Damage (Havoc #2) (10 page)

“You got it.”  Jesse’s casual tone didn’t match the snarl on his lip as Abram released him.  He took a crumpled paper from his pocket and held it up.  “I’ll just walk right the fuck away with Stef’s location and you sorry assholes can figure this out on your own.  Guess we’ll just race to him from here.”

I watched Abram’s stiff, broad shoulders expand and contract with his every breath.  “I’d rather you kill him alone than deal with your bullshit again, so go ahead.”

“Kill him? He’s my brother, who knows what I’ll do.  I might just take his dumb ass with me on the run this time.  You’re just about brain dead around Isla so I can pretty much count on staying alive, right?” His cheek bruising before my eyes, Jesse gave me a wink.  My face grew hot. I couldn’t think of a thing to say and it didn’t matter because he was back to laughing by the time Abram had him again by two furious handfuls of his black T-shirt.  He laughed harder when Nate snatched the crumpled paper from his hands, opening it up to find nothing.  “I put the info safe in my phone, you idiot.  But it’s always fun when you fall for my bullshit,” he said just as an innocent voice broke through the chaos.

“Abram? We need you for your speech!”

I turned.  Sylvie. 
Shit. 
My feet had me flying to her but she spotted Jesse before I could do a thing and suddenly, there was a gasp and then screeching.  My stomach went cold.  The sounds she made were barely human as she instantly thrashed in my arms till Nate took over, hastily whispering a million words of comfort to his aunt but in vain.  Sylvie, chic and polished just a moment before, was suddenly a ghost from my childhood nightmares, paper-white and wailing with her mouth wide open, her arms outstretched.  Rhode held onto me as I watched, frozen, helpless, Sylvie’s flowing chiffon sleeves rippling in slow motion before my eyes.  The night for Gavin had spiraled into mayhem.  The sound around me drowned out to nothing as I watched Abram one-hand a chokehold on Jesse, the only person who could ever look blasé while being strangled half to death.  It was surreal.  It felt like a dream.

I didn’t wake up till I saw the switch flip in Jesse’s green eyes, as if he’d suddenly decided to care.  One blink and I missed him pinning Abram on his back, his fingers digging a good inch into his throat.  I couldn’t hear my own screams or the words Jesse snarled at Abram’s face – all I could feel was my knees hit the ground, Rhode holding me back as I tried to lunge for them.  It was no dream.  It was a nightmare and it felt like it wasn’t going to end.

But of all people, Nate, red-faced and bleeding, eventually muscled the situation under control.

He was jostling Abram into the arms of his own security before rushing to me and jabbing his finger toward the elevator.  His hand crushing my wrist, I turned to see the doors closing on Jesse.  “
Don’t
let him go anywhere,” Nate spat at me, eyes wild.  “I don’t care what it is you do to get him to listen, just do it because if that piece of shit disappears with Stefan, you can kiss the Abram you know goodbye, I promise you. You have no idea where the fuck his head was at when this first went down and you won’t like crazy Abram one fucking bit, so get your feet moving and
go
.”

chapter thirteen

Warm rain fell from the sky as I half-ran, half-teetered in my stilettos, following Jesse as quickly as I could and drawing stares from tourists for a solid three blocks.  When he turned into a corridor between two buildings, I tore at the straps of my heels and kicked them off, running fast so I wouldn’t lose him.  Jesse ignoring me while I chased after him – I’d have laughed over the turn of events if it weren’t for the mess that had just happened.

“Jesse! Jesse,
wait!
” I called just before rounding the sharp corner.  But when I did I saw he had already stopped.  In the middle of the alley, he leaned against the wall, hands in his pockets and rainwater dripping from his forehead to his shoes.  He stared at the ground and only then, with a shiver down my spine, did I realize where I was.  I was in the same alley where I’d first met Abram.  The same alley in which I was certain I’d seen Stefan Toro killed.  Jesse’s eyes were blank as he stared at the gravel.

“It was this one, right?” His voice was hollow.  Catching my breath, I swallowed.

