Carl never left, taunting me at night. I vow I will kill that man. If it’s the last thing I do. I will pull on a pair of big girl panties and grow a pair of balls, take a knife and stab the cunt. He is done fucking with my life. I am over the terror just seeing his eyes brings. The way he stares up at me. Knowing I am watching him. The way his cigarette smoke swirls around him, giving him an eerie feeling.
Timberly has tried to explain why 81 is that way, something about a traumatic and soul disturbing event that took place two years ago has him all grumpy, overprotective and all thatI am the male you are the women you listenspeak. I not at all interested. Not one bit. Fuck, man, you and ya wounded heart I will be the cave man shit can take a hike. I don’t need saving.
Yes, I'm being a bitch about it. I'm over the way guys can pretend that their attitude can be justified by their moods and past events. Fuck, we aren't allowed to use periods as an excuse, so why can they use shit against us.
“We all need someone, Jade,” Timberly says toying with some ribbon between her fingers as she braids some jasmine and ribbon through her long black hair.
“I had someone once you know, Timberly. She was this stunning woman. He took her along with everything that made me, me… including my soul.” I reach my hand up to the necklace, a silver girl with a red balloon; my last gift from her.
“Who was this woman that has your eyes shining brighter than I have ever seen them?”
“My nana, the one woman who I could turn to, who saved me more times than I could count. You see, Timberly, my parents turned their backs on me the moment that I went to them bloodied and bruised, begging for them to help me get out. They did not believe the devil in a suit, as I had begun to call him, could ever inflict such marks on my skin. It must have been me. I pushed him.
My father scolded me for making up lies about his prized son-in-law, the best lawyer his firm had ever had. He slapped me so hard across the face that he reopened a spilt in my cheek that Carl had given to me only days before. Fresh blood stained my skin and a new bruise. Tears ran fast and hot down my face, watering down the molten red turning it to a sicker shade of pinkish red. My soul was completely shattered that night. If my own parents didn’t believe and save me, I surely was going to die now at his hands for going to them.” I watch Timberly as she steps back towards my massive granite table, holding onto the edge to hold herself up.I can see the horror flood her eyes, then pity wash through her eyes and I hate it. I carry on with my story anyway. I have started it now and sooner or later they need to know. I can't keep running. I can't keep hiding. Something has to change. If I show up dead or kill him and got caught, they need to know what I did was with reason.
“Nana was there that night. She had a meeting with my father going over the company accounts - his company was hers. She and my grandfather had built one of the most powerful and talked about law firms in all of Chicago with smaller firms branched off all over America. She came to me the next day and took me from his hatred and hands. She waited for him to leave before her and her bodyguard stormed into the hell that was my home, a penthouse suit overlooking the city. They found me, broken on the bathroom floor. I had awoken there so weak, so lost, so out of it that I actually thought I could possibly already be dead. After father had rung him to come collect me, he had beaten me to the point where I had become so numb that I could no longer feel the kicks, punches, bites and slaps. I saw them all coming, my body moving as each one connected with my flesh. I had become so numb, so tired, so shattered that I had stood over my own body and watched the assault until I had blacked out and he fell into a sweaty heap on the floor next to me. He raped me that night.
I was a shattered mess on that floor, blood everywhere from me. Put there by his hands. So much blood, Timberly. Most of it had seeped from a knife wound to my abdomen. He had tried to cut out my uterus in between my screaming and blacking out. I was brought back to consciousness again by placing another slice to my flesh. He was telling me over and over that he was going to remove the parts of me that made a lady and only leave behind the parts of me that he could use and abuse.” Tears stream down Timberly’s face when I look up from where my hand is resting on the jiggered scars over my stomach.
Timberly nods at me to continue as i watch silver tears ripple over her pale skin.
“She said to me, ‘Forget the past, remember the lesson. If you have never lost your mind, you have never followed you heart. Trust is dangerous, but you are who you are because of lessons, whether they be painful or beautiful.’Why is it, as I watch him with you, that these memories always play themselves for me? Even when he’s in my space, so close screaming safety and pleasure I seem to ripple with a fear that it could all end in pain. For you see, Timberly I see her in his eyes the women before she taunts me yet, dances inside his irises. Free and beautiful not scarred and scared. I want to be more than what I am, but I can never be. Yet Timberly, I stand here in my shop wrapping ribbon around an order of purple iris and baby’s breath. Watching him like a stalker. Like the way Carl watched me. Stalked me and in the end hurt me. So, you see its easier for me and all you, if you just forget who I am,” I say placing the flowers into the little gift vase ready for collection.
“Can I hug you?” Timberly’s voice is laced with tear-soaked tremors and I feel sorry for vomiting that all out onto her. She is far too beautiful for my past to taint her.
“Not today, Tim. But you can take broody biker his flowers and tell him they are on the house. A gift from one broken soul to another.”
Chapter Eighteen
81
Stalking intoThe Beautiful and The Damned, Ghost’s gentleman’s club and the place where he kills the unwanted. Saskia meets me with the files needed for tonight’s kills. They contain info we need before we allow the beasts deep down out to feed.
Like reading about them changes their fate, no, it just gives us a better concept on how sick the fucker tied before us is. Fuels our anger so we can make the kill that much more torturous for them and us.
I don’t need anything to fuel me tonight. The way I fucked up with Jade will fuel that fire for me. I have never wanted anyone the way I want her, yet I can’t seem to shake the nightmare from my eyes that is Hannah. I fucking feel her in my dreams, and I haven’t dreamed since I was six and my life resembled something normal.
I feel her in my brain. I feel her in my soul. She is there, yet it is Hannah who won’t budge and it’s Hannah who Jade see’s whenever she looks at me.
“The room ready?” I bark at the pretty thing known as the queen of death herself, Saskia the Russian killer, who has a massive hard-on for Ghost and his dick.
“Ready and waiting.” She purrs, her long red nails running up my bare arms as I slip my cut off and place it on the couch in the office. Her other hand reaches down and presses a button and the blacked-out window lightens, showcasing my kill spread eagle in the center of the death pit, his head bagged and just his boxers on.
“You going to taste him before I kill him?” I ask her, shrugging her hand from my arm. Her touch burns and not in the way I like… not in the way Jade’s does.
As I sit down on the cool leather couch, a glass of whiskey appears before me with a slice of lime. Is this a fucking joke? All my mind does is flick to little bird - the way she takes her whiskey, the way she can down a whole glass without blinking and still smile over the rim of the glass.
Her blood red nails lay the files on my lap as her blood red lips brush over mine. “Only if you’re offering.” She purrs out in broken Russian.
“Not me, sweetheart.” I push her back and pick up a file. As I dismiss her, she huffs.
“Not interested in playing games with you, Saskia. Find another toy.” Flicking through the files reading what these sickos class as fun, my skin is itching, and my fists are clenched. My jaw is locked tight as I roll a cigarette through my fingers, I inhale deep, feeling the welcome burn, feeding the beast as together we seep and mold to become one.
Closing my eyes, I take in six controlled long and deep breaths. I allow my mind to still and switch to black, no need to taint the memories with death. Not tonight anyway.
“Ready.” Her voice coats me.
“Ready,” I spit out, snaping my neck side to side - two loud cracks of bone-on-bone echo through the still room lit with a dime red glow. It is fitting as we are about to paint the room below in red, just a brighter more sinister kind.
