I gasped when I stepped into my bedroom. It wasn’t that the bed had been slashed like the sofa in the living room. It wasn’t even the fact that all my clothes had been pulled out of my dresser and thrown on the floor, the ones that had been in my closet yanked off hangers and spilling out of my closet.
It was the writing on the wall that sent a thrum of shock through my body.
I stared at the angry red letters spray-painted over my bed: STFU CUNT.
18
LILAH
I leanedagainst the wall in the living room and fought back tears. I would not cry in front of the Bastards. It was bad enough that I’d needed their help the week before, when I’d almost died in the woods, bad enough they’d seen me — again — at my most vulnerable.
I wouldn’t let them see me cry over my lousy apartment, over all the shabby things I’d worked so hard to collect.
They were standing in the kitchen, talking quietly, and I was grateful for the little bit of space to get myself together. I’d taken a pill to calm my racing heart. Now I just needed to process what this meant, how I was going to find a new place to live with my dwindling savings and one shitty job instead of the three shitty jobs I’d had before I had to stick my nose into Vic’s business.
What had I been thinking?
Advice todo the right thingusually came from people who could afford the luxury of doing it. People who could afford to take a hit, to pay a price.
I was not one of those people.
I was barely hanging on, fighting alone for my survival in a world where it felt like jackals were around every corner. Vicand Mr. Suit were obviously doing something shady but I should have kept my nose out of it, let someone else — someone with less to lose — take them on.
But some primitive part of my body rejected the idea as soon as I thought it. The problem with people who had the luxury to wage a war was that they sometimes didn’t even know the war was being fought.
Would someone who had the luxury to wage a war have been behind a seedy bar in a nowhere town at two in the morning? Would they have been hauling out a bag of trash at a time when they would have seen the girl being shoved into the car?
No, that was left to people like me. And being in the trenches of life instead of high on a hill didn’t mean I didn’t give a shit about other people. If anything, I felt more connected to the girl. Who was she? Was she someone like me? Someone who didn’t have people in the world who would know if she went missing?
Maybe I had it wrong. Maybe those of us who didn’t have the luxury had to stick together since no one else seemed to give a shit about us.
I looked up as the Bastards left the kitchen. My apartment was so small it took them all of two seconds to make their way to the living room.
They looked solemn, although Rafe’s expression could have been disgust or hatred or annoyance because he only ever wore one expression around me and it was hard to tell which of those it was.
“We want you to come stay with us,” Nolan said.
I recoiled. “What? No. That’s… that’s crazy.”
“It’s not,” Jude said. “You need a place to stay, a safe place. We’re a safe place.”
He said it with all the certainty of a giant dude who lived with two other giant dudes. All the certainty of someone who’d neveronce felt unsafe even though it was a fact that he — that they — were the ones who had made me unsafe in high school.
I glared at him and he ran a hand over the back of his neck. “I get it. I know you don’t feel safe with us and I understand why, but you can’t stay here.”
“Do you have somewhere else you can go?” Nolan’s voice was gentle, like he already knew the answer and regretted making me give it.
I did a quick mental scan of my options even though logic told me I didn’t have any. I was a hard no on going home to my mom’s — I’d almost died there once before; I couldn’t risk it again — and I didn’t have a single friend. I mean, I had people I knew: people I talked to at Burger Haven when we were scheduled for the same shift, my neighbors, women I sparred with at the gym.
But none of them werefriends, which was as much my own doing as anyone else’s. It was kind of hard to get close to people — to trust people — after you’d been fucked over the way the Bastards had fucked me over in high school.
I forced my voice steady and strong when I finally answered Nolan’s question because if I had to admit I was a total loser with no friends and nowhere to go, I wasn’t going to sound like a damsel in distress while I did it. “No.”
Rafe made an exasperated sound and stomped to the door. “Then stop fucking around and pack your shit.”
PART II
19