Page 38 of Refrain (Beautiful Monsters #2)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

ESPI

“Bang.” Two ice-cold fingers graze the back of my neck. “You’re dead.”

Giggling, Domi steps around me. Her eyes glow neon blue in the dim light of the bar. Her teeth arebared,a partial smile, partial snarl. She’s feral tonight. The way she used to look when Vlad made her turn so many tricks that she could barely walk before he threw her out onto the street.

Something has her worried, but I’m too tired to ask.

No. Fuck that. I’m too drunk. I snatch a shot from the counter and down it without so much as a sniff test to tell what it is.

The shit burns goingdown,but it doesn’t come back up.

Yet. Two more shots don’t chase my sanity away though.

It’s still here, lurking like poison, as Domi returns to her post behind the counter and starts wiping it down with a wet rag.

In all the chaos of the week, I’ve barely checked on her.

Really checked. Francisco’s taken good care of her, protecting her from the shitheads at the bar; I can tell that much.

Whatever’s gotten her antsy lives inside her head.

She never stops fiddling with her hair. Tugging at it.

Pulling. It’s like she’s trying to yank something out, but damn.

Don’t I know better than anyone? Dark thoughts can only be buried beneath liquor and nicotine.

Or confessed to someone so tormented by their own shit that they just might hear you.

Another shot chases the thought. Not far enough away though.

With a sigh, I settle my focus on Domi. “What’s up?”

She stands beneatha puddle of bluish light, and I’ve never realized just how young she is before. I know her age, but she’s young . A tiny little girl with no clue of what to do.

“It’s nothing,” she says, shaking her head. “Someone just asked me something. That’s all.”

In an instant, I’m sitting straighter as anger washes through my stomach, neutralizing the alcohol. “Arno?”

Domi shrugs but doesn’t deny it. Tonight, she’s wearing another outfit of Darcy’s.

Something so fucking skimpy that I can’t even dissect it in pieces.

I just stare at her eyes. The bruise around the one is healing up, but they look even more haunted than before.

Blue and Yellow. Piotr’s hell sure did churn out an unusual pair.

“They just asked me about a girl is all,” she says, her accent thickening the way it does whenever she talks about the past.

I wasn’t stupid enough to pry about her family or her life beforeAmerica. In a way, I never really had to. Domi always was an open book—a fucked-up graphic novel with the scenes depicted in violent, glaring colors.

“She was blond, they said. Green eyes. American. Five foot two…”

I grit a sigh back and shove away the bottle of whatever I was drinking. That definitely sounds like Arno. “You don’t have to—”

“I said no,” Domi says, staring down at the counter. Her fingers twitch against the rag as if she’s fighting to cling to the present. Her eyes reveal the truth though. She’s already back there, living and breathing in the stench of the club. “But that’s not the truth…”

I wait without saying a damn thing. Hope. It’s a bitter fucking taste that burns worse than nicotine. I can still see Parish slumped over the end of the bar, too doped up to carry on a conversation. I would never say it to Arno, but it’s better if she’s dead. Honestly, she already was.

“You saw her?” Iask while Domi just stands there, her palms braced against the countertop.

“I don’t know.” She’s barely loud enough above the shouts of the last stragglers to stagger out of the bar.

“I don’t remember. I never saw their faces, the other girls.

I can’t tell you what the girls who shared my room looked like.

You go through that life blind. You focus on you.

Only you. I don’t know if I… I don’t know. ”

With a sigh, I stand and circle around the counter to where she’s standing. She doesn’t resist when my arms go around her. She just coughs, her nose wrinkling at the stench of cigarette smoke. I’m no good at the nitty-gritty of comforting people. I just wait until she stops shaking.

Until she stops muttering nonsense into the front of my shirt— I don’t know. I don’t know.

She sways on her feet when I finally let her go and send her upstairs to get some rest. But then the real fun begins.

Because, after calming her, I don’t even know how to comfort myself.

Arno’s way isn’t working tonight. I’m all out of cigarettes.

I’m out of fucks left to give. In the end, I just leave the bar, pick a direction, and start walking.

It feels like hours before I find myself somewhere familiar. Even this goddamn early, there’s a man still on the corner, his hands tucked into his pockets. I shove a fifty beneath his nose, and he hands me a vial, full and unbroken.

