Snow in Texas (Lean Dogs Legacy #1) (24 page)

Thirty-Four

Jenny

Crockett sobbed into his hands, the sound heartbreaking, and disturbing. In his prime, he would have killed a man rather than allow him to witness his crying. Now, he blubbered all over himself like a baby. Or like a once-great man afflicted with dementia, which was what he was.

              He was also no help whatsoever.

              “I don’t understand,” he mumbled into his palms. “You two are-are-are married!”

              Crying for them? Or for the loss of his comprehension, Jenny wondered. He couldn’t make sense of it, and that had reduced him to tears.

              “Sit,” Riley ordered, and shoved her down onto the sofa beside Crockett’s chair. He had a roll of packing tape he’d taken from the kitchen and was pulling it from his pocket when she heard the gunshots. A volley of them, right behind the house.

              Pup! Jenny’s stomach lurched and she pitched forward, fighting a sudden burst of nausea. “You bastard,” she gasped. “He wasn’t any threat to you.”

              “Neither are you. Still gonna tie your ass up. Put your hands together.”

              She did, too numb to resist.

              Poor little Puppy, too sweet and decent for the outlaw world. Just a boy with nothing to his name, and he’d been mercilessly gunned down. Because of her.

              Because of Riley.

              “Yeah,” she said, as he wound the tape around her wrists. “I’m not a threat. Keep telling yourself that, Jud, and see how far that gets you.”

              He secured the strip and glanced up at her. Was he wondering? Maybe a little. Wondering what she’d become capable of in their years apart.

              He shrugged and went to fetch her purse, set it on the coffee table and began rifling through its contents.

              Fear was beginning to take root, in a deep, physical way. In the initial excitement, the adrenaline had kept the terror away, but now it was spreading outward from her chest, crawling with cold fingers down her arms and legs, tightening her lungs. The idea of getting shot had been devastating. But now he had her captive; now he could make it slow and painful, and that was ten times worse.

              “Looky here.” He withdrew the switchblade she kept stowed in the zippered pocket with her lipsticks. He grinned. “Would you have used that on me?”

              “In a heartbeat,” she choked out.              

              He laughed. The crazy son of a bitch
laughed
. He might know his name and remember his past, but he was just as compromised as Crockett, she realized. Probably always had been.

              She closed her eyes and swallowed down her rising gorge. Images flashed across her mind, old memories of Riley’s little cruelties. For so long she’d chalked it up to a dark sense of humor. She’d lied to herself, to everyone, until that last night…

~*~

Then

“I’ll be there tomorrow,”
Derek had said on the phone earlier.
“Just hold it together ‘til then, and whatever you do, Jen, don’t let him know that you talked to me.”

              She ran the words through her mind again and again, like fingering rosary beads, a silent prayer that the storm clouds kept from breaking until after Candy arrived. She wasn’t afraid to take on her tormentor…only to do so alone.

              She poured another finger of bourbon into her glass and drank it down, eyes shut tight against the burn, gasping afterward.

             
Hurry, Derek. Hurry
.

              The clubhouse door opened and she fought down the urge to bolt. She touched the sore spot on her lip with her tongue. It hadn’t been so bad, the last hit. She could wait it out. Just one more day. One more day…

              “Jenny, baby,” Riley called. He was happy tonight. He was drunk, too. She could hear it in his voice, smell it on his skin as she turned to face him.

              He’d come in with a whole herd of people, his crew, the jackals. And he had one of the club sluts under one arm, a busty, barely-legal blonde thing with fishnets and a hot pink tube top.

              Riley gave her a sloppy grin. “Your man’s back, baby, and I brought you a lil’ present.”

              “Oh yeah?” Her voice sounded guarded, frightened. She swallowed down a wave of revulsion and stood up on her toes to kiss him, quickly, all too aware of the groupie staring at her. God, how old was the girl? And look at her unblemished face. Riley hadn’t hit
her
, only Jen. His wife.

              There’d been a time when the evidence of his cheating would have sent her spiraling into despair. That time had long since passed.

              “Yeah. Karly here’s gonna come back in the back with us.”

              “Yeah,” Karly chimed in, grinning and twirling a lock of her hair. She giggled, and Jenny thought she might be sick.

              “Be good for you,” Riley declared. “Learn a few things from a professional.”

              The rest of the guys burst into raucous laughter.

              Shit, Karly wasn’t just a groupie, but one of the porn stars Riley was auditioning for his newborn studio business.

              “Come on,” he urged, glazed eyes tracking across Jenny’s face, looking for signs of resistance. “Let’s go.”

              Keep things together, Candy had said. Don’t get him angry, don’t tip him off that anything was about to happen.

              She needed to slide up under his other arm and go back to his favorite dorm, have a three-way with her abuser and a porn star…

              She was going to gag.

              And apparently it showed in her face.

              Riley frowned. “What?” He reached to tangle a hand in her hair.

              She winced.

              Oh no…oh no…

              His hand tightened. “What?” Harsher now, anger burning away some of the alcohol haze.

              All she had to do was cooperate. Just do what he wanted, and maybe he wouldn’t hurt her so badly.

