Broken Pretty Things by Amber Faye

Chapter 54

My eyes crackopen slowly in the middle of the night. Gunnar’s arms are tight around me, the soapy scent of his neck against my nose. I can hear the sound of his slow, deep breathing, and feel his heat against me.

I don’t know what it was that woke me up from such a soft, sweet moment, but I’m not upset about it. I can take a second and look up at his face, lips parted in a dream. With the moon behind him, he’s doused in pale light through the open window, and I reach up and touch his jaw. He hums in his sleep, and wraps his arms tighter around me.

Then I hear it again. A wailing sound, almost like the wind, but the trees I can see through the window are still. I blink a couple of times, feeling parched. It’s some animal, maybe a faraway cat, that woke me up. I extricate myself painfully from Gunnar’s arms and slip out of his bed, smoothing down my hair, and slipping out the door.

I walk down the stairs, trying not to wake up too much. I feel light, dreamy. I’ll just grab water from the fridge and go right back to bed. Resting my cheek on Gunnar’s chest always sends me right back to sleep.

But I hear that wailing sound again. This time, it becomes clear that the sound is coming from inside the house. The sound in this house, especially at night, tends to reverberate through the old walls and amplify itself no matter how quiet you’re trying to be. I learned that the hard way when I heard an entire performance, beginning to end, of Larissa blowing Logan three rooms over.

That’s probably what I’m hearing now, I realize, rolling my eyes. But I’m not going to go back up to bed just because my ex-friends like the thrill of being caught a little too much. Instead, I walk through the doorway and into the kitchen as if I have no idea what I’m walking in on.

He has her up on the kitchen counter, her pale legs wrapped around his waist. I see his ass, weirdly muscular and pale in the moonlight, pounding into her like his life depends on it. His head is dipped to lap at her cleavage, and her head is leaning back, eyes closed, her curly hair bouncing with his every thrust.

I clear my throat and head towards the cupboard to grab a glass.

At the sound, they both jump and Larissa muffles a scream with her hand. Logan scrambles to yank his pants back on, turning around to look at me, open-mouthed and panicking. It’s not until right then that I realize it’s not Logan at all. His hair is dark. For a second, as I try to make sense of what I’m seeing, it looks just like Gunnar. Then Ransom. But he’s a little taller, a little broader around the shoulders.

Spencer Rayne is fumbling with his belt, hands shaking. “Andie,” he stammers. “What you saw … it wasn’t. I wasn’t—”

“Oh, come on,” Larissa mutters, hopping off the counter and grabbing shorts from the floor, pulling them on. “She’s not stupid.”

“Oh my god,” I say as realization awakens my sleepy brain. “You’re her teacher. She’s your student.” I take a couple of steps back, disgusted. “She’s seventeen, dude. Aren’t you, like, thirty?”

“Twenty-nine,” he corrects, but then sharply shakes his head. He’s holding up his hands to me as if I’m brandishing a weapon. “It’s not what you think.”

“Uhh,” I say, because what do you say to that? “Because what I think is that I just walked in on you screwing one of your students.”

“We’re not screwing,” he says quickly, looking increasingly desperate as my eyes narrow further.

“It’s true,” Larissa says, stepping up and hooking her arm around his. “We’re in love.”

“When she’s eighteen, we’ll make it official. We’re not fucking, Andie, we’re together.”

“It’s complicated,” Larissa says. “But it’s super important that you keep it a secret, OK?” She twirls her hair in her fingers, biting her lip nervously. “He wants to work his way up the ladder. Be governor, and stuff. Right?” She walks her fingers up his arm, and his muscles stiffen at her touch, his eyes still on me. “Cole was cool with it, babe, so maybe everyone else will be, too? Like I said?”

“Cole was cool with it?” I ask, my hands tightening around the glass.

He still hasn’t said anything, or moved a muscle.

