Gun Shy(91)
Your wife is a dangerous woman. Pike’s words come back to haunt me. My wife might be a dangerous woman, but I love her anyway. None of this was her fault, not really. At least, that’s what I tell myself as Cassie takes my hands and places them on her waist, her dress gone somewhere while my eyes were closed, her eyes locked on mine. My thumbs find the slight swell of new life in her belly as I grip her hips, her milk-filled breasts pressed against my bare chest, and I wonder how anyone could ever call her dangerous. And then I remember the bodies in the yard, and I close my eyes again.
CHAPTER SIXTY
CASSIE
I wish Steven Randolph had just killed me, Damon said to me once. His delivery was stunning, a blow to my chest, a bruising punch right in my blue-black heart.
I scrubbed the box and the attic as best I can after we buried Damon. The attic of lost souls, I thought, as I knelt on knees that were still tender from all the hours I knelt and panted and cried in labor just days before.
Afterward, I sat in the box up in the attic, cross-legged, no light except the thin slice of weak sunlight that filtered in through the high window.
I held one of Damon’s milk cartons in my hands, turning it over and over.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY? It screamed at me.
Yes. I have seen him. It took me a long time, a year and more, but I broke the man into enough pieces to reveal the child.
I have seen this boy. Lazulite eyes and a dimple in each cheek when he smiled.
He was beautiful.
I thought back to all the nights we spent in here. Nights when Leo was deep in a drugged sleep, safely downstairs, nights when I would pull more secrets from the man who almost broke me completely. How intimately I got to know him, to understand him, to hate him.
How sorry I felt for him.
How much I wanted to taste his pain the way he had tasted mine, how fucking heartsick he’d made me.
He’d already tasted of his own death when I kissed his mouth, dry lips and sunken cheeks, but his body still worked just fine. It still longed for me, hard and rigid as I unbuttoned his dirty jeans and reached inside. His eyes went wide as he shrank back from me. I think he was expecting violence. Maybe expecting that I’d come good on my threat and cut his dick off like I had promised so many times to do.
“Cassie,” he breathed, muscles still sinew, eyes still full of violent love for me, all for me.
His eyes were wet as I took from him what he’d taken from me.
After, I locked the attic door and checked it twice. I took the stairs leisurely, still full of him. I went into the kitchen and drank a glass of milk.
I went upstairs and slept beside Leo, the sticky smear of my old lover still wet against my thighs.
Going mad doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a process. It’s girls in wells and mothers in comas and boyfriends in prison. It’s Damon King in your bed, in your head, and then finally, in the prison you constructed for him.
Epilogue
CASSIE
“Sweet creature!” said the spider. “You’re witty and you’re wise!
How handsome are your gauzy wings, how brilliant are your eyes!
* * *
I bet you thought that I was the fly, didn’t you? All wide-eyed and frightened as the spider closes the gap.
But I am a girl with a darkness inside me.
Carefully placed. Cleverly concealed. A darkness that could devour you.
* * *
I am not the fly in this story.
Pray you do not wrong me. Pray you do not stick in my carefully threaded web.
I am a girl with a darkness inside me.
But I think you knew that already.
Thank you so much for reading GUN SHY. If you’d like more of where that dark and depraved mindfuckery came from, turn the page for a taster of my next story: a modern, bloody, violent and terribly dark retelling of Romeo and Juliet.
* * *
The CALIFORNIA BLOOD series, set in the criminal underbelly of San Francisco, follows two warring families who are ruled by blood, power and twisted desire.
* * *
Read an exclusive excerpt of VERONA BLOOD, the first book in the series, over the page…
About Verona Blood
BOOK 1 IN THE CALIFORNIA BLOOD SERIES
These violent delights will have violent ends…..
- William Shakespeare
Avery Capulet is missing.
Taken by a madman. Kept in the dark.
She might not survive.
He’ll use her body. Destroy her mind. All before he ever lays a hand on her.
* * *
Rome Montague is a drug dealer. A criminal. A thief.
Rome Montague is missing – but nobody will miss him.
Not that it matters; after the things he’s done to this girl, he doesn’t deserve to be found.
* * *
The CALIFORNIA BLOOD series, set in the criminal underbelly of San Francisco, follows two warring families who are ruled by blood, power and twisted desire.
ROME