Breaking Grace Read online

  He brakes. Raising his palms, he mouths, sorry.

  Sorry. What an insult. Worse than nothing at all.

  “You’re sorry?” I yell. My voice breaks. My whole body is vibrating.

  The window rolls down halfway. As the glass disappears, another man’s face emerges. Round, bearded, with close-set brown eyes.

  It’s not Bram. The car isn’t even a Maserati. It was all my insane imagination.

  “I apologize,” he says. “I didn’t see you.”

  The tears I’ve been holding back since this morning spill over. “That’s okay.”

  He frowns. “Are you hurt?”

  The cab pulls up behind me. A tear drips into the corner of my mouth as I grope for the door handle. “I’m fine. Really.”

  I slide into the back seat and shut the door. The driver glances at me in his rear mirror. I wipe my face with my wet sleeve.

  I manage to get home with the six-pack unopened. Twelve entire blocks. I haven’t had a binge like this in a long time.

  “Tomorrow,” I mutter. “Everything will be different. I’ll start all over again.”

  As I get out of the cab, I realize I’m shivering. Even my panties are soaked. I can’t wait to get inside.

  I go up the steps to my apartment and see a dark figure leaning against the wall by my door. My heart jumps, but I know in a second it’s not Bram Russell. Whoever it is is half his height, not much taller than I am.

  He turns toward me as I get closer. The overhead light illuminates his pale, flat face.

  Isaac, my father’s right-hand man. He wears his usual uniform of a black suit, white shirt with a band collar, and shiny, square-toed boots. The look is undertaker with a touch of Nordstrom Rack.

  As soon as he sees me, a smile snakes across his face. My skin tingles in silent warning.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask.

  “Hello to you, too, Gracie,” he says.

  I give him a sidelong glare. “Nobody’s called me Gracie since I was fourteen.”

  “That’s okay. You’ll always be fourteen to me.” He spins his wedding band around his finger and squinches up his eyes. “Can you believe I’ve known you that long?”

  “Feels like longer. Did my father send you?”

  “Yes, he did. He, uh, heard you got fired today.”

  I tuck the bag of beer under my arm and dig in my handbag for my keys. “I didn’t get fired. I quit.”

  “Why?”

  “A bunch of reasons.”

  “Your father’s worried about you. We all are.”

  “I’ll call him,” I say, nudging past him. “Thanks for your concern.”

  Isaac sniffs the air. “You smell like girl’s night out, Gracie. What’s in the bag?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “You know your father doesn’t like it when you drink.”

  “I’ll discuss it with him. Now if you’ll excuse me – ”

  “Sure thing.” He steps out of the way and watches as I push the key into the lock. “You look awfully pretty in that dress.”

  “You said that last time about my baggy jeans.”

  “You look pretty in everything.”

  “Uh huh.” I try to turn the key but it’s stuck. Great timing. I take a calming breath and try again. It won’t budge.

  “Something wrong?” Isaac says. His high, whiny voice makes my scalp crawl.

  “My key is sticky. Must be the rain.”

  “You got the right one?”

  I pull it out and check. “Yes.” I jam the key back in. It still won’t work.

  Isaac lets out a little chuckle. I look over at him. His mouth twists into a cold grin that makes my stomach turn.

  “Somebody changed my locks,” I say.

  He shrugs. “It looks that way.”

  “Who? My father?” Even as I say it, I know it isn’t true. My father can’t hang a picture, let alone change a lock.

  Bracing his back against the rough stucco wall, Isaac crosses his ankles. “The apartment belongs to your parents, doesn’t it?”

  “I pay the rent.”

  “Last I heard it was still their property.”

  I drop the useless keys back into my bag. My pulse pounds in my ears. “You changed them, didn’t you?”

  “Everything I do is at Mr. Garrett’s request. And on that note, he asks that you come with me.”

  My toes brace into my shoes. “Why?”

  “You haven’t seen your parents in two weeks. They’re concerned.”

  “They show that by sending you here?”