“Yeah, we came up with an agreement. Spencer told him a little about his dad’s agreement with Preston, and Cole was cool not telling anybody about us. Right, babe?” She looks up at him with stars in her eyes.

But his eyes aren’t on her at all.

They’re on me. And they keep darting to the left. I finally glance over to see what he’s looking at. The kitchen counter behind me contains a drying rack with a couple of plates … and a knife block.

That nagging feeling at the back of my brain moves from my subconscious to my conscious. The smell. In my room that night. It wasn’t medicinal, not quite. It was that same botanical gin I can see on the counter, smell now on Spencer Rayne’s controlled breaths.

His upper body twitches, anticipating the movement he’s about to make. I can see it. I can see the violence in his posture, in his eyes, before it happens.

“What are you doing?” I ask, almost inaudibly. “I won’t tell anybody.”

But he lunges for the knife block.

“Spencer, what the fuck?” Larissa screams.

“Shut the fuck up,” he spits at her over his shoulder. “I’m not going through this ag—”

I grab one of the drying plates and smash it over his head and he goes down to one knee. “Fuck!” he screams, a line of blood escaping from his hairline. “You fucking bitch.”

“Larissa, get away from him,” I say steadily, but she drops to her knees and grabs at his hands, trying to get a look at his head.

“You hit him, you hurt him,” she’s crying. He throws his arms in the air and pushes himself quickly to his feet. His face is a picture of panic, more than anything else, and he’s looking right at me. I turn and run, but even injured, he’s faster. He kicks out and catches the back of my knee. I crash to the linoleum and crawl a step before getting back to my feet.

When he circles his arm around my neck, I scream, and then when I’m out of air, I bite down on his bicep. He roars, and squeezes tighter. The edges of my vision start to cloud over, but I don’t stop struggling.

“Spencer,” Larissa is shrieking. I feel his body jolt, hard — hear a crack of skull on countertop — and then she crumples to the floor.

“I’m not doing this again,” he says roughly, pulling me back away from the doorway. “I’m not. You’re going to shut the fuck up about what you saw, Andie, you understand me? There won’t be any fucking blackmail, any fucking negotiation.”

He throws me hard against the handle of a cabinet, and I am temporarily paralyzed in pain, screaming while he twists my arm behind my back and slams his hand to my mouth.

“I shouldn’t have gone into your room that night,” he says. “But you’re so doe-eyed, so innocent, and you would not. Fucking. Stop. Snooping.” With every word he tugs on my arm further and I scream against his hand. “Going into Preston’s office? You stupid little bitch. Man. Fuck. I wanted to teach you what happens to people who try to mess with the Raynes, but your roommate stopped me.” He laughs, his breath hot against my face. My tears spill over his fingers.

I feel my arm strain, close to popping out of its joint, and the more I struggle the more pain screams through my body.

There’s a knife to my throat. “Try anything, I gut you.” He shoots a look over his shoulder. Larissa is still slumped to the floor. “Can’t believe I have to do this,” he says to himself, squeezing his eyes shut tight for a long moment before opening them again. “All the shit I went through to keep that little jailbait bitch, and now I have to get rid of her. I’m so fucking mad at you for this, Andie.” He says it like we’re bickering siblings.

When he takes a breath to center himself, opening his eyes, any emotion that was there is gone. His eyes are dull, devoid of anything that makes somebody look human.

If I’d thought Preston Rayne could look frightening, predatory, apathetic, I was wrong.

Spencer Raynes’s slack, blank face is hands down the most horrifying I have ever seen.

“She was the best piece of ass I’ve ever had,” he’s muttering as he places the knife between his teeth, and slips sailing rope around my face, into my mouth. Around my wrists. My back is still spasming, my lungs struggling to draw in air, my vision fuzzy. “Can you really blame a guy for wanting to hold onto that shit?” He gestures vaguely. “I mean.” He touches my cheekbone briefly, giving me a charming, boyish smile that makes bile creep up my throat. “I would have loved to see if those rumors about you were true, too. If you think you like it rough now, baby, you have no idea what I could have done to you.” He laughs softly, blowing at the hair fallen in front of my face. “I was so pissed off when you forgave my cousin before giving me a taste.” He licks his lips. I squirm, plain blooming up my spine.

