Thicker Than Water (28 page)

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Authors: Brigid Kemmerer

Tags: #Romance, #Mystery

BOOK: Thicker Than Water
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Then I slam into someone. Hard. My ankle gives and I hit the ground, rolling with the force of our momentum.
I’m fighting before we stop rolling. Matt always gives the chilling warning that I can apologize later if I’m wrong, but I can’t apologize if I’m dead. One hand is still stupidly tangled in my purse strap, but the other goes for his eyes.
He’s quick and he’s strong and he pins me before I can do more damage than that. I’m face down in the tangled brambles, one hand trapped underneath me, in my purse, the other pinned by his hand.
This sucks.
He’s not even out of breath. “I don’t think we’ve officially met.”
I strain against him, but he’s too heavy, too strong. “You’re Thomas’s brother. You’re Jonathan. JB. Whatever.”
“Yes. And you’re going to be a problem.”
“My family knows I’m here,” I say. “You won’t get away with this.”
“I don’t need to get away with anything,” he says.
I wiggle my fingers in my bag. The zipper scrapes at my wrist, but I ignore the pain.
“What are you going for?” he says. “A phone? Pepper spray? Go ahead. Won’t matter.”
My hand goes still. Footsteps crunch through the underbrush nearby, and I hear Thomas’s fractured breathing. “You caught her,” he says. He sounds uncertain.
“I caught her,” says JB.
“Why are you doing this?” I cry. “I didn’t do anything to you.”
“I need him,” JB says. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“You need him for what?” I demand. I feel an urgency to keep him talking, because if we’re talking, I’m not dying.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” JB says. “I’m not going to harm you.”
“Yeah, this seems like it’s going to end really well for me.” I struggle against him. “Thomas, I don’t know what he’s doing to you, but you need to snap out of it.”
“He’s not doing anything to me,” Thomas says. “He told me what
you’re
doing.”
JB leans down and whispers, like we’re sharing a secret. “He can’t snap out of it. No matter what you say. I’m too strong, and he’s too weak.”
“Thomas,” I cry. “Thomas, listen to me.”
JB sighs. “He won’t listen to you. You were setting him up again. You were luring him out here so your brothers could shoot him. Guess how easy it was to make him believe
that.
”
Very easy, I can imagine. I don’t even need to think about how my brothers have treated him over the last few weeks. “I wasn’t! Thomas, listen to me! If my brothers were here, they’d be
shooting your brother right now.
”
“Go ahead,” whispers JB. “The more you say, the more he’ll think it’s a well-laid trap.”
“Fuck you.”
“Aw, the little church mouse has some spit and fire after all? It’s a shame I need him to kill you. I would have loved to try some of those desserts you kept bringing him.”
I freeze. Was he following us? The whole time? I wish I could reevaluate every moment I’ve spent with Thomas.
I shift my hand again. One more inch. That’s all I need.
I hear the smile in JB’s voice. “I hope you do have some pepper spray. Piss him off and it’ll be even easier to make him retaliate. Hell, we could probably even claim self-defense.
You
asked
him
to meet you.”
Crap. I need to think. “Why?” I say quickly. “Why do you need him to kill me?”
“Because it’ll destroy something inside him,” says JB. “Every death he causes will reinforce the belief that he can’t do anything to stop it.”
“Why? Why are you doing this to him?”
“Because,” he says, and for the first time I hear true pain leak into his voice. “I can’t keep letting my father do it to me.”
Then he rolls off of me, and I’m free. My hand locks on heavy plastic inside my purse.
Finally.
“Shoot her,” JB says. “She’s got something in her bag, Thomas. She’s going to hurt you. Shoot her.”
I roll over, and only have a heartbeat of time. Thomas is pointing a gun at me. His eyes are lucid, just like Alex’s from the dream. He’s cognizant of what he’s doing—he just believes he’s doing the right thing.
I don’t know how JB is doing this, but I know he’s pulling the strings somehow.
Thomas doesn’t want to shoot me. Uncertainty flares in his eyes, and the gun wavers.
“Shoot her, Tommy.” Beside me, JB’s voice is even. Steady.
Thomas cocks the hammer.
