Gun Shy(14)

“Let’s wrap it up!” Damon yells from downstairs.

My head throbs on cue. I take my iPhone from the charger beside my bed and see missed calls from the diner, a worried text. Whatever. I’ll be there soon enough.

Steeling myself, I give one last glance to the face in the mirror, slap a knitted cap over my hair, and take the stairs two at a time, flying past Damon and to the front door. I grab my bag from the coat hook and sling it over my shoulder, eager to get out of this house and away from this for a few hours.

I try the door. Locked.

My stomach sinks.

“Cassie,” Damon says behind me. “Aren’t you forgetting something? Sleeping in doesn’t excuse you from chores.”

I’m tired. I’m so, so tired. I’m twenty-five years old and I’m just as hollow as the woman down the hall, the one whose body carried me for nine months, the one whose body no longer carries anything - not even her own soul.

Still facing the door, I swallow back an argument.

I drop my backpack off my shoulder and turn to face him.

“Sometimes I think you’d let her starve if it weren’t for me reminding you.” Damon hands me the liquid nutrition mix prescription and I take a deep breath, holding it between my palms as I approach the breathing corpse down the hall. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I would let her starve. Anything’s got to be more humane than keeping her alive all these years when she really should have died in that creek.





CHAPTER FIVE





CASSIE





Damon finally lets me leave the house fifteen minutes later, once I’ve injected the liquid nutrition mix into Mom’s feed bag and finished everything up just the way he likes.

He took my house keys off me right after Mom’s accident, and I spend my days either locked in or locked out. Him controlling the keys means I can’t punch out early and walk home in the middle of the day before he’s finished his shift. I did that a couple times before he caught on, and now he’s got that place locked down like Fort Knox. And before you do a double take and start counting on your fingers, yes, you read that right: I’m a twenty-five-year-old woman with less power over her life than most teenagers.

No wonder I spend my afternoons daydreaming about how long it would take to murder my family and take off.

“Can you take me to the store later?” I ask Damon as we drive over the bridge, bumpbump, bumpbump, past the shiny section of guardrail that was replaced after the crash, and pull up in front of Dana’s Grill. It’s beyond ironic that I work at the same place where the accident happened. That I get to relive it every time I happen to look out the window and let my eyes fall upon the highway.

He rolls his eyes. “We’ll see.”

My heart sinks until it’s a lead weight in the bottom of my stomach. ‘We’ll see’ means ‘no’ most of the time.

“I need to get the turkey,” I say flatly.

He throws the car into park and turns to me, his sheriff’s badge glinting in my peripheral vision. How he keeps that fucking thing so shiny, I’ll never know. He certainly doesn’t get me to polish it, surprisingly. It’s gleaming like a goddamned Academy Award. A vestibule of power. I own this town. And he damn well does.

“Thought you got the turkey last night.”

I shake my head. “I forgot.”

He takes a deep breath and exhales. He’s pissed. I see his fingers curl around the black steering wheel and squeeze. His knuckles turn pinkish-red in the cold, not white like I expect. “You forgot last night because you started drinking at midday.”

“My shift finished early yesterday. What was I meant to do?”

I immediately regret lying about the turkey. It won’t end well.

“What were you supposed to do?” he repeats. “Hmm, let’s see. Maybe get some food for Thanksgiving so we don’t starve? We have guests coming.”

I snort. “We have your asshole brother coming.”

Damon frowns. “You know he’s your only family aside from me.”

Damon’s brother is a fucking creep. “He’s not my family,” I almost add, Neither are you.

He looks at me for a long moment. “Sometimes I don’t know what to do with you,” he says finally.

“You get the fucking food if you want it so bad,” I reply, staring at the diner’s front doors.

“You really want to do this, Cassandra?”

“No,” I say. He called me Cassandra. Fuck. Should’ve just gone to the store yesterday.

“I’m sorry, what?” He cocks his head and puts a hand up to his ear. “I didn’t catch that.”

“No,” I say, more forcefully this time.

“You’re an ungrateful little bitch,” he says angrily.

“Go fuck yourself,” I snap. Before Damon can lock me in the car, I quickly open my door and slide out.

“I’m not finished with you,” Damon says, waving his finger at me as I get out of the car.

“Go rescue a kitten from a tree or whatever it is you country cops do,” I reply, slamming the door as hard as I can. I lug my backpack over one shoulder and stand at the gate, watching Damon’s car drive away, growing smaller and smaller until I can’t see it at all. I glance at the police station, on the same row of buildings as the diner, and wonder where he’s gone if not there.