“Spencer. What’s going on in here?” A croaking, tired voice from the doorway has him jump up and turn around.

“Gunnar, I’m really glad you’re here,” he says quickly.

I try to yell Gunnar’s name, try to get him to back up, try to say anything, but my tongue is flattened against the rope between my teeth and I can’t get anything out but a moan. Gunnar’s eyes fall on Larissa’s limp body. The rope around me.

“Andie walked in on me and Larissa talking. She misunderstood, overreacted, and she went crazy.” Spencer makes a ragged noise of distress, his hands over his face. “She said … shit, I don’t want to tell you this. She said I was hers, and she knocked Larissa out. I had no idea she felt that way about me. You have to believe me, I didn’t know … I mean, maybe I should have suspected. She was begging for extra tutoring. God, I ended up having to restrain her. Gunnar, I wanted so badly to believe everything I’d heard about her mental state was a lie, but this was really bad. Look at poor Larissa.”

“What are you doing here, Spence?”

“I wanted to come see Ransom before he has to go away,” Spencer sniffs. “I’m gonna miss that kid like crazy. But Andie came down here and just attacked Larissa while we were talking.”

I groan again. There’s nothing I can say or do.

“Shit,” Gunnar whispers. His gaze is flitting from Larissa to Spencer and back again. Then he looks at me, and he just looks sad. I shake my head, tears falling.

Don’t believe it.

Don’t believe this about me.

"Gunnar, she just freaked out. I don't know what to do. Poor Larissa looks really hurt."

"Don't worry," Gunnar says. "I know Andie. I know the kind of shit she does." His beautiful face twists into a sneer of disgust. "I'll get a phone. We can call the cops."

He starts to move away, but Spencer barks, "No." He wets his lips. "We can figure this out on our own. I teach you guys, I watched you guys grow up. I'm not letting her go down the same route as Ransom, or JJ. She's just been going through so much."

"So what do we do?"

"We can help her. Recommend she goes somewhere that can, you know, help her. With her lies. Her anger."

Gunnar looks torn, then gives a grim nod. "I think that's best," he says. "I'll get the first aid kit for Larissa, OK? You make sure Andie doesn't hurt herself. If they get hurt, we could get in trouble." Spencer nods, pushing his hair out of his face and then exhaling with relief when Gunnar leaves.

“You make sure this goes smoothly, and you all might make it out of here,” Spencer says, nudging my thigh with the tip of his shoe.

I stare at Larissa, whose hands twitch, to my relief, and then back at Spencer with knotted brows and wide eyes. He must understand what I’m thinking, because he lowers himself into a squat and studies my eyes.

“You think just because I hurt her that I don’t love her?” he asks me quietly. “Let me tell you, Andie Palmer. You have no idea what love is if you don’t see it in me, in my actions. The things I’ve done for her. She can handle some roughing up every now and again”—he gestures at her—“if she wants the good that comes with the bad.”

I try to say, “The good?!” but with the rope in my mouth, it comes out as, “Rr ud?!”

He chuckles, reaching out to pat my wrist. “You’re young. Maybe, if you play this right, you’ll grow up and you’ll learn what love is. Real love. The kind you’ll do anything to keep.” He gets back up, looking towards the doorway. “Where is my cousin with those first aid kits?” A muscle in his temple visibly twitches, and in a quick movement he ties Larissa’s hands together, hitches her over his shoulder, and grabs the ropes attached to my wrist.

When he pulls on them, I fall forward onto the linoleum. He yanks on them hard, threatening to twist my already sprained arm. I have no choice but to try to crawl across the cold kitchen floor, my spine and shoulder still white hot with pain.

