Two Roads(6)

“It was a mercy killing, Juliette,” Elliot adds softly, his voice thick with sleep. “Not a murder.”

I soften at Elliot’s words. Knowing how much he hates Jase, knowing how hard it must be to defend the man who ruined our relationship just because he existed and my heart couldn’t forget him. I feel like a fucking idiot.

“Is that true?” I ask Jase softly, shifting my attention to him.

He nods.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask Jase, slower this time.

He laughs mirthlessly. He raises his hands at me like he’s going to shake me by the shoulders, but clenches them instead as he pivots and paces.

“I TRIED to tell you,” he yells. “If you’d shut up for five fucking minutes, I’m TRYING to tell you what happened!”

Dazed, and on the verge of tears, I sit on the end of the bed where Luis and I spoke a few hours ago. When Luis shot you up, you mean, my conscience screams inside my head. I shiver, two fingers pinching the delicate skin in the crook my elbow that’s now marked and bruised from the needle he gave me. I take a deep, ragged breath, steeling myself for what comes next.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m listening.”

He turns again, pressing one hand against the wall where I was just leaning. He licks his lips, his eyes are red and glossy. He looks terrible, and yet I know I look so much worse. He can’t even look at me, addressing the wall instead.

“John and Mariana were taken by the Sangue Cartel,” he begins, his words slow and faltering. “The Cartel and The Gypsy Brothers. It was a complete clusterfuck. Dornan found out what they’d done, and after he took you, after…” he draws in an angry breath, every visible muscle in his body tight to the point I think he’ll snap, “after they killed you, they took me. I saw them. He…shot your dad, Julz. He shot him…Jesus.” He scrubs his eyes angrily, and Elliot shifts uncomfortably next to me on bare feet, his gun held down at his side.

“Tell me,” I press him.

He clears his throat. “Dornan shot John, and he put him in that room. That room where you were.”

Jesus. The room I spent three months of my life in—living a nightmare—was the room where my father died?

“He was bleeding, real bad. It was everywhere. And then Dornan threw me in that room,” he shudders. “And threw a gun in behind me.”

I can feel my palms turn slick with sweat as I listen. I want this to stop, yet I need to know what happened.

“Your dad, he was dying, Julz. Where Dornan shot him? He said it was for betraying him. For screwing Dornan’s girlfriend behind his back. He shot him there so he’d never screw anyone ever again.”

I want to be sick. I imagine Dornan pressing his gun into my father’s lap, the fear he must have felt. The deafening blast, the agonizing pain. My poor father. My poor fucking father.

“Your dad was so brave, Julz,” he says, choking up. “The dude had just been shot in the dick, and instead of freaking out, he was trying to make me feel better. Trying to help me out.”

“What happened?” I breathe. “I need to know it. All of it.”

He steadies himself, looking at me for the first time since he started his macabre confessional.

“He’d lost a lot of blood,” Jase says softly. “And he was in a lot of pain. People think when you’re shot the pain gets better when you go into shock, but not that kind of pain. It’s with you until you pass out, or until you die.”

I nod, swallowing thickly; I know that kind of pain too well. Its remnants are written along my disfigured flesh. A pain that doesn’t allow you to pass out.

A pain that seems to last forever.



“He told me a phone number. A name. I memorized them. I recited them to myself for three fucking years. Amanda Hoyne. Nine-seven-five-three-three-zero-five.”

“The DEA contact?” I guess.

He nods. “Even in his final hours, your dad was more worried about me than himself.”

Of course he would have been. He died trying to get us out of the hell that was the Gypsy Brothers. He did everything for me, for Mariana, for Jase. For us all.

It can’t all be for nothing, surely. That would be too cruel.

“He was in so much pain,” Jase says, his words almost dream-like. They roll over me, like water, like fire.

“Dornan had said to me, only one of us would be coming out of that room alive. And that it was up to me to prove myself. To show I could be…a Gypsy Brother.” His eyes flash with emotion - hatred for Dornan?

I cry, then. “He made you prove yourself because you didn’t rape me,” I say emptily.