CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Jessie

The next morning we drove together to Junction High, Pietr wrapping himself around me like the finest of coats, Annabelle Lee riding shotgun so she could be dropped off at the middle-school entrance.

Our behavior didn’t go unnoticed and after Annabelle Lee had been dropped off, Max and Cat exchanged a look, glanced at us, and laughed.

Max had planned to take the group of us out to the movies after school to keep up appearances and fill my head—and eyes—with things that would keep Derek watching us and not exploring the house while Dmitri and Alexi finalized plans.

Amy told Max the night before that she’d take the bus to school. It was always earlier and she needed a few minutes before homeroom to deal with some library books she’d rediscovered in her closet.

So it surprised me when she wasn’t waiting for us. “Wait—where’s Amy?”

Pietr looked up and down the sidewalk. His nostrils flared momentarily. “She hasn’t gotten here yet.”

“No. There’s her bus.” I pointed.

I jogged over to it. She was nowhere in sight. I dug my cell phone out of my back pack and hit her number.

“Hey,” she answered.

“God, you sound awful.”

“Yeah. My throat’s really killing me,” she said hoarsely.

Max trotted over, his eyebrows tucking his normally bright eyes into shadow.

“So you’re not coming in?”

“No.” She coughed.

“Should we bring you something?”

“No. I mean … I just feel like crap. Can I—can I talk to you later?”

“Yeah. Oh.”

“Did you tell Max?” I asked, catching his eye.

“No,” Amy said. “Could you—” She was coughing again, so loud I had to move the phone away from my ear. “Sorry,” she gasped. “I gotta go.”

“Where’s Amy?” Max asked, tossing the car keys back and forth with Cat.

“Home. Sick.” I slipped the phone back into my pack’s pocket. “It must be some bad bug,” I muttered. “She hasn’t been sick enough to skip school in…” The words dropped away when I saw him. Smiling, laughing, flirting with some girl—a girl who looked remarkably like Amy.

Max, Pietr, and Catherine followed my gaze.

Straight to Marvin.

Max snagged the keys out of midair and spun back toward the car, his stride so long I jogged to keep up. “Take notes for me!” I told Pietr.

Max glanced down at me, his jaw set.

“I’m coming, too,” I panted. “Shotgun!”

“I may want one of those.”

I felt the color drain from my face, wondering what he thought we’d find. And I worried he’d be right.

Jessie

“I’m sick,” Amy protested from the other side of the door. “I don’t want you to get this, too.” She coughed. Suddenly it sounded fake.

“I’ll take the chance. Let me in now,” I insisted.

“I am absolutely unwilling to spread this contagion. Go back to school.”

“Open the damn door, Amy,” Max demanded.

The dead bolt slid into place.

“Nice move.” I tugged at my hair. “If she’s locking both of us out it must be bad. What the hell could he have done…?”

Max closed his eyes and he stepped forward, one hand on the door.

“Oh…” Bile rose in my throat.

He licked his lips. “I can get through this.” He tapped the door with a finger.

“Amy, open the door,” I urged.

Silence.

“Step back, Amy,” Max commanded. “Check me,” he whispered.

“Coast’s clear.”

His eyes glowed and he grabbed the edge of the door and peeled it off the hinges, throwing it behind us like he was discarding old cardboard.

There, behind a coffee table leveled with shims, Amy stood, eyes wide, arms wrapped protectively around herself. The hem of the bathrobe she snugged against her flapped in the sudden breeze.

Hair snarled, her wrists were black with bruises. At a glance I knew her sore throat was legitimate, a handprint visible on the slender curve of her neck.

Max was inside a heartbeat ahead of me.

Something passed between them and the air electrified. Max’s nostrils flared. And then his hands brushed the hair back from her eyes and rested on either side of her face. Tenderly he tilted her face up to him and he kissed her forehead so lightly his lips might have been a feather brushing her battered skin. “I have to go,” he apologized. “Here.” He handed me his cell phone and some cards. “Use the Visa to get a door that works.”

“When will you be b—”

But he was already gone, the car slinging gravel as its tires spun.

“Visa.” I flipped through the plastic options. My hands shaking, the cards tumbled to the dingy carpet. “Oh. Crap.”