“Gunnar,” Spencer calls through the house, his voice casual. “Kid? Where’d you get to?”

He makes his way into one of the cozy living rooms, hurls poor, stirring Larissa onto a couch, and then yanks me inside. I cough against the gag, stumbling into the room. Pushing through the pain like this is making me dizzy. My arm feels broken; my spine is screaming. Once I get back into a sitting position and steady my panicked breathing, I start to twist my wrists, chafing them against the tight knot. Of course, Spencer grew up in the lap of privilege. He’s been tying knots on the deck of a yacht since he could walk. Fuck.

He’s flipped the light on, and I squint into the brightness. Gunnar is rummaging through a couple of bags at the end of the room, but when the light fills the room and Spencer kicks the door shut, he raises up slowly. “Spence,” he says. “They doing OK?”

Spencer nods at the bags, and pulls the kitchen knife from his belt. “What you looking for in there? Is that where a first aid kit would be?”

Gunnar gives him a grin, as if he doesn’t notice the cold glint in his cousin’s eye. “Worth a look, right? Listen, we need to get our story str—” Spencer has hauled me to a sitting position, holding my wrist. I loosened the knot, hardly, but apparently noticeably enough. He tuts at me, holding the knife between his teeth again and yanking it tight. Even tighter than it was before. “Spencer. Be careful with them,” Gunnar warns. “Dad can’t protect us from everything.”

“Preston keeps two first aid kits. One is in the kitchen, where we just were,” Spencer says thoughtfully, stepping over my legs and towards Larissa, “and the other is in the closet by the back door. What were you looking for in the bags?” He tilts his head, looking at them. “Whose bag is that, anyway? Is that JJ’s?”

Gunnar shoves his hands into his pockets and shrugs, that easy smile still on his face. I whine behind the gag, willing for him to do something. Bolt for the door. The window. Something.

“If you’re thinking the cops just let JJ keep a gun …” Spencer says with a laugh. “He’s no Rayne. And they’re way out there, won’t be back for a while. No use screaming.”

“Why would we scream?” Gunnar asks, laughing like he’s playing along with some joke. “Why would I be looking for a gun? Come on, Spence, let’s just figure this out and call my dad and ask him what we should do. You know he’s cool.” He pauses. “Does he already know?”

“About what?” Spencer asks him calmly.

I close my eyes and will him not to say it. What we’re both thinking. “About Cole.”

Spencer sighs with irritation, any pretense completely over. Relief also rolls over his features. It must have been frustrating, exhausting, to pretend to be something he wasn’t for twenty-nine years. He rubs at the bridge of his nose with one hand, pointing at Gunnar with the knife with the other. “Alright,” he says. “I guess we’re doing this. Your father doesn’t know a whole lot. There’s no need for him to know details. He just wants me to take care of my shit on my own, quietly.”

Spencer brandishes the knife, his body between Gunnar and the door. “Don’t think about bolting,” he says. “I’ll gut your girl, and I’ll make it hurt.” Gunnar’s hands clench. “And don’t think about rushing me. We both know how badly it’ll go for you. I’m stronger, and I’m armed. Sit. Back against the wall.”

He uses the knife to point to the same wall I’m up against. “I need time to figure out a way to make it look like it wasn’t me,” he adds, as Gunnar, jaw clenched as he thinks, slides down the wall beside me, hands in his hair.

“You can’t kill all of us and make it look like suicide,” he says, his throat bobbing. “There’s too many of us.”

“Actually,” Spencer says, pacing up and down, “sure I can. The three of you, at least. You fell in love with the wrong girl.” He nods at me, looking darkly victorious. “Everybody knows that. And your best friend died. Your suicide writes itself. Your slutty redhead friend pretty much created a whole narrative for me last time. That’s what this town does. If it looks like one thing happened, they take the reins. Create a whole story. As dark and delicious as they can possibly make it. Dirt on people is like goddamn currency here.” He sneers. “I was happy just to let people think Cole was another troubled teenager. Wanted to read books, not play football, but daddy was pushy. It worked, but it still looked pretty weak in a suicide note. But the golden boy cheated on, played for a fool, by his childhood sweetheart? It was too good a story to pass up.”

