No Rep by Lani Lynn Vale

CHAPTER 24

Brains are awesome. I wish everyone had one.

-Text from Mavis to Fran

FRAN

Leaving him with his dead grandmother felt like taking a knife straight to the heart.

But he’d asked for the time alone with her, and I wasn’t about to argue with him.

Plus, I felt like I was intruding.

I didn’t know what to do.

I didn’t know Madden’s number to call him and tell him. Hell, I didn’t even know who to call in the case of a death. The police? The justice of the peace? Paramedics?

Shit.

Thinking that I’d take that time he asked for to research what to do in the event of a natural death, I drove back to Taos’ place, my head in a fog.

Though I’d only spent one day with the woman, I knew that I would grieve harder for her than I would for my own grandmother that I’d known for my entire life.

My head was so focused on how bad my heart hurt, that I didn’t notice the signs.

I walked into the house, not thinking about serial killers and my name being out there, but about how sad Taos had looked when he’d walked through that door. The same door that, only hours ago, he’d walked out of with a huge smile on his face.

The first thing I noticed when I got into the living room was the entry table being a couple of inches away from the wall where it usually sat.

I frowned hard at it, dropped my keys onto the table, and then looked at the window where it’d been in front of.

I had just swung the door closed, reached for the lights, and then felt something wrap around my neck.

My automatic response was to struggle, and struggle I did.

I fought, kicked, screamed, and bit as I tried in vain to get away.

The man that had a hold of me, that had something wrapped around my neck, was so strong that I had no hope in getting him to let me go based on my strength alone.

By the time that he had me subdued, his big body lying on top of mine, pinning me to the ground, I had nothing left.

He was too big. Too strong. Too determined.

And my puny strength put against his was laughable.

“All done?” He laughed in my ear.

I closed my eyes as silent tears started to track down my cheeks.

“I don’t like it when they cry. I like it when they scream, punch and hit. It…” He dug his erection into my back, and my mind just… blanked.

I went to a place that was light. That there was no scary man holding me down, in the dark, and pressing things against me that no woman would ever want pressed against her.

Fight, girl.

Fight.

I heard the voice in my ear and knew without a shadow of a doubt that it hadn’t come from the man that it sounded like. It was part of my dissociative event. Something my therapist said that I did when I was coping in unhealthy ways.

After the first time that I was targeted by a serial killer, I’d met with a therapist who helped me get back on the road to being healthy, as well as a contributing member of society.

She’d told me that when I disconnected from my thoughts, feelings, and surroundings, I was escaping reality in an unhealthy way to try to cope with what had happened to me.

And I might have been.

Since I hadn’t experienced one of those events in a long time—at least since before I’d started CrossFit—until right then.

Right there.

But my irrational brain, and my rational brain, were warring.

Stay here where it’s okay.

Fight. Don’t just give up.

There were two very different thoughts.

Fight.

Fight.

Fight.

I came to again with the taste of blood in my mouth, the man laughing in my ear, and an understanding that if I didn’t fight right now, I would be getting something that I didn’t want. That I didn’t think that I could recover from.

Fight.

The man was busy trying to pull down his pants, but he was holding on to me as if he expected me to fight.

And about two seconds ago, it would’ve been something I had no intention of doing. I just couldn’t deal anymore. At least, that was then. This was now.

And I wouldn’t allow myself to go down like this without giving everything that I had to give. Because this was Taos’ house. He’d just suffered one of the hugest blows a man could suffer—losing his only other living relative. I wouldn’t make him come home to me dead, too.

So I had to fight.

When he shifted off of me to get to his pants, taking my complacency as me giving up, he shifted almost completely, leaving me the only opening I had a feeling I would get.

I bolted, scrambling on my hands and knees while he was struggling to get his dick out of his pants.

He looked up and laughed, happy that I once again had some fight in me.

I wasn’t sure what to think about it.

But what I thought and what I felt were two different things.

My usual MO was to overthink everything, to second-guess, and then triple-guess. How I felt was enraged.

So fucking pissed that I wanted to fight this motherfucker.

I ran, and ran hard, for the kitchen, knowing without a doubt that I wouldn’t be making it to the bedroom, or even out the door.

The guy’s dick may be out, and his pants halfway around his waist, but I wasn’t fooling myself.

He was big, in shape, older, but still able to move.

