Page 40 of Wrecked With You

“And you love her.”

I nod. Sometimes I forget how much that plays into it. When you grow up the way I did, with only survival on your mind, things like love don’t seem to matter. Or maybe they matter so much you don’t see them. They’re the fabric of your life. The thing that holds it all together. But even then, love doesn’t feed you or clothe you or put a roof over your head. Not that I’d seen, any way.

“You got away from him, though,” Tony says, obviously figuring out where my story is heading. “How?”

“I killed him,” I say bluntly, my eyes on his, waiting to see him cringe. He doesn’t even flinch, and I feel my body relax even more.

“How?”

“I pushed him down the stairs. To be honest, we were just trying to escape. Our room was a basement storage closet. No windows. No nothing. But I told Eliza we were getting out, and I pushed him. I wasn’t trying to kill him—slowing him down and getting away were all I could really think about—but I was hoping he’d die. After all, death was the only thing that would be sure to work. Where we could be certain he didn’t catch us. And,” I add, not the least bit ashamed of the confession, “the idea of him living on—just existing after we ran—made me sick to my stomach. I wanted him dead. And after all the times he—“ My voice catches. “After everything he did to me from the time I was six until I was fifteen ... well, yeah. I wanted him to die.”

“Fucking prick,” Tony says. “I hope he suffered, broken and in pain before he went to hell.”

A sad smile flickers on my lips. “Yeah, me, too. But I don’t know. I never looked back. Never even checked the newspapers. I was fifteen years old and on the run with my little sister. We took a bus to Los Angeles, and we lived on the street.”

“At fifteen. Christ.” He takes his hand from my hip and runs it though his hair. Immediately, I miss the contact. The connection. “Why didn’t you go to a shelter?”

I shake my head. “They might have separated me and Eliza. I learned the truth years later—he died in that basement—but back then I didn’t know if he’d survived or not. If he had, he might find us if we were on the grid. If he was dead, someone might find out what I’d done.”

He looks so profoundly sad I want to reach out and comfort him, and it warms me to know how much my story is affecting him. After a moment, he says flatly, “You turned tricks so the two of you could stay alive.”

There’s no judgment. No emotion. He’s just stating a fact, and that flat simplicity gives me the strength to tell him the rest. How I prostituted myself so we could have a decent apartment and money for fake IDs, not to mention money to hire someone to pretend to be our parents long enough to get Eliza enrolled in school. Me, I didn’t have time for that.

And, yeah, crime does pay. I tell him about that, too. About how I shoplifted. Did whatever I had to do to keep my little sister alive. And I told Eliza all of it.

“All?” His brows rise with the question.

“Yeah,” I say. “Granted, the details were tied up with a pretty bow until she was old enough to really understand, but yeah. The whole ball of wax. Turning tricks and all.”

He says nothing, but his brow crinkles enough that I feel compelled to continue. With anyone else, I probably would drop it. Hell, with anyone else, I wouldn’t be having this conversation. But Tony’s different. I want him to understand.

“She was all I had. And I was all she had. We’d grown up in a house filled with lies and pain and the kind of stuff that two kids should never have had to deal with. I wanted her to have total honesty. It’s not like I needed to dress up our new life. Even with me working the street, we were better off. Happier. Healthier. She wasn’t even ten, but she got that.”

“I get it,” he says gently. “I just hate that either of you had to experience it.”

I shrug, resisting the urge to squirm. I’m not a touchy-feely person. And while I appreciate compassion, I never quite know what to do with it.

“Yeah, well, it got hard to keep the promise later.”

“But you did.”

I nod. “Yeah. Always.”

“What happened later that made it harder?”

I meet his eyes, because it’s important I see his reaction. “I killed somebody.” My mouth is bone dry, the memory of that horrible day washes back over me. The shock on Eliza’s face when the verdict came in. And again when the judge sentenced me. “I got the death penalty. I was eighteen and my lawyer said the judge was making an example of me.”

“Good God,” he says. “You must have been terrified. Not just about you, but by what would happen to Eliza.”

And that’s it—that’s when I can’t hold the tears back anymore. Because he gets it. I can’t quite wrap my head around it, but he really, genuinely gets me.

“What happened?”

The story is long and convoluted, but the bottom line was that if I didn’t help with a job, the prick who was blackmailing me would kill Eliza. I helped, and it all went south when someone else on the team killed an innocent woman. I said I was out. The prick said he’d kill my sister. So I took him out.

“And they nailed you for his murder and for the murder of the woman,” he guesses after I give him the story in a flat, emotionless voice.

I nod. “And no one could corroborate my story. And it got even worse when the others on the team banded together and pointed the finger at me for both deaths, too. It was bad. I was terrified.” I hug myself, remembering that cold fear. Not so much for me, but for Eliza.