  His thin mouth tics. “What do you have against me, Gracie? I’ve been nothing but good to you for twelve years.”

  “Good to me? Is that what you call what happened that day?” I’ve never said it out loud before, but I’ve always been sober in his presence. I’ve always had something to lose.

  “There’s no need to get snippy,” he says in a quiet voice. “I’m only here to help.”

  “I just wonder. What would your wife think if she knew? Not exactly godly behavior, is it?”

  His jaw grinds. “Let’s go, Grace.”

  “Go to hell. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  His face is red and twisted. “I won’t let you embarrass your parents any more than you have.” He grabs the six-pack and wraps his thick, short fingers around my arm.

  Panic rises in my throat as he hauls me down the stairs. “Let me go.”

  I try to jerk away but I’m too weak. My mind is too fuzzy to think. “You can’t do this,” I hiss through clenched teeth.

  “Whine about it to your father.”

  I stumble behind him. Rain pelts my face as he drags me across the parking lot and pushes me into his car, a gray sedan with a child seat in the back.

  Chest heaving, I stare straight ahead out the windshield. He bends down so close I can feel his stale breath in my ear.

  “Now, buckle your seatbelt, Gracie. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

  Bram

  “It’s a beauty, isn’t it?”

  Fritz slides the sword out of its battered leather sheath and holds it up to the light behind the bar. “Four hundred and nine years old. Who knows how many men it disemboweled in Burma.”

  “Honey, please,” his wife Coral says, wiping down the bar. “I have enough trouble keeping food down.”

  Fritz gives her an apologetic pout. “Beheaded?”

  Sighing heavily, she straightens and rests her hand on her pregnant belly. “Another drink, Bram?”

  “Thanks, Coral. I thought you’d never ask.”

  I push my empty glass toward her. I haven’t thought about Grace or her haunted eyes since halfway through whiskey number three. With this much booze in my veins, I can almost forget that I pulled over four blocks from the convenience store and jerked off to Grace in my car like a fucking pervert.

  I’m sitting at the bar of The Usual, owned by Fritz and Coral and heavily invested in by me. Fritz has been a cab driver, an EMT, and my head of security, so when he asked me to help him open The Usual in an industrial part of town, I wasn’t sold on the idea.

  “What do you know about bars?” I asked.

  “I like to spend time in them,” he said.

  It seemed as good a reason as any, and I trust him with my life if not my money, so I forked over a few hundred thousand. I look around, proud of what we built. The interior is pure class – dark beams, red brick, a bar made from a solid chunk of zinc. Three years after opening, The Usual is one of the most popular places in the city on weekends. During the week, it’s a second home to the kinds of people I like to hang out with: veterans, ex-vigilantes, starving artists, MC guys who have no idea how much money I’ve got and wouldn’t give a shit if they did. They’d treat me just the same.

  Coral extends an arm toward Fritz. “Give me that,” she says. “Before you wipe out half the bar with it.”

  He surrenders the sword and sheath with a smirk. She handles the sword like a
n expert, sliding it in its case and setting it behind the bar.

  “I blame you for this, Bram,” she says. “You and your grandfather’s Glock.”

  “You should,” I say.

  “That was a hell of a gun,” Fritz says. “I still think about it sometimes.”

  I still think about it a lot, though I don’t say so. That battered old gun was almost a living thing to me, the closest thing I had to a protector. And Christ knows I needed one.

  I’ve known Fritz since I was thirteen, when we were broke townies with bad attitudes and crap home lives. I was the runt, a favorite of bullies and asshole rich kids. Fritz was big enough to defend himself, but his grades were so bad he was always in detention. We had no friends but each other. We’d take off after 4th period to shoot beer cans in the woods and dream about slaying our enemies.

  One day we’d show them. If our shitty existence didn’t screw us over first.

  Fritz dropped out of school just before senior year, and we lost touch. By coincidence we met up again overseas, when I was working as an interrogator and Fritz was teaching firearms classes for a military contractor. He ended up at the school in England, and invited me to join him. Black Hollow. Or Black Halo, as everyone called it.

