Because of You

Because of You - By T. E. Sivec


Thank you to Max – the best editor and friend a girl could have. You put up with a gazillion texts on a daily basis and my complete stupidity when it comes to tenses without wanting to stab me (I think) and I love you for it.

Thank you so much to my awesome beta readers: Madison Seidler, Amanda Clark and Tressa Sager. You are the best cheerleaders and I love you all so much for taking time out of your lives to help me.

Thank you to Tiffany King and Ana Ivies for reading this early, being amazing and boosting my ego without me having to pay you!

Thank you to my Street Team for all of your hard work and support, especially my head honcho, Angie West-Ellis, who never hesitates to jump in and help me out. I love all of you and I’m so glad to have you on my team.

Thank you to Trish Patel-Brinkley for practically being my own personal signing planner! You are wonderful and I can never say enough good things about you for all of the hard work you’ve put in to each of the events this year.

Thank you to Rose Hunter for the quick, last minute legal advice!

Thank you to my “Wicked Girls” for being the best friends ever and for GOAT SCREAM.

Thank you to Jasinda Wilder, Katie Ashley, Raine Miller, RK Lilley and C.C. Wood for dealing with my swift ninja skills and knowing just the right words to yell to bring me to the yard.

Christina Collie – this one’s for you. And you better finish it, bitch! I love you!





Present day…



In the dark, cold room, I blink my eyes to focus, but all I can think about is the pain. It hurts to breathe and every inch of my body feels bruised and battered. Probably because it is.

Oh God! Why is this happening to me?

I try to move, to get up off of the hard floor, but my broken body isn’t cooperating. I need to find a way out of here or I won't survive this. I know with every part of my being that if I don’t leave this room, I’m going to die here. Alone.

The tears run down my face, and I can’t even move my arms to brush them away; something is holding them in place.

I slowly turn my head to the side, trying not to throw up from the pain that rushes through me with that one simple movement. I’m tied down to something, but I can’t make out what it is. The only light in the room comes from a street lamp right outside, which throws a thin ray of light through the small window close to the ceiling.

With all of the strength I can muster, I try to pull one of my arms free from whatever is holding me in place, the bindings cutting into my wrists and pain instantly shooting up my arm that's most likely broken in several places.

My scream echoes through the empty room and my throat aches from all the screaming I’ve already done…yesterday? The day before? I’m losing track of time.

Oh God, this is the arm I play with. This is the arm that cradles the guitar to my side and the fingers that strum the notes that take me away to another place. Notes and melodies that bring me back to life and allow me to be who I really am.

I know I’m going to pass out again soon. My vision is swimming. Spots flash before my eyes as I struggle to remain conscious.

Flashbacks of the past few months run through my mind like someone flipping the pages of a book, and my heart shatters at the memories. I should have seen what was happening. I should have listened to him from the beginning, but everything about him scared me. The force of what I felt for him shouldn’t have been so strong so quickly. He had my heart and my soul from the very first touch, the very first moment. But he didn’t want it. He didn’t want any of it. I trusted too quickly, gave too easily.

Trusting someone is what got me into this mess. I trusted the wrong person, and now I’m going to pay for it with my life. Someone who should have been there for me and protected me…it was all a lie from the very beginning. Deep down I knew it. I’d always known it. I just never wanted to believe the hatred ran that deep.

I let the darkness wash over me, knowing it’s the only way the pain will go away. I close my eyes, thinking back over the last eight years and wondering about all of the things I should have done differently, the choices I made that have led me to where I am now. If I had never let her control me, never succumbed to the undeniable connection I had to him…if we hadn’t experienced that initial pull towards each other, maybe things wouldn’t be ending this way.

I hear shouts and the pounding of footsteps in the distance, but I can’t force my eyes open no matter how hard I try. They are probably just coming back to finish the job, not satisfied with how much they have already broken me, how much they have already taken from me.

Maybe if I had realized sooner, listened earlier, put away my pride and the belief that everyone has some good in them deep down, I wouldn’t be where I am now—fighting for my life and wondering if the person I love cares enough to save me from this hell.





Three months ago…



Even though my mind is going a hundred miles a minute, worrying about how I’m going to pay the growing pile of bills in my hand and keep a roof over Gwen and Emma’s head, I'm still one hundred percent aware of my surroundings, a blessing and a curse given to me by Uncle Sam.

