The Vigilantes Collection by Lake Keri

Author:Lake, Keri
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2020-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

24

Jase

Hotel Savarine, or Hotel Winston, as some knew it, sat on the corner of Jefferson and Lenox Street, about six miles out from downtown. Little traffic meant it was a perfect spot for underground parties, and Dax was notorious for hunting down some crazy gigs.

I parked on the side street and and yanked my hoodie up over my head to conceal my face, as I crossed Jefferson to the back of the building, where one of the boarded up windows had been pried open to let partygoers in. Dim lanterns and white Christmas lights had been strung across the main floor of the otherwise dark hotel. Rolls of carpet and cables had been pushed aside to the walls, along with the larger chunks of debris. I stepped over rotted wood and cardboard, making my way to what was something of a courtyard, smack in the center of the building where all four walls of apartments faced one another.

Lucia. Fuck me. What were the odds? What kind of sick and cruel joke was it that the girl from my past, whose gray eyes had haunted me for years, the girl who’d changed everything in my world, would be the one strapped to my bed?

For a kid who had nothing, had grown up with nothing but dirty fucking rags and scars across my skin, she was something straight out of a dream. Like finding a spring of fresh, unpolluted water in the middle of the slums.

She’d mind-fucked a hole right through my skull, threatening to dredge up something I’d buried a long time ago. Hope. A small glimmer of what I might’ve wanted, what I might’ve busted my ass to have—something clean and pure. Like Lucy.

Kids with shady pasts and drugged-up parents, who lived in trailer parks and stole shit to get by, didn’t get the girls who lived in the houses across the street, though. They got the easy ones. The tripped-out ones who didn’t give a damn whose cock banged them, as long as enough green slid across their palm by the end of it to pay for the next hit.

Numb, mindless fucking that did nothing more than blow off a little steam.

No skull mining for feelings that didn’t exist and pasts that couldn’t be changed.

I didn’t want to feel anything. I wanted to finish what I’d started without the touchy-feely shit clogging my brain, without putting reason or regret to my actions.

I hated that she saw beneath the mask, beneath the bones and flesh, and yanked at my soul like a beam of sunlight fighting its way through murky waters of a swamp.

That warmth called to me, as she lay sprawled out on my bed—a fucking prayer trapped in a mind full of debauchery. I’d have taken her and snuffed out that light quicker than a used-up candlewick, pulling her into the cold and empty truth of what I’d become over the years. A thief. A murderer. A selfish prick with a single motive of survival.

I needed to get numb again.

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