Reborn (Altered) (3 page)

It was all so goddamn good.

And so goddamn breakable.

The good days burned into bad nights, and the bad nights bled into bad weeks. Eventually Mom left, and Dad started drinking more, and every day was a bad day until I forgot what it was like to have a good one.

The first time Dad hit me, I was eight. He was drunk on cheap tequila and harassed by old demons. I’d broken a window hitting a ball around the yard. It was the only time he ever apologized for hitting me. And it was the only time I believed he wouldn’t do it again.

After a while, when I got bigger, I started fighting back. Sometimes I was as drunk as him. Two dark-haired guys, haunted and sneering, stumbling around with fists flailing. We must have looked like a joke.

The last night I saw him, he beat me so bad I couldn’t walk. I hid in my room for three days, only coming out when he was in town at the bar or bumbling his way through his job at a factory.

On the fourth night, after he passed out, I stole his car keys off the kitchen counter and a six-pack of beer out of the fridge, and crept outside in the dark.

I never looked back.

But now, for some fucked-up reason, I
was
looking back. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. And about me. And about whether or not I was just like him.

And sometimes, when I killed someone with my own hands, I
worried I was worse than him. Far as I knew, he’d never murdered anyone. But me, I’d killed so many times I couldn’t count the bodies.

Maybe that’s what was driving me to dig up the past now, to find out the details of the mission I’d been on when I’d met that girl.

I took another hit off the cigarette and ground it out beneath my boot.

If I found out I’d killed that girl—well, then maybe I’d finally accept my fate. Embrace the cursed blood in my veins.

But if she was still alive…

Maybe there was redemption for me after all.

4

NICK

I SOMEHOW MANAGED TO SLEEP A FEW more hours, and when I got up, Cas was staring at me from across the room.

I scrubbed at my eyes, trying to scrub away the dregs of last night. I had a headache so fucking huge, it felt like my eyeballs were trying to pop out of their sockets. “What the hell are you looking at?”

“You were growling in your sleep,” he answered.

“Bullshit.”

“I thought you were turning into a werewolf. ’Course, at least as a dog, you’d be easier to house-train.”

I grabbed an empty beer bottle from the dresser and lobbed it at him. He deftly plucked it from the air and grinned. He was always so disgustingly pleased with himself.

“I’m so badass.”

I ignored him as I made my way for the door.

“Put some clothes on!” he yelled. “Anna doesn’t want to be assaulted by your junk.”

I looked down at my boxers and turned back around, throwing on some pants before I headed downstairs. Anna and Sam were already up, dressed in their running clothes.

“You guys heading out, or just coming back?” I asked.

“Heading out,” Sam said. “You want to come?”

One thing that helped clear my head was running.

“Give me five minutes?” I asked, and Sam nodded.

Exactly six minutes later, we were facing the woods behind our house. I’d thrown on a T-shirt and baggy sweatpants, along with my running shoes. I preferred training with as many disadvantages as I could come up with, so I always overdressed, and rarely wore sunglasses. The clothes were easy to run in, but in less than a quarter of a mile, I was sweating buckets. The day had promised to be a hot one, and zero cloud cover made the sun merciless. The more scenarios I was prepared for, the better.

When we rented this house in the woods, we’d gone out and mapped a running route that took us through dense forest for over seven miles. It was uneven terrain, the path barely worn enough to give us clear access to the forest. Every few feet, branches were clawing at my face and threatening to blast out an eye. Anna, the shortest out of all of us, had it easier. She raced through the forest like a ghost.

We came back to the house somewhere around ten
AM
. Anna called the shower first, so Sam and I hung out in the backyard to spar. We’d tossed our soaked T-shirts onto the porch to make it harder for either of us to get a grip on the other.

Sam swung with a left hook that I dodged easily enough. I caught him with a right to the ribs, and he hunched over, blowing out a breath.

“Fuck,” he muttered, holding his side.

As much as I liked Anna, I liked Sam better without her. For one, he cursed more. And two, he was a lot more vicious.

“Come on, pretty boy,” I said. “Is that all you got?”

