“King,” Skylar mumbled early the next morning, prodding my arm. “When did you get here? And God, you smell like a brewery.”
I was only half asleep in the chair by her bed. The night had been long and the ghosts had refused to leave me alone. I sat up and rested my elbows on my knees, stretching the kinks out of my neck. Sleeping in a hospital chair fucking blew. So did the headache pounding my skull. “We buried Jen yesterday afternoon.” It didn’t answer her question, but it told her everything she wanted to know.
Her face softened. “Oh.”
I stood so I could also stretch my back. I felt like hell, but I was more interested in how Skylar was feeling. “How’s the pain?”
“It’s okay. The drugs are working.” She paused for a moment before saying, “You know I wasn’t a huge fan of Jen’s, but I hate that she died like this. No one deserves that.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, but I didn’t want to get into it. Didn’t want to be having this conversation with anyone, because that meant I’d have to face the guilt again. “I’m going for a smoke. You want anything when I come back?”
The look she gave me told me she knew what I was doing. Skylar knew me better than anyone. It was one of the reasons we argued so damn much. She liked to see how far she could push me. Always had. But today, she let that shit slide. Nodding, she said, “Yeah, a coffee. I can’t do the stuff they serve here.”
When I stepped outside five minutes later, I lit a smoke and stared up at the dark morning sky. The colour of the clouds matched my mood. And the rolling thunder added to the symphony playing in my head. A symphony of fucked-up thoughts that wouldn’t leave me the fuck alone.
For one mad moment, I wondered whether my father’s mind had been as chaotic as mine. Was this how he crossed the line into insanity? Did the thoughts become too much to deal with that his mind cracked into so many pieces that he could no longer figure out right from wrong?
Could I fucking figure out right from wrong anymore? I wasn’t sure. Most days I didn’t give a f
uck, but every now and then, someone came along and tested that attitude. Ivy reappearing in my life was one big fucking test.
She and Jen had played on my mind all night, and my dreams had tortured me. It had been a long time since I’d had dreams like this. After I’d pushed Ivy away years ago, I’d spent a year dreaming of her, my father, my mother, and Margreet. The dreams had become nightmares I couldn’t escape. I’d avoided sleep that year, and insomnia had plagued me ever since, but the dreams had disappeared.
Until last night.
Last night I dreamt of Margreet and the disappointment she felt over the choices I’d made in my life. Ivy and Jen had shown up in my dream, too, and told me I was going to hell after I was finished with this life.
Fuck.
I’d woken in a cold sweat, thoughts of hell still on my mind. I knew the only place I’d be going after this life was straight to hell. My father had made sure of that the first time he’d forced me to help him with his sick and perverted crimes. Usually it was my mother who helped him, but not that night. She’d been sick and unable to do what he wanted, so he’d dragged me out of bed and used me to lure the blonde teenager into his car. What girl wouldn’t want to stop and help a nine-year-old who was alone on a street in the middle of the night? She’d never stood a chance between my sad eyes begging for help and my father’s brute strength when he pulled her into the car.
He’d kept her locked up in our house for a week before he ended her suffering. I’d endured seven nights of her screams and his grunts. But that was only the beginning of it all.
I had the blood of five girls on my hands by the time I was ten. Three days before my tenth birthday, my father was arrested for assaulting a man at the pub he frequented. My early birthday present that year was my mother abandoning me at a hospital because she decided she couldn’t raise me on her own. It was the best birthday present I ever received.
Jesus, would this shit ever go away? Would I ever stop thinking about my father? Would Margreet linger in my mind forever?
I took a long drag of my smoke, closing my eyes as it worked its way into my lungs. Why the fuck was I turning my actions over in my head? Questioning myself in ways I tried never to question myself. There was a lot of shit to deal with today. Thinking about this wasn’t doing me any favours. All it did was fuck with my thinking. And that wasn’t fucking useful. Not to me and not to my club.
I opened my eyes, took one last drag of my smoke before stubbing it out, and turned to go back inside. Another round of thunder cracked overhead, but I barely heard it. Thunder didn’t come close to the noise of my mind.
“Good morning.”
I’d been so lost in my thoughts I hadn’t seen Skylar’s physiotherapist standing in my path to the front door of the hospital. I’d almost run into her.
I nodded at the smoke between her lips. “If the way you’re sucking that smoke back is any indication, your morning is as shit as mine.”
“Yeah, that about sums it up. Kids.”
My gaze dropped to her body. She wore the tightest fucking jeans I’d ever seen with a white T-shirt and black leather jacket. It seemed an odd outfit for a hospital employee to wear, but what the fuck did I know? Finding her eyes again, I asked, “How many you got?”
“Do you really care?”
She had me there. And yet, I was engaging in small talk, which I rarely bothered with, so there was some interest. “How many?”
A smile ghosted across her lips as she drew more smoke deep into her lungs. “I knew you weren’t as big of an asshole as they told me. I’ve got three. Two teens and an eight-year-old. It’s mostly my fourteen-year-old daughter who keeps my nicotine addiction fed.”
I narrowed my eyes, assessing her more closely. “You don’t look old enough to have a fourteen-year-old.”