Noah, Liam and Wroth were already carrying our gear inside so Devlin and I jumped in to help. Mostly I played bass, but because my Gram had been forcing me to play the piano since I was three, I had some skills with the keyboard as well. Of course her version of skills was playing Mozart whereas mine was learning to play Metallica and actually making it sound good while being played on a cheap-ass keyboard.
Because I loved my Gram so much, I’d learned to do both, but she didn’t need to know about the Metallica part. It would probably break the old lady’s heart and that would only lead to my broken mind getting that much more fucked up.
Once everything was set up, we had half an hour before we had to start our set. We sat in the back office of the bar drinking the beers that Floyd slipped us. Wroth was the only one who was legal to drink, so if we wanted to drink we had to do it in the office.
I lifted a beer to my lips and swallowed half before blowing out a long breath and finally turning my gaze to the guy sitting on the shabby old couch to my right. “We gotta talk, man.”
Noah’s light blue eyes were so much like his sister’s that my gut twisted when he lifted them to meet mine. “What’s up?”
I clenched my jaw and glanced around at the other guys in the room. Liam was off in the bathroom and I could only guess what he was doing. Since he’d started dating Tawny, his whole personality had changed and he’d been getting deep into the drug scene. Devlin sat on the rolling chair across from me and Wroth was staring off into space like he usually did. The dude was scary as hell without those demons flashing in his unfocused dark eyes; when they did, he looked like he was fucking possessed.
“It’s about Annabelle,” Devlin cut in.
Even from the few feet separating us on the couch I could feel the way Noah tensed up. “What about her?” he gritted out. “Is she okay?”
I tipped my beer up and swallowed the rest in one gulp before speaking again. “She’s been spending the night with me every night for the last few weeks, man. She’s scared shitless of Jacob.”
Light blue eyes narrowed. “What the fuck are you talking about?” Noah snarled. “She’s been spending the night with you? How the fuck has she been spending the night with you?”
“Dude, relax,” Devlin cut in. “It’s not like that. She’s just been sleeping there. Nothing else. Z wouldn’t do that, man.”
I didn’t speak, because I wasn’t sure if I would do that or not. I wanted to, so damn bad. So far I’d been able to keep from crossing that line, but it kept getting harder and harder with each passing night.
Noah’s shoulders dropped with something that looked like relief crossing his face. “Okay, then what the fuck is going on? Why is Annabelle sleeping in your room?”
“Because things are ugly at your house, man,” I told him. “Your mom has been drinking every night. And not just a few glasses of wine, dude. She’s been getting shitfaced. She gets pissed and starts screaming at Jacob. I can hear her from my house.” Thankfully my grandparents were getting hard of hearing and hadn’t heard Wendy Cassidy-Malcolm screaming at her husband like the hag she was. “Then when she’s done screaming and throwing shit, she goes to bed and Jacob takes his frustration out on Annabelle. The first night you know about, but Anna didn’t tell you everything.”
I knew when Annabelle found out I’d told her brother everything, she was going to get pissed at me, but I couldn’t let that shit keep going on without him knowing. So I told Noah about how Annabelle had been woken up one night over the summer to Jacob pulling her out of bed and slamming her against the wall. How he’d slapped her over and over again, splitting her lip and putting bruises all over her arms.
I felt my rage starting to boil up all over again just thinking of how she had looked when she’d knocked on my window afterward. Her lip had been bleeding and she’d had black and blue fingerprints on her soft peaches-and-cream arms. She begged me not to do anything, pleaded for me to just stay and hold her that night and the rest of the weekend. By the time I’d had to go to work that Monday, I’d been a little more sane, but not by much. I’d kept my hands off Jacob Malcolm, but I’d made sure that he knew I was watching him.
Of course he hadn’t heeded my threats for more than a week or so before he’d woken Annabelle with a slap to her beautiful face. She’d climbed through my window that night with a red handprint on her cheek. I’d paid a visit to the fucker at work the next day and given him a few handprints of my own. He’d told everyone he’d gotten his black eye from walking into a door, and Annabelle had been able to sleep in her own bed for several more weeks without having to worry about her stepfather hurting her.
“A few weeks ago he did it again,” I bit out as I glared off into space, flashes of Annabelle holding her bleeding nose making my hands fist on my thighs. “She begged me not to say anything to you, and I didn’t out of loyalty to her. But I made sure Jacob knew I wasn’t playing around. He still walks a little stiff from where I punched him in the ribs.”
“So she’s been scared all summer?” Noah’s voice was hoarse, his blue eyes nearly cobalt with emotion. “He’s been beating on her and she’s been so scared that she doesn’t even sleep in her own bed. Why didn’t she tell me?”
I shrugged. “Probably because she knows that you’ll do something crazy. Like kill the fucker.” It was what I wanted to do to the bastard. But it was the image of her begging me with tear-filled baby-blue eyes not to do anything that would take me away from her that had kept my instinct to destroy that little prick in check.
“Has he touched her since?”
“She says he hasn’t but she’s terrified that he will. She doesn’t get enough sleep because of it and I think she’s starting to struggle in school. I saw one of her test papers sticking out of her backpack the other day and the grade on it wasn’t one I would expect Annabelle to get.” She was so damn smart. What the fuck was she doing making D’s?
Noah jerked to his feet and started pacing. “What the hell am I going to do?” he muttered, but I knew he wasn’t asking any of us. He was talking to himself, like he always did, raking his fingers through his blond hair.
If you looked at him and Annabelle you would have no doubt that they were brother and sister. They had the same platinum-blond hair, the same light blue eyes, even the same nose. On Noah it gave him a pretty-boy kind of face, one that girls went crazy for every Friday night when he took the stage. On Annabelle it gave her an almost delicate elfin quality and it only increased my instinct to protect her.
“We could kill the motherfucker,” Wroth spoke up for the first time letting us all know that he hadn’t been so lost in his nightmarish memories that he hadn’t been paying attention. “I’m not against slicing that fucking loser up.”
“I’m with you there, dude.” Devlin pushed his long dark hair back from his face, grinning evilly. “You’re a beast. You could hold him down while we took turns slicing him open.”
“We’ll call that plan B,” I muttered. The whole idea would have made me happy, but I knew that Annabelle would be upset. Probably not that we actually did it, but that we would get in trouble. She was always trying to protect us, when that was exactly what we wanted to do for her. “Noah, what are you gonna do, man?”
“I don’t fucking know, bro. I don’t fucking know.”
C HAPTER T HREE
Annabelle
My stomach was growling and I still had over an hour to go before I could lock up the garage. I was exhausted after spending all day at school dealing with the drama that went with high schooclass="underline" bitchy girls, boys who thought they were men trying to either get me to notice them or wanted to push my buttons because of old vendettas against my brother and his friends, pop quizzes as well as tests that I should have studied for but hadn’t remembered to, teachers complaining and lecturing… The list went on and on.