He straightened and smiled, but his eyes were burning with a promise to do me bodily harm. I’d like to see him try. He was a better technical fighter, but I was more explosive, even hungover. When I hit, I hit hard, and although Sam hid it well, I could tell he was hurting.

We circled each other. Sam cut left, then switched at the last second, catching me off guard. He landed a blow to my face, cracking my jaw off-kilter, and I staggered back, spitting blood to the dirt.

His smile grew wider.

“All right,” I said. “Now we’re talking.”

I didn’t pause, didn’t want him to catch his breath. I went in fast, threw one, two, three punches that Sam deftly blocked. He swung for my face again, and I ducked. When I came back up, he caught me in the nose.

“Son of a bitch,” I said, feeling the blood already pouring down my throat.

“Come on, pretty boy,” he mocked. “Is that all you got?”

I laughed. “You’re such an asshole sometimes. If Anna only knew how ruthless you really are.”

He threw an uppercut. I blocked.

“Anna isn’t delusional,” he said. “She knows I’ll kick your ass just for fun.”

I laughed again and rocked back for a kick to his knee, but he was gone before I could land it. A second later, his arm was around my neck, his other arm moving into place for a choke hold.

I grabbed both his wrists and flipped him over my back. He landed with a
thud
on the ground, and a ragged chuckle escaped him as he rolled onto all fours.

Being the considerate person I am, I gave him three seconds to recuperate before I kicked him in the kidneys. He flew back, but got his feet beneath him and charged before he’d barely landed.

He slammed me into a tree, and the breath rushed out of my lungs. I came up with a knee to his chest. He countered with an elbow to my face.

I was just about to kick him off me when a shot of cold water blasted both of us.

Anna stood ten feet away with the hose in her hands. “You guys never know when to call it quits. You keep going and you’ll kill each other!”

Sam stalked toward her. “We just started. No one got hurt.”

“Blood is running down your face,” she pointed out. “And Nick’s nose is bleeding. And your lip is split and—”

While Sam distracted her, I charged toward her, grabbed the hose, and yanked the sprayer out of her hand.

“Nick!” she screamed, and then I soaked her.

Sam threw his head back and let out a chest-deep laugh. Anna wasn’t so amused. She stood there, soaking wet, glaring at me.

“I hate you both!” she screamed, and turned for the house, but Sam caught her, his arms around her waist, before she could escape. He kissed her neck, murmured something through her hair that made her blush.

“That’s my cue to leave,” I said.

Cas was leaning against the sink in the kitchen when I came inside, a hunk of steak in his hands.

I grabbed a towel out of the laundry room. “You look like a fucking barbarian.”

“And you look like a dumbass.”

I took the stairs up two at a time, and claimed the bathroom before anyone else could. After running seven miles, sparring with Sam, and then getting doused with bitingly cold water, the hot water felt good. I stayed beneath the showerhead longer than I should have—the hot water would run out before Sam got in here—but I didn’t give a shit.

When I came up for a breath and swiped the water out of my eyes, a pulse started in the base of my neck and rocketed up my skull.

I slammed my eyelids shut.

I knew what that feeling meant. It was the precursor to a flashback.

Images flickered in the darkness beyond my closed eyes. Like the past was a movie slowly coming back in fits and starts.

There was the girl again—the one I’d seen in the forest—but she was somewhere else now. In a white room, with a white floor, dark hair wild around her face. She looked at me, through that wild hair, and said my name.

But it wasn’t
Nick
she used.

It was Gabriel.

5

ELIZABETH

AS I WALKED IN THE SIDE DOOR OF Merv’s Bar & Grill, I nearly ran into my best friend, Chloe.

“Heeeeeyyyy,” she called, sliding her order pad into the apron tied around her waist. “I nearly knocked your face off.”

“Sorry,” I said, and made my way to the break room, Chloe trailing behind.

“What do you work tonight?” she asked, and hopped onto the table, swinging her legs.

“Umm… I think I work till eleven.”

“Oh?”

Though my back was to her, I could hear the devious smile spreading across her face.

“Why?” I asked, turning.

“Evan works tonight,” she sang, and waggled her eyebrows.

“I thought he had today off?”

