Break Us (Nikki Kill #3)
Jennifer Brown
DEDICATION
FOR SCOTT
YOU ARE THE SUNLIGHT THAT
MAKES THE RAINBOW POSSIBLE.
PROLOGUE
THE DOOR SEEMED flimsy. She probably could have kicked it in if she wanted to. And, at the moment, she really, really wanted to. She wanted to kick in everything in sight. She wanted to kick in the world. She had lost, and if there was one thing she could not stand, it was losing. If she kicked in the world, she could let everyone know—she had lost for now, but she would win in the end. Make no mistake about it.
She followed him through the flimsy door and dropped her bag on the carpet just inside, then peered around. Tacky, tacky, cheap, tacky, common, tasteless.
“I’m already bored,” she said.
“Don’t be like that. Give it a chance.” He hurried across the room and threw open the curtains, revealing a window almost the length of the whole wall. Sunlight flooded into her, causing her to squint, a small stab of pain lighting up in her temples. She cursed, but he ignored her. “What do you think?”
She followed him to the window, pressed her hand against it. It was warm. Her heels sank into the carpet, so she kicked them off and curled her toes into its fiber. At least the carpet was plush. Still tacky, but plush. A gull swooped past the window and winged into the distance, until it was a tiny, squawking dot. She turned, pressing her back against the toasty window, and faced him. “I’m not doing this forever.”
“Of course not,” he said. “There’s no intention of that.”
She paced through the living room, testing the cushion of the sofa with her palm. Plush, just like the carpet.
Okay, so maybe not quite as cheap as she’d originally thought.
“Let me show you the rest,” he said. He’d somehow gotten back over by the door—this place was way too small—and grabbed her bag.
She sank onto the sofa, propped her bare feet up on the coffee table, and closed her eyes. “I don’t feel like it.”
“At least let me show you your room. You can freshen up. I’ll make us some sandwiches.”
Her lip curled in disgust. Sandwiches? She didn’t eat sandwiches. Sandwiches made people fat. Sandwiches made people ordinary. She didn’t know why she kept having to prove it over and over again, but she was not ordinary. She was special. She was meant for better than this. She was meant for better than anything she’d ever been given in her life. How was it fair that she’d been gifted with so many talents and not one person—not one!—who could truly appreciate them?
“Well? You hungry?”
“I don’t think so.”
“We can talk.”
She opened one eye. “And what exactly is it you think I want to talk about?”
“You know exactly what,” he said, his face grave. He gestured toward the hallway with her bag again.
She sighed and pulled herself off the sofa. Already she felt herself getting cankles and dull hair and ragged cuticles. No, she could not do this forever. He stood aside and let her go down the hall first, even though she didn’t know where she was going. But damn straight she would lead. Because leading was what she was meant to do.
“Are we going to talk about getting rid of Nikki Kill?” she asked. So casual, even though the name Nikki Kill made her insides boil.
“No,” he said. “We’re going to talk about getting rid of you.”
She stopped, causing him to nearly bump into her, and turned her deadest eyes on him. Her lips pulled back in a snarl. “I told you I’m not doing this forever.”
“I told you, I have no intention of you doing this forever.” He grinned. One tooth stood just the tiniest bit out of line with the others. His lips looked dry. “Trust me,” he said. “I have something much better in mind.”
1
THE MINUTE I stepped out of my car, I knew I should have rolled down my window before lighting up. I stank. That’s what he would say, anyway. If he remembered how much he hated my smoking.
He might or he might not. The doctors said it would be that way. He’d remember some things and not others. He would forget again things he’d remembered just the day before. He would suddenly recall something silly and unimportant, or maybe something serious and very important, but there was no way to tell what would trigger him and no way to force him to recall everything we wanted him to recall. Basically, they said, the brain was as mysterious in injury as it was in health, and we just had to learn to live with it.
I was not great at learning to live with things.
We also had to learn to live with it if he got frustrated and headachy and short-tempered and tired. He’d been through a hell of a trauma, and it would take a while to put all the pieces of Chris Martinez back together again, even if he looked whole on the outside.
Those conversations happened in the early days—the ones right after he woke up, opening bloodshot eyes in swollen, purple sockets, darting glances around the room warily, as if he had come back from the other side and wasn’t sure where, or who, he’d come back to.
Maybe I was being dramatic. Maybe Chris Martinez was behind those eyes, present and accounted for, so serve-and-protect upstanding yellow you could get a sunburn off him, and I was too distracted by the blissful release from my crimson prison to see it.
I was so sick of crimson. Death, death, death. It followed my life like a grim shadow, rolling in and out on tides of deep, burnt red.
Mom, Peyton, Dru.
Vanessa.
And almost Chris.
Almost.
It had been three months since I’d last seen him. Right after he’d woken up and it had been clear that everything between us had changed. How could it stay the same when he didn’t remember anything more than my name? It hurt too much to be forgotten. And it annoyed me too much to be hurt.
Besides, his gaggle of cop buddies hung around, watching me like I was a suspect, like I had done this to him just by virtue of being in his life.
And they might not have been altogether wrong. If I hadn’t been in Chris’s life, he might have never been following Rigo Basile. Peyton’s murder would have remained an unsolved case, but he wouldn’t have had any reason to be at Tesori Antico, trading bullets with Bill Hollis. He wouldn’t have been walking across the street, distracted by the blood seeping through his shirt. He wouldn’t have been there at all when that black Monte Carlo rounded the corner.
But that Monte Carlo had nothing to do with the Hollises. At least not that I could tell. That black Monte Carlo was about something else. Something Chris wouldn’t let me in on. Something that had him driving around with bullet holes in the front panel of his car and had him checking sidewalks and doorways like he expected someone to jump out at him.
He’d been right to expect that, apparently. They’d caught him in that one rare instant that he wasn’t watching for them.
Whoever they were. I had a name—Heriberto. Someone he’d been searching for. But the last name was escaping me because it was associated in my mind with a color I didn’t expect and I usually relied on my synesthesia to help me remember things like words, numbers, and names. Heriberto’s last name wasn’t red, and it wasn’t exactly purple. . . .
Basically, I had nothing for the cops who caught me in the hallways, the waiting rooms, the cafeteria, peppering me with questions. You’re . . . close. What do you know? What did he tell you? Who did this? My answer was always the same: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. We weren’t that close.
We weren’t that close.
We were that close. But I was the only one who knew it. Even Chris didn’t know it anymore.
So I stayed away. It killed me, but I didn’t belong by his bedside. Not like the others. I paid attention to his progress from afar.