Prologue
Present day…
In the dark, cold room, I blink my eyes to focus, but all I can think about is the pain. It hurts to breathe and every inch of my body feels bruised and battered. Probably because it is.
Oh God! Why is this happening to me?
I try to move, to get up off of the hard floor, but my broken body isn’t cooperating. I need to find a way out of here or I won't survive this. I know with every part of my being that if I don’t leave this room, I’m going to die here. Alone.
The tears run down my face, and I can’t even move my arms to brush them away; something is holding them in place.
I slowly turn my head to the side, trying not to throw up from the pain that rushes through me with that one simple movement. I’m tied down to something, but I can’t make out what it is. The only light in the room comes from a street lamp right outside, which throws a thin ray of light through the small window close to the ceiling.
With all of the strength I can muster, I try to pull one of my arms free from whatever is holding me in place, the bindings cutting into my wrists and pain instantly shooting up my arm that's most likely broken in several places.
My scream echoes through the empty room and my throat aches from all the screaming I’ve already done…yesterday? The day before? I’m losing track of time.
Oh God, this is the arm I play with. This is the arm that cradles the guitar to my side and the fingers that strum the notes that take me away to another place. Notes and melodies that bring me back to life and allow me to be who I really am.
I know I’m going to pass out again soon. My vision is swimming. Spots flash before my eyes as I struggle to remain conscious.
Flashbacks of the past few months run through my mind like someone flipping the pages of a book, and my heart shatters at the memories. I should have seen what was happening. I should have listened to him from the beginning, but everything about him scared me. The force of what I felt for him shouldn’t have been so strong so quickly. He had my heart and my soul from the very first touch, the very first moment. But he didn’t want it. He didn’t want any of it. I trusted too quickly, gave too easily.
Trusting someone is what got me into this mess. I trusted the wrong person, and now I’m going to pay for it with my life. Someone who should have been there for me and protected me…it was all a lie from the very beginning. Deep down I knew it. I’d always known it. I just never wanted to believe the hatred ran that deep.
I let the darkness wash over me, knowing it’s the only way the pain will go away. I close my eyes, thinking back over the last eight years and wondering about all of the things I should have done differently, the choices I made that have led me to where I am now. If I had never let her control me, never succumbed to the undeniable connection I had to him…if we hadn’t experienced that initial pull towards each other, maybe things wouldn’t be ending this way.
I hear shouts and the pounding of footsteps in the distance, but I can’t force my eyes open no matter how hard I try. They are probably just coming back to finish the job, not satisfied with how much they have already broken me, how much they have already taken from me.
Maybe if I had realized sooner, listened earlier, put away my pride and the belief that everyone has some good in them deep down, I wouldn’t be where I am now—fighting for my life and wondering if the person I love cares enough to save me from this hell.
Chapter 1
Three months ago…
Even though my mind is going a hundred miles a minute, worrying about how I’m going to pay the growing pile of bills in my hand and keep a roof over Gwen and Emma’s head, I'm still one hundred percent aware of my surroundings, a blessing and a curse given to me by Uncle Sam.
The four-door, blue sedan parked three spots down from me has a rear tire that's losing air and will most likely blow a flat within three days.
The wind is blowing from the southeast at around five miles per hour.
Fireside Bookshop, the store across the street, is three minutes and twenty-seven seconds late opening this morning.
Mr. Jensen, the owner of the building I rent, has a yappy, shit-kicker dog named Mitzy. They live upstairs from Marshall Investigations, and on nice days like today, he leaves a window open so Mitzy can get some fresh air.
Pushing open the door to the office with my shoulder, I sort through a stack of mail as I make my way inside, blindly reaching one hand out to the wall and flipping on the light switch as I walk by. Mitzy manages to bark thirty-five times from the moment I open my car door to when I reach the quiet tranquility of my office.
My dark fucking office.
The fact I can barely see what’s written on the envelopes in my hand now that I’m inside the building and out of the bright, early morning Nashville sun can only mean one thing.
“Son of a bitch!” I angrily mutter to myself, shaking my head in irritation. I back up a few steps and feel across the wall with my hand, flicking the switch up and down a few more times and cursing under my breath once more just for the hell of it.
When the florescent lights from above fail to blind me, I smack the pile of bills and junk mail down on the closest desk with a loud snapping noise and make a move to touch the light switch again.
“Playing with it over and over is not going to miraculously pay the electric bill.”
The flat, unenthusiastic voice stops me mid-step, my hand in the air just hovering over the switch. I roll my eyes at Gwen as she walks into the office area from the kitchenette in the back. Every time she walks into a room, I can still feel my jaw drop slightly. My baby sister's always been the quiet one, never doing anything to draw attention to herself until she showed up on my doorstep one night looking like she'd gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson.
My parents live in a world where the country club dictates their every move. If what they're doing doesn't make them look good to snobby friends, they don't bother doing it, and unfortunately, that affected our childhood—Gwen's more than mine. She’s always been the picture perfect daughter: shy, well-mannered, wearing clothes and her hair just as Mother insisted.
When Gwen burst through my door that night and headed straight for the bathroom, I didn't know what to expect. A few minutes later she came out holding her long blonde ponytail in her fist, her tiny shoulders shaking with fury.
“Never again, Brady!” she half-cried, half yelled. “That woman is never going to tell me how to live my life again.” A little while later, we were slumped against the wall, and after I managed to calm her down, she laughed through the tears. “Guess I won't be catching the eye of a good man ever again without my beautiful long blonde hair and impeccable social etiquette.”
