Brutal Precious (Lovely Vicious #3) (20 page)

The whole time, Jack is grinning madly, his mouth and face blood-spattered.

The fifth man, the one who’d pinned Sophia to the tree, is frantically trying to pull his pants on. Jack slams the bat into his side, and the man staggers into the leaves, reaching for the gun. But Jack swings again, and Sophia screams. Something cracks, and it isn’t the bat, and the man holds his hand up, and against the night vision it’s a cluster of broken bones and mangled meat and dangling skin. The man looks at it, stunned, and then the pain catches up to him, and he starts crying and crawling away and begging.

“Please, man, we didn’t mean – we weren’t gonna –”

The man gets up, and starts running, and Jack throws back his head and laughs, and then chases after him. They disappear into the gloom, the night vision losing sight of them, but not of the sobbing Sophia, who staggers to her feet and tries to pull her dress back on. She’s shaking too badly. She tries to walk away, but trips on something, and her fall isn’t far but she rolls down the hill, hitting trees with vicious momentum until she rolls to a stop. There’s a stunned silence, minutes ticking by as Sophia squirms and there’s a squelching noise and then she goes still, her white-blonde hair splaying in the pine needles.

“Holy fuck,” Avery whispers. “Holy –”

From the darkness, Jack returns and a shiver runs through me, his grin gone and an even more terrifying expression in its place – one I’ve come to know very well.

The mask.

The ice mask is wearing him.

But it lasts for only a second, because when he sees Sophia he makes a choked noise and runs to her, dropping the bloodstained bat and cradling her in his arms.

“Soph,” He whispers. “Sophie, Sophie please –”

He holds his hand out, sticky and wet with blood. Sophia doesn’t move. He pats the pine needles around Sophia’s body and chokes again, the sound of a wild animal shot through. Blood. A pool of blood around her pelvis, her floral dress stained with it.

There’s a noise, like Avery shifting and her shoe breaking a twig. Jack’s head snaps up, eyes glowing an unholy white with the night vision, and he grabs the bat, face twisting with rage. Avery swears and takes off running, and as Jack advances, Wren’s paralysis breaks and he drops the camera, the lens barely catching his shoes as they flash by. Jack’s bigger shoes pass just a split-second after.

“I’ll kill you!” His screams echo. “I’ll fucking kill you!”
  

He keeps screaming, the sound fading and coming back, like he’s walking in circles. The metallic noise of a bat hitting splintering wood resounds, and his screams are deep and strong and furious and riddled with pain, and over them, Nameless finally speaks.

“He keeps screaming for a while. And then the tape cuts out.”

The tablet screen goes blue, then goes dark. My hands want to shake, but I compose them. Nameless is watching me for a reaction.

“So?” I say. “What was I supposed to learn from this?”

Nameless quirks a brow. “You weren’t terrified? He beat four men into pulp and killed the last one – ”

“The last one ran off the cliff because it was dark,” I say smoothly. “Jack didn’t push him. He killed himself.”

“He wouldn’t have been running if Jack wasn’t chasing him,” Nameless counters. “Don’t defend him. He killed a man and he’s going to jail for it once we turn this tape in to the feds.”

“He didn’t, and there’s no body anyway,” I retort. “You can’t prove anything.”

“Belina Hernandez. You know her, don’t you? You went to visit her.”

“How do you know –”

“Her pathetic computer was very easy to access. She keeps a journal on it. Belina Hernandez is the wife of the man who ran off the cliff; James Hernandez. Your bloodthirsty nemesis has been paying her child support under the guise of federal funds because he’s so guilt-ridden. How do you think it’ll look when the jury sees that? He’s practically convinced he killed James, and that’ll convince the jury.”

“He was protecting Sophia!” I snarl.

“Protecting is one thing. Mindless violence is another. This tape shows the difference very clearly.”

I clutch the tablet and weigh the pros and cons of throwing it into an incinerator, but Nameless laughs.

“I know what you’re thinking. Don’t try it. I have many copies on different harddrives. You’d just be ruining a perfectly good tablet.”

Nameless stands, and I shrink into myself, fully aware again of how locked in this room we are. I grip the nail file, but he just laughs louder.

“I wanted to show you just who you think you’re in love with. He’s not me, that’s for sure. But he’s worse than me. He’s a killer. He’ll hurt you more than I ever did.”

He ducks just in time as I throw the tablet at his head, my chest heaving. It clunks against the wall, leaving an indent in the pink paint.

“Fuck you,” I spit. “No one will ever hurt me more than you did.”

The door behind me suddenly unlocks, and a wild-eyed, afro guy walks in.

“Oh, u-uh, shit. Sorry, wrong room.”

I lunge for the door, but Nameless calls me back.

“It’s been nice talking with you, piggy. I know you don’t like it, but you’ll have to do a lot more of it.”

“Why?” I hiss. He smiles.

“I saw you on the camera feeds, defacing Summers’ office. Even made a few copies of the video for myself. What will the dean think of that, I wonder?”

I run, as far as I can from the room, from the house. When Nameless’ voice finally fades in my head, I collapse on the lawn and throw up on the grass.

4 Years

0 Weeks

0 Days

Seeing and talking to Nameless is one thing.

Seeing and talking to him the day before the anniversary of his evildoings is too coincidental. He had to have planned that. Or not. Maybe I’m the only one who remembers the exact date everything went to shit. He could probably care less.

In the last few years of my short yet brilliant and extremely fucked up life, I’d take the day off from school, play hooky. I’d walk down to the beach with McDonald’s and count crabs and collect little jewel-colored rocks. I tried to go easy on myself, since on that day no one had gone easy on me. Last year I hadn’t done anything at all, because I was so wrapped up in the war with Jack. It was the only year I’d completely forgotten about it.