“‘Life is heavy,’” Gunnar recites under his breath. “You were his English teacher. You knew his favorite books, his goals next year. His handwriting.” Spencer is still pacing, deep in thought.

“Maybe a gas leak got you all,” he says, and my ears are ringing with fear and helplessness. “Maybe you got into a little fight out on the lake, the boat capsized, and none of you made it back to shore. So many choices.”

“Why did you kill him?” Gunnar’s voice comes out quietly. Anyone else would mistake it for calm. Not me.

“Your perfect little friend was a punk,” Spencer is more than happy to provide. “Everybody thought the sun shone out of his ass. I never understood it. Angry little nouveau riche social climber nobody. His family was all new money, no real weight behind the name. Yet he acted like he was, well, you. Incomparable.” He shakes his head hard. “He walked in on me and my girl over there. Knew I was headed up the ladder, school board, governor, and beyond. Can you believe that bankrupt little shit threatened me? Told me I was to get him proof that Preston screwed his family over, or he’d out me. Well, I wasn’t ever going to play his game. But he followed me, found me at the Palace, got video of us.” He jerks his thumb at Larissa. “That was the last straw.”

Gunnar makes a noise of guttural disgust. Even he is unable to hide his visceral reaction to this story. I twist my hands, and he reaches over and grips my fingers.

Spencer nods to himself. “I think gas leak, maybe fire, is the way to go. Our fathers could even collect insurance. We get a new family lakehouse. It’s like nothing ever happened.”

“You won’t get away with any of this,” Gunnar starts, but Spencer snorts. I almost snort too.

Of course he will.

The sky is blue. Grass is green. A Rayne will never face a consequence.

“It’s a huge shame,” Spencer says, rubbing the back of his neck. “I wish there was a way to do this without losing you. But at least there’s still Ransom.” His cold eyes flick up to meet Gunnar’s. “Unless he comes home in the middle of all this.”

Gunnar gets to his feet, straightening his shirt. Spencer squares his posture, holding up the huge knife, a warning. “Sit back down.” He doesn’t. “Thank you for the confession,” he says.

Spencer laughs. “You gonna tell me you recorded me? Not a problem. I’ll wipe it from—”

“No,” Gunnar says, and nods behind him at the large window looking out onto inky blackness. “But I’m pretty sure that’s what he’s doing.”

Logan is hard to make out just outside the window, in the dark. His mouth is hanging open, his phone in his hand. It’s too late to wipe; he’s definitely streaming this live. Spencer takes a second, blinking as he tries to figure out what he’s seeing, and Gunnar launches forward. He takes a step, launching over the couch, and smacks into his cousin’s broad back. They tumble on the floor and I scream behind the gag as I try to get free.

Spencer pins Gunnar, pulling back his arm. The knife glints. Gunnar catches his arm, but Spencer is bigger, stronger, and inch by inch his arm lowers towards Gunnar’s tensing neck muscles.

With a piercing shriek, the fire poker is swung, catching Spencer’s back and snagging his shirt. He gasps in pain as Larissa staggers back, and Gunnar twists underneath him, swinging a punch, and then another. The two men struggle, Spencer wincing now at every movement. Larissa holds her palm to her forehead, and then she sees me and drops the poker, crawling towards me.

Muffled, I cry for her to go back and grab the weapon, but she reaches me and finishes what Gunnar and I started. Soon, the knot is loosened, and she carefully pries the rope from around my head. I cough, and get to my feet just in time to see Gunnar pin Spencer with the kitchen knife to his throat.

His entire body is swaying with ragged breaths. His jaw is set, lips pulled back. With the wildness in his eyes, and the stony apathy in Spencer’s, I can’t believe my mistake. I can’t believe I ever thought Gunnar was a monster.

