Trust in Me (11 page)

Fucking blood loss.

Leo was still on the phone, so I went to my dresser. I didn’t get my own cell phone, seeing as I was only allowed outside the compound with Carlos or Leo, but I had Zachary’s phone.

Static cracked through the earpiece so loudly I was sure Leo would come charging in. “Hello?” came Zachary’s voice, small and tinny.

“Zachary, it’s me,” I whispered.

“Hello?” he said again, a little louder now but obviously he hadn’t heard me. Damn.

I went back into the bathroom and flipped on the shower for white noise. “Zachary? Can you hear me?”

“Mia, what’s going on? Are you okay?”

What a loaded question. Although the answer was simple enough—
no
.  “I’m fine. Listen, how did Tyler get this job?”

“Who? Listen, we’ve got a problem. My guy’s gone off the grid. What’s happening over there? The drop isn’t supposed to be for a few days.”

A chill caressed over me like a slick blade. “It’s been moved up. I’m talking about Tyler. Tyler Martinez. Your guy.”

“No, he’s Jack Martin.”

More crackling buzzed from the earpiece, or maybe it was only in my head.  The shadows closed in on me.

“Wait,” he said. “I thought you made him. Oh, but that’s not the name he goes by undercover. It’s Trunk.”

Without a word, I dropped the phone into the toilet with a plop, slammed the lid shut, and fell. Blackness folded me in its embrace before I even hit the tile.

* * *

I must be on a ship
, I thought. I was both lulled and nauseated by the endless rocking, back and forth. Back and forth. I gagged and choked on a thick wad of fabric. That should have been the end. I should have vomited into the small space and suffocated on my own bile. But my body was too damn good at surviving, always had been. With a shudder, it tamped down the urge to throw up, leaving me with a faint sickly feeling.

The shiny plastic ceiling puzzled me. It felt like hours that I stared at it, thoroughly befuddled. What kind of room was so very short? It looked like the roof to one of those Barbie limos, but white. Surely, I hadn’t died and turned into a Barbie doll.

Every degree my neck turned wrenched down my spine, until finally I stared at small round windows. Holy fuck, I really was on a ship. I’d thought that was just medication-fueled fancy. Although ship was probably too fine a word for the thin plastic walls and dirt-scuzzed port windows. Still, they were round. Very ship-like, very authentic, I thought, unaccountably pleased at that fact.

Damn, I needed sleep. Now I had both the pain and the meds swirling around in my mind.
Focus.
The glass, or more likely plastic, was too fuzzy to see out of, but it still let in the dusky light.

“You’re up,” Leo said. “The show will be starting soon.”

I tried to whip my head around but only ended up shutting my eyes on a groan.

“Yeah, you’re a mess,” he said, almost cheerfully. “Thought you’d offed yourself for a minute there with those pills. But if you tried to, you failed.”

Asshole.
I groaned.

He chuckled. “Don’t worry. You’ll get your wish by the end of the night.”

Promises, promises.
The blackness consumed me again.

* * *

When I woke again, I was still on the boat. But the purr of the motor had ended, leaving only ringing silence in its wake. The portholes said it was darker, as well.

But I was alone.
I kicked a few times, hoping to draw Leo’s attention. After he didn’t come, I realized it was stupid to draw his attention anyway.

There wasn’t much I could do bound as I was. And it wasn’t just the lack of sounds I heard. It was a stillness in the air. Whatever latent animal senses I possessed told me I was alone.

Alone did not mean safe, however. The place was different, my captor was different, but the trapped feeling was too familiar. My mind flashed back to the metal cage.

“Eat your kibble, eat it all up.”

“Not a sound out of you. Bad dogs get their hides whipped.”

“Be a good bitch and go on your newspaper. Come on, you won’t get out of there until you do it.”

Hell, now I had to pee.

And anyway, I couldn’t just lie here and wait for fate to fuck with me again. Tyler was out there, the scheming, lying bastard. If I was going down, then I was getting answers out of him first. If not that, then I figured I could nail a kick to the balls. I’d pay for it after, but it’d be worth it.

