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He charges into the hallway as if bullets can’t hurt him, as if facing a potential attacker is a better prospect than talking about his feelings.
CHAPTERFIFTEEN
Jamie
As I search the garden—not giving a damn that I’m in my underwear—I think about my delayed reaction. I wonder if it has anything to do with my time inside. In prison, when stuff goes down, it’s a waiting game. Wait for the guards to sort it out. Wait for the offending prisoners to be under control, but I’m outside now. I let it slip and put my woman in danger. I should’ve reacted quicker.
Luckily, Patrick seems to have run away once Lucy spotted him. Standing in the security light, I stare into the darkness, wondering if he’s out there. I don’t want to return to Lucy to talk about how weak I was, how I let myself slide. I’m supposed to be better than that—a perfect man for my perfect woman, but I failed.
“Is everything okay?” Lucy asks when I walk back into the house.
She’s in the downstairs hallway, her arms wrapped around herself. She looks so heartbreakingly fragile.
“He’s gone,” I tell her.
“Then I need answers. I can’t wait anymore.”
“I got hooked on pills,” I snap. “I was weak.”
“No,” she hisses, marching right up to me. “Don’t frame it like that. It’s not that simple. You got addicted because they’redesignedto be addictive. Like millions of other people. And… you were filling a hole.”
I sigh and nod. I can’t keep lying to her. Kylie’s safe, off in the wilderness with several armed men. Kylie tells me Kyle loves being in nature, but I’ve never seen it first hand.Killersdon’t deserve that privilege.
“Ever since I was a kid, I’ve felt hollow,” I say, keeping my voice steady, maybe as a defense mechanism.
We stay in the hallway, in the near total darkness, only the outline of each other visible, but my eyes adjust. I see the kindness on her face and the glistening in her eyes.
“Something was missing,” I go on. “Maybe it was raising Kylie. Maybe it’s just how I was born. When I took those pills, though, for a little while, it went away.”
She wraps her arms around me and pushes her cheek against my chest as I talk. It’s like she knows it’s easier for me to say this in the dark without looking at her.
“Once they stopped prescribing them for me, I found a dealer through a contact at the gym. It was your dad. He was… I’m sorry, Lucy.”
“Whatever it is, say it,” she whispers.
“There was—is—something wrong with him. After going to him for a few weeks, I heard rumors he had taken out his anger on some of the other customers. He’d belittle them, bully them, even assault them. Once, I arrived to find a woman with her nose bloodied.”
“Oh, God.”
Lucy squeezes onto me tightly. I never wanted to tell her any of this, but now that I’ve started, I owe her the truth. She deserves to know the full extent of what happened.
“I was already in a bad mood. The last batch hadn’t been as strong, and my response was a wake-up call. I was so angry at how weak it was, andthenI was furious at myself for ever touching that shit. I flushed it all. I quit cold turkey. I’d run up a debt with your dad, so I was there to pay him back. Sorry. I’m messing this up.”
“You’re not messing anything up,” she says, kissing my chest, somehow still loving, still intimate, despite everything. “You were there to pay a debt. While withdrawing off drugs, you saw an injured woman.”
“Yeah, and I lost it. I was angry at myself, angry at the world, angry athim. I went upstairs. Your dad used to run out of this attic office. When I got there, he wasn’t alone. Some deal was going down. Your dad tried to act tough. He talked to me like I was his servant, and I just lost it. I rushed him and beat him up. All his high-and-mighty criminal friends saw. In that world, Lucy, that kind of disrespect…”
“What did he do?” she asks.
“In the moment? Nothing. He just cowered with his hands over his face. A few men tried to help him, but I fought them off too, but after that, he couldn’t handle the disrespect. He put a hit out on me. When that didn’t work—”
“What do you mean,didn’t work?”
“I beat up the man they sent for me.”
She shivers, completely different from her other kind of shivering, clutching me tightly. “Then he… sent people after your sister?”
“Yes,” I snarl. “He took a photo outside her house at night. My sister never chose to take any pills.”
