one night when she brought a razor and begged him to cut her.
When he said no way, he wasn’t going to hurt her, she asked, “Why not? I thought you liked hurting me?”
It freaked him the fuck out. Was that what she really thought?
It was just kinky sex. He didn’t actually get off on hurting women. Did he?
He was so goddamned upset by the thought that he couldn’t sleep all night after he asked Marissa to leave. The next morning, he showed up at church for the first time since he was a little kid.
And that, as they say, was all she wrote.
He committed his life to Jesus. Never looked back.
Of course, the never looking back part was easier to do when he was so stoned he couldn’t even feel his own dick.
“Do you still believe in Hell?”
Her question caught him so off guard it took a second for it to register.
“Um,” he blinked before gathering his wits and sitting down beside her on the muddy bank. He looked over at her but she just kept stubbornly staring out at the water.
“You were a preacher. So you believed in Hell, right? Like for bad people,” she clarified, picking up a rock and toying with it before lobbing it in the river. “Do you think we’ll all get what we deserve after we die?”
Jonas turned to look at her sharply. He had the feeling these weren’t just idle questions. He’d spent enough years as a pastor to know when someone was beating
around the bush.
After the catastrophe with Marissa, he’d made pastoral counsel his focus in Seminary. Never again did he want to be in a position where someone in front of him was in so much obvious pain and need and he had no idea what to do to help them.
“What’s going on, Shay? Why’d you run out of the house like that?”
She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she just shrugged. “It’s nice out here. Peaceful.”
Avoidance. It was a classic defense mechanism.
He studied her more closely.
All right. She didn’t want to face whatever it was that brought her out here head on? He could respect that.
After all, he’d spent eight years in a pot-induced haze rather than deal with his shit. He really wasn’t in a position to judge.
At the same time, her putting herself in danger like she had was not acceptable.
So he decided to answer her first question.
“I used to believe in Hell. Right and wrong. It used to be so clear to me. There was good, and there was bad.” He sliced a hand through the air. “The good people who believed in God and did good things? They got rewarded with eternal life.”
He watched her closely as she swallowed hard. “And the others?”
It was his turn to shrug. “Well that was what was so nice about being so goddamned sure of myself all the time. It was all black and white.” He followed her gaze and looked out at the flowing water. “People came to me with a problem and asked, Pastor, what should I do?”
“I always had an answer. I knew right from wrong. My dad was a judge and I’d grown up believing in justice as a very solid concept. The righteous were set free. The bad people were thrown in jail.”
She was looking at him by now. He could feel her eyes on him but he didn’t turn to meet her gaze.
“But then came Xterminate and D-day,” she said.
He nodded. “Even before that, though. About a month before Xterminate, I found out my wife was cheating on me.”
“You had a wife?”
He looked at her then, seeing the shock she didn’t bother masking. He hadn’t realized she didn’t know. He wasn’t intentionally keeping it a secret. It just wasn’t something that came up often. He was used to everyone in town knowing all of his business. He’d lived here his whole life except for those few years of college in Dallas.
“What happened?”
He met her inquisitive green eyes. For the first time since he’d found her today, the despair he’d felt hanging around her seemed to have momentarily lifted.
So he barreled forward, as much as he hated to talk about Katherine. Who the fuck knew, maybe talking about it would help him too. He hadn’t exactly been concerned with his own emotional health the last eight years.
He took a deep breath. “I brought her with me back here to this small town after my father died because…” he trailed off. Christ, he couldn’t even really say why. If his dad had still been alive it would have made sense. But after he was gone?
He’d counseled enough people to know shit with parents usually ran deep but he’d never stopped to examine how his own dad’s larger than life presence—whether he was actually there or not—had always influenced his life and behavior.
“Anyway,” he dragged a hand through his hair, “Katherine was never happy here. Apparently she started up the affair with one of the deacons in my church just a few months after we moved in. Maybe to get back at me for dragging her away from Dallas and city life and everything she loved—”
Of course, at the time, he’d thought she’d loved him more than any of the rest of it. Wasn’t that what marriage was supposed to be about? Leaving everything else and cleaving to the person you married? Starting a new life, together? At least that’s what he’d so naively thought when he’d stood in front of Katherine in her big white dress at the front of that church in Dallas with five hundred of their closest friends and family.
Yeah. He’d barely known anyone there. It had seemed like a big lotta hoopla for nothing. But whatever, Katherine had always dreamed of having what she called a ‘fairytale wedding’ so he went along with the endless tux fittings, the cake tastings, picking out the perfect card stock for the invitations, registering at five stores, picking out a china pattern, hiring the live band…
He shook his head. Ironic that the guy who thought weddings were bullshit ended up being the one performing them long after he left religion and all the rest of it behind.