And he would overtake a girl in a heartbeat.

Which left me with one choice.

The kitchen.

The first thing that I got to was a paring knife that I’d left on the counter from dinner. I’d started to put it in the dishwasher earlier, but Taos had stopped me, saying putting knives in the dishwasher ruined them.

So I’d left it on the counter, intending to wash it later.

I reached for it at the same time that the man caught me.

His hand went into my hair at the same time my fingers closed around the knife.

I turned at the same time he yanked and had no choice but to go down or be pulled backward.

I went down but I didn’t go out.

The moment I hit the ground, I swung the knife at the back of his ankle.

He bellowed loudly and let me go, trying to step back on the injured foot, but he cried out in pain and fell backward, releasing the hold on my hair.

I scrambled back just as the front door slammed open so hard that it banged against the wall.

I hit the cabinets across the room and started to stand myself upright as my fucking grandmother walked through the damn door.

“Francine Pope, you will talk to me right now, or else!” she cried out as she walked into Taos’ house as if it was her own.

“Grandmother,” I gasped. “Call 911 and hurry back outside!”

My yell didn’t stop her forward movements. Instead, it only caused her to hurry.

She walked into the room with her cane, took one look at the man on the ground with his still-hard cock hanging out, then one look at me, disheveled and scared out of my ever-loving mind, then stuck her cane underneath her armpit and reached into her purse.

Then she pulled out the biggest motherfuckin’ gun I’d ever seen and aimed it at the would-be rapist’s face.

That’s when I realized who, exactly, had been in the house with me.

The serial killer that, by last count, had murdered seventeen women.

“You will remain on the floor or else,” my grandmother ordered.

The man laughed and got up, putting zero weight on his bad leg.

That’s when I saw all the blood.

It was everywhere.

He tried to take a step toward my grandmother, slipped in the blood, and tried to use his bad foot to catch himself.

It didn’t work.

All he managed to do was fall back to the ground.

The man cursed and tried to get back up, but my grandmother stupidly took a few steps toward him, placed her gun on top of the fridge, then went all professional golfer on the guy’s dick.

She switched the cane around until the grip was toward the ground, then used her forty years of golfing experience to take aim at the guy’s still-hard dick—how the hell was it still hard through all of this?

I physically heard the thwack of the guy’s dick getting smacked with the handle of her cane.

I would never, not ever, be able to describe it.

The low-life went down to the ground completely, then turned, or tried to turn, into the fetal position.

While he was distracted, my grandmother picked up the gun again, twisted the cane around, and then marched until she was standing over the man who was now crying—quite loudly—on the ground.

“I don’t know what you were trying to do,” she hissed as she aimed the gun right at the man’s face, “but I don’t like it when Popes are hurt.”

While the guy’s eyes were on her, aimed at the gun she had trained on his face, she did something with the cane.

I heard another ‘pop-like’ sound and felt my stomach curdle at the high-pitched scream that came out of the serial killer’s mouth.

I covered my mouth as I realized what she’d just done.

Ruptured his testicle. Or something. I wasn’t sure what. But her cane lifted from between his legs and she stepped back.

“Call the authorities,” my grandmother urged as she stood over the man. “Tell them the Popes are in trouble and need assistance.”

I didn’t tell them that.

After hurrying toward my grandmother’s discarded purse, I reached into it and pulled out her fancy phone with delicate rhinestones—rhinestones that were probably real—and called 911.

I told them that Taos Brady’s girlfriend was in trouble.

That would get them here way faster than anything else would.

I knew it.

• • •

TAOS

My heart was pounding as I hurried toward my front door.

There were about twenty-five police cars on my lawn and in my street.

Local police. State police. FBI. State troopers. You name it, and the agency was in my house.

Getting out of the patrol car that’d given me the lift here, I ran hard to the front door, scared as fuck of what I would see when I got inside.

The moment I breached the entrance of my door, a hundred-and-fifty-pound weight slammed directly into my chest, wrapped her legs around my torso, and clung on so tight that I knew she was scared.

“Oh, fuck. I’m so sorry, baby,” I whispered into her hair.

Fran didn’t reply.

Only held on while she shook. And shook hard.

My eyes met Chief Wilkerson’s, and I quietly asked what happened despite the shaking woman in my arms.

“Tell me,” I ordered.