I’m doing a mental count of just how many extra syringes I have by the time I start home. The moment I reach the front stoop, I lose count .

Someone broke into my house again, but I don’t goforthe knife this time. Ishoulderthe front door open instead and find the culprit in plain sight, slumped against the wall. I blink as my eyes adjust, making out a slender frame. Pale. A woman.

I’m on my knees beside her before I even realize I’m crouching.

She flinches when I touch her, cringing against the wall.

She’s shivering—so cold that the chill bites through my fingertips.

I try to withdraw my hand, but she grabs my wrist before I can, her nails digging in.

Scraping. I let her hold me as I wrestle the door shut with one hand. I don’t say a fucking thing.

I’m just here. She pulls me closer when she’s ready. Her head finds my shoulder, her breath hot on my skin. There’s something in her hand, I realize, held to her chest. It’s metal. It’s oddly shaped. Her finger is on the trigger.

Stitches won’t cure this newer pain. No. I have to reach into another box of tricks this time.

“Which one shall it be, huh?” I wonder out loud as I lean back against the wall and stretch my legs out in front of me. “ Little Red ? Sleeping Beauty ?”

She tilts her head just enough for me to make her eyes out through the shadows—wide, empty, yellow. They drift down my chest, and I sigh, reaching up to follow the line of her gaze with my fingers.

“All right. Listener’s choice it is.” I eye the ceiling as the sound of her breathing counts the seconds. I grit my teeth at the realization that she’s crying, gaspingatthe air.

I have a feeling that the tears aren’t because of sadness. In my experience, the real waterworks start flowing once you lose every fucking shred of control. When your emotions turn against you and all you can do is just feel your body fall apart.

It looks like I’ll have to dig deep for story time. Maybe play a game of Show You Mine because she already showed me a bloodied bit of hers.

“Do you know the difference between a murderer and a killer?” I ask to no response. “Animals kill. Hunters kill. Diseases kill. It just happens. Sometimes there’s a reason behind it. Sometimes not. Murder is different…”

She doesn’t react when I reach for the gun and pry it from her grip. It’s the one I gave her. I sniff and catch the telltale scent of residue drifting from her fingers. She used it.

“You have to want to murder,” I say, continuing my story as I tuck the weapon against my side. “You do it on purpose. There’s no reason behind it. Just rage. You want the fucker to suffer. You need them to die. I…I’ve never killed anyone in my life.”

She swallows noisily. I know the question she wants to ask. Maybe she’s too tired to. Maybe she already knows the answer. Either way, she says nothing, and I let her lie here beside me. I let her heat sink into my skin. But a promise is a promise, after all. I owe her a story.

“My brother is a killer ,” I say to kick off my little fairy tale. “He does what he hasto,when he has to—no questions asked. He doesn’t think about it. I think about everything.”

It’s a sloppy way for the story to start. I take a deep breath and try again.

“My dad…if you want to call him that. He was a doctor. Had a nice house. Nice car. I barely even knew the guy, even though I got sent to live with him when I was eight. My mother died in a car accident not long after I was born. I had an older brother, though, who stayed with my dad while my grandparents raised me. I never really saw him growing up. He was always in a ‘special home’ or out on the streets. By the time he was eighteen, he’d moved out of that place, and our dad always said he was on drugs.

A runaway. But he came back. I never knew why until I got older though. ”

I’ve never been a good storyteller. The fact must run in the family. All the words run together. It’s hard to keep it all straight. My captive audience doesn’t seem to mind though. Her eyes never leave me once .

“As it turns out, my dad wasn’t as squeaky clean as he seemed.

He did stuff to Dante…” I have to suck in air as the words stick in my throat.

I grit my teeth and force them out—that bastard doesn’t deserve any sugarcoating.

“He used to sneak into his room when he was a kid. Touch him. Hurt him. He was a fucking pedophile.” I flick the word out the same way I flick the dead ash from a smoke.

This flame continues to burn me up though. I smolder.

She doesn’t react to the minutes-long pause that comes after.

She listens, and it takes me a while to hunt down the thread of the story again.

I’m fishing in my pockets before I even register craving a cigarette.

I’m all out though. I have to inhale the air and use the rage in my blood as fuel rather than nicotine.