The four-door, blue sedan parked three spots down from me has a rear tire that's losing air and will most likely blow a flat within three days.

The wind is blowing from the southeast at around five miles per hour.

Fireside Bookshop, the store across the street, is three minutes and twenty-seven seconds late opening this morning.

Mr. Jensen, the owner of the building I rent, has a yappy, shit-kicker dog named Mitzy. They live upstairs from Marshall Investigations, and on nice days like today, he leaves a window open so Mitzy can get some fresh air.

Pushing open the door to the office with my shoulder, I sort through a stack of mail as I make my way inside, blindly reaching one hand out to the wall and flipping on the light switch as I walk by. Mitzy manages to bark thirty-five times from the moment I open my car door to when I reach the quiet tranquility of my office.

My dark f*cking office.

The fact I can barely see what’s written on the envelopes in my hand now that I’m inside the building and out of the bright, early morning Nashville sun can only mean one thing.

“Son of a bitch!” I angrily mutter to myself, shaking my head in irritation. I back up a few steps and feel across the wall with my hand, flicking the switch up and down a few more times and cursing under my breath once more just for the hell of it.

When the florescent lights from above fail to blind me, I smack the pile of bills and junk mail down on the closest desk with a loud snapping noise and make a move to touch the light switch again.

“Playing with it over and over is not going to miraculously pay the electric bill.”

The flat, unenthusiastic voice stops me mid-step, my hand in the air just hovering over the switch. I roll my eyes at Gwen as she walks into the office area from the kitchenette in the back. Every time she walks into a room, I can still feel my jaw drop slightly. My baby sister's always been the quiet one, never doing anything to draw attention to herself until she showed up on my doorstep one night looking like she'd gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson.

My parents live in a world where the country club dictates their every move. If what they're doing doesn't make them look good to snobby friends, they don't bother doing it, and unfortunately, that affected our childhood—Gwen's more than mine. She’s always been the picture perfect daughter: shy, well-mannered, wearing clothes and her hair just as Mother insisted.

When Gwen burst through my door that night and headed straight for the bathroom, I didn't know what to expect. A few minutes later she came out holding her long blonde ponytail in her fist, her tiny shoulders shaking with fury.

“Never again, Brady!” she half-cried, half yelled. “That woman is never going to tell me how to live my life again.” A little while later, we were slumped against the wall, and after I managed to calm her down, she laughed through the tears. “Guess I won't be catching the eye of a good man ever again without my beautiful long blonde hair and impeccable social etiquette.”

I gently ran a hand over her freshly battered skin and thought maybe that wasn't such a bad thing considering the “good” man she found had done that to her. Once the bruises faded and she stopped jumping from her own shadow, I took her to some fancy hair place down the street from my office, and they waved their magic wand over her hack job haircut and color from a box.

Standing in front of me now with her hands on her hips, impatiently tapping her foot, waiting for an answer, I don't even recognize her. Her hair is still short. Chopping it off with my straight edge razor didn't leave the stylist with much to work with, but they turned it into some type of edgy reverse bob or whatever it's called.

I squint my eyes and try to make out her hair color in the unlit office. “Is that purple and blue?” I ask, slightly shocked.

“Pretty bad ass, huh?” She smiles proudly.

Shrugging, I say, “At least you don't look like an emo a*shole anymore. The black made me feel like you were going to start worshiping the devil any minute.”

The sun starts to filter through the wooden venetian blinds, and I notice something sparkling on her face. “Gwen...” Protective big brother is starting to kick in, and it shows in my voice, but then I see her smile and I change my tone. “Is that a nose piercing?”

“Don't even start, Brady...”

I smile and admire the tiny diamond stud. It suits her, but I'll never get used to my five-foot-two, one-hundred-pound tiny wisp of a sister and her new found confidence.

“That’s a pretty cool stud,” I tell her, leaning back in my chair and kicking my feet on my desk so I can watch her annoyance turn to relief. “The nose ring isn’t bad either.”

My smirk puts the irritation back on her face, but I can see she’s trying to hide a smile by the way she’s fighting with the corners of her mouth.

“It’s really sad that you think so highly of yourself,” she tells me good-naturedly.

We both let out a laugh as she rolls her eyes at me and starts sorting some of the open case files on my desk.

It’s good to see her smile and laugh again. Real good.

