Vengeful (Villains #2)(75)

“They called you.”

June smiled. “Yeah, they called me. But I couldn’t kill him.”

Marcella raised a brow. “What, you had a change of heart?”

“Hardly,” said June. “I mean I really tried to kill him. And I couldn’t.”





XI





THREE WEEKS AGO


MERIT CITY LIMITS


JONATHAN Royce owned one good suit, and it didn’t even fit.

It had, once upon a time—when he was thirty pounds heavier—but now, it slumped and sagged, always on the verge of slipping off. Just like his wedding ring, staying on only because of a twice-broken knuckle. Jonathan had never been a large man, but these days he was all harsh angles, underslept and undernourished. It was ironic, really—Jonathan looked like an addict, even though he’d been clean since Claire’s death.

Everyone he knew had dabbled—drugs and music went hand in hand, and the jazz scene was no exception.

But heroin was a hell of a high.

Not the roller coaster peaks of cocaine, or the mellow que sera sera of good weed, but a dreamy wave, a blissful way out of your own life, and your own head, a summer midnight swim in the ocean bare-assed kind of freedom—at first. Jonathan had seen the addiction coming, watched it roll in like a tide, but he was already wet, and he couldn’t drag himself back to shore.

And just like a high tide, an undertow, it came and washed everything away.

Money. Joy. Safety. Sanity.

Every day, the tide a little higher. Every day, the water a little deeper. Every day, a little farther from shore. Easy to get swept away. All you gotta do is stop swimming.

Jonathan looped the tie around his neck, fumbling with the knot, his fingers aching.

It had been nearly a year, and the joints still hurt every day.

He wasn’t even surprised, the night Caprese’s men came to visit. He was already high. Claire was out with friends and Jonathan didn’t have their money and he knew it and they knew it and there was the hammer and his hands—but then there she was walking in, there was Claire, screaming, there was Claire, pulling out a gun—where had she gotten that gun?—and then there was noise and pain and darkness.

Jonathan should have left Merit, after that.

Should have bailed the moment he came to in that hospital room with two broken hands and three bullet holes in his stomach and chest. But Claire’s blood was still mingled with his on their kitchen floor, and he just couldn’t bring himself to go. It just didn’t make sense, that she was dead, that he was not—Claire didn’t deserve it, didn’t deserve this, to become a past tense, a footnote in someone else’s story—and Jonathan had the strange but unshakable idea that he hadn’t made it either. That he was a ghost, anchored to the place where it all happened, bound there until some grim business was done. So he stayed, and wore that one good suit he had to her funeral, dripped ash on it chain-smoking cigarettes in a cheap hotel room afterward, waiting for Caprese’s men to find him and finish the job.

Funny thing, but until that night when Caprese’s men showed up, Jonathan had never killed anyone before.

He thought it would be harder.

It should have been harder, should have been impossible, considering the number of men, the number of shots fired, but so much about that day was impossible. The blue-white shine, like a shield, knocking their bullets away. The cacophony of sound and violence, and when it was over, Jonathan, standing alone among the corpses.

Unscathed.

Untouched.

In his rare metaphysical moments, Jonathan thought it was Claire, looking out for him. But in his masochistic moments, of which there were far more, he knew it was punishment, the universe mocking him for what he’d failed to do.

The clock chimed seven, and Jonathan knotted his worn-out tie. He slid on the jacket, picked up his saxophone case, and headed to work.

His breath fogged before him as he walked, this part of Merit already dark, like it couldn’t be bothered with streetlights. It was a half mile to the Marina, a patch of Merit they’d labeled Green Walk on the map, another bit of irony considering there was nothing but stone and asphalt in every direction.

The Ghost of Green Walk.

That was him. The man who couldn’t die.

He was already—

“Hey,” snarled a voice. “Give me your money.”

Jonathan hadn’t heard him coming, hadn’t really been listening. But he felt the barrel jab into his back, a single nervous thrust, and he turned to find a kid, maybe sixteen, gripping the gun in both hands like it was a bat.

“Go home.”

“You deaf or stupid?” growled the kid. “Don’t you see this gun? I said, give me your fucking money.”

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll fucking shoot you.”

Jonathan tipped his head back, looked at the sky. “So shoot.”

Half the time, they didn’t have the balls to fire. This one did. Not that it made any difference. The gun went off and the air glinted around Jonathan, like flint striking stone, that shine, like Claire’s arms around him, telling him it wasn’t his time, wasn’t his turn. The bullet ricocheted, flung into the dark.

“The fuck?” said the kid.

“Quit while you’re ahead,” warned Jonathan, right before the kid emptied the magazine at Jonathan’s head. Seven shots, and six of them rebounded uselessly into the dark, sparkling off bricks, asphalt, shattering a window. But the last bullet snapped back and hit the kid in the knee, and he went down screaming.