              But the idea of one more violation, when her brother was on the way, when help was so close…

              He spotted her phone on the bar, and that was when she knew it was all over.

              She made a grab for it, but Riley was quicker, even drunk, even holding onto a porn star. “Who you been talkin’ to?” he demanded, thumb gliding across the buttons. The harsh blue light of the phone illuminated his face, all the lines and wrinkles and mysterious little bruises.

              “Riley, please. You wanted to go in the back, right? Let’s go.” She made an unsuccessful reach and he stepped back. “Riley…”

              “Candy,” he said, and the whole room fell silent. “You talked to Candy?”

              “He’s my brother. We talk.”

              Riley shoved the blonde away from him – she yelped – and closed the gap, bearing down on Jenny with a black-eyed glare. “About what?”

              She tried to catch a breath. Wet her lips. She hated him right then, almost as much as she feared him. “I – I–”

              “What?”

              “He’s on his way. He knows everything, Riley, and he’s coming.”

              The first slap knocked her off the stool. The second took her consciousness.

~*~

Now

That night boiled around her now, bringing with it the old rising tide of panic, the taste of blood in her mouth, the high whine of dread in her ears. How was this happening again? At Riley’s mercy and Candy on the way, but too late, always too late.

              She choked on a few breaths before she finally drew a decent one down into her lungs. Held it, concentrated on it, let it out slowly through her mouth.

              Through the course of their marriage, Riley had slowly, systematically stripped all the Snow from her, chipping away her identity until her parents wouldn’t have recognized her had they been alive to witness the horror of her unmaking. It had taken seven years to find herself again, scrape off the film of Riley’s wife and lock her hands around Jennifer Snow once more, the true parts of her he hadn’t been able to break.

              She wasn’t going back. Not on her life. Not even on her baby’s life.

              She opened her eyes.

              Voice calm, solid: “It’s not very original you know.”

              He’d found her second knife, and laid it on the table beside the first. “What’s that?”

              “Taking back your club. Candy already did that. You can’t do anything else but copy him?”

              He smirked and sat down on the coffee table across from her. “What he did was treason. You know that, right? He didn’t take any votes. Didn’t explain himself to anybody. He oughta been buried in the desert, with the black dogs burned off his arms.”

              “Except that’s what happened to your boys, isn’t it?”

              The smirk vanished. “You turned into a real mouthy bitch.”

              “From one bitch to another, huh?”

              He stood suddenly, with a familiar, impulsive violence.

              Crockett made a startled sound.

              Riley reared back with his hand, a big theatrical slap, and Jenny ducked, threw herself down on the floor at his feet. Above her head, the whoosh of his hand through empty air.

              He snarled. “Jesus, you stupid whore.”

              Her wrists were bound, but her hands were not, and she managed to wriggle one down into the top of her boot before he grabbed her arm and hauled her upright.

              She tilted her head back, so she could see his face, as she staggered to her feet. He was glaring at her with all the old hate and anger.

              Soft, slippery
click
of the switchblade opening in her hand.

              He froze, eyes widening. “Wha–”

              And Jenny used the momentum he’d given her to straighten in a rush and drive the knife up into the soft underside of his jaw.

              Candy had forced her to stab sandbags when she was younger. Stabbing a man was harder than it seemed, he’d reasoned. She needed to know what kind of resistance she would face. She thought of that afternoon now – the bright sun, the sound of sand pouring down onto the ground – but the feel of flesh was so different. The sudden spurt of blood nothing like the clean patter of sand.

              An awful, animal sound tore out of Riley’s throat, and he staggered back from her.

              Blood splashed her hands, her arms; she felt its wet viscous touch sliding down her face.

              Riley pitched forward and blood poured out of his mouth, thick red ribbons. He gasped like a winded horse. Groped madly at the handle of the knife.

              “You forgot about the third one,” Jenny said, tipping her bound hands so the blood ran out of her palms and dripped down onto the rug.

              Glass shattered behind her, and she whirled.

              Riley’s crew, coming in through the front windows, the door, blocking the fall of sunlight. She counted four.

              “Oh shit.”

              A gun went off, and she closed her eyes, waited for the pain…

              Another shot, another. Curses, swears.

              Her eyes popped open and…Pup??

              One of Riley’s men fell facedown just inside the window and Pup stepped over him, gun in hand. He was still pale, still skinny, still shaking, even, but he turned and fired at the others.

              Crockett heaved himself out of his chair, roaring, and threw himself between her and the unfolding firefight. He had a gun in his waistband, and pulled it, bellowing obscenities at the intruders.

              Jenny glanced at Riley, and her stomach heaved. The knife had gone up through the soft tissues in his bottom jaw, just to the side of the bone, up through his tongue. The silver point flashed in his gaping mouth. The blood loss was incredible, a vivid splash down his chest, but she hadn’t hit the carotid, hadn’t killed him.

              Yet.

              He met her eyes, briefly, his cloudy with pain, as vacant as an animal’s.

              He made a move for his gun.

              Jenny snatched hers up off the table and put three rounds through his heart.

              He fell, boneless, eyes still open, and his neck snapped when he hit the carpet. She heard the dull crunch.

              Silence.

              It had its own faint ring, like running a finger around the rim of a wineglass.