When I finally pulled myself out of my six-month drunken bender, tired of filling my days and nights with cheap whiskey and even cheaper women from every strip club within a fifty mile radius, I decided to open up my own security specialist/private investigating firm. Gwen jumped at the chance to help me out. She had her own baggage, her own rough couple of years. She'd been working a dead end job as a waitress that was more trouble than it was worth ever since she showed up here, so it made her decision a no-brainer.

Her six-year-old daughter is in school full time now which gives her more freedom to come and go during the day. Managing the office side of my business lets her finally put that college degree in Business Administration to good use. Gwen is two years my junior, and is still the only member of my family who has never given up on me. I've been to hell and back this past year and never thought I would make it out alive. I put her through the f*cking ringer when she first got here. After the life she left behind, she didn’t deserve that shit from me. She deserves more, so much more. It's only been recently that I've realized how much she's done for me, how much she's always done for me, and just how much I’ve let her down.





Throwing the last few items from my dresser drawer into the camouflage duffel bag on my bed, I zipped it closed and slung the pack over my shoulder, hustling out of my room and down the front stairway before my father could get another word in to criticize me. Ever since I made the announcement I was joining the Navy over dinner two months ago, I was met with nothing but anger and shame from my parents. The shame came from my mother.

“What will everyone at the club think when I tell them you aren’t going to law school?” she asked in a horrified voice.

My father had always been an angry person, but he hid it well behind the twenty-five-year-old scotch and fancy suits. It wasn't until I dropped the bomb that I'd be leaving after graduation that his true colors came out. Apparently, “only poor people with no future and no direction go into the military. Not bright young men from affluent families with a reputation and a name to uphold.”

Little did he realize, I fit perfectly into his “poor and directionless” category. I had no money to my name because I would be damned if I took one penny from him. Ever. Even if I wanted to, he made it perfectly clear he wouldn’t support my frivolous dream of “goofing off on a boat and playing with guns.”

The day I got the results from my SATs, my father popped open a seven thousand dollar bottle of Perrier-Jouet Champagne and called up his good friend, the dean of students at Harvard Law, and asked him what kind of a donation would get me early admission. My future and the direction of my life suddenly began to choke me. I thought about going to work every day wearing a three-piece suit and arguing the innocence of people I knew were far from blameless. I thought about kissing the asses of Circuit and Supreme Court judges every single day like my father did and playing eighteen holes with opposing counsel and joking about the sad, underprivileged people who came to us for help.

I couldn't do it. I couldn't live my life like that. I wouldn't.

“You take one step out of that door, don’t you dare think about coming back here.”

The stern words spoken from the top of the stairs didn't even cause me to falter as I continued to the bottom step. He had made those same threats to me every single day for the past sixty days.

“Don’t worry, Dad. I wouldn’t DREAM of coming back here,” I replied as my steel-toed boots clacked across the marble floor in the foyer, refusing to turn around and look at him.

No matter who or what I was leaving behind, I had to leave―before it broke me.

“Brady! Wait!”

The panicked shout from the library stopped me in my tracks, kept me from the freedom just within my grasp. It was the ONLY voice that could stop me at this point. I dropped my duffel on the floor and turned just as my sixteen-year-old sister threw herself into my arms. With her face buried in my shoulder, she choked back tears and I wrapped my arms around her tightly and held her close.

“It’s okay, Gwenny, it’s okay,” I told her softly as I rubbed my hand against her back.

“Please, don’t leave. Don’t leave me,” she whispered.

“I’m just going away for a little while. I will never leave you. I promise.”





But I did leave her. I left and I never looked back. She did everything my parents told her, so in my mind, she became the enemy.

I will never forgive myself for leaving her behind, for walking away and letting that monster get his hooks in her and turn her into someone I hardly recognized. Gwen doesn't blame me. She would never blame me. But I know better. She SHOULD blame me. She should scream and yell and curse at me for walking away from the one person who really, truly loved me. She had come back into my life so I could save her, but she's saved me in more ways than she will ever know.

When she found out how I’d been spending my days and nights before she showed up on my doorstep, she took action. The dead, lifeless eyes that looked up into mine and begged for a place for her and my niece to stay, if only for the night were suddenly filled with determination. For someone who had lived in her own private hell for seven years, she wasn’t afraid to call me out on my bullshit. It only took six little words from her one night three months ago to make me pull my head out of my own ass.