Chief looked at the woman in my arms, then back to me.

“She showed up in your house, and he was already in it. We’re thinking, in your haste to leave, you forgot to set the alarm, and Pasqual took advantage. He was in here waiting, likely for you, when she arrived alone. He took advantage and tried to…” Chief Wilkerson trailed off.

“He didn’t succeed,” she whispered. “I channeled my inner Taos and got away when he was trying to undo his pants. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed that paring knife you refused to let me put into the dishwasher. When he grabbed my hair, I fell to the floor, and swiped out.”

“She severed his Achilles tendon,” Chief Wilkerson said when the woman in my arms trailed off. “Around that time, Madame Pope came in the door, ready to rip you a new asshole, and found them fighting instead. She held him at gunpoint with a fifty caliber and accidentally ruptured one of his nuts, that were still hanging out, might I add, with the end of her cane.”

“She took a swing at his hard dick, too, with the handle of it,” she whispered into my ear. “I didn’t tell them that part.”

I shuddered at the thought.

Both were downright heart-attack-inducing.

The woman sure did know how to go for the heart of a man.

“We arrived to find her still holding him at gunpoint. He’s currently at the hospital getting his dick and balls looked at,” Schultz said as he came into the room with Easton. “We got everything.”

My brows rose. “What?”

“He confessed. To everything,” he said. “Citing his anger at you for taking his buddy away that he used to play with. Worked his way back here, planned on doing it in his old stomping ground. Succeeded for a few months, and then you figured it out. The connection with their hair.” Schultz gestured at Fran’s hair, that was the only thing you could see since her face was buried so deeply into my neck.

I had to take a seat as the ramifications of the day hit me.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry for causing you trouble on this day.”

I pulled back, fisting my hand lightly in her hair to pull her back from my neck, and stared into her tear-filled eyes.

“Don’t you ever, not ever, think that you don’t come first with me,” I ordered. “Hell or high water, you need me and I’m here.” I paused. “I’m just sorry that you had to go through that alone.”

“Let me get to my sister, motherfucker!” I heard Mavis yell.

“Mavis,” I heard Murphy’s low voice urging her to be calm.

“Fuck you,” Mavis growled. “Thanks for the ride but go the fuck away.”

“Let me have your kid.”

The growl came, and then Mavis entered a few seconds later sans child, staring wildly around the room until she found her sister.

She came straight for us, throwing her arms around both of our necks as she buried her face between us and pulled Fran in close.

“I fucking hate our grandmother, but I love what she did,” she declared.

“I think that we’re going to have to invite her to our Vegas wedding,” I found myself saying, wanting to lighten the mood.

Mavis and Fran snorted in unison. “We wouldn’t go that far.” Fran sniffled.

Then I had two crying women in my arms, and I couldn’t help but think how lucky of a man I was.

I just wished that I had one other woman here with me.

• • •

Later that night, as the wee hours of the morning started to creep up on us, I lay in the bed, eyes wide open, holding the woman that meant the world to me.

“You’re thinking pretty hard up there,” she muttered as she flipped her head from resting on my right pec.

She moved until her head was in the middle of my sternum, and even in the dark, I could tell that she was staring at me.

“I…” I paused. “I can’t believe that I almost lost you.”

My admission caused her to pause for such a long time that I wasn’t sure she was going to reply.

But then she did.

“That could’ve broken me,” she whispered. “I dissociated for a little bit. Closed my mind off to what was happening, and it was really bad.”

I heard her swallow, but the thickness in my throat was so tight that I couldn’t get the words to leave my mouth.

“I kept hearing you tell me to fight. Fight, Fran. Fight.” I felt the wetness of tears on my chest, and I knew that she was crying again. “And I knew that I couldn’t do that to you. I couldn’t let you find me like that. So I fought.”

Thank God.

Thank God that she fought.

“I’m selling my house,” I told her. “I can’t… we can’t stay there anymore.”

She sighed. “I don’t think I want to, either.”

We were quiet for a few long seconds and then, “I want to kill him.”

She sighed. “I know you do. But just think, Grandmother is going to do things worse to him than killing him. Just let her do her thing.”

At her words, I realized she was right.

Pearl Pope had already done her best to make the fool’s life a living hell.

Pasqual didn’t have any idea what was coming. Pearl Pope was a force of fucking nature.