Sweeter Than Sin (2 page)

She wished she could banish that voice.

Wished she could just silence it, forever.

But that wasn’t going to happen, and she knew it.

While memories chased her, she ran, her feet pounding the pavement, her breathing sawing in and out of her lungs.

She consoled herself with the knowledge that the monster responsible for
all
of this was dead and the evil he’d spawned had also died. It wasn’t good enough and it didn’t undo what he’d done.

It wasn’t much, but it was all she had.

The memories still haunted her and her impotence, her fear, chased her, choked her.

So she ran harder.

That was part of her routine, too.

Life was just routine, and it had been for a good long time.

Her routine crashed to a halt that hot, muggy day.

It was at precisely 7:42. Eighteen minutes before she was supposed to be downstairs, when she took over the store.

Her life went straight to hell … all because of a Google alert.

Clifty Drive.

The words jumped out at her, quick as a snake.

She knew that name. She’d tailored this search down to catch only the things she needed.

And this was something needed.

It was an announcement in the paper. A small paper, from a town in southern Indiana. A place so small, most people had never heard of it.

She had, though.

The announcement was short, simple and to the point.

All about a house, one that had sat empty for years.

And now it wasn’t.

Somebody had bought the damn thing.

Leaning back in her chair, she rubbed her hands over her face and tried not to panic.

Somebody had bought the old Frampton place.

That didn’t have to mean anything … did it?

CHAPTER TWO

As it turned out, it meant everything.

She didn’t realize it until later.

Several weeks later.

Part of her had already been prepared. She had money stashed. No bank accounts. She hadn’t had one of those in decades. But she did have money, some saved, and then there were people who owed her. Those who could pay she tried to collect.

The people in her life she cared about, she made sure she visited them, one more time.

She’d learned the value of that. The hard way. You never knew just when might be the last time you got to see somebody you cared for. The final memories should be good ones.

She didn’t let herself admit she was saying good-bye.

Not at the time.

But deep inside, she knew what she doing.

Then the day came when she read about the discovery that rocked the little town.

A body, discovered in a cellar, in that small town on the Ohio River.

In a city like Chicago, the discovery of a corpse wouldn’t even make most of them blink or pause for more than a second. Some might murmur about what a waste, might wonder who the victim was, but it wouldn’t slow life down, not a bit.

It would bring the little town of Madison to a halt.

She haunted the website for the town newspaper, day in and day out. Had a few messed-up moments when she was skimming the archives and discovered an article about a body found in a submerged car that had been pulled out of the river.

Who—

But then she made herself stop.

Don’t,
she cautioned herself. The body had been in the river for years, but she wouldn’t let herself think negative things.
You can’t think it. If you think it, you might make it happen.

Once, she hadn’t believed in such a thing. Paranoia had been something she would not let herself dwell on. She’d always believed that if she just pushed hard enough and did the right thing it would make a difference.

She’d been wrong.

Bad shit happened and nothing she did or said could stop it, and sometimes that bad shit just kept right on rolling.

And this was that bad shit, in force. It was like dominos. One thing after another happened.

The body in the river, the one in the cellar, the fire … and then the arrests.

She’d read about
those
with a mix of horror, despair and rage, her hands shaking, her vision blurring to red, while part of her wanted to rage and shove the computer to the floor.

No. No. No
. This wasn’t happening—

Except it was.

That was when she understood.

She couldn’t hide anymore.

It didn’t
matter
if she stopped thinking about the bad shit, because the bad shit had never stopped and she’d been up here, blissfully unaware, while monsters continued to exist.

You’d promised me,
she thought, half-desperate as she read through the article, reading the disbelief in the reporter’s words even as he tried to be objective:

Years of rape and abuse …

Going back for generations …

She dropped her head into her hands as darkness crowded in on her.

She barely remembered anything from that night so many years ago. All of her memories came from after, nearly two days later while she was recovering, her head aching from a concussion that had left her with headaches that haunted her for months. There was also shock, from her injuries, from what she’d seen, what they’d had to do.

Memories of blood, pain and screaming had taunted her.

And when she came out of the darkness, all she’d heard was a voice.

I know you’re still healing up, but it’s not safe here. You have to go.

That low, steady voice, so full of certainty and so steady, as she tried to argue.
Go?

No, what she needed to do was
find
him. Had to help.

It’s too late to help now. You can’t. And if you stay, you’ll be in trouble. You didn’t do anything wrong … you just tried to help. But nobody will believe that—

Setting her jaw, she pushed all of that aside and continued to read, hoping that somehow the words on the screen would change.

But they didn’t.

The depravity appears to go back some fifty years, spanning across generations. The Cronus Club, as reports have called it, allegedly consists of several well-known families, all men, and their sons are inducted into the club through acts of sodomy and sexual molestation that start in their early teens and last for three years—

That was all she read before the need to puke hit her.

Hard and fast.

She bolted for the bathroom and emptied her belly.

Heart racing, head pounding, the violent spasms racked her body for endless minutes, but she didn’t mind—she almost welcomed it.

The Cronus Club.

Son of a bitch.

It hadn’t stopped.

Everything she’d left, everything she’d walked away from—her father, her friends, her
home
—it had all been because she thought they’d managed to
stop
it. That one
good
thing had come out of that night.

And it had been
worth
it. Even the nightmares, vague bits of memory that she would never fully recover, all those faded bits and pieces of a night she’d never understood. Even the misery of the next few years, when she’d lost herself,
that
had been worth it.

It had all been a trade-off, a lousy one, but in the end a trade-off she could live with because it had stopped.

