Gun Shy(68)

I catch Damon’s hand with loose fingers. He looks back, confusion on his face, irritation.

“I have to go,” he says.

I start to cry again. “Idontwantyoutogo.”

I won’t remember most of this in the morning. The pill will leave me with a thankful case of near-amnesia. I will recall flashes of things, single words picked out of the fray, but that’s it. That is the greatest mercy and the biggest lie of all. I will not remember. But now, encased in the thick rush of euphoria, of whatever he’s given me frothing in my veins, I need him to stay.

“Please, don’t go,” I beg, my words slurring under the sedative effect of the drug. I beg him! I am a sick girl. I am ruined. I will take my captor because he is the only person left in the world. I see the hesitation in Damon’s eyes, the hard reality of what’s to come when he reaches the foot of the stairs and steps in his brother’s blood. He can’t stay, but he doesn’t want to go, either.

He relents. He strips off the plastic blue overalls he was wearing, naked underneath, and slides into the bed beside me. His hands are hot on my cold skin, despite my hot bath, two shots of bourbon and three extra blankets. I am as cold as Jennifer’s bones in the icy ground. The moon casts an eerie sliver of light into the room through the gap in my curtains, a sliver that illuminates Damon’s face.

His head rests on the pillow beside mine, his hand under the blankets on my bare hip. He slides his palm down, cupping between my legs.

“Did it hurt?” he asks. I nod.

“Do you want me to make it better?”

These damn pills and the haze they cloud you in. In ten minutes they can turn you from an unwilling victim into a begging slut.

Do you want me to make it better? I do. I nod.

And then he’s on me and in me and the room is spinning, my knees pressed wide, my hips protesting at the way I’m spread apart. But none of it registers as pain anymore, not when I’m flying high above Gun Creek in a hallucinatory daze. Damon uses me as I use him, as he scratches an itch deep inside me that nobody can ever seem to find. He takes and I take and no wonder we are all so empty, so barren, so dead inside. His thumb finds the magical spot, right above where he’s pushing inside me, and I finally feel whole again.

I bite down on my tongue so I do not say Leo’s name. I come quickly, loudly, and when Damon kisses the moan from my mouth, there is blood.





CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE





CASSIE





The morning brings a blue tinge to the world, a fresh layer of snow, a kitchen and a staircase scrubbed clean of any crime. I want to ask where Ray is buried, or burned or submerged, but I don’t. I make coffee instead, and sip it from my Disney mug like nothing ever happened. My body is humming pleasantly, thanks to the two Percocet I took before I got out of bed. The heat is blasting through the house, I can’t feel the rope burns on my wrists and ankles through my buzz, and there’s a gentle snow falling outside the kitchen window. The dining table Ray tied me to is gone, probably firewood now, and our plastic outdoor table sits in the spot where it once lived.

Damon hasn’t slept by the look of him. I sit down at the new table, across from him, wincing as my bruised thighs make contact with the dining chair.

“Did you sleep?” Damon asks.

I return his vacant stare. “Like the dead.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Too soon?”

“Just shut up and make me some coffee.”

I mock salute him, standing up from my chair. My sweater is loose, and it drops down my arm, exposing my bruised shoulder. Damon looks at the bruises, then at me. I hold his gaze for a moment before I make him coffee, slamming it down on the table in front of him.

I resume my spot, drinking coffee as I size up the man who thought it was a good idea to roofie and fuck me after his brother raped me.

“Cassie,” Damon says sharply. “Say something.”

Something, huh? Okay.

“What did Ray mean about that junkie creek bitch?”

Damon’s eyes cloud over and he looks at the floor.

“It was Karen, wasn’t it?” I prod.

Damon looks at the ceiling and nods, his eyes glassy as he blinks. “Yeah. It was Karen.”

Something inside my chest tightens so hard, I can barely breathe. “Did you kill Karen, Damon? Did you kill her and dump her body on Leo’s property so it would look like he had something to do with it?”

He shakes his head tightly. “I didn’t. I wouldn’t.”

“Did you rape Karen Brainard?”

He gives me a withering look. “You don’t need to rape girls like Karen, Cassie. You just need the right currency. Hers was any kind of upper she could get her filthy little hands on.”

“You’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead.”

Damon snorts. “I think we drove off that bridge a long time ago.”

Something about the way he says that rattles me. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I’m deeply unsettled.

“Is that why you killed Ray? Because of what he did to Karen?”

He finally meets my gaze again. “I killed him because of what he did to you, Cassie. You. I thought… I didn’t know if I’d be able to stop him in time.”