I struggled to sit up. My breath caught at what I saw. Maybe I had underestimated Leo. He could be a decent replacement for Carlos after all, because I found that though my ankles and wrists were still bound, a knife winked at me from the cracked plastic bench. And between me and that bench was a thick layer of glass. I’d have to walk, or crawl, on broken glass to get free. It was like a macabre fairytale, except instead of a red carpet there was a carpet of glass, and instead of a prince there was a knife. The same principle.

With a wrench in my side, I maneuvered myself to a sitting position and inched my way across the floor in the slowest escape ever. I found that if I slid my butt through the glass, instead of over it, that saved me a lot of glass splinters. Still, there was no avoiding the cuts all over my ankles as I dug in and gained enough leverage to pull my ass along the floor.

Luckily, the pain in my bloodied feet was barely noticeable. Not over the breath-stopping pain in my stomach. I swore if I made it out of there alive, I’d die. There’d been a time that had seemed like a release, like freedom. Maybe it still held a certain allure, but I had unfinished business. Maybe I really was already dead, and I was just a ghost trying to wrap up the loose ends. A bloody, weary ghost whose uncontainable groans of agony tangled with the wind that gently rocked the boat.

Finally I reached the bench and hauled my ass up, wincing at the piercings of glass into my soles. My fingers fumbled for the knife, scraping and sawing until finally my hands were free. By the time I got to work on my ankles, blood had pooled at my feet, slithering under the glass to form a red sequined blanket. It was pretty, I conceded, the glittering blanket of suffering. That might have been the pain meds talking.

I glanced behind me out the porthole and barely made out lights bobbing in the distance. Or maybe the lights were stationary and this boat was the one bobbing. Slipping over my own blood, walking on my own cuts, I hobbled out of the cabin and onto the small deck. The ocean marked me with its spray, salty and thick, as I leaned over the railing. Away from me, dark swirls circled and threatened, but up close to the boat, they lapped disarmingly. Which was the true nature of the sea, the murky monster or the gentle lover? Maybe both, which was almost a scarier thought, because in the end, it didn’t matter. I was lost to them both.

I jumped. Cold water filled my mouth, my nose. Salt burned my feet, my stomach, all over. Like the lashes of a thousand jellyfish, they stung me into paralysis. I gulped water. I breathed it. I sank.

Chapter Eleven

I’d surrendered to the dark mistress, to death. It turned out I wasn’t good enough, not even to die. The waves tumbled and scrubbed me like mother nature’s washing machine, and then spit me out onto the beach to dry. I clutched at the sand, grounding myself as it clumped wet in my hands.

Lying there, wrung out, I had a memory of another moonlit night.

Dad had come to visit me that night, and then passed out beside my bed. Unable to sleep, to even sit still, I slipped out of the house and into the backyard. The moon had swathed everything in a silver glow. Somehow it wasn’t eerie, but peaceful. Like we were all just flat grayscale cutouts in someone’s imagination. If we weren’t real, then our shame wasn’t real either.

I heard noises next door, ones I instinctively recognized, even though I never made them myself. It was the rhythm, the universal rhythm of a man taking. A man hurting. Unable to stem my morbid curiosity, I crept along the peeling wood siding until I reached a window.

Just as I suspected. The man was pushing against a girl underneath him. His hands were all over her, his mouth, his body. And she was making these sounds, breathless and squirming. It had to be hurting her.

Although, oddly, they both seemed to have clothes on. But even as I watched, that was changing. The girl scrabbled at the hem of his shirt. First I thought she was fighting him, maybe pushing him away or scratching at the soft skin there. But then she pulled his shirt off and threw it across the room. Then her hands were back on him, running up and down. And I realized, looking at the slim torso, that it was Tyler. Not his father. Not some faceless, hurting man, but Tyler. And the girl, some made-up slut from school probably.

He was one of them.

It should have been obvious all along, but a whine of shock escaped me. Maybe not surprise, but mourning. Love lost, a love I’d never had.

“Shit,” I heard him say.

“What?” the girl asked.

I turned and raced through the dirt and hopped into the old tire, curling up into it. Even over the racing of my heart I heard the screech of the porch door open. The pebbles crunched closer and closer. Tyler’s head appeared in my line of vision.

“Hey, little girl,” he said softly.

I ignored him.

“I’m sorry you saw that,” he said. “I should have closed the window.”

