Acting Brave (Fenbrook Academy #3) (5 page)

My knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “Is there a point?”

I swerved around a corner and the donuts slid across the box on Hux’s lap. He hooked one on a finger and took a full quarter out of it in one bite. He’d long since grown used to my driving. Plus, for Hux, nothing interrupted donuts. We could have been in a full-on guns-blazing high speed pursuit and he’d still have found time for an original glazed. “My point, Kowalski, is that you need to shit or get off the pot.”

“You’re the master of romance, Hux.” We turned onto Brybecker and I started searching for the address.

“You’re...what? Twenty five?” he asked.

“Twenty four.”

“Whatever. Too young to be fixated on some girl you’re never gonna ask out. Do it, or forget about her.”

I pulled up outside the house. “I can’t,” I said. “And I can’t.”

Hux sighed and clambered out of the car, then patted his gut with something between sorrow and pride. “All your angst,” he told me. “That’s what it is. I’m comfort eatin’ on your behalf. How is that fair, huh? You mope and I put on weight.”

He drew me into a headlock as I got out and we horsed around for a moment, one eye on the house in case the owner came out and demanded to know why two of NYPD’s finest were acting like school kids. But that was Hux all over: older, wiser, and still a kid at heart. He’d mentored me through the academy after my dad died, and then we’d partnered up when I graduated. He drove me crazy, but I loved him.

“Come on,” he said at last. He climbed the steps to the door and knocked. “Let’s get this over with. Then you can get back to Jas—”

The bangs were so close together, they sounded like one noise. Everything else in the street seemed to go deadly silent in their wake. Hux took a stumbling step backward down the steps, and then another, and then he tumbled backward onto his ass. That’s when I saw the holes in the door, and the blood soaking through Hux’s shirt.

The door burst open. A guy jumped down the steps: my height but half my weight, his clothes hanging from a skin-and-bones body, the gun still in his hand. He gave me one wide-eyed look of terror and sprinted away.

I was still rooted to the spot. I drew my gun just as he disappeared around the corner. Every nerve in my body was jangling, my chest clenching painfully tight around my heart. I was overwhelmed with a sense of
wrongness.
Hux couldn’t get shot! He was
Hux!
I was the idiot who fucked up all the time and did dumbass things like getting shot.

I ran over to him. He was gulping at the air like he was trying to bite off a piece. Blood had already soaked his shirt and a lake of it was spreading out beneath him. It hit me that he was going to die, and that I should be screaming “
No! No! Stay with me!”
like you see in the movies, but I just stared into his eyes and he stared into mine and then he was gone.

Chapter 6

Jasmine

One Month Later

I was one shoe short. Literally. I’d only discovered the second one was missing when I already had the first one strapped on, so now I was staggering around the apartment with one leg three inches longer than the other. I had maybe three minutes to find it and get out before I crossed the line into being seriously late to class.

I could have just worn a different pair, of course. But
Jasmine
wouldn’t compromise. Always looking good was a part of her...and therefore me.

I looked under the bed for the third time and then tried the wardrobe again.
Bathroom?
I hop-walked there.
Nope.
This was getting ridiculous, now. There were only so many places it could be.

The apartment was by far the nicest place I’d lived since coming to New York. After the seedy motel and the roach-infested first apartment, I’d spent a few weeks sleeping on Karen’s couch—okay, technically
that
was the nicest place I’d stayed, but it wasn’t
mine.
Then, when Connor moved in with Karen, I’d moved into his drafty but homely little place for a glorious rent-free month until his lease ran out. Between that and the time on the couch, I’d finally been able to save some money and get this place—a small but warm little nest where I wouldn’t get stabbed or beat up or eaten in my sleep by hungry roaches. Money was tight but, if I was careful, I could
just
scrape by. I’d even managed to furnish the apartment with some flea market rejects: posters of Hollywood sirens, some old-fashioned mirrors, and lots of throws everywhere: dark green that looked good against my flame-red hair. The bedroom was a particular favorite. I’d gone for a full-on seduction vibe, with black sheets, an iron bedstead, and fake red satin staple-gunned to the wall in thick, shining ripples. It looked like a Parisian prostitute’s boudoir, which I figured was perfect.