Amy’s eyes widened at the sight, too. She picked them up tenderly and tears came to her eyes. “What is he planning?”

My stomach curled in on itself and I shook my head. Whatever Max was planning, it was obvious he didn’t want any identification on him if he was caught.

Amy clutched his school ID and license and I rooted through old newspapers and magazines for a place to sit.

Jessie

I awkwardly nudged the door up the trailer’s rickety stairs and leaned it in place to provide us with some sense of security. Coaxing Amy’s old computer to crawl to a site with a phone number, I called and ordered a new door.

We sat there silently for a few painful minutes, Amy staring at her hands, and me staring at the handprint on her neck.

“Marvin.” I said the name and she flinched. “I didn’t think…”

“I didn’t, either,” she admitted, the words scratching their way out of her throat. “I mean. We fought. A lot,” she confessed. “More than I ever wanted to think about. I mean … I thought he was like some prince at first. Taking an interest in me. Him with all the money and privilege … I thought I was being rescued. My brother Frank got out of this dive. Mom left soon after that. Dad escaped when he started drinking. Heavily. Why not me? Don’t I deserve to escape?”

I reached out and rested my hand on hers.

“But he pushed me around. At first he said he was sorry.”

“And you believed him,” I said.

“I was stupid.”

“No. He was a liar. How could you know?”

“The flowers he gave me at Homecoming? They were part of an especially big apology.”

“Oh.” I had thought they were beautiful.

“He wasn’t what I expected. He pushed me around. He smacked me. He kicked me. He pinched me and shoved me…”

The words unsteady, I urged her, “You can just say it, you know.” I couldn’t stand to hear each way he’d hurt her.… The use of each cruel verb. The summary was bad enough. “Just say he beat you.”

“No,” she said, the word stark and cold. Her eyes locked on to mine and I saw a bit of fire—a bit of that beautiful and bold Amy sparking in their depths.

“Why not?”

“Because of the word, Jessie. It makes a difference. Beat has different meanings, you know? One’s right for the way he treated me.” She swallowed and tugged her hands out of mine to rub her tender throat. “But one relates to winning—like if you beat someone in a race. If I say he beat me, it feels like he won. And he hasn’t.” She swallowed hard, a tightness around her eyes at the pain. “No,” she croaked. “He didn’t beat me. He’ll never beat me,” she promised. Her eyes flashed open and she caught me watching her. “But he did rape me.”

And then she was silent. The words all used up.

I stood, rubbing my forehead and urging my brain to kick in. “I need to make a call.”

She nodded. “I need a shower.”

“No,” I said, aching at the look she gave me and so sorry to make her wait. “Not quite yet.” I closed myself in the small bathroom and called Alexi.

Next I’d call Dad.

Alexi

“God.” Words escaped me. “Where will he go with him?” I heard Jessie’s question, but my ears were so full of the noise of blood rushing through them as my pulse pounded in anger, it took me a moment to respond. I pushed the phone more firmly to my ear. “This is Max we are talking about. He will take the fight to Marvin. Nyet. An audience won’t be enough to stop him from grabbing him. Da. I know. Pietr’s at school.”

She rambled, doing what she always did when panic set in.

“Jessie.” I stopped her. “Max has the car. Da. Taxi. You get her to the hospital to be checked out.”

I hung up and called the cab service. It was the slowest ride I’d ever taken, knowing what I did.

Amy had been attacked and Max was out for blood.

Alexi

If doing cardio was good preparation for a fight, then I would be in amazing shape, I thought as I sprinted away from the taxi, hurling bills at the driver and racing for the main entrance of Junction High. I’d used my time in the crawling cab wisely (after cajoling and then verbally berating the man in Russian when he refused to go a single notch past the speed limit).

I’d called Jessie back and gotten a basic overview of the school’s layout.

Hindsight being what it was, I realized I should have attended the parent-teacher conference about Max’s flirtatious behavior when it was first requested. At least then I would have known the school’s layout personally.

The place was nearly empty—the strange illness that kept being mentioned in the local papers making the high school more and more desolate. I slid to a halt outside Pietr’s classroom and waved my arms wildly at him. He needed no more instruction, but vaulted out of his desk.