I yank my hand out of my bag, drawing my own gun.
I’m too late. Thomas pulls the trigger.
CHAPTER THIRTY
THOMAS
J
B goes down.
I kind of expected something more spectacular, for him to go flying back and land in the dirt. He’s wearing his vest, so I know I didn’t kill him. It must absorb some of the shock, but not all of it, because he kind of crumples.
His arms are wrapped around his midsection and he’s making little choking sounds. I can feel his pain like a pulsing, living thing in the air, raining down on me.
Good.
I almost couldn’t do it. Even now, it’s like looking at the past fifteen minutes from the other side of a waterfall. I can barely remember why we came here. The force of his will is fighting mine already, trying to regain control of this encounter.
I have to think of Mom. I know what he did now.
I know what I did.
Charlotte is gasping, one leg cocked, her gun still pointed at me.
I put my hands up, real quick. “Don’t shoot. Please, Charlotte. Don’t shoot me.”
Her gun is steady, and she sidesteps away from JB with a limp. “Put your gun down.”
“I won’t hurt you. I swear I won’t hurt you. I had to make him believe I was still working with him. I need to make you understand. What you said—about someone controlling me—I put it together—”
“I told you to put the gun down!”
“I will. Okay? I will.” I very slowly lower my hand with the weapon, but I don’t want to give it up completely. I don’t know how quickly my brother will recover. Once he can start talking, we might be screwed. I pull out my waistband and start to slide the gun there.
“Don’t put it down your pants!” she yells at me. “Are you stupid?”
“Yes,” gasps JB. “He’s stupid. Shoot him, Charlotte. He just tried to kill you.” Another gasping breath. “You’re lucky I came back early. I caught him trying to strangle you.”
“Shut up,” I tell him.
“Think of how violated you felt,” JB says to her. “When he broke into your room. In front of those little girls.”
“Stop it.” I look at Charlotte. “I never meant to hurt you. You know I never meant to hurt you.”
Charlotte’s gun hand is shaking.
JB takes a moment to catch his breath. “Didn’t you think, just for a moment, that he might have finished with you and moved on to them?”
“Shut up!” I yell at him. I point the gun at him. “Just shut up!”
“You won’t shoot me,” he says. He’s got his hands underneath him now, but he winces when he looks at me. “You’re my little brother. I’m all you have left.”
The strength in his words is almost overpowering. I almost lay down the gun. It took every ounce of strength in me to shoot him the first time. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do it again.
I banish the self-doubt from my mind. If he suspects it, he’s going to exploit it.
Hell, he’s probably exploiting it now.
“Roger that,” says JB.
“Fuck you.”
“What is this?” whispers Charlotte. “How is he doing this?”
“Your emotions,” I say. “He can manipulate your emotions.” I pause. “He forced me to attack you.”
“You liked it,” says JB. “You
loved
it.”
I want to kick him in the face. “Shut the fuck up.”
“She’s not even the first one, Tommy.”
I freeze. The horror of that implication is almost enough to make me lose my focus.
He laughs, but it’s a bit choking. “Ah, kid, you make it too easy.” He looks between me and Charlotte, then gingerly gets to his feet. “Both of you do, really. Neither of you wants to kill me. You might as well put the guns down.”
A siren splits the air somewhere close. A few more kick up alongside it. Cops. For the first time, relief swarms through me.
JB raises his eyebrows. “You think the cops will help you? The kid who strangled his mother, then tried to rape and murder his girlfriend? The kid who’s standing here with a gun right this second?” He pauses. “You don’t think they’ll believe me when I say I wrestled you off her and got shot while she was trying to shoot
you
?”
“They’ll never believe that,” says Charlotte.
“They will,” I say resignedly. “They’ll believe every word. I’ve seen him in action.”
“I’ll tell them the truth,” she says.
JB laughs at her. The sirens grow closer. “What, that I mentally compelled Thomas to hurt you? Okay, let me know how that goes over. Maybe you’ll be able to convince them I got the Chinese carry-out guy to attack you, too.”
“That was you, too?” I demand.
“I wanted to see how you’d handle it.”
