Chains (13 page)

EIGHT

I cradled Danny in my arms on the bathroom floor, rocking her back and forth. She’d been sick all night, crying, but not speaking a word.

“You’re okay,” I whispered, my lips against the top of her head. The words I’d used to assure her countless times over the years coming out like my assigned dialogue in a script. If only this was acting and not our real life. “You’ll be stronger in a few days, and in a week or two you won’t want it so bad.”

She sniffed and wiped her tears. “I don’t want to be this person,” she said, glancing up at me with red-ringed, puffy eyes. “I don’t want you to have to take care of me. I never wanted you to feel like I was a helpless little girl you were burdened with.”

“I don’t,” I said, turning her shoulders so she was facing me. The pitiful look on her face killed me. “I want to take care of you, Danny. You’ve never been a burden to me.”

She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have done this to myself. I’m stronger than this. I survived fifteen years with Striker. I’m not weak!”

“Don’t,” I said, easing her head against my chest to hold her close. “Don’t even think about feeling guilty for this. It’s not your fault. You were too young to be on your own. I should’ve taken you with me.”

I was eighteen. A man. I never should’ve left her there with Striker. Why the fuck didn’t I run away with her and never look back? I didn’t need to beat the shit out of him, I only needed to get us the hell out of there. “It’s my fault,” I said, stroking her soft hair back from her face.

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “We can’t look back. There’s no changing things. I put myself in this situation. Not you. I took the drugs. I got hooked.”

“Now you’re going to get clean.” I stood up with her in my arms. “Are you going to be sick again, or do you want to go back to bed?”

“Bed,” she said, her eyelids blinking heavily with exhaustion.

I walked her to the bed and tucked her in, sitting beside her against the headboard keeping watch. Alex The Dog jumped up and lay between us. Danny put her hand on his head and fell back into her deep sleep that was riddled with nightmares. She’d wake up sweating and crying. But I knew this phase would soon pass. I lived through it with Mike beside me. Danny would make it with me here to guide her through it.

A faint knock sounded at the door, and it opened a crack. Alex stuck his head in. “How’s she doing?”

“As good as expected,” I said. I lifted my chin toward a chair in the opposite corner. “Sit down.”

Alex walked across the dim bedroom with his familiar, long-legged gait. It was strange being together in the same room again, all three of us. Surreal almost. It shot a vein of anxiety through me, my subconscious thinking Striker would come busting through the door next.

“An MMA fighter,” Alex said, smiling and shaking his head. “You know, with all that drawing you used to do, I figured you’d end up illustrating books or becoming an architect or something.”

“Starving artist isn’t my style,” I said. “Not physical enough.”

“You still draw?”

“Not really.”

“Remember the time Striker broke all your colored pencils? Shit, the look on your face. I didn’t know if you were going to cry or cut his throat in his sleep.”

“Yeah.” The memory came back sharp and clear. Colored pencils. Nothing I’d give a rat’s ass about now, but back then when I had zero control over anything in my life, those fucking pencils meant everything. Freedom. Escape. I could draw myself anywhere. Out of Striker’s house, out of fucking existence if I wanted. They were my fists. I fought back with those pencils. “Should’ve cut his throat,” I said.

“You cried like a baby,” Alex said and laughed.

Danny shifted. “Shh,” I whispered. “She finally stopped puking.”

“What’s she puking? She hasn’t eaten anything.”

“She’ll eat tomorrow. I’ll make her.”

“So are you two…?” Alex made a gesture indicating Danny and I were together.

“I don’t know, man,” I said. “I just found her.”

“Seems like there’s more. I always thought you two made a good team, you know.” He stretched out is legs and ran his hands back and forth over the arms of the chair.

“We’ll see,” I said, not sure Danny and I were ready to throw ourselves into a relationship with how fucked up both of our lives were at the moment. “She needs to get better, and I need to get back in the cage.”

Alex stared at Danny for a minute, a deep line creasing his forehead. “She needs more than that, Ty.”

I gazed down at her, ran my eyes along her delicate jaw, up over the small, supple curves of her lips to her closed eyes, ringed with golden-tipped lashes. “She deserves more,” I said.

“So do you,” he said. “Hell, we should be given a mansion on a private island and free strippers for life for what we went through.”

Strippers. I had my share of banging chicks whose names I forgot the second they told me. They were tits and asses and pussies to stick my dick into. I didn’t care where they were from, what color their eyes where, what their favorite movie was. They were immediate gratification. They lined up after fights, tight jeans, high heels and low-cut shirts. They got wasted at parties and let you take them wherever you wanted—however you wanted. Against the wall with people everywhere. Blowing you in the parking lot. Bent over the bathroom sink. Didn’t matter to them. Didn’t matter to me either for the longest time.

Something changed though, in the past few months. With the option of going pro, it was like a door opened, and I could see something better in my future. Now I had Danny back and Alex. It was too good to be true. It was like walking across an iced over lake knowing you were going to break through and drown any second.

I studied Alex’s face, wondering what kind of future he saw and if it felt like risking fate to feel hopeful. “What about you?” I asked. “No woman in your life?”

He let out a sharp laugh and cringed when Danny jolted a bit. “Sorry. No. My career choice doesn’t exactly make me a catch. Women tend to shy from violence and illegal activity.”

