Better When He's Bad (Welcome to the Point #1)(84)
“What are you doing here?”
She wouldn’t look at me directly, but she reached behind me to adjust the pillows I was lying on until I found a more comfortable position to relax in. She was twisting her hands together, and even though I was still slightly doped up, I could tell she was out of sorts . . . distracted and fidgety.
“Reeve, why are you here?”
“You know how I know guys like Bax are bad news, how I know they can destroy your life without thinking?”
I scowled. “You don’t know anything about the kind of man Bax is. You have no idea what he was willing to do to keep me safe.”
If she was just here to try and talk me out of being with him again, I was going to find my way out of this hospital bed and smack her.
“My sister.” Her voice cracked and she had to take a second to clear her throat. “She’s a couple years younger than me. She was a straight-A student, class president, the apple of my parents’ eye. We were best friends.”
I couldn’t figure out what she was getting at, but I didn’t have anything else to do but let her tell me her story.
“Her senior year of high school she met this guy . . . a guy a lot like Bax. Good-looking, charming, and messed up in all kinds of really bad and dangerous things. He just overwhelmed her. It took a month for her to start skipping school, three for her to start ignoring me and start constantly fighting with my parents, and then six months in, she was doing drugs and stealing. By seven, she had dropped out of school, was working as a stripper, and I didn’t even recognize her anymore.”
She was crying silent tears and her hands were curled into fists at her sides. “He left her when she refused to start turning tricks for him, but he didn’t just dump her, he beat her to death. She died strung out and alone because of him.” She gulped loudly and stared intently at me. “The reason she didn’t want to prostitute herself out was because she was pregnant. He killed her and her baby because she wouldn’t f**k strangers for money. She was only eighteen.”
I felt bad for this girl. It was a heartbreaking story, but Bax wasn’t like that. “I’m sorry for your loss, Reeve, but what does that have to do with me or with Bax?”
She shook her head a little and her eyes got really big in her face. “You’re so nice, you have such a big heart. I couldn’t stand the idea of him doing to you what happened to Rissa . . .” She trailed off and turned her head to look out the window. “I was mad when Rissa died. I think I went a little crazy. The guy that screwed her up, he was evil, and the only way to fight evil is with evil. If you ask enough people in the Point, they eventually tell you about Novak.”
I felt my heart start to drop and my breath go still in my lungs.
“Look at me, Reeve.”
Her midnight-blue eyes clapped on mine, and even though they were shiny with tears, I knew, just knew in the bottom of my gut, that she had something to do with Novak’s goons pulling me off the street.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me. I just wanted to explain. Novak took care of the guy that destroyed Rissa, but he always asks for a price. For a long time he never came calling, never bugged me about money or working it off. I thought I was just lucky. Rissa’s killer was dead, a victim of his own horrible lifestyle, and I would work myself to death to help those in need so I could pay the world back for being vengeful and wanting blood.
“Benny showed up at the group home the first day Bax dropped you off. He spun this big story about what Bax was doing to you, how he was using you to get revenge on Race. The time to pay Novak back had come. They wanted to know when you were going to be alone and if I knew where you were staying, because they knew you weren’t with Bax anymore. I got you suspended. I called the home administrator and told her you took off with Bax. I told them you would be walking to the bus stop alone and that you mentioned someone named Gus. I don’t think you were even aware you let the name slip, but it was all they needed. I tried to tell myself I was helping, that anything that got you away from that guy was for your own good . . . but I knew. Inside I knew they would use you, kill you, and I gave them the info anyway.”
I should want to string her up, want blood for blood, and who knows? Maybe if things had gone differently and Bax had pulled the trigger, I would indeed want all of that, but right now, all I could feel was pity. Reeve had wanted an evil man dead that had hurt someone she loved, and I had made an evil man die because he was going to continue to hurt and torture those I loved. We just stared at each other, I don’t know if she really wanted redemption or some kind of validation from me, but she wasn’t going to get it.
“My brother almost died because they found him. A very nice, decent man didn’t make it because you handed over that location. I’ll heal from the knife wounds, they hurt but not nearly as much as watching the man I’m in love with hold a gun to his own head because he was that desperate to get me out of that warehouse alive. I understand what happens when you make a deal with the devil, Reeve, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think you don’t deserve your time in hell for paying him back.”
She opened her mouth and then closed it again. She blinked back the last of her tears and her mouth twisted up in a sardonic grin.
“I quit the group home. I’m going to the cops to tell them what I’ve done. I don’t know what that means for me, but it’s the right thing. I got so lost in what I was doing, in revenge and hate, I don’t even know who I am anymore, and that’s exactly what I was trying to prevent from happening to you. Only you seem more like yourself than you ever have before.”