Gun Shy(74)

But rage… rage is useful. It is the tiny seed that sprouts inside you and spreads like tendrils on a vine. It weaves itself around your veins, sticks in its barbs, and reminds you that you are still alive. It burns in your blood, that blood passes through your heart, and over time you fill up your hollow with something else. Rage…. And purpose.



* * *



I can thank Damon for my rage. A hard kernel of hate that passed from him to me, a metaphorical transaction, the grit from which a pearl forms. It rests inside my belly like a bullet, smooth and hidden, and with it I find a strength that comes only from surviving something utterly catastrophic.



* * *



The accident wasn’t Leo’s fault. The accident wasn’t an accident at all.



* * *



In my rage, I find my solace. In my rage, I vanquish my despair.





CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR





CASSIE





The next morning, I make coffee, just like I always do. One cup for me and one cup for him, fresh and black and bitter, just the way we like it.

Damon’s cleaning his gun when I sit at the table across from him, sliding him his cup. He glances up at me, our eyes catching for the briefest of moments before he goes back to brushing imaginary dust out of his gun parts. The guy is obsessed with military cleanliness. And while I enjoy living in a tidy house, I do not understand why he cleans so obsessively.

I bear the time patiently, watching him as he fiddles with gun parts in between sips of coffee.

“What?” he finally asks. So he’s noticed my sudden interest in him. Good. I have a few things I’d like to ask him.

“Did your mom used to clean a lot?” I ask him. “Your real mom, I mean.”

He freezes, his right eye twitching the tiniest bit. You’d miss it if you weren’t watching, but I am watching. Intently.

“I don’t remember,” he says. “Why?”

“My mother used to tell me I was made of glass,” I say, smiling as I remember her in happier times. “You remember? She had this way of knowing what I was thinking. She always knew if I had lied to her.”

He frowns. “I don’t want to talk about your mother.”

“I think you’re made of glass,” I continue. “I see right through you, Damon. I know what you’re doing.”

He smiles then, a smirk that drags up one side of his wide, sensual mouth. “Oh, really?” he says. “Enlighten me.”

I wait for a moment, watching as he fiddles with a tiny brush and some clear oil.

“I think you’re trying to pin Jennifer’s disappearance on Leo.”

His expression goes blank.

“You promised me that if I stayed away from him, you would let him be. And yet, he’s your only suspect in her disappearance.”

Damon’s jaw tightens; his grip on the little brush in his hand threatens to snap the thing in two. “Are you staying away from him?” he asks.

I always look down at the ground when I’m lying. Mom always told me lying would send me straight to hell, so when I lie, that’s probably why my eyes go down.

“Yes,” I reply, a flawless lie, and my eyes don’t waver from his. “I am. And so should you. Find somebody else to blame Jennifer’s disappearance on.”

He doesn’t say anything for a while, his eyes on the gun, his body language telling me that he’s mad. One wrong word and he could snap.

“Damon,” I press. “Promise me you will leave him alone.”

He pretends like I’m not even here.

In my mind, I sharpen my knife. I stare at the vein in his neck, the jugular, and I imagine slicing through it like a surgeon of death.

“Daniel.”

He drops the gun like it’s made of fire; if it had bullets in it, the thing would probably fire from the force at which it hits the tabletop. There it is. I have cut him open and now I’ll watch him bleed out.

And I’ve got to say, I expect something more in his reaction. Something indelible, something violent. I expect him to tackle me down to the floor, maybe stick a bar of soap in my mouth and make me choke on it until I promise never to say his real name again. But he doesn’t.

He doesn’t do anything.

I say his name again. His real name, the one his mother gave him. “Daniel?”

I look at his hands; they’re trembling. Damon King— Daniel Collins — doesn’t move a goddamn inch.

I grab those hands, pulling them, jolting him out of his daydream and toward me. Though the table separates us, I kneel on my chair, draping my top half across the table so our noses are almost touching.

His blue eyes to my green, and that’s how we stay for a long moment, while I imagine the horrors of his childhood, the events that created the monster.

I whisper my secret, his secret, a handful of murmured words that tear everything apart. “I know who you are. And I know what you did.”

I push back, getting off my chair and getting the fuck out of the kitchen before his violent tendencies kick in. I go up to the attic, the heavy bolt removed, something that took me all of five minutes to pry off while Damon showered earlier. The laptop is up there already, part of my plan, and I’ve moved the stacks of milk cartons so all the photos face out.