Needing Her (From Ashes #1.5)(61)
“That isn’t an excuse, you could have taken her away from them. Uncle Jim could have done something!”
“Look, Gage, you can’t make me feel any worse than I already do! I’m the one who had to clean the blood off her, I’m the one who had to bandage her up even during the dozens of times when she should have gotten stitches. I had to buy a mini freezer for my room so I could have ice for when she came over!” He pulled his phone out of his pocket, tapped the screen a few times, and stifled another sob as he handed it over to me.
“What is this?” Whatever these fresh bruises were, they definitely weren’t done by hands. The small rectangles looked familiar, but I couldn’t place what I thought they were.
“Golf club. I didn’t even know about this last time. She just told me about it on the way back here, and I took the pictures before I came in here. She said it happened yesterday morning before I came and packed her bags.”
“Are there more pictures?”
He raised his head for a second to nod. “Ever since I got my first phone I’ve taken pictures every time she came over, and I always transfer them to my new phones so I’ll have them. They’re all backed up too. She wouldn’t let me say anything, but I wanted to have photos in case . . .” His voice trailed off. There wasn’t a need for him to finish that sentence anyway; I got the message.
Flipping through some of his pictures, I couldn’t believe this was the same sweet Cassi I’d just met a few hours ago. Bruises of all shapes, sizes, and colors covered her body and it was killing me to look at them, but I couldn’t stop. You could see all the ones that were fading slowly get covered up by new ones, and other pictures showed her back, arms, and face covered in blood. What killed me was that whenever her face was in the picture, she wore the same expression I’d just seen outside. No emotion, dead eyes, and absolutely no tears.
“What would they do to her?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Like hell I didn’t. I was already planning on going to California with my twelve-gauge. “What. Would. They. Do?”
He was quiet for so long I didn’t think he was going to answer. “When it first started, it was usually just hitting and kicking. The older she got, the more it turned into whatever they had in their hands or could grab quickly. Once that started, she only came over if it was other objects. She lived for the days when it was only hands.”
“So what I saw tonight, you said it isn’t the worst?”
“Not even close.”
“What was?”
Tyler sighed and looked up at me, tears streaming down his face. “I don’t know, there were a few that really stood out, but I couldn’t name one that was the worst.”
I just kept glaring at him; he needed a beatin’ just for letting this go on for so long. She was seventeen or eighteen now, so she had been six or seven when this all started. And he’d known the entire time.
“A couple years ago, the cops showed up one night—”
“I thought you said she wouldn’t let you call?”
“I didn’t.” He sighed and ran his hands through his hair a few times. “The old lady that lived in between us heard her screaming one night, called the cops.”
I shoved off the wall and flung my arms out. “You had a perfect opportunity and you still didn’t do anything? They didn’t do anything?!”
“Gage, I didn’t even know the cops were called until she texted me hours after they’d left!”
“What happened?” I demanded, and forced myself back against the wall.
“Cassi opened the door, her mom and stepdad right behind her. None of her bruises were visible then and they all denied the screaming, including Cass.”
Seriously? What the f*ck?
“When the cops left, her mom took off her high heels, used the pointy heel part to hit her head repeatedly. There was so much blood when I got there, Gage, and she couldn’t lay her head even on a pillow for almost a week after that. Another time her stepdad threw a glass of alcohol at her, she ducked, and it shattered against a wall. Since she didn’t get hit by it, he grabbed her by the throat, dragged her to where it was, and just kept slicing her forehead, arms, stomach, and back with one of the pieces. She wore a scarf every day ’til the finger marks were gone. That’s why she wears her hair with those things, what are they called? Bangs. She got those scars when she was ten and the one on her head isn’t very noticeable anymore, but she still tries to hide it. She tries to hide all of them, but some she can’t unless she wants to wear jeans and long sleeves in the summer.”
I stood there in shock, trying to make the connection between this girl he was telling me about and the girl I’d just met. Even with seeing the pictures it wasn’t clicking for me; I couldn’t imagine someone touching her, or her being so willing to let it continue. “You’re a poor excuse for a man, Tyler.” I opened my door and stood next to it, arms crossed over my chest.
He looked like he crumpled in on himself. “You think I don’t know that?”
I couldn’t say anything else to him. As soon as he was out of my room I slammed the door and fell on my bed. I wanted to make him stay in my room and go to her myself. Hold her and tell her I’d never let anyone else hurt her again. But for whatever reason she wanted him, and we didn’t know each other so it would be even creepier than my trying to be close enough to hear her talk tonight.