Looking back, I should’ve realized the only boy in the world who managed to distract me from my pain was special. Special and worth keeping around. Maybe I knew that subconsciously, because I tried to keep him around in my own way, in my
‘haha-I-planted-drugs-in-your-locker-and-pried-into-your-past’
way, which admittedly probably wasn’t the
best
way. But I was so out of practice asking people to be my friend, asking them to stay, it was all I could do. Be annoying. Be loud, and people will remember you and maybe hopefully stay.

Maybe hopefully.

‘You try to. You try to stop all these injustices, and save people from them. But you never try to save yourself.’

I shake Kieran’s voice out of my head, and make a quick damage assessment. For obviously working with Nameless by luring me into that room, Heather is now on my shit list permanently, with at least ten red exclamation marks. I can’t trust her, but I don’t think I ever really did to begin with. Nameless is gonna give the feds back the video, and Jack will be in a whole new world of shit. Even better – he has the camera footage of me defacing Summers’ office. I’d considered cameras, but I figured I’d be inside the office, away from the cameras, while I did the defacing. My unquenchable zeal for justice blinded me and I went completely overboard and into the sea but that is honestly nothing new, the only new thing is this time, I could get kicked out of college for it.

College! Collagen! Collage! This isn’t high school. This is the Real World™, waiting for me to slip so it can open its mouth and swallow me whole. College is the end-all-be-all, the big cool thing you’re supposed to do so you can get a degree and put it on your wall or use it as kindling when your student loans eat the money for your heating bill, I guess, and sometimes it helps you get a job but all the upperclassmen at my old high school went to college and got a degree and then worked at American Eagle or Starbucks anyway, so I’m fairly certain it would be more useful as toilet paper, or, if you’re feeling particularly vindictive about your college experience, a maxi pad. I worked hard to be here, didn’t I? I think I did. I can’t exactly remember, it’s a blur of school assignments and your mom jokes and bad fish sticks. If I get kicked out of college I’ll bring shame to my entire family and dad will be disappointed and mom will be happy, probably, and I’ll be sinking my future into the ground with a jackhammer and condemning myself to a life of flipping burgers and blood will probably start raining from the sky or something. Everyone just goes to college. That’s something middle America does, and I’m definitely privileged middle America.

If everyone goes here, why do I feel like I’m a seal in a fishpond?

Why do I need to go to college again? To figure out what I want to do? But I already know what I wanted to do, and that was get out of this state. Get away. Go to Europe. But I couldn’t leave Mom, so I compromised.

I put my feet up on my desk and frown.

Getting kicked out of college is nothing compared to getting arrested for murder.

The tape lingers in my mind, Wren’s young face and Sophia’s healthy face and Jack’s furious, heartbroken one. I wandered right into all that without even considering their feelings. I forced my way down the shittiest, darkest rabbit hole, their rabbit hole, and they somehow tolerated me for it.

If I close my eyes too long, I hear Jack’s screaming again.
 

If I close my eyes for too long, Nameless’ laughter mixes with it and makes thinking impossible.

My arm throbs, and I remember I have to get the bandage changed, so I head to the nurse’s.

Jemma is a pretty woman with brown hair and big dark eyes like a deer. She sits me down the second I walk in and peels the bandage on my arm back carefully. The smell is rotting flesh and stale cotton balls. She doesn’t even wrinkle her nose.

“Well, it’s looking good. You’re taking those antibiotics I gave you, right?”

“I made a candy necklace out of them and I’ve been chewing at it in class.”

She fixes me with a stern gaze, and I sigh.

“Two a day with meals.”

Jemma smiles. “Good. You can’t imagine how dirty a human mouth is and what it can do to a wound.”

I fidget as she dresses my wound, my eyes catching on a fish bowl full of condoms she has on the counter. She unfortunately catches me staring.

“Are you sexually active?” Jemma asks.

“Nay, madame.”

“Do you plan on being sexually active?”

“In the entirety of my future as a living human being I would certainly hope so. But, you know. Things could change. Meteors could strike. The sun could go cold and peanut butter could stop being gross and I could get smart.”
  

Jemma stares at me forever. Fiveever. Her brown eyes are huge and knowing and for a second I could swear she knows me, knows what I’m all about in a creepy crystal ball way. And then her eyes soften, and I know she knows. She knows what happened, without me saying much at all.

And it makes me angry – angry that I’m so obvious. Angry that I’m too weak to hide it anymore. The bruises and the booze and the flurry of make outs have only made me weaker, and I didn’t want that shit. I wanted to be stronger. Better. More experienced.

“I’ve been having some problems,” I say carefully. Jemma takes out a clipboard slowly, so closely, like she knows she won’t be able to take notes on this at all.

“Where does it hurt?” She asks.

There’s a moment, a moment where I could get up and walk out and leave her to less complicated problems, problems that pills and casts and shots can fix.

“I tried shots for my problems, too,” I say finally. “Vodka shots. But it didn’t work because that’s not how it works. You can’t just shoot things over and over and expect them to get better.”

Jenna’s silent, writing fluidly.

“Bad things happen, and you tell yourself that’s life, because you’ve lived a while and you know bad things happen ,and they’ll keep happening, but you try to stay alive even after they do because you know it isn’t all bad, so you keep moving, keep going, try to put space between you and the bad things so you forget about them but they always catch up and then they sit on your back and make you trip while you try to move forward and it sucks,” I knead my forehead with my knuckles. “It just fucking sucks.”

A couple sits out the window below us, holding hands on the bench and I want to be them and kill them at the same time.

“And sometimes you get tripped so much and so hard you just feel like staying down, you know? Like, maybe you deserve to stay down, maybe it’s meant to be. Maybe it’s just easier to stay down, and you don’t have the energy to haul your ass off the ground again at all.”