“Yes.”  The bar I’d been at with Evan was further down the block.  I had run out of it from the other direction, just four or so months ago, when the biggest active problem in my life was my best friend marrying my ex.  It was genuinely awful but compared to what I was living now it felt like middle school drama.  I listened to the water smacking down on the pavement, watching Jesse stand frozen till a grimace ghosted his face.

“You have no idea what it felt like to see those pictures.  Stefan’s head split open.  I could see his skull.”

I know.  I saw it in person
.  I thought the words but I certainly didn’t say them.  “I’m sorry, Jesse.  I know it must’ve been hard.”  He didn’t reply so I simply stood with him for a moment, watching him stare at the brick wall, the rain washing away his usual smugness – that smirking attitude that constantly hid what he was truly feeling.  Without it, he was bare now, stripped more naked than I’d ever seen him.  It felt as if I were meeting him for the first time.  “Do you miss him?”

“Of course.  I’m never gonna stop.  He used to be such a fuckin’ good kid.”

“Yeah?” My toes curled against the gravel, just starting to register the pain of running barefoot.  “What was he like?” I could hear my gentle, feathery soft teacher voice coming out.  I hadn’t used it in ages.  I took a step closer as Jesse slid down the wall to sit on the ground.  I wasn’t sure if this was the right direction to go in but I had nothing else.  “What was good about him?”

Jesse looked at the ground.  For awhile, his face was completely blank.  But then the littlest smirk formed on his lips and I knew it was for Stefan.  “That kid worshipped me,” he laughed, staring into his hands.  “Growing up at least.  Probably because I chose to live with our mom.  He didn’t get to see me as much as he wanted but I was always the cool older brother so whenever I came around, he pulled out everything he could to impress me.  New toys, new shoes, school papers.  He was like a Golden Retriever dropping all his favorite toys at my feet when I got home.  It was funny.  He was just happy all the time.  Didn’t realize what kind of family he was from yet.”

I tried to jog my memory about what Jesse had told me about Stefan from the beginning.  “
He wasn’t the smartest kid.  But things weren’t fair for him when we were younger.  He didn’t get a shot at normal.  And that was my fault
.”  I gathered my dress in my hands and slowly lowered myself to kneel in front of him, letting my bare knees and shins press against the pebbly, wet pavement.  “You said things weren’t fair to Stefan when he was younger and it was your fault,” I murmured.  “What did you mean by that?”

Jesse finally looked up at me, his glinting green eyes lighting the dark.  “I told you that?”

I swallowed.  “Yes.”

“Christ,” he sneered.  But just as I thought I’d lost him, Jesse’s gaze floated away and I could tell he was traveling back to a memory. He blinked water from his lashes.  “You know my grandfather?”

“Not personally,” I tried smiling.  It was a comment he would’ve laughed at under normal circumstances but I knew these weren’t normal circumstances.  Jesse Toro was sitting in an alley with me, soaked in rain and considering taking me with him on a mental road trip.  I felt as if I had him in a place more vulnerable than anyone else in the world ever had.  It made me thankful that I wasn’t somebody dangerous – someone who would use this against him.  “Tell me then.  Tell me about your grandfather,” I said lightly, waiting to hear about some sweet old Sicilian man who bounced his grandkids on his knee.  But that wasn’t the story.

“He was the craziest piece of human shit to walk this Earth,” Jesse muttered.  “Dante Senior.  All the most fucked up things you’ve ever heard about the Toro Family doing – that wasn’t under my dad.  That was under Dante Senior. He wasn’t a businessman.  He was just a sick bastard.  He’d gouge a man’s eyes out in front of his kids and sleep like a baby at night.  My mom hated him.  She saw the things he did and after ten years of being a Toro, she was done, she had to go.  Loved my dad but left him and took me.  Let him keep Stefan.  She wouldn’t have gotten away with taking him.”  Jesse’s voice trailed off toward the end and suddenly he was back to reminding me of my so-called neighbor, skateboard Sean, all thoughtful and boyish as we sat next to each other on the ground, his attention distracted by a nickel wedged into a crack in the pavement.  Jesse picked it up and spun it, his eyes flickering as he watched it dance in the rain.  “I visited my dad every week to see him though.  Stefan.  My grandfather would always be there and he’d always sit in the kitchen and watch us.  And he’d just stew over me.  He thought I chose to – “abandon the Toros” is what he called it.  He loved Stefan to death, never said ‘no’ to that kid but he hated me with everything inside him and it just got worse as I got older.”