Only …

She closed her eyes.

“We didn’t stop anything,” she whispered, her voice a stark echo in the small bathroom.

She didn’t get it. The men who’d abused David were
dead
. She knew that.

A string of accidents had befallen them in the years since she left Madison. She’d tracked their deaths, watching the newspapers over the ass-backwards Internet, tracking things down in a way that would have done Lois Lane proud.

They were
dead
.

So how had this started again?

“Look at the facts,” she told herself, her voice hoarse. Her mind worked furiously, though, processing the information she had to work with.

Apparently David hadn’t known all of the men involved. Her head pulsed, pounded with that information.
Fuck,
how many of them could there be? It wasn’t like Madison was that big. There couldn’t be
that
many people who’d been involved in this, could there?

In the end, the only thing that mattered was that they hadn’t gotten everybody. The one thing that had kept her sane all this time, and it was a lie.

Sweat broke out over her forehead as she hunched over the sink, washing her hands, rinsing out her mouth.

It took every last bit of will she had to force herself to go back to the desk and sit. It took even more strength than she thought she had to focus on the monitor and make herself read. Almost desperate for something to cling to, she fished out the key she wore around her neck and gripped it, the rough edges biting into her palm as she made it through once, then a second time, then a third, reading between the lines all the things that hadn’t been said.

Then she leaned back and rubbed her hands down her face, swallowing the bile rising up her throat.

Hiding was no longer an option.

Lana Rossi was going back home.

Damn it to hell and back.

*   *   *

“Damn. You mean I get to just
stay
here?” The guy staring at her looked like he’d been given the keys to the kingdom.

She smiled at him from the mirror as she wrapped a band around the end of her ponytail. Already a few strays of her hair had worked free, wispy brown strands coming loose to frame her face. She needed to decide what to do about her hair, she thought. She’d started dying it brown not long after she’d left Madison—the vivid red curls were just too noticeable. Did she stop coloring it now? Keep it up? She didn’t know.

What was she going to do with her clothes?

Too many decisions to make, not enough time.

And the man across from her just continued to watch her with confusion in his eyes. She forced herself to smile, remembering how she’d felt when Deatrick had shown her this place.

“Yeah, you get to stay here, Jock … but not
just,
” she said quietly. “I talked to Deatrick down at the store downstairs. You have a job waiting. It won’t pay you a lot, but it will keep you in food and the rent is part of your wages.”

Jock blinked and then shook his head, backing away. “No … no, ma’am. Ain’t no place going to hire me. I’m a fucking junkie and—”

She turned around and caught his arm before he could vacate the premises. “So was I.”

Shoving up the sleeves to her shirt, she bared her forearms and showed him the needlemarks on her arms. Fourteen years ago, she’d been one of the ones living not too differently from Jock. Deatrick had been her knight in shining armor, dragging her out of the streets when she’d tried to pick his pockets. The asshole hadn’t called the cops when he’d caught her, either.

He’d dragged her kicking and screaming back here. Fed her. Told her the next meal wouldn’t be free, but she could have a meal any time she wanted …
if
she’d work for it.

A week later, she’d come back. He’d made her scrub the damn toilets. Then he’d fed her chicken and dumplings.

Four days later, he had her mopping up the stockroom in the little convenience store he ran with his parents. He’d fed her beef stew that night.

The pattern kept up for over a month and then one night, instead of feeding her, he’d brought her up here and shown her this little apartment. It had been his, but she didn’t know it at the time.
You need a job,
he’d told her.
I need somebody to help out in the store when my folks retire. You can have the job if you’ll get clean. You have a month and I’ve got friends who’ll help you.
Then he’d told her if she used, even once, after that month, he’d kick her ass out and never feed her again. If she ever stole from him, he’d turn her in.

He didn’t know it—or maybe he did—but she’d been chasing her death almost ever since she ran away from Madison.

Guilt, the memories she couldn’t uncover, the nightmares, it all plagued her and one night, when the dreams got to be too much, she’d given in and accepted a pill from a guy she’d been flopping with. She’d woken up with him inside her, and instead of freaking out and pushing him away she’d clung to him because she hadn’t been alone and the pills made her not care about anything else.

It didn’t get any better from there, and the guilt, the shame, all of it, piled up and she couldn’t outrun that any better than the memories.

She thought of Noah, the boy she’d left behind, the boy who’d loved and valued her, and how she’d never be able to look at him after what she’d done … and it only made it worse.

She’d been spiraling down, so hard and fast, and the spiral lasted for years.

It was a miracle she hadn’t ended up dead or sick.

And if her spiral hadn’t crashed her into Deatrick, she probably would have ended up dead, sick … or worse.

He’d probably saved her life.

He’d definitely saved her soul, and for that she could never repay him. He’d given her a lifeline when he offered her that job. Now it was time to pass that lifeline on to somebody else.

Under the scruff and the street dirt and the punches life had thrown at him, Jock was a good guy. He’d take this chance and make something of it. She knew he would.

Right now, he was staring at the scars on her arms with something like shock, though. Then it moved to sympathy as he shifted his gaze to her face.

“You’re sick, aren’t you? That’s why you’re leaving.”

“No.” Man, if
that
was the burden she carried, she’d almost be ready to shoulder it. At least then it would only be her life she’d screwed up. She’d almost be up for that. Instead she had this one.
How many lives
— She pushed the thought aside, stared at Jock.
Brood later.
This had to come first. She didn’t leave things undone. Not anymore. “I’m not sick. Got lucky on that front. Only used the needle a few times; the tracks got infected and I had a bad trip. Decided pills were better.”