Behind him a man shouted about his current math grade not being mathematically impossible to lower. Yet.

Pietr winced.

“Max,” I wheezed, struggling for breath. I should have given up cigarettes months ago. Hell, I should have never started smoking the blasted things.

Pietr’s nostrils flared and he grabbed my arm, dragging me with him down the hall as my shoes—a decent grade of Italian leather—slipped on the linoleum tiles. This was why Mafia men were so often shown in tracksuits on television and in the movies, I thought as we rounded a corner and I scrabbled for purchase: There was running involved. Sensible shoes were necessary all the time.

Pietr, not even winded, pulled me to a stop at a door marked BASEMENT. “Down there,” he said, yanking the door open. He paused, seeing the line of steps, and then, judging the distance, took them all in one stunning leap. Show-off. I ran down them as quickly as my feet could carry me, my goal simply to not trip to my own death in my haste.

Pietr stood in the corner, assessing things, and I leaped between my brother and his girlfriend’s attacker.

“I will kill him—” Max’s fist raised and I covered my head with my arms—the noise of glass breaking punctuated his words as he shattered a lightbulb swinging above us—like a boxer taking a warm-up swipe at a convenient punching bag.

Marvin dropped to the floor and rolled into a fetal position as glass rained down and I straddled him.

“Max—MAX!” I shouted, trying to break his focus and stem the rage boiling in his bones.

Glass stuck out from Max’s bloody knuckles, but he didn’t even twitch at the shards wedged there, his focus so tight on Marvin, whimpering before him.

I spread my arms. “Max, think!” I urged. “Pietr—a little help!”

Pietr jumped forward and grabbed Max’s arm.

Max’s shoulders rolled forward, head low, his brows brutally shadowing his eyes. The beast inside my brother fought to claw its way out and he welcomed it.

I closed my eyes and puffed out a breath. “Max,” I urged, trying to find him somewhere beneath the red swirling in his eyes. “Stop this madness.” This could quickly go from bad to tragic. And no matter what Max was planning, Amy would lose. Realizing we had one casualty already, I focused on limiting the collateral damage.

“Max. Calm down,” Pietr said, pulling back on his brother’s arm and bracing himself for a fight.

He spit. “Calm down? Whose side are you on?” His glare cut at us as deeply as the claws and fangs of the wolf could bite.

“Amy’s,” I answered, working to rebuild a cool façade that kept crumbling beneath the rolling heat of his hate. “We’re on Amy’s side.”

“Then let me have him,” he purred—a deceptive noise that folded seamlessly into a growl.

“Nyet,” I insisted, my ears disbelieving, my own neck still remembering the brutal power of his enraged hands from the one day we’d had it out for top dog of the family.

He knocked me aside easily, barely flicking his wrist, but I still stumbled under the impact and plowed with a curse into the wall.

Max straightened, stretched, swaying. In one long, smooth movement, bones cracking as he raised his arms, he leaned back his head and summoned the change, relishing the beast as it pushed to the surface. His face stretched, eyes glowing the red of hot coals, hair sprouting along his skin as his fingers curled under and his hands became heavy paws.

Cloth ripped as his haunches and barrel chest burst free of the constraints of human clothing. For a moment he teetered on his hind legs, balancing awkwardly as he peered at his paws and flexed them—claws like stiletto points unsheathing with a deadly whisper.

He looked down at Marvin—impossibly small in the shadow of the wolf—and fell forward …

… to come face-to-face with me.

I amazed us both, successfully sandwiching myself between the leering wolf with its slavering jaws and its whining human victim.

I was officially an idiot.

Marvin reeled back beneath me as far as he could go, his face pressed into the floor, trembling so hard at what he saw above me his body shook mine.

“No!” I shouted, keeping as much of my back pressed against Marvin’s quivering form as I could. “I won’t let him destroy your future, too!”

Glass ground into us both as I adjusted my position to better cover him.

Max grabbed my arm to pull me out of his path.

I stiffened. Marvin balled up more tightly beneath me and my disgust for him grew. He was only brave enough to fight if his opponent was smaller than himself.

And I protected him.