“Well.” She grabbed a pen from the table and twirled it between her fingers. “I may or may not have told John, who was supposed to work tonight, that we overscheduled, and then I may or may not have told Evan that we were shorthanded. Ergo…”

“Chloe!”

“What?” She shrugged. “Now you get an entire shift with Evan. Though”—she checked the clock—“he’s, like, two minutes away from being late. Go figure.”

I hung my bag in my locker and pulled out my apron, trying to pretend like I didn’t care that Evan was working the same shift I did, like I wasn’t thankful that Chloe had pulled all these strings to put us on the same shift.

I liked Evan. A lot. But I was also A-level dysfunctional, and having a real relationship seemed the least likely thing to ever happen to me. It didn’t help that the entire town knew about the horrible things that had happened to me six years ago. The kidnapping. The trauma thereafter.

Three months after I’d been rescued, I’d had a meltdown in a grocery store that nearly made the local news. It didn’t matter that it hadn’t. Everyone had heard about it within a day anyway.

I’d started screaming in the toilet paper aisle, and then burrowed
into the stacked packages shaking and sobbing. That was the first time I’d switched foster homes, and it wasn’t the last.

“You shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble,” I said. “I mean, it’s Evan. And it’s me.”

Chloe bit the end of the pen between her teeth. “Don’t even feed me that line of bullshit about how you’re unlovable.”

She teased out another smile, this one wanton, as she added, “Evan asked about you yesterday.”

My interest was piqued and it got the better of me. “He did? What did he say?”

“He asked what you were doing. Said we should call you up and invite you out after our shift was over.” She twirled the pen. “I texted you, but you never answered.”

My heart sank. She
had
texted me. And I’d ignored it because I’d been watching movies with Aggie. But if she’d told me in the first text that Evan wanted me to hang out with the group, I would have answered. All she’d said was,
Hey
. That was it. Chloe was the kind of person who would talk your ear off face-to-face, but her texts were sparse. One word. Sometimes two. Never strung together in a coherent sentence.

“Are you guys going out tonight?” I asked.

She nodded. “But we’re hitting up Arrow.”

“Oh.” Arrow was a nightclub that was eighteen and over, and I wouldn’t be eighteen for a few more months.

The back door opened and then slammed shut. Evan sauntered
into the break room a few seconds later, his eyes heavy and bloodshot. His Merv’s Bar & Grill polo was wrinkled and untucked, and his blond hair was unkempt. He dropped into the chair next to Chloe and rested his head on his arms.

“Feeling good today?” Chloe asked him, to which he replied with merely a grunt.

I stared at the back of his head, at the long blond hair hanging over the collar of his polo.

“My fucking head is pounding,” he said. “Whose idea was it to buy a fifth of Jäger last night?”

“Um, yours,” Chloe said. “I tried talking you out of it.”

“Well, you clearly didn’t try hard enough.” He sat up and glanced at me. “Hey, Lis. How come you didn’t come out with us last night?”

I shrugged. “I fell asleep early.”

Chloe arched a brow my way, but I ignored it.

Evan leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs out. “Maybe that was for the best. Considering I feel like shit today.”

“You look like shit, too,” Chloe said.

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Why are we friends? You’re always so mean to me,
Emily
.”

Chloe scowled in return. She hated being called by her first name. Chloe was her middle name, and she’d been using it as long as anyone could remember. I’d known of Chloe before I started working at Merv’s. She was friends with some of my friends, but we hadn’t been properly introduced.

I didn’t get to know her until last year, when I’d nearly had a panic attack in the middle of Merv’s while Aggie and I were there for dinner. Chloe had been the one to sweep me away to the bathroom where, by some miracle, she’d been able to talk me down.

We’d been close ever since. She was the one who convinced me it might be a good idea to apply at the restaurant. “When you can’t stand being inside your own head, getting out, being around other people helps,” she’d said. I hadn’t believed her at the time, but I was a believer now. Though I was nowhere near mentally healthy, I’d been doing a lot better since starting a part-time job.

Merv, of “Bar & Grill” fame, came into the back room and clapped his hands. “Chop-chop, people!”