Page 43 of Reckless Woman
“A Good Samaritan.”
I glance up through my eyelashes at him. “Male or female.”
His lips quirk. “Male. And he wasn’t half as tempting with his face so close to my cock. Just pull the wound together and keep the suture about half a centimeter from the edge.” He straightens up and brings the bottle to his mouth again. “Now excuse me while I drink the rest of this vodka and pass the fuck out.”
“What’s the worst pain you’ve ever been in?” I hover the needle over the wound, wanting something—anything—from his past before I start.
“Seeing you in a cage in Amsterdam.” There’s a pause. “The death of my son.”
I freeze, my heart hammering. There’s a sloshing sound as more vodka is tipped down his throat. It’s a liquored-up full-stop to the first line in his story.
“Three stitches should do it, Anna,” he murmurs.
Three stitches and the truth.
Chapter Twelve
Joseph
Past…
Isat on the steps of the front porch until they came for me.
I sat all day and all night, watching the crows circle above Pa’s dead body in the doorway of our barn.
I hoped that he was hurting real bad wherever he was in hell right now. I wanted to know that when the crows got bold and greedy and started feasting on his eyeballs, he felt every one of their nasty, stinking pecks.
He’d blasted a hole the size of my head in the screen door, so the flies were swarming thick and black over Ma’s body in the hallway. I pretended the rank smell was coming from the dead chickens littered all over the drive. Pa didn’t just try and take out his entire family that day. He took out all of our livestock, too. He spared no one except me, and even that was a fluke.
Eventually this place would become known to the locals as Dead Animal Farm. Teenage kids would dare each other to smoke weed in the ashes of my past. That night it was a graveyard, and I was a twelve-year-old kid working the all-hour shift.
I didn’t have the courage to peek inside and see Cash’s body. I didn’t want to accept that hurt just yet, so I figured it was best if I stayed put and didn’t move.
It was best not to move.
And I didn’t, not even when the temperature dropped, and my shorts and T-shirt were as useful as brown paper packaging left out in the rain.
For twenty hours it was just me and the tin soldier I’d been playing with in the barn earlier that day. I’d pulled it out of my pocket and balanced it carefully on one bare knee. I couldn’t stop staring at it. He was small, green and mean-looking, and he wore the same expression on his face that he always did.
Nothing affected him.
Not even this hurt.
At some point, sitting there, I became that tin soldier. I made myself swallow my feelings. I adopted the same remote expression that would see me in and out of kid therapist rooms for the next four years. Tin soldiers were supposed to fall down and get back up again. They were caught in a loop of indestructibility, until you lost them or some stupid high school bully like Brett Chambers stole them out of your locker.
I was the only survivor of Pa’s madness, and I was going to close myself off from thieves and loss so I’d never feel this way again…
Time moved.
The day ended.
When the sun set, I saw blood.
When the sun rose, I saw violence.
In between, the stars were scattered bullets. But the moon was different. She looked like the hole in the barn door that Pa left when he missed his shot at me.
She looked like survival.