When the f*ck did I put a tilt-a-whirl in my house? And when did tilt-a-whirl employees start smacking their riders?

“Brady! You son of a bitch! Wake up! God dammit, wake up!”

Gwen’s screams made the room stop spinning so I could finally focus, but too bad the spinning was now replaced with an ear-splitting headache.

“Jesus Christ! I’m up, I’m up. Stop smacking me,” I complained with a groan as I rolled over away from her and tried to get comfortable in my bed.

My eyes flew open when my hand smacked down in a puddle of vomit two inches from my face. I looked around and realized I was sprawled out on the kitchen floor wearing just my boxer briefs and the phone number of the stripper I was pretty sure I banged tonight written in black pen on my forearm.

“Where’s Emma?” I croaked, wincing at the raspy, worn-out sound of my own voice as I avoided the puke on the floor and pushed myself up to my feet, trying not to wobble but being unsuccessful.

Gwen quickly wrapped her arms around my torso, supporting my weight and helping me over to the sink to wash my hands and splash cold water on my face.

“She’s next door with Mrs. Nichols. I decided to come here first after my shift to check on you before I picked her up. Thank God I did. What a great way for your six-year-old niece to come home from the babysitter. Finding her uncle facedown in a pool of his own vomit, smelling like a hooker.”

Between the stale whiskey and the disgust in her voice, my stomach started to churn.

Still dripping with water, I squeezed my eyes shut as I turned the faucet off and flung my arm out to the side blindly as Gwen smacked a dry dishtowel in my hand.

“I don’t smell like hooker. Stripper maybe. Probably. But never hooker. That’s just gross,” I said with a laugh as I wiped the towel down the front of my face and chucked it into the sink.

“Don’t you dare,” she whispered, tears forming in her eyes. “Don’t you DARE make light of this. Do you honestly think it would have been fun for me to walk in here to find you dead? Do you think I like working my ass off at a job I HATE, spending too much time away from my baby who asks every day when she can see Daddy? Do you think it’s fun for me to worry all day, every day, if today is the day I’m going to have to plan your funeral?” She swiped angrily at the tears that poured down her cheeks. “You need to stop this, Brady. Right now. Nothing that happened was your fault. Not in the Dominican, not here in Nashville, and certainly not my marriage. None of it.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t stand to be in my own f*cking skin half the time, and I honestly didn’t know if I COULD stop what I was doing to myself.

“You promised me, Brady. You promised you’d never leave me,” she whispered.





Those six little words from Gwen that night were all it took to end the self-destruction. I said goodbye to the booze, goodbye to the random hook-ups with all the nameless, faceless women, and I said goodbye to the worry I saw etched all over Gwen’s face every single day when she looked at me. Unfortunately, the guilt and the nightmares that ate away at me every night wouldn’t be dismissed as easily. But I cleaned up my act, opened my own business, and made sure I would never, ever break that promise to Gwen again.

Except now I may have to if I can't figure out a way to pay the bills.

“Please tell me there's a few checks I can deposit in that stack of mail so we don’t have to work like the cavemen did. I am not in the mood to chisel stone instead of use the computer,” Gwen states as she walks up to me and leafs through the mail, tucking a blue strand of hair behind her ear.

“Bill, bill, bill, meet interested singles in your area, bill, bill...” she turns the envelopes over one by one and places them face down on the desk “...increase your penis size in just five days.” She purses her lips and lets out a sigh. “Awww, Brady, did you send away for something to enhance your teeny tiny weenie?”

Gwen laughs at her own joke while I stand there staring at her with my arms crossed over my chest and one eyebrow raised.

“No, I’m pretty sure that came free when you signed up for the Itty Bitty Titty Club,” I deadpan.

“Oh, you’re such a riot. Now tell me, what are you going to do about getting this electric turned on? Because hey, I’ve got a great idea. There's this awesome job where you can get paid up front―”

“No,” I interrupt before she's finished.

“Brady, stop being so damn stubborn.” She's starting to whine and I'm losing my patience. “They called again and raised the price. All you have to do is―”

“NO.” My feet slam back down to the floor, and I raise my voice, letting her know this isn't up for discussion.

“You don’t even want to know how much they want to pay you?” Gwen asks in a high pitch voice that makes me want to stab a pencil in my ear as she follows behind me like an annoying puppy—like Mitzy, but yappier.

