Gun Shy(47)

In my head, I imagine opening a can, pulling away the lid to reveal a mass of writhing worms. The lid cuts me, and some of my blood drips down onto the worms so that their beige-brown bodies are mottled with red.

This is what happens when you open a can of worms and show it to Damon. You end up with blood, and it’s almost always your own. But blood isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes, it’s the one thing that reminds you you’re still alive.

I can see myself in his eyes. My soul. He’s taken it from me.

“Do you feel empty, Damon?” I whisper.

He rests a hand at the base of my throat, all trace of his smile gone as he matches his fingers, onetwothreefourfive, to the brand-new bruises he left on me in the night, in the dark. “Not when I’m inside you.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE





CASSIE





I ache between my thighs. I’m reminded of last night. Of how Damon crept into my bedroom after my mother’s wake and fucked me until I hurt. Of course, it wasn’t enough that she was dead. That we’d just buried her. It wasn’t enough that he shot my dog. Once he’d had a taste of my pain, he had to come back for more.

The man I’ve been fucking for the past eight years, or rather, the man who’s been fucking me — his eyes gleam in the harsh sunlight that casts a brightness over the kitchen, bathing it in some macabre stage lights that scream: Action! But this isn’t make-believe, and the curtains won’t fall at the end of our grotesque little act, and after we’re done here, I won’t be able to peel my mask off and toss it on the ground as I exit the stage.

I swallow thickly. I wish he’d get tired of me.

“I heard you in the shower last night,” he says, his fingers squeezing into my flesh. “Did you think you could just wash me off like nothing happened?”

My cheeks burn as I try to twist away from him; Damon tightens his hold on my throat, crushing my windpipe as he pulls my face to his.

“You need to learn,” he says, through gritted teeth, “that I know everything about you, Cassie. You can sit here and try to psychoanalyze me, but I know what you think. I know where you are. And I know exactly where you’re going.”

It hurts, this familiarity. This incessant pain.

“My wife just died. Say sorry,” he says, loosening his grip.

“I’m sorry!” I wheeze, my throat burning as tears stream down from my eyes.

“Not like that,” he says, one hand moving to his belt buckle. “Show me how sorry you are.”

I do what I’m told. I show him just how sorry I am. How sorry I am that he ever came to this godforsaken town and ruined my life.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR





LEO





Taking Hannah to see an obstetrician in Reno is like a covert fucking CIA mission. We don’t tell my mother. She will freak. She will worry that we won’t come back, or that we are trying to take Hannah away for good. My mother is nothing if not a ball of narcissistic anxiety and paranoia with a streak of nasty for good measure.

We drive Hannah to the hospital under the cover of darkness. We tell her we’re going on a vacation, and she gets so excited, she ends up packing a bathing suit, all of her coloring books, and every stuffed toy ever made.

The doctor’s smile fades as he takes more measurements and calls more doctors in. Hannah is doing so well. I’m so fucking proud of her. I keep giving her candy, so distracted by keeping her calm that I don’t notice the two doctors in the room has given way to ten different people, squinting at the screen.

Hannah notices, too, because she starts to freak out a little bit. I manage to keep her calm long enough for the doctor to send them all out and bring in a new sticker book for her. It’s got all the Disney princesses, and she gets to work on it while the doctor and I talk in the hall.

Always shutting her away while we talk about her. I feel a brief flash of anger at my mother. She did this. Hannah would be so smart, so capable, if Mom hadn’t poisoned her. It would have been better if she’d been shooting up heroin during her pregnancy— at least then detox as a newborn would have been the worst of Hannah’s struggles. But alcohol has effectively ruined her chance of ever growing up, a girl stuck in a body that gets older as she stays a little child. As it grows a child.

The news is bad. Very fucking bad. “Incompatible with life” is what they say, but what they actually mean is that if a disabled girl has a baby with her own biological father, things are generally going to fuck up. We don’t tell the doctors the Daddy Carter part, of course. I haven’t even told Pike that part yet. It’s a knowledge I carry in my chest like a delicately balanced grenade with a faulty pin, waiting to explode.

Child Protective Services show up at the hospital, two of the motherfuckers, and it takes some very fast-talking to get them to back off. They won’t let Hannah come home with us, though. She’s a minor who has been raped and is in her third trimester. Not only that, she’s got something called preeclampsia, and she’s one bad day away from multiple organ failure. From death. My baby sister is teetering on the brink of dying because of what that bastard did to her.

She needs to be induced. But first, she needs a legal guardian. And since neither Pike nor I are legally her parent, that leaves one particular bitch who needs to fix this situation.