Page 7 of Gash (The Skulls #13)

A woman with red and blue hair

answered the door, and Charlotte loved the color s. It looked amazing on her as

it wasn’t glaringly bad, or anything. She fingered her ponytail as

she’d pulled her hair back, and her brown locks were dull and

boring.

“ Gash, what are you doing

here?” she asked.

“ Hey, Lacey, I’m here to

see Whizz.”

Lacey turned and yelled Whizz’s name.

“Come on in.”

“ What are you doing now?”

Gash asked.

“ I’m actually in college

right now. I’m taking beauty courses, and putting my love of dying

my hair to good use.”

“ Beauty?”

“ Yep. I’m loyal to The Skulls,

and the old ladies are more than happy to let me work on their

hair.” Lacey smiled, looking at Charlotte. “I could do wonders for

your hair. It’s so long.”

“ You’re not touching her

hair,” Gash said.

Tugging out her ponytail, Charlotte stuck

her tongue out at Gash. “What do you recommend?”

Lacey chuckled. “I like

you.”

“ I’ll probably be dead

before you can do anything.”

She noticed that made Lacey

pause.

“ Excuse me?” Lacey

asked.

“ Gash is threatening my

life. I don’t know how much time I’ve got left.”

Gash slumped. “I’m not going to kill

you.”

Charlotte looked at Gash and shrugged.

“You’re the one that has been threatening to kill me. I accept my

fate, and if I don’t make it out alive, then I don’t.”

“ This is weird,” Whizz said.

“Talking about your death should have you at least a little

freaked. Normal women would be freaked out, even Lacey, and she’s

not that close to normal.”

“ Hey!” Lacey said, chuckling at

the same time. They were a strange couple, but seeing them both together,

it worked.

Charlotte smiled. “I’ve had a lot of

time to deal with it.”

“ You’re Charlotte,” Whizz

said, moving toward her.

Lacey didn’t stop running fingers

through her hair. “Purple, it would totally rock purple, and a

trim. I bet we could put some curls in the length, and it would

totally look fuckable.”

Gash groaned.

“ I tell you what,” Charlotte

said. “When we finish what we’re doing, you can do whatever the

hell you want with my hair.”

“ Deal.” Lacey glared at Gash.

“She better be back in one piece, or I’m going to start

making some

serious use of the knives that Whizz gave me for

Christmas.”

“ Lacey, keep Gash company. I want

to talk to Charlotte.”

Before she could protest, Whizz

was dr agging

her down a long corridor into a large room that looked like a

command center.

“ Wow,” she said. “That’s a

lot of computers.”

“ Yes, it is. This is my

office. Welcome.” Whizz closed the door, and Charlotte leaned

against the wall that had nothing against it, no technology, and

nothing worth breaking.

“ I don’t want to touch

anything in case I, erm, I break it.”

“ Have you told him?” he

asked.

“ Told him?”

“ About what you

lost?”

Charlotte tensed up. “No one knows

about that.”

“ There’s always a trail,

Charlotte. No one is clear from shit like a forced abortion. There

had to be paperwork.”

She pressed a hand against her stomach

as tears filled her eyes.

“ The suicide attempts,

along with every other shitty thing that you’ve been through.”

Whizz kept his distance, and she was more than happy about

that.

“ I … I didn’t think anyone

would know what happened.”

“ Gash asked me to find

information on Rebecca and Jeff. You came up, and I gave him the

way to locate you.”

“ Wait? You told him?” Why hadn’t

Gash asked? Why did he assume she helped put him in

prison?

“ No. I didn’t give him

everything.” He moved away from his position opposite her toward

his wall of screens. “To be honest, the information for me, it only

gave me more questions. You see, abortions, documents, all of that

stuff I can follow, but I cannot follow emotion. I don’t know what

happened between you and Gash, or between Jeff and Rebecca. Only

the paper trails, and possible security footage. It’s a lot in this

day and age, but it’s not everything.”

She listened and watched as he

clicked on the keyboard, and her life came up on the multitude of different

screens.

Whizz moved away, and she forced herself

to face the life that she had been trying to forget.

Pictures of herself before and after

her life was turned upside down. Hospital images of her injuries

and files of her diagnosis were displayed for her to

see.

“ I didn’t give him this. Gash

doesn’t know that when you tried to testify on his behalf, you were

drugged and shipped to a hospital to have the baby that you had

created together, torn out of you.”

Her heart was racing. This was her secret.

This was what Jeff did to her, and what Rebecca did to her. They

held her down, forced her to sleep, and removed something so

precious to her that she had already been making plans for her

future. The promotion had come first, and then when she landed,

she’d gotten the positive test, and for those few precious minutes

her life had been perfect. A few minutes, that was all she

got.

“ Gash didn’t know, and he still

doesn’t know,” she said.

“ He still doesn’t know.