Jesse picked up the coin when it stopped spinning, running the thin edge along his skin, drawing lines.  It took me a few seconds to realize he was tracing the scars – the ones he’d used to undress me the night we had sex.  I had asked him, when he was Sean, to tell me about the skateboard wipeout behind every one.  And for every story, he got an article of my clothing.  His niece, Gianna, had proven those stories to be true but I was slowly starting to wonder if they were the real reasons behind his scars.  They were far too fine and neat to be the results of high-speed collisions on gravel.  I peered up just in time to see Jesse reading my mind, wearing a tired version of his usual grin.  “Someone’s catching on fast.”

“He did those to you?”

“When I did something he didn’t like.  Or if Stefan somehow managed to piss him off.  The one time he tried to burn Stef’s little arm with his cigar, I broke a bottle over his head.  Don’t even remember what happened after that but I woke up in the hospital and my dad was pissed,” Jesse laughed, pushing up the sleeves on his shirt and gazing down at the fine lashes that licked across his rock-hard biceps.  “So he took it down a notch after that, kept it to little burns and cuts to remind me of what a little shit he thought I was.  My mom thought I was doing them to myself, cried every night.  I couldn’t tell her the truth or she’d never let me go there again.  But it was fine.  They didn’t hurt that bad after awhile and every burn and cut was like my badge of honor.  If I was Dante Senior’s punching bag he’d have nothing left for Stef, so that worked just fine for me.”

“Then I don’t understand,” I whispered.  “I don’t understand how anything was your fault.  You did everything you could for Stefan.”

Jesse flicked the nickel into the dark.  I never heard it land and for some reason, that made my skin prickle.  Or maybe it was the way Jesse’s eyes fixed on me, with a darkness that put a bad feeling in my stomach.  “Stef walked in the room one day when my grandfather had me on the wall by my throat.  Right as I was spitting out my teeth.”

“What?”

“I was nineteen.  I told him I didn’t want to be a part of the Family so he pistol whipped me and picked me off the floor by my neck.  And then he just started squeezing.  I was bleeding everywhere but that wasn’t enough for him.  He kept squeezing.  Tighter.  Tighter.”  The vein in Jesse’s forearm swelled as his fingers curled into fists, mimicking the chokehold.  “I remember the moment I realized that he wasn’t going to stop.  And I was blacking out just thinking about my mom.  How she’d kill him if he killed me, and then she’d kill herself, too.  I was so scared.  I was crying just thinking about her beautiful face.  But then out of nowhere, I saw Stef walk into the kitchen with his headphones on.”  Jesse’s eyes were wet, far away as he gave the smallest laugh.  “This fucking kid.  Dr. Pepper in one hand, Sour Patch in the other.  And he saw me.  Froze.  I looked at him one last time and I blacked out.  Could’ve sworn that was it for me but at least I saw the person who loved me most right before I went.”

The agony on Jesse’s face wrestled every emotion out of me.  He was doing everything in his power to hold onto his tears, so instead he got mine. I couldn’t help it.  My heart ached for him.  I could see his pain, practically see the memories flickering in his eyes, playing through the rain like a scene from an old movie.  Jesse shook his head as he squinted through the sheets of water, as if seeing young Stefan right across from him in the alley.

“But next thing I remember, I’m on the floor and I can breathe.  One big, deep breath.  And I can see that Stef’s just sitting next to me crying, holding my head in his lap.  He’s got blood all over his shirt and next to us, our grandpa’s still bleeding but he’s dead.  Skin white, eyes open.”  Jesse cursed and shook his head.  “Stef was twelve when he cried over having to kill a mouse but a year later he managed to kill the head of the Toro Family with a dull fucking kitchen knife.  We couldn’t figure out how he did it.  I still don’t know how he did it.”

The image sent a violent shudder through my body.  I wondered if it was my way of trying to reject the sympathy I felt.  I refused to feel for Stefan Toro but my heart was overriding me.