His cousin’s lip lightly twitching into a smirk with a knife digging into his skin. That’s a monster. The boy panting, trembling, holding the blade to this killer’s throat? That’s just human.

“Gunnar,” I whisper. He doesn’t turn to look at me; I don’t want him to take his eyes off Spencer anyway. “Don’t do it.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” he barks, pressing it deeper. Spencer’s smirk remains on his lips, but there is some element of fear blooming now in his eyes.

“You’ll remember this for the rest of your life,” our English teacher says. It’s matter-of-fact. “Either a cherished memory you revisit again and again until you need more, or a nightmare that pulls you out of sleep every night you’re safe from the other nightmares.”

“Fuck you,” Gunnar spits.

“You think I don’t remember what you told me? Hate lying in a bed, trying to sleep, because the memories of finding your dead junkie mommy creep into your head as soon as you close your eyes in the silence? You’re weak, that’s what I thought then. Tried not to laugh. That’s what I think now, too. Weak. She let herself die, and so did Cole, by provoking us.” He struggles, but his jaw clenches. He’s in a lot of pain. “He wanted to come at our family, and he expected to live through it. Him doing what he did was basically suicide. He wanted to die.”

Gunnar finally finds words. “Then you must really want to die.” There’s something newly vicious in his voice. He’s losing control right in front of me.

“Don’t do it,” I say again. “It’s not your job. It’s not your responsibility to make things right.”

“She’s right,” a voice croaks from the doorway. JJ Waller, hands in the front pocket of his sweatshirt, leans on the door jamb.

“JJ knows, he understands,” I scramble to say. “It nearly ruined his life trying to get revenge. Right?” Under Gunnar’s pinning weight, Spencer starts to laugh.

“Right,” JJ says, his face pale and darkness around his eyes. “Right. She’s right.”

“JJ…?” I say, taking a tentative step over to him.

“Gunnar, man, get off him,” JJ grunts. Gunnar wrenches himself off of his cousin, knife still pointed at him, his shoulders heaving.

“The cops back home might not help,” he says, wiping his forehead with his forearm, “but out here, I think maybe they will. We just need to call the—”

JJ whips his hand out of the pocket of his hoodie, and I just about catch the sight of the gunmetal glint before the deafening bang goes off right beside my ear.

Ransom rushes at him just as he shoots a second time. “You moron,” I hear him scream. When JJ falls, I see Ransom kicking the gun out of his friend’s hand and pinning JJ before he can move for it.

Ears ringing, head screaming, I reach down and grab the gun away from everybody else. When I look up again, Gunnar has his arms wrapped around his body, and his eyes are wide with confusion. “JJ,” he says, and he leans back against the wall, looking down at himself.

“Gunnar,” JJ whispers. Gunnar sways. “No, no, wait, Gunnar. I didn’t mean—”

Then everybody is in the small room, and the chaos is too much to keep track of. And the pool of blood is growing, seeping into the rug, sliding in the gaps between floorboards, creeping towards our feet.

So much blood.

So much screaming.

I run to the other end of the room, kneel, and search Gunnar’s body for the source. Most of it is coming from a hole in Spencer’s abdomen, I think. I can’t tell. “You’re OK,” I tell Gunnar. “Are you OK?”

“No, no,” JJ is saying over and over, and Larissa is screaming, “Why does he still have a goddamn gun?” and Ransom is yelling, but I can’t really hear anymore. This town is not taking anybody from me ever again. His shoulder is seeping red, and I put pressure on it. His hand, bloodied, finds mine.

“I’m fine,” he mumbles. “I’m fine. It’s just nicked. Barely. The blood is his.”

“You didn’t believe him,” I say, brushing hair from his forehead.

“No, baby,” he says, his lips against my hair and his arms the only things keeping me up. “It’s you and me. It’s always been you and me. I’m never going to forget that. Ever again.”