You’re the woman from his dream. The woman he had sex with, and

can’t remember it.”

She nodded.

“ I was away when Gash was

arrested. I got a promotion, and that was why I was out of the

country. When I got back, I discovered he was on trial and I was

going to testify on his behalf. I’d been feeling sick, and the only

explanation I had was being pregnant. I took a kit, but Jeff was

there, and Rebecca.” Her cheeks heated. “Before him, I was a

virgin, and I’ve never been with anyone else. Sad really, I

know.”

“ That’s not sad. Everything

that comes with you returning, that’s sad, that’s unbearable,”

Whizz said.

“ Everything had gone to shit in

the time that I was away. Gash was being done for murder and rape.

I knew he was capable of murder, but not out of jealousy. Gash

didn’t give a shit about Rebecca, or who she screwed.”

“ How did you know?” Whizz

asked.

“ He came around one night when

she was entertaining another man.” Charlotte laughed. “I was so

embarrassed that I couldn’t even talk. Anyway, Rebecca was always

really loud. He came and laughed. Said Rebecca was an easy girl,

and he’d wait his turn. No jealousy. He even picked up a cooking

magazine, and read it while Rebecca was screwing another guy. Then,

when the two came out, Gash shook the man’s hand, and grabbed

Rebecca.”

“ Wow, I didn’t know

that.”

“ Not everything is written on a

computer, just like you said,” Charlotte said. “He’s not a rapist.

Gash would never hurt a woman.”

“ Yet he hurt

you.”

She cupped her neck and shook her

head. “I guess I’m not considered a woman in his eyes.”

“ And yet for a short time,

you were the mother of his kid.”

Charlotte flinched. “That’s a long

time ago.”

“ He or she would have been seven

years old, entering his eighth birthday.”

Tears filled her eyes, and before she

could hold them back, they fell down her face. “Please, stop.” She

started to shake as the pain took over her entire body. For a

little over two years she hadn’t experienced this. Two years, at

least she’d known a struggled peace.

“ Gash doesn’t know what he

lost.”

“ He wouldn’t believe me.”

She wiped the tears away.

“ You need to tell

him.”

“ You knew all of this, so

why didn’t you tell him?”

“ Some things are best said

by the person who suffered through it.”

Charlotte snorted. “He tried to kill

me.”

“ Did he really try to kill you?”

“ He had his hand wrapped

around my neck, about to choke me.”

Whizz sighed. “I didn’t know him before

prison, but something tells me if Gash intended to kill you, you’d

be dead. He doesn’t leave people alive if he can help it. He’s a

hard ass.”

“ So, I should be grateful

he didn’t want to kill me?”

“ No, you should think about

the fact he hasn’t.”

Charlotte licked her lips, staring

back at the screen. “Why didn’t you tell him this?”

“ I believe people deserve second

chances. My wife, Lacey, she was going to kill me—well, she

couldn’t kill me. It’s complicated. Anyway, I don’t believe you and

Gash got your chance. Now it’s time for you to get your shot

together.”

“ He doesn’t want

me.”

She stared down at her large figure and

sighed. When she was trapped in a mental ward, she’d actually

slimmed down to a size eight. She couldn’t eat, and the doctors

ended up forcing her to eat. The moment she got out of the hospital

and started making her way in the world, she promised herself she’d

stayed slim. Then her pain would only be eased by baking and

cooking in the kitchen. Her size eight didn’t last long. She had

remained a size sixteen for the past two years, and she no longer

believed in diets. Her life had already sucked enough without

taking out her love for food.

“ You’d be surprised what a

man wants.”

“ We’re looking for Rebecca

and Jeff.”

“ I get it. Okay, let’s go

and invite Gash back into the room before my wife tries to kill

him.”

“ Lacey? She’d kill

him.”

“ Lacey’s an interesting

character. I love her, but Gash, he doesn’t like her smart

mouth.”

She smiled.

Following him out of the nerd room,

she saw Gash was glaring across the counter in the kitchen as Lacey

sang out of tune at the top of her voice.

“ Getting her out of the

clubhouse hasn’t been good for her,” Gash said.

“ What? I love her singing.”

Whizz walked toward Lacey, kissed her on the mouth, and smiled at

his wife.

Charlotte’s chest hurt. She had never

experienced that kind of love.

Her own life was all about work and

sleep.

Life truly sucked.

****

“ We want to find Rebecca

and Jeff,” Gash said. He’d had enough of hanging around Lacey. Just

being around the weird woman irritated him. After everything that

had happened to her, she was too damn happy. Charlotte wiped her

cheeks again, and he noticed her eyes were red. What the fuck had

Whizz said to her?

“ How do you expect me to do

that?” Whizz

asked. “If I could find her, I would.”

“ Tell him, Charlotte.”

She rolled her eyes. “Have you