And that was the problem. Like everything else in my life, I’d made those choice because they were
what Jasmine would do.
Most of the time that felt fine. But occasionally, I’d catch myself and wonder if I really liked all that stuff...or if it was just in character.

Being intensely
Jasmine
was working, though. Sleeping in the boudoir-chic room separated me from my past and that seemed to help with the nightmares. They only came once a week or so, now, and they didn’t burn themselves into my brain so deeply—sometimes, by around lunchtime, I’d actually stopped shaking and feeling like I wanted to throw up in fear.

The worst events weren’t necessarily the worst ones for hanging around my head all day. Like the time my dad had tried to drown me—or scare me, I’ve never been sure which—by pushing my face under the freezing water at the bottom of the old ice chest and holding me there. He’d been drunker than usual, that night. Angry, because someone had tried to stiff him for a few hundred bucks. That was all it took.

I’d been twelve, at the time.

The ice chest was a regular in my nightmare cycle, but it usually faded fast, once I’d realized that I was safely in my bed. But others were harder to shake. The first time he’d taken me with him in his truck to collect money from a debtor, for example. He’d left me in the passenger seat while he talked with the guy in his garage, maybe ten feet away. My dad’s voice had started out friendly, then turned threatening, then taken on that cold, detached tone I’d learned to fear.

He came back to the truck and fetched his baseball bat. I hunkered down in my seat and kept my eyes on the dashboard.

I heard the bat whistle through the air and then there was a sound I’d never forget, both alien and horribly intimate: bones breaking. The man’s scream hurt my ears. Then it became muffled and I figured my dad must have stuffed something in his mouth to shut him up.

Another cracking noise. Another. Another. Muffled moaning. The noises started to sound wet. I could have turned on the radio or put my hands over my ears, but I knew by then, at sixteen, that either of those would make my dad turn his anger on me. So I sat there like a little statue and stared at the dashboard as if it was the best book I’d ever read.

The moaning grew weaker. Eventually, it stopped altogether.

That
nightmare was one of the worst, because the sound followed me around afterwards. I’d be walking along with Karen, the morning after, and I’d still hear that wet crack of bone echoing in my ears. I always had to pretend that I had a stomach bug, because I felt too sick to eat.

And then, of course, there were the two worst nightmares of all. The reruns of the two worst nights of my life.

The nightmare I’d had that morning hadn’t been anything like as bad as one of those. It wasn’t even anything that had happened to me, as such.

In the nightmare, one of the customers in our bar, a pimp, was sitting there with one of his hookers, a blonde called Hayley. I was cleaning glasses, trying to keep a low profile. My dad sauntered over there, drunk as usual, and he said something I couldn’t hear, a crude come-on. Hayley, I figured, didn’t realize that her pimp owed my dad money, and didn’t know what my dad was like. So she told him where to go.

The pimp back-handed her. And then, apologized to my dad and encouraged him to do the same. Between them, they split Hayley’s lip open.

A few minutes later, I saw her going into the restroom. I knew there was nothing in there you’d want to put remotely near a wound, so I got some clean kitchen towel and soaked it in cold water and handed it to her when she came out. I expected her to be grateful.

But she just glared at me. “I don’t need your fucking pity,” she snapped. “You think you’re better than me? You’ll be just like me! I’m your future!”

I’d woken with those words echoing around and around in my head and the sheets soaked through with sweat. I’d had to lie there for ten minutes before I felt strong enough to move, before I’d fully reassured myself that I’d escaped, that I was in New York now. That was why I was running late.

I looked in the refrigerator, just in case I’d had a complete brain-melt and put the shoes in there. Nope. I slumped down on the bed, defeated. And immediately jumped up again as a heel dug into my ass. The
bed?!
What was my shoe doing in the bed?!

