Spite Club (Mason Brothers 1)

One

Evie

It started with a phone call at one o’clock in the morning.

I’d put my pillow over my head to block out my roommate’s music, and I pulled my head out when I heard the ringtone, my hair falling over my eyes as I reached for my phone. I didn’t recognize the number. “Hello?”

A strange man’s voice on the other end said, “Evie Bates?”

“Yes?” I croaked, half into my pillow in my dark bedroom.

“Is your boyfriend a guy named Josh Brantwell?”

“Yes.” I sat bolt upright, shoving my hair back. “Oh my God, is he okay?”

“Not for long.”

The man’s voice was rough, as if he’d been shouting over a bar band all night, and I could hear the faint sounds of street noise in the background. I had never heard that voice before, and for a second I got a strange chill down my spine, like a premonition of doom.

“What?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

There was a pause. Then the man’s voice came again, dark and cold. “Look, Evie Bates, I realize this is probably bad news, but I’m about to go beat your boyfriend to a pulp.”

For a second, the words didn’t compute. “Who is this?” I nearly shouted, standing up in the dark in my old pajama top.

“It’s going to be bloody. I just thought I should warn you first.”

“Is this a joke?” It didn’t sound like a joke. It sounded like someone was about to beat up Josh. Was he being mugged? No, muggers didn’t phone their victims’ girlfriends first. And Josh couldn’t get mugged unless he was out on the street somewhere, when I knew exactly where he was. He was—

“No joke,” the strange man said. “My girlfriend is at Josh Brantwell’s place right now. And I’m about to go mess him up.”

That stopped me. It made no sense. “There’s no girl at Josh’s place,” I said stupidly. “He’s there alone.”

“You sure about that?” the man said. “Because I followed my girlfriend tonight. And she came here.” He rhymed off an address that made my stomach drop to the floor. “Resident is one Josh Brantwell.”

“What is she doing there?” I said.

“Fucking him, I presume,” the man said bluntly. “I’m pretty pissed off about it, I have to say. I’m about to go in there and give him a beating. But I looked him up first, and I saw that he has a girlfriend. So hey, Evie Bates, your asshole of a boyfriend is cheating on you. I thought you should know.”

“I—” I couldn’t think, couldn’t speak. Josh? “I—”

“Well?” the man said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah,” the man said. “I thought so. Bring bandages, a towel, maybe a mop.” Then he hung up.

For a second I stared at the wall of my bedroom, my mouth open.

Then I grabbed my clothes.

There was no way Josh was cheating on me. Simply no way. There had to be a mistake somewhere.

We’d been dating for four months. I met him at the bank where we were both tellers. He was dark-haired, clean-cut, good-looking, and when he asked me out I said yes. Of course I did. Josh was the Yeti of boyfriends: straight, single, sober, no baggage. I was twenty-five, and I was supposed to have a boyfriend like that. It was flattering that he’d picked me, when the other single women at work were circling him like sharks. I hadn’t asked a lot of questions—I’d just gone on the date.

And it was going well. We got along. We liked the same TV shows. The sex was normal and semi-regular. I’d met his family, and he’d met my mother, who had pulled me aside and told me in a low voice that she could see a future for me with a young man like that. Finally, finally, I was putting in place everything I needed: a good job, a nice boyfriend, a regular life, my mother’s approval. It was finally happening.

The call could be a fake. Maybe this guy—I had no idea who he was—was just crazy. Maybe he was a serial killer, trying to lure me to my death. But I thought about the voice I’d heard on the phone, rough and a little dangerous, and I felt that chill again. The stranger hadn’t sounded like a serial killer. He’d sounded honest and very, very pissed off.

Still, I told myself there was a mistake somewhere. The stranger’s cheating girlfriend had gone to a different address, not Josh’s. Or something. Because Josh was definitely, definitely not cheating.

Right?

I gripped the wheel and pulled up to Josh’s condo complex and thought about signs. Were there signs when a guy was cheating? What were they supposed to be? We didn’t have sex often, but then we never had. That was what happened when you were in a regular relationship, I’d told myself calmly. That was real life. No one went around having sex all the time, anyway. You did it on a schedule, when you were free and you were both in the mood. Had we been having sex even less than usual? When was the last time? I stared at the door of his building and thought back. Saturday night? No, he’d gone out with his friends. It must have been before that.

How else was I supposed to know he was cheating? We didn’t fight. He got a lot of attention from female coworkers and customers at work, but he didn’t make a big deal about that. He didn’t act furtive, and I hadn’t caught him lying. In fact, I’d been starting to think about having the Big Conversation with him. The one about Us and Our Future and Maybe Moving In. I had a schedule. I needed a schedule. Without a schedule, I would mess everything up. I was determined not to mess up this time. I was determined to make it work.

Bring bandages, a towel, maybe a mop.

I got that chill of premonition again.

No. Just no. I was going to handle this. And everything would be fine.

It was raining, a warm June rain. We’d just come off of a cold, shitty Michigan winter, and even the rain was welcome after the months of snow. I g

ot out of the car and walked up Josh’s driveway, letting myself get wet. Josh lived in a complex of townhouse condos, attached in a long line like one of those cutout crafts you did in public school. The complex was brand new. It was his first place, bought with his nice bank salary. In every way, my boyfriend was on the way up.

There was a second car in the driveway, parked behind Josh’s treasured Mustang. A pretty little car, as red as lipstick. And beyond that, parked on the street, was another black car I didn’t recognize, inky in the darkness.

There was no one around. This was a neighborhood of nice young professionals, tidy and brand new, unlike the rest of Millwood, Michigan. This wasn’t where the drunks and the teenagers and the pot dealers hung out. This was where people had jobs they had to get up for in the morning, and they all went to bed at ten.

There were lights on in Josh’s place. An upstairs light, and a light downstairs in the living room. More ominously, the front door was open. Just a little—it was a few inches ajar—but it was open. And something was going on inside. A man was bellowing. A woman was shouting. There was a thump, a crash of something breaking.

Oh, shit.

I ran the rest of the way up the driveway. A neighboring door opened, and a woman of about thirty-five stepped on to her porch, giving me a total bitch face that could turn you into stone from twenty feet away. “I’m about to call the cops!” she shouted at me. “See if I don’t! I can hear them straight through the connecting wall!”

“Don’t do it!” I shouted back. I ran past her to Josh’s doorway.

Inside, the living room was carnage. Josh’s nice Ikea coffee table was overturned, and one of the brand-new blinds had been ripped from the living room window—it hung crazily, making the whole room look like it was on an angle.

Josh was lying on the floor, curled up in pain, his hands over his face. Blood seeped through his fingers. He was wearing nothing but a pair of tighty whities, his gym-toned body on display. Standing next to him, shouting Stop, was a woman with long, dark curly hair. She was gorgeous and sexy, and she was wearing a t-shirt I recognized as Josh’s, and obviously nothing else. I could literally see her bare ass.

That answered the cheating question, then.

Something inside me snapped, and I went numb. I stopped seeing Josh’s nice living room, where we’d watched TV and made out with his hand down my pants. I stopped seeing the nice furniture, some of which I’d helped him pick out. I stopped seeing his nice body, that I’d had sex with on a nice regular schedule for four nice months. I stopped seeing anything at all except that woman’s bare ass, perfectly round and much smaller than mine, beneath the hem of my boyfriend’s T-shirt.