Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 53361 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 267(@200wpm)___ 213(@250wpm)___ 178(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 53361 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 267(@200wpm)___ 213(@250wpm)___ 178(@300wpm)
“What happened to her?” I asked, the question slipping out before I could reconsider. “To Sarah.” I’d have felt like an ass for pushing him, but I got the feeling he needed to get this out and had been leading up to the conversation but was stumbling along just as much as I was.
Rancor went still beside me, so completely motionless I wondered if he’d even heard me. Then I saw the change come over him -- a darkening, a hardening around his eyes and mouth. When he finally spoke, his voice had dropped to nearly a whisper.
“Carjacking.” Each word emerged like it was being torn from somewhere deep inside him. “Wrong place. Wrong time. I was across the street. At the store.” His breathing had changed, becoming more measured, controlled. “Came back to find her bleeding out on the pavement.”
My heart clenched. “Rancor, I’m so --”
“She was pregnant.” His hands curled into fists on the arms of his chair. “Five months. We were gonna name him James. After her father.”
The grief in those simple statements nearly broke me. I couldn’t imagine the weight of losing not just a partner but a child who never had the chance to be born. The storm inside this man suddenly made perfect sense.
“The guy who did it.” Rancor’s voice remained steady, emotionless in a way that spoke of practiced control. “He was a junkie lookin’ for money for a fix.” His jaw tightened. “Police caught him. Released him a few days later because his daddy had enough pull to get him bail when he never should have been let out of a fuckin’ cage.” The more he spoke, the less calm he seemed. He broke out in a sweat, his reaction to the memory visceral. I knew what was coming. Could see it in the set of his shoulders, the careful blankness of his expression.
“So I found him myself.” No inflection. Just fact. “Beat him to death with my bare hands. Didn’t even try to hide it. Waited for the cops to come.” A muscle in his cheek twitched. “Got six years in Terre Haute, but I would do it again without hesitation.”
The confession hung heavily between. He’d admitted to murder, calmly and without remorse. I should have been afraid. Should have been looking for the quickest way off this porch, away from this man who had killed and had no remorse. Instead, I understood. Not in the abstract way of someone sympathizing with tragedy, but in the bone-deep recognition of what it meant to protect those you loved.
“I ran away from home when I was sixteen,” I said, the words emerging from some place I usually kept locked down tight, but I thought I owed it to Marcus to give him a piece of myself. Same as he’d just done to me. “My parents had me late in life. I was supposed to be the miracle for their son, Jace.”
“Why you?” Marcus’s question caught me off guard. In fact, this might be the most he’d ever spoken to me in one sitting.
“He needed a bone marrow transplant and no one else in the family was a match. Jace was on the national registry as needing a BMT, or whatever, but he had some rare antibodies in his blood that made it difficult to match him with a suitable donor. The only realistic chance he had was with a close relative and there simply were none.”
“So they decided to have a baby? Take a chance that child would have whatever your brother needed to survive?”
“Pretty much, I guess. Looking back, I’m not sure they really thought the whole process through.”
“Not sure why any doctor would allow something like that to take place. Seems unethical.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “Marcus, I think you know I like you a lot.”
He tilted his head, narrowing his eyes in confusion. “I hope you do.”
“I do. So please understand I mean no disrespect when I comment on the irony of the guy who killed someone talking about medical ethics.”
Surprisingly, he barked out a startled laugh. “Yeah. I can see the irony.”
“And you’d be right about the whole medical-legal-ethics-whatever shit. Obviously, I don’t actually remember the whole thing, but my parents weren’t exactly quiet about their displeasure with me. I’ve never actually sat down and questioned them, but I’ve overheard tearful conversations with Jace and my father when Jace was twenty-three and I was nine. I overheard Mom crying and stood outside their bedroom door.
“I don’t remember the details, but I remember vividly when they’d lamented how I hadn’t been able to help him, even though it was the sole reason they’d had me.”
“Christ,” he bit out. “That’s a hell of a thing for a kid to hear.”
“She was yelling at my father, and someone was throwing things. She said I was useless because I couldn’t save her baby. And lots of other things, but I kind of got sick to my stomach and ran to my room. After that, I stayed out of her way.”