I strapped it on. Time was, it would have been there because I’d invited some hot guy back to my place and kept my shoes on while we worked through the juicier parts of the Kama Sutra. In the last month, though, I just hadn’t been able to face it. And that was a problem, because if I didn’t keep shoring up
Jasmine
by living like she would, a void formed in my center, sucking everything down into it. And once everything was gone, all that would be left would be Emma.

Something else was different, too. Since Ryan and Hux had blipped their siren and talked to me, a month before, I hadn’t seen them.
Maybe it worked,
I thought.
Maybe he finally lost interest and moved on to someone who deserves him.

Maybe. And if so, that was a good thing, right? So why did I keep looking over my shoulder every Thursday, not in trepidation but in hope? Why had I strolled from Fenbrook to Harper’s three times, last Thursday, eyes scanning both ends of the street? Why did I dream of him almost every night: Ryan pulling me into his patrol car and pushing me down on the back seat, his muscled thigh between my legs; Ryan in my bed, my legs wrapped around him, his mouth at my ear as he told me what he wanted; most disturbing of all, Ryan and me hand in hand, as if I was some innocent, carefree girl, glimpses of funfairs and beaches and picnics.

I pushed that thought down inside me. It didn’t matter why. However much I ached for him, he was better off without me.

I grabbed my bag and ran.

***

We were well into October, but the weather was holding. I’d had to add a shawl to my dress but, as long as I kept to the sunny side of the street, it was bearable.

The sidewalk was more crowded than it normally was, which told me I was running even later than I’d thought. Great. Still, it was only method acting class with Mr. Gizacho (or Gazpacho, as we’d renamed him). The first half hour would just be him regaling us with stories of life in the theater—he wouldn’t even notice I was missing.

I clattered down the stairs, half an inch and one sideways heel away from a sprained ankle. I slipped through the mass on the platform and was just in time to see the train pull away. I swore under my breath, drawing surprised glances from the suited commuters on either side of me. One of whom soothed his moral outrage by checking out my boobs.

I realized I was staring across the tracks at the exact spot where I’d seen my brother, Nick, a few years before. I still wondered if I’d imagined it. I’d had a class cancelled, that day, so I’d been coming into Fenbrook an hour late, waiting at the station when I’d just looked across...and there he was. His jeans had been frayed and muddy at the ankles, and he’d been wearing an oversized shirt that looked like it once belonged to a long distance trucker. If it hadn’t been for the ancient Cubs t-shirt, I might not have recognized him at all.

He’d looked up and seen me, and we’d stared at each other across the gap. And then my train arrived, and I told myself I had to get on it, and that was that.

Except, as soon as I’d arrived in Fenbrook, I’d gone to the toilets and thrown up for about an hour straight, as if all of the memories were choosing that route out of my body. Seeing him again had made my entire escape from Chicago, the whole creation of Jasmine, seem like nothing more than a daydream. They’d found me.
They’d found me!

Eventually, when weeks went by without seeing him again, I calmed down to realize that it had been a simple coincidence. There was no sign of my dad, so it wasn’t that he’d tracked me down. More likely, Nick had done exactly what I’d done, fleeing the family and coming to New York on his own, with no idea that I’d picked the same city. It made sense: he’d always loved the idea of coming here, as well.

So he was on his own. So I should do the right thing and find him. Family stick together, and all that.

But this was
my
family. My twisted, fucked up, crime-ridden family. Yes, my dad was the root of the evil, but Nick had bent to his will more than once to stop the beatings. He was a year older than me, so he’d been first in line when my dad needed things doing. He’d started small, just a little dealing in the high school parking lot. But then he’d got into bigger, more serious deals, until he eventually wound up doing time. He was released and almost immediately got involved in the same old world, although this time the charges didn’t stick. It was only a matter of time, though, and by the time I fled I was pretty sure he was using as well as dealing.