Chapter Thirty Two
Seventeen years old
“Stefy, have you got a sec?” Chris asks from behind my closed door after her customary knock. I am sitting at my desk, finishing homework, when the door opens and Chris comes into my room, face pale and eyes rimmed red.
“Is everything okay?” I ask, getting up and crossing the room to her. She has her sleeves pulled down over her hands, wringing them together in the way she does when she is nervous.
Thoughts of her thinking her period meant she was dying pop into my head, so I smile at her, remembering her naivety, but it is short-lived when Chris’s eyes brim with tears. She glances behind her and goes back to the door, turning the key and locking us inside.
“Chrissy?” I whisper, my palms becoming clammy.
“I haven’t had my period in four months, Stefy,” she says, not meeting my eyes. “I think I might be…” she trails off, tears splashing to my floor. I take a step back away from her.
“Fuck,” I whisper, beginning to pace back and forth as Chris cries silent tears. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
I rake my hands through my hair, tugging sharply and willing myself to wake up from whatever nightmare I’m in. There was no way my baby sister of thirteen was pregnant. None.
“Are you sure?” I ask, and she bobs her head. “Uh… who… uh… you had sex?”
Her cheeks flush, and what a stupid question to ask. I know she has. There’s no such thing as a miraculous conception.
Shit.
“Who–” I pause, unable to finish the question in fear of the reply. I feel sick to my stomach, my mouth is dry, and I can’t stop my hands from shaking.
“Ronan,” she whispers through a sob, and my world crumbles.
“What?” I spit, stopping dead in my tracks and grabbing Chris’s shoulders in a vice grip. She winces at the contact, but I can’t let her go. This has to be some kind of sick joke. I start to shake my head, fighting the urge to scream, asking how this could have happened? How could she have been so stupid? He’s our goddamned half-brother.
But it wasn’t her fault, it was his. He’s her older brother. He would have known it was wrong when he first engaged with her in that way, but he did it anyway. He took her innocence away from her and destroyed her childhood.
She steps away from me and lifts her top over her stomach, revealing a small bump that she gently frames with her delicate hands. My eyes well up at the sight of her and my hand flies to my mouth.
“I didn’t know it was wrong, Stefy, I promise,” she says, finally looking at me. She lowers her top to cover herself back up and bites the edge of her finger. “He said nice things to me, gave me pretty things, and said I looked so grown up. He made me feel good, Stefy. He – he told me he loved me, and it was different because we weren’t full siblings.” She walks over to my bed and pushes herself up so she’s leaning against the headboard, hugging a pillow to her chest.
“I realised what we were doing was wrong when the girls at school said they haven’t even kissed a boy before, and when I said I’d kissed a boy who was about to become twenty-one, they said I was lying because ‘what old sicko would be kissing girls our age?’” Her voice is quiet when she tells me this, and I feel like the room is getting smaller. “And then I told him about this”—she gestures around her stomach and a tear slides down her face—“and when he told me we had to keep it a secret, I knew. I just knew, Stefy. I needed to tell you. I don’t keep secrets from you. Ever.”
“You did nothing wrong, Chrissy, it was him,” I say, my voice wobbling. I take a deep breath and ask the hardest question I think I’ll ever have to ask my baby sister. “What do you want to do?”
She bites her lip before answering, “I want to keep it.”
I join her on my bed and pull her into my arms and we both cry. I cry for my baby sister whose life has been turned upside down by our paedophilic brother, I cry at the knowledge she is going to become a mom at such a young age, and I cry for the tsunami of guilt threatening to drown me for not protecting my sister like I’d done so many times before.
“I need to tell Alex,” I say through a hiccup, and Chris’s face somehow becomes even paler as she shakes her head, her eyes begging me to keep this from him. “I need to get you away and keep you safe, but I can’t do that without his help.”
She’s quiet for several minutes before giving me the smallest of nods in acceptance. I scramble off my bed and text him.
Stevie: Is Grandma Mary still an option?
Alex: Now?
Stevie: Now.
“I need you to pack a bag, Chris. Keep it light.”
Ice cold water roused me from my concussion-induced sleep. I coughed and snapped my head up to see mom tossing an empty water bottle to the floor and wiping her hands together. My ears are filled with the sound of my pulsing blood, a high-pitched hum drowning out whatever my mother was trying to say to me.
“Are you even listening to me, Stefany?” she asked and reached out, taking my chin in her grasp, her nails digging into my skin as she shook my head back and forth in sharp, jagged movements. “I’m her mother. Just tell me where Christina and Nathaniel are. That is all I’m asking.”
“You lost the privilege of being our mother when you left us with that man, allowed your sick son to groom and rape Chris, and when you kidnapped me.”
She laughed, a sound that was not warm and friendly, but cold and disenchanted.
“Oh, Stefany, I’ve already lost one child. I really don’t want to lose another,” she said, moving to the back wall where a metal table had made an appearance. That was new. “But if you don’t tell me, I’ll have to force her out of hiding.”
Mom walked back to me, and a glint of light sparkled off a long blade that she must have picked up from the table. I looked from it and back to her.
“I am pretty sure she would attend the funeral of her beloved sister, so one way or another, I will get her back.”
I glared at her, the first facial expression I gave since I came around for the second time. She came to my side and ran the blade along my throat. I didn’t flinch, because she had shown her hand when she had Jake beat me. I doubt she had ever done her own dirty work, plus, as she said, she’d rather I was alive.
She turned and held out the knife to Jake, who had been sitting off to the side in a fold-out metal chair, dressed in the same suit as earlier. He stood and walked slowly to her side. He raised an eyebrow and took the metal handle in his hand, weighing it the same way he had done with my small knife in his limo, which now felt like a different lifetime.
