Gun Shy(76)

I am a girl with a coal-black heart beating inside my chest and a murderer underneath me. The first one I can’t do anything about, but the second I can.

Because there’s no other way around this: Damon has to die for what he’s done to us, and nobody can ever know it was me.

I curl my hands underneath his arms and drag him into the now-open pine box where he stuffed Jennifer, his dead weight backbreaking. I drop him in the middle of the box, and his head makes a thick sound as it connects with the wood.

I gather my supplies; plastic sheeting, rubber gloves, Leo’s hunting knife, Damon’s gun.

You’re not gun shy, are you?

I look down at the man who ruined my life and I feel nothing. Nothing except the first butterflies of excitement. Of relief. Because this is the part where I take my life back. This is the moment when I grab the wheel and correct course.

This is where Damon King – Daniel Collins – says his final goodbye.





ONE YEAR LATER





CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE





LEO





Spring came early this year. All the flowers in the garden are blossoming. Cassie is blossoming, with a baby. Our baby.

Yeah. We’re having a baby. It still sounds weird when I say it. Good weird. I never thought I’d see the day. Cassie, literally barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen of her house, our house.

It’s strange to think how much has changed in one year.

Since Damon lost his shit and went on emergency stress leave, right after Cassie’s suicide attempt, everything has changed. I haven’t seen or heard from the guy since the day I found Cassie in the bath, bleeding and drugged from her almost-suicide. Cassie says he still calls and writes her periodically. Sounds like the guy just couldn’t take it anymore, handed in his badge and gun and high-tailed it out of town. Which I didn’t believe at first. Didn’t think he’d ever let Cassie out of his house, out of his sight, out of his clutches.

She was all he had, but now she’s mine, and if he ever comes back, he can’t have her, because she belongs to me.

I keep waiting for him to come back. But it’s been a year now, a year since that night when Cassie ran down to my place in the freezing snow and told me he’d gone for good, that we could finally be together. My parole is almost finished, I’ve got the girl, and now she’s having my child.

We didn’t plan that. About three months after Damon left, as the twin scars on Cassie’s wrists has just started to fade a little, two other lines showed up. Not planned, not ideal, but probably the best thing that had happened for either of us since we were kids. Now she’s nine months pregnant and she should let me cook while she rests, but she insists.

“You want bacon?” Cassie asks, breaking me out of my thoughts as she holds a pan above the dining table. The engraved key she always wears on a chain around her neck glints against her skin, the word Nomad etched into it, an ironic thing for a girl who’s never been anywhere further than Lone Pine, California.

“Do I want bacon,” I echo, pinching her ass. She squeals, dropping a pile of burnt pig slices on my plate, her baby belly brushing against my arm as she heads back to the sink with the empty pan. She sits next to me, her plate looking much healthier than mine, covered in slices of avocado and scrambled eggs and broccoli. Mine looks like a heart attack in comparison, but I’m sure I’ll be working it all off straight after we’re done.

Sure enough, we don’t even make it five minutes before Cassie’s sitting in my lap, her food untouched. “You know,” I say in between her fevered kisses. “If you want my bacon, you could just take it off my plate.”

She laughs, her fingers making quick work of my zipper and boxers. I sink my fingers into her round ass cheeks as she pulls her panties to the side and slides down on me, her eyes rolling back as I sink into her. She’s fucking insatiable now that she’s past the morning sickness, and she’s finally got some weight on her. She looks healthy, instead of gaunt. Her cheeks are rosy instead of pale. And she wants sex all the damn time, so much that I can barely keep up with her. Not that I’m complaining. We have all those years I was gone to make up for. And I fully intend on making it up to her.

After we’re done, with the food and the fucking, I wash up the dishes while Cassie showers. She heads downstairs a few minutes later in an oversized striped sweater and leggings, her hair in a loose knot atop her head.

“You coming?” she asks.

“Coming where?” I ask.

“The midwife appointment,” Cassie says breathlessly. “She’s going to do that stretch and sweep thing, see if we can’t get this baby out. The sex obviously isn’t working.”

“Maybe we’re not trying hard enough,” I reply.

She looks stressed. “I’m having this baby at home,” she says stubbornly. “I’m already three days overdue. If I go much more, they’ll induce me in the hospital and that’s not going to happen.”

I dry my hands on a kitchen towel, heading over to the bottom of the stairs where my pregnant-to-bursting girlfriend is fighting back tears. The fucking hormones, man. I love this girl, but she’s psychotic with the hormones.

“I asked Pike to help me fix the fence this morning,” I say, putting my hands on her belly as I lean down to kiss her forehead. “He’ll be over in a minute.”