“No amount of money is enough for me to follow around some pop star diva princess who has more money than she knows what to do with and probably invented this little stalker because her name hasn’t been in the tabloids in at least three point two days. Sorry, no.”

I press the power button on my computer, completely forgetting about the whole no-electricity dilemma.

“Hey, Einstein, last time I checked, computers run on electricity,” Gwen says cockily.

“It’s too early for this,” I mutter, scrubbing my hands over my face. “I need coffee.”

“In case you weren’t aware, coffee pots also run on electricity,” Gwen says with a smirk before she turns and walks over to her desk and takes a seat, turning her chair so she can stare at me and smile.

I ignore her gaze and pick up the phone to check my messages to see if any new clients had called overnight.

“Oh yeah, remember that new phone system you said would be more efficient? Guess what it runs on?”

I grind my teeth together and exhale loudly through my nose, counting to ten in my head before I do what I really want to―pick up the phone console and heave it across the room, preferably at my sister’s head. My mood instantly sobers when I remember the kind of life she's lived for the past seven years.

I slam the receiver down in its cradle and sit silently at my desk, tapping my fingers on the wood.

If I only had my well-being to worry about, this wouldn’t even be an issue. I'd decline the job and figure out another way to pay the bills. There's a cheating spouse job I had put on the back burner because it's boring as hell, but that would only last a day or two. It may pay the electric bill, but it won't pay Gwen’s salary. Asking her to quit her full-time waitressing job where she was guaranteed a paycheck puts added pressure on my shoulders. I'm still kicking myself in the ass every single day for being too caught up in the Navy SEALS, and then the police force, to notice what was going on with my own sister. I'll do right by her and make up for everything she's gone through if it's the last thing I do. Even if it means taking a job that goes against every single moral, ethical, and personal belief I’ve ever had.

When I first left the Navy SEALS a little over a year ago, I spent a few months with the Nashville police force. I experienced my fair share of celebrity craziness from arresting the spoiled daughter of a hotel mogul for a cocaine bender that left one of Nashville’s most popular restaurants trashed beyond recognition to turning down “tips” handed to me on the sly if I just did the collagen-injected, silicone-enhanced country music star one “teensy tiny favor” and not put that she was having sex with her underage back-up dancer when her husband came home and died of a heart-attack in my police report. I couldn’t make that shit up if I tried. I was quickly tiring of the outlandish, overindulgent, spoiled rich kids. After my last SEAL mission where my best friends had been injured, and an entire team of SEALS I'd known since the Naval Academy were all killed, I thought maybe the hustle and bustle of the Nashville police force would keep my mind off of the dark thoughts and endless guilt. All it did was make things worse.

Three months after moving to Nashville, I went out on a routine domestic violence call. Everything should have been cut and dry: separate the victim from the supposed attacker and get each of their statements so we could sort things out back at the station. I had no idea we were walking into a hostage situation and the husband had no intention of letting anyone live.

That night, my partner, a thirty-five-year-old father of four, a twenty-two-year-old mother, her little girl, and a very disturbed twenty-five-year-old young man all lost their lives.

How I managed to make it out alive is still a mystery.

My parents, world renowned doctor, Beth Marshall, and Supreme Court Judge, Patrick Marshall, incorrectly assumed their prodigal son would come running back home and do their bidding by becoming a son they could be proud of and brag about over mint juleps and games of Canasta once I left the Navy SEALS. They wrote me out of their lives once again when I chose to become a cop instead. My parents' blatant disapproval of my life choices and their constant need to remind me about how I wasn’t living up to their expectations pushed me further and further away until the only contact I had with them was the occasional greeting card on birthdays and major holidays.

Unfortunately, the distance I put between myself and my parents over the years also affected my baby sister. Gwen never agreed with their opinions of me, but at that time in my life, contact with her just brought the pain to the forefront. In order for me to excel at my job, I needed to remove all the negativity. I had thought Gwen was well taken care of and that was all that mattered. Even though I cut off contact long before that fateful SEAL mission, I still kept up with the news. I read all about her famous plastic surgeon husband and saw pictures of the smiling, happy couple at events throughout the years. I never really cared much for my brother-in-law the one time I met him at their wedding seven years earlier. He was pompous, had no sense of humor, and our parents treated him like the son they always wanted.