I gently ran a hand over her freshly battered skin and thought maybe that wasn't such a bad thing considering the “good” man she found had done that to her. Once the bruises faded and she stopped jumping from her own shadow, I took her to some fancy hair place down the street from my office, and they waved their magic wand over her hack job haircut and color from a box.
Standing in front of me now with her hands on her hips, impatiently tapping her foot, waiting for an answer, I don't even recognize her. Her hair is still short. Chopping it off with my straight edge razor didn't leave the stylist with much to work with, but they turned it into some type of edgy reverse bob or whatever it's called.
I squint my eyes and try to make out her hair color in the unlit office. “Is that purple and blue?” I ask, slightly shocked.
“Pretty bad ass, huh?” She smiles proudly.
Shrugging, I say, “At least you don't look like an emo asshole anymore. The black made me feel like you were going to start worshiping the devil any minute.”
The sun starts to filter through the wooden venetian blinds, and I notice something sparkling on her face. “Gwen...” Protective big brother is starting to kick in, and it shows in my voice, but then I see her smile and I change my tone. “Is that a nose piercing?”
“Don't even start, Brady...”
I smile and admire the tiny diamond stud. It suits her, but I'll never get used to my five-foot-two, one-hundred-pound tiny wisp of a sister and her new found confidence.
“That’s a pretty cool stud,” I tell her, leaning back in my chair and kicking my feet on my desk so I can watch her annoyance turn to relief. “The nose ring isn’t bad either.”
My smirk puts the irritation back on her face, but I can see she’s trying to hide a smile by the way she’s fighting with the corners of her mouth.
“It’s really sad that you think so highly of yourself,” she tells me good-naturedly.
We both let out a laugh as she rolls her eyes at me and starts sorting some of the open case files on my desk.
It’s good to see her smile and laugh again. Real good.
When I finally pulled myself out of my six-month drunken bender, tired of filling my days and nights with cheap whiskey and even cheaper women from every strip club within a fifty mile radius, I decided to open up my own security specialist/private investigating firm. Gwen jumped at the chance to help me out. She had her own baggage, her own rough couple of years. She'd been working a dead end job as a waitress that was more trouble than it was worth ever since she showed up here, so it made her decision a no-brainer.
Her six-year-old daughter is in school full time now which gives her more freedom to come and go during the day. Managing the office side of my business lets her finally put that college degree in Business Administration to good use. Gwen is two years my junior, and is still the only member of my family who has never given up on me. I've been to hell and back this past year and never thought I would make it out alive. I put her through the fucking ringer when she first got here. After the life she left behind, she didn’t deserve that shit from me. She deserves more, so much more. It's only been recently that I've realized how much she's done for me, how much she's always done for me, and just how much I’ve let her down.
Throwing the last few items from my dresser drawer into the camouflage duffel bag on my bed, I zipped it closed and slung the pack over my shoulder, hustling out of my room and down the front stairway before my father could get another word in to criticize me. Ever since I made the announcement I was joining the Navy over dinner two months ago, I was met with nothing but anger and shame from my parents. The shame came from my mother.
“What will everyone at the club think when I tell them you aren’t going to law school?” she asked in a horrified voice.
My father had always been an angry person, but he hid it well behind the twenty-five-year-old scotch and fancy suits. It wasn't until I dropped the bomb that I'd be leaving after graduation that his true colors came out. Apparently, “only poor people with no future and no direction go into the military. Not bright young men from affluent families with a reputation and a name to uphold.”
Little did he realize, I fit perfectly into his “poor and directionless” category. I had no money to my name because I would be damned if I took one penny from him. Ever. Even if I wanted to, he made it perfectly clear he wouldn’t support my frivolous dream of “goofing off on a boat and playing with guns.”
The day I got the results from my SATs, my father popped open a seven thousand dollar bottle of Perrier-Jouet Champagne and called up his good friend, the dean of students at Harvard Law, and asked him what kind of a donation would get me early admission. My future and the direction of my life suddenly began to choke me. I thought about going to work every day wearing a three-piece suit and arguing the innocence of people I knew were far from blameless. I thought about kissing the asses of Circuit and Supreme Court judges every single day like my father did and playing eighteen holes with opposing counsel and joking about the sad, underprivileged people who came to us for help.
I couldn't do it. I couldn't live my life like that. I wouldn't.
“You take one step out of that door, don’t you dare think about coming back here.”
The stern words spoken from the top of the stairs didn't even cause me to falter as I continued to the bottom step. He had made those same threats to me every single day for the past sixty days.
“Don’t worry, Dad. I wouldn’t DREAM of coming back here,” I replied as my steel-toed boots clacked across the marble floor in the foyer, refusing to turn around and look at him.
No matter who or what I was leaving behind, I had to leave―before it broke me.
“Brady! Wait!”
The panicked shout from the library stopped me in my tracks, kept me from the freedom just within my grasp. It was the ONLY voice that could stop me at this point. I dropped my duffel on the floor and turned just as my sixteen-year-old sister threw herself into my arms. With her face buried in my shoulder, she choked back tears and I wrapped my arms around her tightly and held her close.
“It’s okay, Gwenny, it’s okay,” I told her softly as I rubbed my hand against her back.
“Please, don’t leave. Don’t leave me,” she whispered.
“I’m just going away for a little while. I will never leave you. I promise.”
But I did leave her. I left and I never looked back. She did everything my parents told her, so in my mind, she became the enemy.
I will never forgive myself for leaving her behind, for walking away and letting that monster get his hooks in her and turn her into someone I hardly recognized. Gwen doesn't blame me. She would never blame me. But I know better. She SHOULD blame me. She should scream and yell and curse at me for walking away from the one person who really, truly loved me. She had come back into my life so I could save her, but she's saved me in more ways than she will ever know.