“My dad and Uncle John covered up what happened but Stef cried probably every night for the next year.  Called me at all hours with nothing to say, just cried on the phone.  He tried to kill himself his freshman year of high school but we found him in time, pumped his stomach and after that, they all coddled him like a baby.  Never let him be alone, never let him do anything for himself.  Always sent someone to look after him and he hated it.  He hated being treated like this damaged, fragile little bird.  So he repackaged himself.  Decided after high school that he was a cold-blooded assassin and he didn’t kill his grandfather, he murdered a Mafia boss.  Tried to get into fights, always lost.  Tried to run business, always failed.  He was trying to prove himself to the Family up until the shit last year with Gavin.  No one told him to do what he did but he wanted respect.  He wanted us to see that he was a man and that we didn’t have to look at him like someone who should be pitied.  So he went as hard as he could.”

It explained the three days of torture – the videotaping before cutting open Gavin’s throat.  I couldn’t think of anything to say so I brought myself closer to Jesse.  There was sorrow in his eye but at the same time, disgust curled his lip.  I watched his handsome features twist in a war of emotions and suddenly, I understood him.  I could see the internal struggle that had been ravaging inside him since we started this mission.  “Did you come tonight to remind yourself?” I asked suddenly.

Jesse nodded.  He palmed his close-shaven head, his fingers digging into his skull.  “I needed to see the people Stefan hurt.  How bad he hurt them.  Because as much as I hate him for doing this to the family, I don’t want to kill him.  I can’t.  I still remember him as that kid who’d do anything if you bought him candy and I still wake up giving him excuses.  For everything.  Gavin.  The FBI.  I know I can’t forgive him but I also can’t stop the urge to take away his pain.”  Clawing harder at himself, Jesse grimaced when I tore his hands off his head.  They twitched to get away from me so I held onto them tight.

“You can’t stop being his big brother.”

“No.”

“That’s okay, Jesse,” I reassured him softly, holding his hands in my lap and trying to figure out if I really meant what I said.  I had no idea if it was really okay.  Stefan was a murderer – a sadistic one at that.  I wondered if it was really possible to keep loving someone who could do something so horrific.  My eyes drifted elsewhere as I thought of Elle, imagining if she’d ever gotten the chance to grow up.  The tears immediately came.

Fuck
.  I hated doing this – mostly because I could still imagine a life with Elle.  If I thought of her long enough, vividly enough, imagining all the things she would’ve done if she’d beaten the cancer, it sometimes felt as if she were still alive.  As if she never died at all.  It was like a high.  Back on my couch, alone in the apartment I never left if not for work, I could ride that wave of imagination for hours, pretending that Elle was still around and I’d simply not spoken to her in awhile because she was at camp.  I imagined that to celebrate her remission, we had all scrounged up to help pay for some sort of fancy summer camp where Elle got to catch up on living.  She got to do things like swim and paint and learn how to sew, which she’d always wanted to do.  She’d get to sit in the grass with the other girls, in floral skirts she’d made herself, and take a million selfies.  Elle had taken a lot of herself, especially during the chemo, but she always dreamed of taking one with a big group of friends.  So I even pictured her friends.

The crash was always brutal.  Remembering that she was dead, in the ground with my grandparents, never to wear another dress besides the one she was buried in – it always spiraled me into darkness that took days to dig out of.  I hadn’t gone to that place in awhile.  Since meeting Abram, I’d stopped having the time or lack of distractions that were needed to sink myself in a fantasy world where I hung out with my dead sister all day.  But sitting in the dark, rainy alley, holding Jesse’s hands, I closed my eyes and tried to take myself back to that dangerous but sweet-as-honey place in my mind.  Where Elle was alive.  She’d beaten the leukemia for good and she was a teenager now, old enough to start making real mistakes.  To stop being as perfect as she was during every one of her twelve years.  She would’ve been beautiful and that, of course, would’ve caused its fair share of problems.  It would get her noticed.  I imagined her niceness would get the best of her at some point.  Some boy would break her heart and take away a chunk of her faith in the world.  But knowing Elle, she’d try again to see the best in everyone.  She’d trust someone again.  She’d do it over and over, telling herself that the mean ones were only exceptions.  But eventually, she’d give someone her heart and this time, when it backfired, she’d finally be broken.