“Urrgh!” I snaked my neck to catch Max’s glimmering eyes with my own. Nose-to-nose he could hardly ignore me. If I stared him down—grabbed hold of the humanity in him, the part that wanted blood as much as it warred against the idea—maybe I could stop him.

“Max, don’t…”

His eyes glowed, the red fire swirling up to consume the light that regularly sparkled in them. The cords on his neck stood out—metal rods holding his head in place—and I wrapped my hands around them and raised my legs so my knees were jammed beneath his heavy chest.

I built a wall of bone, flesh, and blood between him and his prey—a wall he could raze in an instant. His lips slid back from his teeth as his anguished snarl turned into a jagged-toothed grimace.

“He rrraped herrr,” the beast within him shrieked from deep in his gut, shaking everything but my resolve.

Pietr stepped back, putting his hands up. “Tear him apart,” he agreed.

“Shit, Pietr!” I snapped. “It’s murder!”

“Justifiable homicide,” Pietr returned.

“When did my questionable moral code start to qualify as the guiding light in this family?!” I wedged myself more firmly between the two of them. “He will pay, Max,” I swore. “He’ll pay.…” My hands on his shoulders I pushed, trying to pry him off. No good. “But if you kill him—”

Marvin shuddered beneath me, pinned and listening.

“—you will go to jail. There will be no way to stop that.”

“I could run,” Max muttered, his eyes still glowing, and fixed, on Marvin. “I could kill you and run,” he clarified, looking past my shoulder at Marvin. Max’s mouth twisted into a smile.

At my back, Marvin’s heart pounded.

In the corner, Pietr rubbed his forehead and cursed. He stepped forward again, leaning over Max and wrapping a hand around his shoulder. “Then who will protect Amy?” he whispered to our brother.

Max froze.

Pietr closed his eyes and added, “What will happen to Amy without you?”

“Da,” I agreed, grabbing at Pietr’s logic. “She will need you now more than ever.”

The temperature dropped as the fire faded from Max’s eyes and the light of reason returned.

Max slid back onto his heels, crouching, his eyes on my face. Reluctantly he stuck a hand out. I took it and popped up to my feet and off of Marvin.

“He has to pay,” he said, eyes locked on mine.

“He will,” I assured him. “God.” I sniffed. “What’s that smell?”

“Him.” Max pointed a finger at the heap of humanity still curled in a puddle.

“Disgusting.”

Marvin only moved far enough to get his eyes back on Max and then he froze again, still as a statue.

I looked at my two brothers. “Get Max some clothes and then head back to class,” I said to Pietr. “You,” I said to Max, “stay.” I pulled out my cell phone and called the cops.

Jessie

I’d wrapped Amy in a long winter coat and dragged a brush through her hair before my father’s truck pulled up. We’d been through the reasons she couldn’t shower and shouldn’t change and I was sick knowing that maintaining evidence of Marvin’s crime meant maintaining physical proof of his contact with her.

The door was dragged aside and my father, eyes dark with worry as they scanned the damage to the door frame, asked, “Max?”

I nodded and, shielding Amy in my arms, walked to the truck with her. We rode in nearly perfect silence to the hospital; the only sounds were the wind with its growing chill as it clawed at the truck’s windshield and the grinding of Dad’s teeth as he worked his jaw in anger.

We were ushered into a small room, just Amy and I, and we waited behind the drawn blue curtain for a nurse and a police officer. I stayed the whole time, Amy’s hand tight around mine, while the nurse collected evidence and the female police officer asked questions that swirled around my head and fed my blood with rage. Nothing but being there for Amy mattered in those long minutes between formal introductions and the suggestion she see a counselor.

There was, in fact, only one moment when I felt the need to speak.

The officer, scribbling detailed notes on a small pad of paper, looked at Amy and asked, “So this Marvin Broderick, you say he smacked you around numerous times before and you never reported it.”

Amy nodded slowly.

“He beat you a lot.”

Amy paled at the word and looked away.

“No,” I corrected the officer when Amy could no longer find the words. “He hit her, he punched her, he kicked and pinched her. I saw bruises on Halloween night before she left him for the last time,” I admitted. “And today he raped her. But he hasn’t beaten her.” I squeezed her hand and looked at her, hoping she read the determination in my eyes. “And I’ll be damned if he ever does.”