Shit. A psychologist would have a field day with him.
He could really use a fucking joint. Anytime he ever thought of any of this shit, he lit up and forgot it all again. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Shay, he’d be halfway through a damn bowl by now.
Instead, he took another deep breath and clenched and unclenched his jaw before going on. “So anyway, after living here and pastoring five years, I come home early from a pastor’s retreat in Austin.”
“I’m thinking I’ll surprise Katherine, right? I got roses and everything.” One of the speakers at the conference had talked about how important it was not to let the romance die and how wives were a Pastor’s first and most important partner in their ministry.
So in spite of how cold and distant things had become with Katherine, he was determined to fix it. To do whatever it took to bring the old spark back.
At least until he had jogged up the stairs and saw Roger, the local CPA who did the church’s taxes for Christ’s sake, spanking Katherine before plowing her ass.
Jonas’s mouth had fallen open in shock and his first thought had been, ridiculously: she only lets me fuck her missionary. Why the hell did he get to take her goddamned ass, a part of her Jonas had never even had? The one time he’d even tried exploring it with his finger she’d freaked the hell out and called him a pervert.
But Roger—fucking Roger got the whole kit and kaboodle?
“Three weeks later, she got the first boil.”
Shay’s hand went to her mouth. “Oh my God.”
Jonas shrugged. “Don’t think God had anything to do with it.”
“Wait,” she said, eyebrows scrunching. “Three weeks later? She stayed after you caught her with that Roger guy?”
“What was I gonna do? I was the town’s favorite pastor. Think of the scandal.” He huffed out a bitter laugh. “Plus there was the fact that he didn’t have money for a hotel on a pastor’s salary. Katherine certainly didn’t have a job. She claimed Roger was going to leave his wife and they’d move into an apartment together. But then both she and Roger’s wife got sick. Shit, you know how it was. Almost all the women got sick.”
She nodded, looking down at her lap.
“So what happened then?”
Jonas shrugged.
“I took care of her until she died.”
Shay’s head came up at this, eyebrows lifting. “Even after…?” She shook her head. “I mean, did she regret it in the end? Betraying you?” Her eyes dropped again. “Did she apologize?” And quieter. “Did it matter at that point?”
Jonas shifted uncomfortably. Goddamn, he could really, really use a fucking joint.
“No.”
“No she didn’t apologize or no it didn’t matter?”
He huffed out a quick breath. “Neither. She didn’t apologize. And I doubt it would have mattered even if she had.”
Shay pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “Why?” Her voice was small.
What did she mean, why?
“She’d lied to me for years. Years. I was always trying to do things to fix the distance between us. I read books. Brought her little gifts. Tried to surprise her by cleaning the kitchen while she was out getting her hair done. I’d set a candle-lit bath so she could relax after a day of committee meetings at the church.”
He’d tried extending foreplay on the rare nights she did let him touch her, which was about once a month. And when she did, she’d only have it one way—ankles hiked over his shoulders, eyes squee
zed shut, looking like she’d rather be anywhere other than underneath him.
“And then to find her bent over the kitchen table, him spanking her of all goddamn things and her moaning like it was the best she’d ever had—” Jonas stopped when he realized he was raising his voice.
He dragged a hand through his hair again. Shit. He still really had a chip on his shoulder about it all, didn’t he?
Be honest. It was more like a giant, fucking gash. And he’d never dealt with any of it.
Repression. Classic coping mechanism.
Well shit.
Eight years it took him to diagnose himself. Some counselor he was.
“But you took care of her till she died anyway?”
He cringed at the look of admiration in her eyes. “I’m no saint.” Time to clear up any confusion. “Outwardly, I continued being the perfect husband. I put on the poultices. I changed her bedding. Fed her broth and switched out her bedpans near the end.”
He shook his head, one hand fisting as he remembered. “But I hated her the whole time. I hated her for what she’d done to me.”
He thought Shay might pull away at his admission, but instead, her hand tugged her knee down from underneath her chin and when she relaxed it, he kept his hand on her thigh. He still couldn’t look at her while he made the rest of his confession. “And she knew it. No matter how gently I bathed her or how patiently I spooned broth in her mouth. Her last months on earth were spent locked in a dying body and her only company was a man who would never forgive her.”
Shay squeezed his hand. “Didn’t the, um… her lover, try to see her?”
Jonas scoffed. “She kept asking for him. And finally, I swallowed my pride enough and went to him. But his own wife was sick. And he had his children to think of. The whole thing had only ever been a bit of fun to him. He’d never planned to actually leave his wife. None of it mattered in the end anyway. Katherine died and that was that.”
Shay shook her head. “But you stayed with her.”
“There wasn’t anyone else to do it.”