The memory soured in my stomach as shame consumed me about how fucking stupid I had been. But as the thoughts of that day continued to play, the image of his lips running along the inside of my thigh appeared and heat pooled low, like I was getting ready for him to touch me. I clenched my legs together, so fucking pissed at myself for still being attracted to this liar.
Did that make me a hypocrite? I had lied to him too, right? But I told him about my mom leaving us and he empathised with me. He held me and told me he would protect me.
Shut this shit down, Stevie. At least you never fell in love with the asshole.
Love. The word made my heart clench.
“Emmy,” Jake warned, his voice low and threatening, but not a warning aimed at me. I gritted my teeth at the familiarity of her shortened name. Before she left, Emilia was what everyone called her. No exceptions.
Mom nodded and took the knife back, spinning and slicing along my collarbone in one fluid movement. I released a shallow breath at the sting and a trickle of blood dripped down the front of my chest and pooled along the unbuttoned neckline of Jake’s shirt that I still wore. In quick succession, she sliced into my skin another three times, all along my chest.
“You can stop all of this, Stefany, if you just tell me where Nathaniel is,” she said, turning back to Jake and leaning her head on his arm while twisting the blade in the light to examine my blood that had stained the edge.
“Suck a dick,” I snarled, keeping my gaze at the pair in front of me and not checking the damage inflicted at the hands of Emilia. She chuckled and looked up at Jake, bringing her hand to his cheek and guiding his face down to look at her.
“Maybe later,” she purred, and leaned up to place a lingering kiss on his lips. I swore I could see his whole body tense at her touch, but everything with the guy had shown I had no fucking clue about his reactions… if it was in disgust or arousal.
’…Take your emotions out of a job and judge the situation unperturbed. Never show how you feel on the outside. Lock that shit down and keep it hidden...′
Will’s chastising words filled my head, encasing me in titanium and making me strong enough to weather the torment Emilia was trying to dish out.
I was Stevie motherfucking Matthews. Contract killer for one of the most influential families in our town. I would not be beaten by some bitch with perfect skin and phenomenal fashion sense and her fuck boy.
I shifted, causing the chair to creak. A throb ran down my side to my hip and continued dully down my leg to my ice-cold toes.
The sound of the chair groaning stopped the couple’s kiss, and Emilia gave a contented sigh, then licked her lips. She clicked her tongue and tried again.
“Where is my grandson?”
“Fuck. You.”
“Tell me where he is!” she roared, her face close to mine, causing droplets of spit to land on my face. It took everything in my body not to flinch or move away from her.
“No,” I said in a cool, even tone.
Suddenly, the tip of the knife plunged into my thigh, and I sucked in a breath through my nose. The blade dug deep until nearly two-thirds had disappeared beneath my skin.
Emilia pulled it out, swinging the blade to the side as my blood followed the trajectory, and if it wasn’t my blood, I’d have appreciated the cast-off pattern on the white floor. The perfect oval shapes with little tails told a gruesome story of which direction the victim, me, had been sitting when she was stabbed. One perfect arc in dark red showing a nearly fatal delivering blow.
The knife pierced my skin for a second time, blinding white pain consuming the bottom half of my body, and the need to scream causing me to bite hard on my tongue to keep any sound deep in my throat. My breathing stopped, my lungs ached, and a lump in my throat pained as I fought back the tears.
“Emmy, enough,” Jake’s strong voice echoed in the room as he circled her wrist, halting the knife from going deeper. “You’re lucky you didn’t hit an artery. She would have bled out and you wouldn’t have had any answers. Plus, now you’re covered in blood.”
Mom straightened, letting go of her grip on the handle, allowing Jake to pull it slowly from my thigh. I panted and my body started to shake as adrenaline flowed through me. I sagged as soon as the tip was free from my skin, and I felt my blood slide down the side of my thigh.
“You’re right,” she conceded with a sigh, slipping her feet out of her shoes. “If you wouldn’t mind helping me, I did bring a change of clothes in case something like this happened.”
She waited for Jake to come to her side, only to rest her hands on her hips with a little pout on her lips when he didn’t move. She turned her back on him and pulled her long black hair over her shoulder.
Eventually, Jake tore his eyes from the blood oozing out of my leg and went to grab the zipper of Emilia’s dress, pulling it slowly down the length of her back and stopping just above her ass. He reached up and brushed her shoulders, bringing the blood-spattered dress down her arms and letting it slide to the floor, leaving her in her matching pink underwear set. She turned to face him and pushed her body up the length of his, then slowly kissed up the side of his neck to his jaw.
“Thank you,” she whispered in a sultry voice. Jake’s eyes caught mine as she peeled her body away from his and walked to the back of the room, leaving Jake and me staring at each other.
As much as I tried, I knew the hurt and betrayal were written all over my face as my shoulders rose and fell as I breathed through the burning sensation radiating through my leg. He always did have the power to see through my walls, even if they were made of steel.
Emilia came back wearing a red dress and stopped to wait for Jake to pull the zipper back up.
“I am going to leave you to think about what you’re going to do, Stefany,” Mom said, putting her feet back into the patent leather shoes with the red soles.
When I get out of this, I am going to burn my pair of those heels.
“The quicker you tell me what I want to know, the quicker I can get you a doctor before that gets infected.” She pointed to my weeping leg, then sauntered toward the door, heels clicking off the floor. Each sound echoed through my head like a sledgehammer smacking a concrete wall.
Jake stood watching me, and I watched him. He opened his mouth, about to speak, but then stopped himself, running his hand along his stubble-covered jaw. He then turned and switched off the light, shrouding me in the dim light coming from the dull pendant bulb above.
Two locks clicked, and I was finally alone to close my eyes and drown in pain.