“Please,” I said. “I’ve known a lot of women who were drawn to that.”

“Well, not the ones worth keeping,” he said, leading me to the conclusion that there was someone—or had been someone—who didn’t approve of him dealing drugs and whatever else he was into.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“Nobody that matters anymore.”

“You love her?”

Alex dropped his eyes and picked a dog hair off of his jeans, nodding. “Didn’t make any difference to her, though.”

“She wasn’t worth getting a mainstream job for?”

“Like what? Working the drive thru at McDonald’s? Stocking shelves at Food Lion?” He spread his arms wide. “How could I live like I’m accustomed to making minimum wage? I’m not exactly CEO material.”

“Yeah,” I said, knowing it was a stupid argument to make. No argument at all. There was only so many options for guys like us—beat down, shit on, and rough around the edges.

“Don’t feel bad for me,” he said. “I get all the ass I want.” He shot me a wicked grin, but I’d already seen through it.

“Did you ever try to find your mom?” Danny asked me. She’d insisted on coming downstairs for lunch the next day.

“Sip slow,” I told her, handing her a cup of chicken broth. “No. I never tried to find her.”

“Do you ever think about it?” she asked, taking a couple crackers out of the box I set on the table.

“No. She took off on me. I don’t want to force my way into someone’s life who doesn’t want me there.”

She stared into her mug. “What about you?” I asked. “Have you found your mom?”

Danny was taken away. Her mom wanted her, but she couldn’t take care of her. When we were with Striker, Danny made wishes on stars and dandelion fuzz and birthday candles for her mom to take her back home, but her mom never got her shit together.

“A couple years ago, Striker told me she overdosed.”

I put down the glass of water I’d poured her a bit too hard, with a thunk that echoed. “She’s dead?”

“That’s what he said.”

I was hesitant to say what I was thinking, but it was Danny, and she would have already thought it, too. “Was he lying?”

She shook her head. “I looked it up online at the library. Found her obituary. It didn’t mention a daughter.”

I sank into the chair beside her and took her hand. “You know what sucked the worst about my mom leaving me? She didn’t want to know me anymore. I mean, it was fucking shitty of her to abandon her kid, but after that, when I was alone at night in the dark I thought about how she didn’t know I liked to draw.”

“You lived to draw,” Danny said, squeezing my hand.

“Yeah, and she had no idea. She didn’t know that when she left the lady next door made me sleep on an old dog bed infested with fleas and sprayed me off with the hose instead of letting me shower.”

“How can people be so cruel? You were a little kid.”

“We were both little kids, Dan. People are fucking animals. They take care of their own and screw everyone else.”

“Not everybody,” she said.

I thought about Mike. “No, I guess not everybody. Most people.”

“I thought my mom wanted me,” she said. “I thought she’d try to get me back. When they took me away, she cried and promised she’d do everything she had to so we’d be together again.” She looked up at me with watery blue eyes. “She lied. She never tried to get me back.”

The pained expression on her face gripped my insides and twisted. I hated her mom. I hated Striker. I hated my own mom. How could they all do this to us? Then it hit me. I promised to go back for her, too, and I never did. Just like her mom.

I leaned forward, pressing her hand against my chest and my lips to her temple. “I want you, Danielle. I want you in my life. I always have. I was selfish and caught up in setting things right first, but I never forgot about you.”

She turned to me and stroked my cheek. Her eyes roamed my face, her sorrow of past memories gone. She watched her fingertips grazed my lips and lifted her eyes to mine, asking permission.

My heart drummed. I took her hand away and cupped her face, bringing her close enough to feel her breath on my cheek. I ran the tip of my nose along her jaw before tilting her head and securing my lips against hers.

It was like breathing in life. Like I’d only been keeping myself alive with air in my lungs, food and water, but
this
—Danny in my arms with our lips seeking and discovering—
this
was really being alive.

The tip of her tongue edged along my bottom lip and started a fire in my gut. I dropped my hands from her face and wrapped my arms around her, pulling her onto my lap. Our tongues sought the other out, shy and bold at the same time, learning the feel of each other. How could Danny—
my Danny
—still have parts of her for me to discover?

The thought sent my mind south of her navel. Danny wasn’t the girl she used to be. If I were honest, I’d admit to myself that I’d noticed it when we were teenagers. She’d gotten hips and breasts and a firm, round ass. By the time she was fourteen, it was hard to look at her like she was the same little girl anymore. I never thought of her as a sister. Maybe I would have if we’d lived in a house that was like an actual family instead of an abusive nightmare.

Sitting here with her ass pressed against my crotch and her lips and tongue slick and hot against mine, I was so fucking happy I’d never thought of her as my sister, or I’d be in for some serious guilt. There was no way I was turning back from being this close to her.

I wanted more.

I wanted closer.

I wanted inside her.

She parted her lips from mine, panting, and looked at me with hazy eyes. The last thing I wanted was to pressure or scare her. “Should we stop?” I asked, hearing the deep rasp of lust in my voice.

She gazed into my eyes for a moment before shaking her head and falling back into our kiss.

I stood, picking her up in my arms, and carried her upstairs. In the bedroom, I laid her down on the bed and straddled her, sitting on my knees with my hands on either side of her head. “I need you to tell me if you don’t want to do this,” I said. “Or if you want me to stop.”