I scowled. That wouldn’t have changed the fact that he was doing
that.
With her! If he needed to hurt a girl, why couldn’t it be me? If I had to be hurt, couldn’t I at least choose who hurt me?

“Come out of there,” he coaxed. “It’s not —”

“No!” I knew what he was going to say, that it wasn’t safe. “You don’t know anything.”

There was a pause, then he said, “Okay, you’re right. I don’t know. Why don’t you come out and you can tell me?”

I didn’t care anymore. I wanted him to know just how unsafe I really was. Even then, I knew I could hurt him with that knowledge. So I came out and wielded my weapons: a sensual shimmy inappropriate for my age, a knowing half-smile.

“Do it with me,” I whispered.

He cocked his head, all genuine puzzlement. “What?”

“What you were doing with that girl. Do it with me.”

He jumped up as if scalded. “Jesus! No!”

The rejection whipped through me. “Fine,” I yelled, uncaring if the whole neighborhood heard. Let them!

I stormed off toward the back alley, but he caught my arm in a tight grip and yanked me around. “Mia, I didn’t mean it like that.”

I refused to look up.

“It’s not a personal…you’re too young, that’s all. Way too young. You’re a very pretty girl, and I’m sure —”

“Spare me the pep talk,” I growled at him, unwilling to accept his fake kindness. If he really liked me, thought I was pretty, my age wouldn’t matter. I knew that. My age didn’t stop them. “I know I’m pretty. I hear it all the time, I’m so pretty. So beautiful and young, and I bet I can make you feel better than she can. I saw her. She couldn’t even stay still. I can!”

He stared at me, eyes wide and black. “When —” He swallowed thickly. “When do you stay still?”

The question cut through my reckless temper. I’d said too much. I couldn’t think, had to stall. “What?”

“When do you stay still for…that?”

I picked up the pieces of my bravado to boast, “Why? Do you think I don’t do it? That no one wants me? Well, not everyone thinks I’m too young.”

“Who, Mia? Who doesn’t think you’re too young?”

He was serious, so serious, and suddenly I had an inkling, a vision of how bad this could get. Already it was spiraling out of my control. “No one.” I blinked away the wetness. “I was lying.”

“Goddamnit, Mia,” he shouted.

The sound of the screen door cut through the night, but it wasn’t Tyler’s door this time. It was mine.

“What the fuck are you doing out here?” my dad slurred.

This time I didn’t wait for Tyler to tell me to go inside. I turned and ran for the steps.

“Stop,” Tyler said.

“I told you to stay away from her,” my dad said. Then he turned to me. “Get your skinny ass inside.”

“No, Mia,” Tyler said. “Wait. She was just telling me something.”

I started to shiver. Nothing good could come of this. They taught us about Eve in church, how she’d taken a bite of the apple. I thought this was how she must have felt when she realized what it meant. Relieved. Remorseful. Afraid.

They were shouting at each other, hurling so many swear words it was hard to make out a meaning other than fury. Then there was more than words flying through the air, fists and bodies, as they fought. At eighteen, Tyler was strong, but my dad still had a lot of weight on him. The wrestled until finally Tyler had him pinned on the dirt.

My dad spit up into his face. “You don’t know shit about shit, you motherfucking cocksucker dickhole shithead.”

Tyler lifted him and slammed him against the ground. “You fucker, you disgusting motherfucker. You’re going to fucking jail.”

I just stood there in shock, but then the girl came running out, screaming and hollering, and I wanted to stop her, to warn her not to bring attention to herself when they were in this rabid state, but I was rooted to the spot.

“Get inside,” Tyler said. He hadn’t moved his head, but he was talking to the girl.

“But,” she whined.

“Do it now,” he said. “Just get.”

My dad spoke between wheezes as Tyler’s forearm pressed into his throat. “That’s right, girlie. You don’t want my type to catch a look at you. Might be getting ideas.” And then he choked out a laugh when she ran inside Tyler’s house and slammed the door shut.

But my dad just kept laughing this awful gasping noise that reminded me of an animal dying. Even Tyler seemed freaked out, standing up and releasing him with a shove.

“You…think…you’ve…got…me?” my dad croaked through his hysteria.

“Fuck you,” Tyler said, sounding uncertain.

My dad straightened and made a visible effort to rein himself in. “Boy, I know exactly what your mama is. I done fucked her for some spare change.”