  I take a long swallow of whiskey. We’ve showed our fucking enemies, all right. Sometimes, just for fun, I count all the ways we got ahead. But I always run into the same fucking snag.

  I never had a father and never will. Lucky for me, I don’t need one anymore.

  One of the bar’s regulars, Vernon, leaves the table where he sits with two aging bikers and takes the stool beside me. His worn jeans are so low they look like they might slide off his bony hips.

  “Vern,” Fritz says.

  “Hey.”

  I wouldn’t normally have much to say to a guy like him – he’s a mama’s boy who lost a chunk of his brain in a motorcycle accident – but he’s the most loyal person I’ve ever met. When the trial was going on, he came to the courtroom every day for weeks. He didn’t call attention to himself; he just sat in the back a few rows behind Fritz and listened. We never even talked about it.

  “Hey, Vernon,” I say, shaking his thin, tattooed hand. “It’s been a while.”

  “Mr. Russell.”

  “Bram. For the hundredth time.”

  “Any man who drives a car like yours is Mister to me,” he says.

  Coral pushes a vodka on the rocks at him. “You’re the ideal woman, Coral,” he says, forking over a few wrinkled bucks.

  She smiles. “Shut up and drink.”

  He swirls the ice with his finger, takes a sip, and looks at me. “I been meaning to thank you.”

  “For what?”

  He gives me a baffled frown. “For what? The wheels you gave me last year.”

  “That old Jeep?” I tap my glass against his. “It was sitting in my garage taking up space. You did me a favor.”

  “Maybe so, but I treasure that car. You gave it to me when I was feeling low and it changed my life.”

  Fritz leans his elbows on the bar. “An old Jeep changed your life?” He laughs.

  Vernon shoots him a frown. “Every day I pick my niece up from kindergarten in that car. And every day I remember. Mr. Russell did this for me.”

  I have to say, I’m touched. “Thanks, Vernon.”

  He nods. “I just want to say, anything you want, you let me know. I’ll make it happen.”

  “Anything, huh?” It’s a joke of course, but still. He doesn’t want to say that to a guy like me, not after the day I’ve had. He doesn’t want to say that to anybody.

  He spreads out his hands. “Whatever you need. Last week I delivered a baby elephant to a guy two towns over. He wanted one his whole life and I got it for him.”

  “It’s already at a sanctuary,” Coral pipes up, slinging a bar towel over her shoulder. “The idiot lasted two days with it.” She opens the door marked Employees Only and shuts it behind her.

  Vernon looks like a child who just got scolded. “But you delivered, right?” Fritz says, bucking him up. “It didn’t work out, but you got it done.”

  “That’s right,” Vernon says, his voice full of pride. “I delivered. I’d do it for you and Mr. Russell, too.”

  I’m just drunk enough to indulge him. “Funny you should ask, because there’s a girl I know.”

  Vernon smiles his gap-toothed smile. “A girl.”

  “If I had my way, which I never will, you know what I’d do?”

  His man-child eyes light up, like I’m about to tell him a bedtime story. “What?”

  After hours of burying it, my fury roars back. It feels good to feed it whiskey and cheer it on. Maybe Grace has the right idea after all. I should drink the pain away more often. Or bask in it, like I’m doing now.

  While Vernon drinks and Fritz polishes glasses, I go on a little rant. I talk about her pretty face, her bitter heart, and the balls it took to show up at my office. I predict the shitstorm to come if she tries to take me down. And then, when the rest of the bar is empty, I spin a yarn so fucking dark it brings tears to my eyes. The one I’ve been mulling over all afternoon.

  Vernon won’t understand and Fritz will think I’m bullshitting, and I suppose I am. But it doesn’t matter. This is for me. Maybe if I get it out, it’ll go away. Poof. Like a dream that disappears the second I open my eyes.

  The story’s simple, really. Just a little fairytale. A girl, a remote house, and me.

  She doesn’t choose to go, and she doesn’t go quietly. There’s nothing out there. No comfort, nothing to read or watch. Just her and me.