My hand shakes on the gun. I want to shoot him so badly, but I can’t pull the trigger. I’m almost breathless with wanting to harm him.
His eyes flick to me. “Fight it all you want, kid. I’ve been fighting it all my life, and he still gets me to do what he wants. We’re family.”
Our father. I wish I’d paid more attention in the car. I remember JB’s tension, his anger. I just never realized how deeply it ran. “You’ve never been my family.”
“Oh no?” For the first time, his expression shows true fury. It bleeds into the air around us. “You don’t think there’s a small part of you that
likes
this? I know you feel it, Tommy. I know you do.”
“You don’t know anything.” His power is pulling triggers in my mind, though. I think of the man in the alley, the addictive feel of his fear.
Sirens squawk closer, and I know our time is limited.
“I do know, Tommy.” JB pauses, and I can feel the truth in his words. “I just can’t do it anymore. Don’t you understand that? He tried to make me kill her. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill her.”
“But you could make me do it,” I bite out.
“It was so easy the first time. I knew I finally had a way out.”
“You won’t get away with this,” Charlotte says. “I’ll tell them everything. I’ll make them believe me.”
“You’re sweet.” JB takes a step closer to her, and she sucks in a breath and steps back, gun still level at his chest. “Put it away,” he says. “You’re not a killer.”
“I will shoot you,” she says. “Back off.”
“No you won’t.” He steps closer. “You’re sweet, and kind, and full of all the good things that people like Tommy and I are missing. You’re good, Charlotte.”
She begins to lower the gun.
“Don’t do it,” I say.
JB takes another step, and his voice goes soft. He’s right in front of her, and she’s not making a move to either defend herself or flee. “You wouldn’t hurt a fly. I can feel it.”
She lowers the gun further.
Then, she lifts her gun hand and swings hard. She clocks him right in the side of the face. I hear the crack of metal against bone.
He goes down. The gunshot wasn’t spectacular, but
this
is.
“Feel that,” she says.
“Holy shit!” I say.
She swings her gun around to point it at me, but her breathing is rapid and panicked now. “Are you on my side or not, Thomas?”
“On your side,” I say. My brother is down in the grass, so I set my weapon on the ground. “Always on your side.”
With that, she starts crying, and she throws herself into my arms.
And that’s exactly how the cops find us.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHARLOTTE
Three weeks later
I
’m sitting on the front porch with Nicole. She’s sipping iced tea. We’re speaking very quietly because I don’t want my mother to hear us.
I’ve told Nicole everything. The real truth, not the truth Thomas and I manufactured for the cops.
“So,” she whispers. “That JB guy is locked up?”
“For now. I actually thought he was going to get the charges dropped, but Stan found his letters, and some of them were pretty creepy. The DA says that points to motive for wanting to kill his mother.”
“And he was the guy who tried to strangle you?”
I push off against the porch swing. I had worried it would be difficult to convince the police of that one, but we told them that Thomas had
followed
JB to my house, and my skin got under his fingernails when he was trying to wrestle his brother off me. He never said anything about it because his brother was trying to blackmail him for his mother’s murder.
Thomas had worried JB would be able to convince the authorities of his innocence, but listening to Thomas explain things, I almost believed him myself.
“More or less,” I say.
“What about you and Tom?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t
know
?” she squeals. “How can you not
know
?”
I watch the ice swirl in my glass. “It’s complicated.” I hesitate. “We need some time. He needs to figure out who he is.”
“Is that your idea or his?”
I frown. “His.” And it was. When the dust settled and I tried to talk to him, he said he needed time. I asked if that really meant we were over, and he smiled and brushed a kiss against my cheek and said, “No way. I can never go back to McDonald’s food
now.
”
But I haven’t heard from him since then.
“So what are you going to do now?” Nicole says.
“I’m going to spend time with my family. Thomas says that JB hated cops because it’s hard to break through their natural suspicion. I’m not a police officer, but I know how they think. It’s in my blood. I wonder if my own suspicion helped keep me safe, too.”
“You’re going to spend time with family?” she squeaks. “When the hottest guy to set foot in this town is still mooning over you somewhere?”
“Yep,” I say. “I’m right here. He knows where to find me.”

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