Nick started unbuttoning his shirt. “You never saw. You kept my shirt on last night.”
“I had no reason to take it off.”
He removed the shirt, and he had to hand it to her for not doing what most people did. She didn’t gasp. But there was pity in her eyes and the disgust he’d seen before, stronger now. He hated that look. God, it pissed him off. It was a natural reaction and he didn’t blame her for having it, but he hated it. He didn’t want pity.
She set down her tumbler and examined his scars. Six on his chest. Two on his right side. Five on his back.
“These are all from his belt?” Her voice cracked.
He pointed to his left shoulder. “This one was a burn. Boiling coffee.” He pointed at his chipped tooth. “This? Happened at the same time. Hit in the face with a coffeepot when I was seven. The scar on my lip is from the glass. For some reason, my face didn’t burn but my shoulder did. Must have been how the glass broke and the coffee fell.”
“By the Mountain.”
“This one on my abs, that’s from a knife.”
She shook her head. “It’s so wrong. How can anyone do that to a child?”
The thing about Rowan, she ran a community center. He knew she’d encountered child abuse before. Maybe this was the first time she’d seen an abused child grown up though.
“There’s always a reason an adult beats a kid, you know?” Nick said. “The place wasn’t clean enough or I’d made too much noise. Like when I got sick and couldn’t stop coughing, but instead of taking me to the doctor, he flicked a lit cigarette at my face and told me if I didn’t stop he’d make me stop. I spent the rest of the night coughing into my pillow.”
Rowan’s face changed, morphing from pity to anger. Fire flashed behind her amber eyes. Good. He’d get it all out. If she couldn’t take it, he hoped she’d leave now, before he got any closer to her.
“Anyway, I was used to going to school so beaten that the back of my clothes would stick to my healing skin. Every time I’d go to the bathroom, I’d have to peel my pants away from the dried blood and it would rip the scabs and hurt like hell. The nurse knew. The teachers knew. I’m not sure why they didn’t do anything. No one cared enough, I guess. But when I was thirteen, I got really sick. Walking pneumonia. I went to school anyway. I never missed school. School was far better than home and the only place I could get a good meal. And that day we had a substitute school nurse. She took one look at me and sent me to the hospital. When they x-rayed my lungs, they saw signs of old injuries, poorly healed bones, cracked ribs. They saw the burns on my shoulder and the scars from Stan’s belt on my back.”
He paused. She’d moved closer and rested her hand on the scar that ran from his ribs to halfway to his navel. Her full attention was focused on him. That touch shook him to his core. It wasn’t what he’d expected. He’d expected her to back away.
“Go on.”
“The hospital called DCFS, and I went into a foster home. A couple whose last name was Grandstaff, Judy and Doug, took me in and eventually adopted me. Changed my life. It was great. For the first time I had enough to eat and a safe place to sleep and therapy. Years of therapy that helped the nightmares, the rage.” He swallowed hard. “Judy was a great cook. The gentlest, most patient mother. And all those calories she fed me were like rocket fuel. I grew big and I grew up. But the past has a way of refusing to die. I wanted to forget. I wanted to deny I’d ever been Stan’s punching bag.”
“That’s not how it works.” Rowan’s eyes held ghosts of their own, and he supposed that had to do with her brother’s murder. “The only way to master our past is to confront it. When we bury it, the bodies rise.”
“Yeah, my buried bodies rose in the form of Trojan. Stan disappeared and his boss found me. You might ask yourself, what did the mob want with a kid like me? I was eighteen when they pulled me off the sidewalk in front of my high school and told me that Stan had been keeping two sets of books. He’d screwed them out of thousands. Trojan figured I was Stan’s closest relative and must know something about where they could find Stan and their money. I didn’t. They decided I would earn the money back by doing a job for them. I needed to steal a car. A very expensive car.”
Rowan shifted. He’d suspected something about her since last night in her apartment, but it wasn’t until now, now that he knew she was immortal, that he put it all together.
“I need to tell you something, Rowan. I think we’ve met before.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Manhattan, 1998
Rich people lived in a bubble. Nick could always tell the ultrarich because they assumed the world would revolve around them and if it didn’t, they could buy themselves out of any mess they wound up in as a result. Take the Aston Martin convertible parked in the alley behind Arnold’s grocery. No one parked a car like that in this neighborhood and expected it to still be there an hour later. But what would be devastating for most people was a minor inconvenience for the rich. Whoever owned this thing was asking for it.
If Nick had owned a car, any car, he’d take care of it. That thing would be locked down like Fort Knox. But then, anything Nick had ever owned had been hard-won. He’d once fought another boy over a pair of shoes, taken a hit to the jaw on purpose at exactly the right time to get that boy thrown out of the community center they were in. The pain was worth it to ensure he was wearing those shoes when he left the building. He’d worn them until the toes split.
Whoever had left the car in its current state didn’t need it, and that was permission enough for him to use it to save his life. Stan was missing. Fuck if he knew where the asshole had gone, but he’d taken Trojan’s money with him. And now Nick had to pay Stan’s debt or risk the consequences. He could stand the pain of being tortured himself. He’d been beaten and worse by Stan for most of his life, but he couldn’t handle anything happening to Doug or Judy. The Grandstaffs were the kindest, most patient people he’d ever met, and he’d do anything to keep them safe, even hot-wire a car and take it to the chop shop in the Bronx where Stan used to work before he’d fallen off the planet.
He hopped behind the wheel and inserted his screwdriver into the ignition. No dice. He pried the plastic cover off the steering column. Everything had to be done quickly, quietly, attracting as little notice as possible. Nick dug out the bundle of wires and sorted out the ones for the battery and the ignition.
“You should be wearing gloves when you do that. You could get the shock of your life,” said a voice on his left.
He turned his head and saw a woman standing beside the car. The first thing he noticed was how he could see her thighs. She stood on the sidewalk, wearing a peacock-blue slip dress trimmed with black lace. The kind that was so popular now. No one wore it like this woman did though. His breath caught. Her long black hair cascaded straight to her shoulders, and her round, wire-rimmed glasses shone blue beneath her thick bangs. In her arms was an old leather book.She had to bea celebrity or a supermodel. Maybe some billionaire’s trophy wife.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” he said. “I lost my key.”
He saw one bushy brow arch above the mirrored lenses. “This is your car?”
