Eagle
“Squirrel, I’m only going to ask one more damn time, and then I’m going to get pissed. You tell me what the fuck happened back there!”
From her seat on the couch, curled up beneath a wool blanket despite the heat of the late afternoon, Autumn peeked up at me through several strands of hair that had fallen in front of her eyes.
At least a full hour had passed since I’d brought her home. I skinned and gutted the bird, cooked the meat, and set it aside in the safe, the coolest place in the building. Half was going to the guys at the garage, and the other half was for Autumn and me, only she hadn’t mentioned being hungry. In fact, she still had yet to speak.
Fucking Liv. I’d known she wasn’t going to take this lightly. Maybe part of me had actually wanted her to strike out and publicly make a fool of herself, an action I’d hoped would result in Jeffers seeing her for what she really was.
Needless to say, it wasn’t a well-thought-out plan. Not that anything that had happened since finding Autumn bleeding in the field had been well thought out, or could even be considered an actual plan. More like the blind leading the blind over a bridge riddled with cracks and gaping holes.
Aw, the voice mocked me.So Adler’s carefully constructed life is falling apart?
My nostrils flaring, I breathed in hard and released it slowly, repeating the action several times until my head was finally quiet again.
“She told me you were there,” Autumn said, her voice flat. “She said you were at the pits.”
Clenching my teeth and closing my eyes, I shook my head and prayed for calm. It would do neither of us any good if I lost my cool right now. She was already upset, and I needed to hear the rest of the story so I could figure out what could be done about it.
“She’s a liar,” I gritted out as I opened my eyes. “You can’t ever believe a damn word that insane bitch says.”
“So you don’t ... like her?”
I shot up off the table I was leaning against and glared at Autumn. “No, I do not fucking like her. I tolerate her because I have to. But if I could, I’d rip her fucking cold, dead heart straight from her chest.”
Autumn’s forehead wrinkled. “So you’re not ... um ... friends?”
Could I glare any harder at this dense female? “No, we’re not friends.”
Still, Autumn looked confused. “But she said you were, she said you ... she said she pleased ...” She stopped and bit her lip, her pale face flushed with color.
At first, I didn’t have a goddamn clue in hell what she was babbling about, at least not until she started blushing. And it wasn’t just any old blush; it was a full-on color infusion from her neck to her forehead. The girl looked downright humiliated.
Under any other circumstances, I would have dismissed this conversation entirely, not bothering to answer a damn thing because I didn’t have to answer to anyone. But something inside me felt the need to explain this to her, and in a not-so-explicit way.
“Yeah,” I said, running a hand through my hair. “We had this thing. And now we don’t.”
But that was a lie, wasn’t it? Because even when I wanted nothing to do with Liv, I still wanted to hurt her because hurting her turned me on like nothing else could.
And just like that, I felt ridiculous. And uncomfortable. And stricken with an insatiable desire to beat the fuck out of something.
“Stay away from her,” I said, turning toward my bedroom. “Just stay the fuck away from her, and I’ll take care of the rest.”
Inside my room, I headed for my punching bag, and without even bothering to wrap my hands, started swinging.
This life I was living, it was becoming far more complicated than I liked. And starting to resemble something ...
Something I never wanted to see again.
• • •
Jeffers’s scream pierced my thoughts, making my stomach clench painfully.
“Jeff!” I shouted as I took off at a run toward the screaming, one foot in front of the other, my arms and legs pumping, the gun swinging in my hand. Through the door, into the kitchen, into the hallway, past the dining room, past the downstairs bathroom, and finally into the living room where I came to a sudden stop.
A small pile of gore, blood, and bones lay in one corner of the room, and in the other corner was Jeffers. Sobbing loudly, his head bowed, he had his hands wrapped around the neck of his infected wife, keeping her snarling, snapping teeth at bay.
Shaking, I backed out of the room, back into the hallway until I felt the wall behind me. My heart pounding furiously, I slammed my head against the sheetrock, trying to breathe, trying to think, tried to figure out what the fuck I was going to do.
