Stepbrother Thief(72)
Gilleon just murdered two men.
Knowing that someone's capable of something and seeing it firsthand, those are two very different things. In the back of my mind, past all of the whirling thoughts and the shock, I realize that these are probably very bad men, maybe one of them is even the same guy who tried to kill me all those weeks ago. I get it. I really do, but …
“Are you okay, Regina?” Gill asks, moving over to the edge of the bed and kneeling down to eye level with me. A few feet away, warm corpses dot the beige carpeting. I swallow hard and nod, refusing to descend into any sort of freak-out. When Gilleon came back, invited me into this, he gave me a warning, told me that something like this might happen. And I realize that ten years in this sort of lifestyle has to have led to some serious situations, but Jesus H. Christ, I've never been around anything like this before. “Just wait here and I'll take care of it,” he says, voice calm, eyes like icebergs floating in a black sea, bright around the pupil but darker at the edges.
He stands up and switches the gun out for a cell, stepping over the bodies and tucking himself in the brightness of the bathroom, so I can't quite hear whatever it is that he's saying.
I look back up at the blood on the wall again. Nope. Definitely no bullet holes. I remember reading something about how .22s are often used to assassinate people because the round gets stuck inside their skull and bounces around their brain.
I lean back and close my eyes, sucking in a big breath that turns out to be a mistake. The air smells like gunpowder and copper, metallic and tangy. I almost throw up, but push the urge back, opening my eyes and reaching out for my half-full pint of beer on the nightstand. I throw it back, sucking down the amber liquid like it's water.
When I slam it back down on the table, I can see Gill standing near the door to our room looking back at me. Half of his face is covered in shadow, the other half limned in light. It's a perfect analogy, but a sad one. Here he stands, the love of my life, a man who I'm still fairly certain is my soul mate—if one can believe in such things—and he's on the precipice of darkness, ready to topple over the edge. I've always seen him fight back against that, against the roughness inside of him, against whatever happened between the time Cliff and his mom got divorced to when he came to live with us. I know it was bad because he'd tell me his tamest stories with a frown on his face and his fists clenched at his sides. But I've never heard the worst of it.
Maybe I don't want to know. If it's taken over him so thoroughly, then maybe it really is better that he left?
No.
No. That's just me trying to rationalize what I saw. If Gill's half dark, then he's also half light. What if I gave him a push in the right direction? Even scarier, what if I don't? What will happen then? Will that shadow take over his face and consume him from the inside out?
“Aveline will be here in a few minutes to pick you up,” he says, his tone even and undisturbed. I stare right back at him, at the slight stubble on his jaw, the firm set of his lips. The jovial, smiling Gill, the bit of teenager that I keep seeing pop up in him, is buried deep right now. So I just nod and sit still. If Aveline's coming, then I'll wait right here until she gets to the hotel. “She'll take you home.” Gill glances down at the two bodies on the floor. “This should send Karl a strong enough message that he shouldn't bother us there. Not tonight anyway, not with Max's guys on patrol.”
I just nod again because this isn't my world; Gill isn't a part of my world anymore, and I can never, ever forget that.
“Bonjour, Regina,” Solène says brightly, skipping into the kitchen where I'm sitting with a cup of coffee clutched between my palms. She pauses in a square of sunshine leaking in from the window above the sink, and twirls. Her pink and purple striped skirt spins in a dizzying circle around her, revealing a pair of white leggings stamped in red roses underneath. With a pair of black Doc Martens on her feet and a white sweater with a ghost on it, she's the walking epitome of fashion at its finest, far too trendy for me to pick up on, but that's the beauty of the industry, right? “I sewed the skirt myself,” she says, and then points to her top, “and Aveline found this fantôme and said she thought of me. I think it's positively perfect with these leggings.” She lifts up a leg and pats it fondly, dropping her boot to the floor with a thump.
The sound reminds me of Gilleon and a chill travels down my spine. I clutch the cup tighter in my hands and try not to think about him. My thoughts have become almost maniacal lately, a spinning, twisting mess where I waffle between two extremes: wanting him out of my life forever and … wanting him back in it.