  That’s how I want it. I’m her world. Her breath. Her food and water.

  She’s got a temper, this girl in my story, but tempers cool down fast when it gets lonely. When all you can see through the window is bare branches and snow.

  Every detail is so fucking clear. Concrete. Ropes. Crushing silence.

  My girl on scraped knees with her head bowed. Her transformation, unfolding over weeks. Her surrender. The light restored to her eyes.

  The brain responds to isolation. Mindfuckery. Rewards and punishments. With one kind gesture, it attaches to an enemy like a lover. That’s what I wanted to see in the women I trained, but I never did. They never let me in. It was a stupid game to them, so that’s all it was to me.

  For Fritz, it was enough. I was never satisfied. I didn’t want a willing captive. I wanted something real. I wanted life and death.

  I’ll never have it, but fuck it. That’s what I wish for. Normal guys don’t want to do this shit. They don’t even think about it. But if I could have anything tonight, it would be her and me. Just us. Just like that.

  Vernon crunches a piece of ice and squints. “So…wait a minute. All this really happened?”

  Fritz shoots me a look. “No, Vern. We’re just shooting the shit, that’s all. Telling stories.”

  “Oh, okay. Cool.”

  Vernon aims a bloodshot blue eye at me. There’s a strange expression on his face. He’s smiling even though he’s not. Maybe on some reptilian level, he gets me. Maybe he’s smarter than I thought. Smarter, and not nearly as drunk. Jesus.

  He taps the shattered screen on his phone and pockets it again. “Gotta go, gents,” he says, sliding off his stool. “I’m hitching a ride with a friend.”

  “Goodnight,” Fritz says.

  “Vern,” I say, nodding.

  He walks behind me and at the last second, pats me on the shoulder. He’s never touched me before. The Vernon I know wouldn’t dare.

  “Later,” he says, and he’s gone.

  Grace

  By now, I’m dead sober.

  My parents sit across from me, both leaning forward, hands on their knees as if they practiced their movements in advance. We’ll unnerve her by being a united front. We’ll say the same words and synchronize our breathing.

  I never noticed until this moment, but they’ve started to look alike. They both have short brown hair and black-rimmed gl
asses, and wear loose, dull-colored clothes. I don’t remember my mother this way. She used to wear bright colors and laugh a lot. For a long time it felt like being raised by another kid who was older and knew more.

  “Was she cooperative?” my father asks Isaac.

  Isaac leans in the doorway of the living room, wearing a look of sarcastic piety. I have the urge to throw a lamp at him.

  “As cooperative as Grace gets,” he says, and chuckles.

  “He’s lying,” I say. “I fought like hell. I didn’t want to go anywhere with him.”

  “She was a little feisty but she calmed down quickly,” Isaac says.

  I glare at him before looking back at my parents. “Why did you change the locks?”

  My mother looks at my father for approval before speaking. He gives her a curt nod. “We feel you’d do better in a more structured environment right now.”

  “Like where? At home in my old room?”

  “I’m getting to that,” my mother says.

  I have a blood-boiling vision of slipping back into my old life, complete with flowered wallpaper and stuffed animals. Yesterday I was a grown woman with a job and an apartment. Today I’m a child.

  “Maybe I could dig up my clothes from eight years ago and go back to high school,” I say. “I mean, since apparently I never grew up.”

  “Where did you get this streak?” my father breaks in, his voice harsh and loud.

  “What streak? The one that makes me want to live on my own, free from surveillance by creeps like Isaac?”

  My mother glances at Isaac. “She’s been drinking,” she says in an apologetic tone.

  My father clenches his wide, square jaw. “The streak that makes you determined to embarrass us. It started long before James died, and I know it didn’t come from this side of the family.”

  My stomach twists up behind my heart. “What does that mean?”

  His eyes are like black embers. “It means you were born this way.”

  “Maybe not born,” my mother says to him. “The way she was raised…her first three years…”

  My father shoots her a withering look and she shuts up.