Page 6 of Shattered Veil

“You have such good taste,” Cassie joked as she set my glass down in front of herself, taking it as her own.

“Cas,” Liam admonished her. “Stop bothering him.”

I sighed. “Uh huh. Good taste. Right. I’m, ah—I’m outta here tonight, actually.”

“Oh, come on, Jay,” Cassie complained. “Stay. Have fun. Please.”

The last word came out as a playful beg, and she pouted out her lower lip in a way that made me want to bite it. I considered her last word for only a moment until my brain damn near screamed at me.

“Early morning at work,” I lied, needlessly telling her, “Go ahead and drink my whiskey—I won’t.”

Luke and Claire griped from behind the counter, stating that the night was still plenty young. Zoey loudly agreed with them, and Liam mirrored similar thoughts aloud from the right of her.

I didn’t listen to them, though. I paid my tab, began walking toward the front door, and caught Cassie frowning as I chanced a peek back at her. She waved goodbye, I waved back, and I returned home to sleep, eat, and repeat.

Chapter 2

Iwoke with a flinch of my entire body, my heart and mind racing. I immediately rolled over and tapped my phone, which laid on my bedside table, to check the time, and it glowed as it read: 2:00 A.M.

On the goddamn dot.

I laid back with a grunt, placing my hand on my bare chest and finding it damp with a cool sheen of sweat. I grimaced, the feel of it along with the tremor of unease that ran in my veins an unwelcome one, and the memory of the dream remained vivid in my mind. I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes until I began to see stars, blinked hard, and sighed at what replayed in my brain.

His legs were warm. Skinny to the point that my hands wrapped around them completely, my thumb overlapping my index finger on either ankle as I helped carry him. Pale. So pale that I wondered if it was due to the stoppage of blood flow to his extremities. But warm—that was the biggest thing that I remembered about it, for whatever reason—his legs were still warm.

I thought about it as I sat in Claire and Zoey’s apartment a mere hour after we had disposed of him, watched him float away, and drove back to the complex. It was a ridiculous notion that we could all just go back to life as we all knew it, but that’s what I felt as though I was expected to do. I sat on the couch with my head in my hands for…fuck, I don’t know how long…and I was alone. Remarkably alone. Luke had Claire. Zoey had Liam—a fact that I was rapidly putting behind me. But as far as leaning on someone who could fully grasp the situation at hand, I had no one.

And it wasn’t until then that I realized that Cassie was also home alone, battling her own demons just as I was.

I audibly scoffed at the idea the first time I considered it, for I didn’t know her. It felt like I did, but I didn’t, really. I had only met her twelve hours previously, and in those hours, she managed to immediately drive her way right under my skin, scared the ever-living shit out of me by going against all of our suggestions, made me think she could be dead in the woods somewhere, and actively helped us all consider how to dispose of a corpse. I didn’t know her—but I was fairly certain that despite that, she and I were somehow trauma bonded just as the rest of our group was.

I mean, we dove toward each other while bullets were flying, for God’s sake. She yanked me away from a line of fire. And now, both of us were sitting in our own abodes, wrestling with what I could only assume were similar dark thoughts.

The more that I thought about it, the crazier it seemed that we weren’t in the comfort of each other’s presence…so, after the seventh time that I eyeballed my car keys on the kitchen table, I stood from the couch to grab them. I drove to Cassie’s place, which was straight north of me and directly into the woods. I parked in front of her tiny cabin of a house. I shut my car door loudly, as if I needed to announce my arrival, and I stood next to my vehicle for upward of a minute.

A full goddamn minute.

A full minute of attempting to talk myself out of being here. A full minute of telling myself that this was stupid. A full minute of wondering if sleep deprivation could drive someone insane.

And then, she opened her front door.

She stood on her patio in a flimsy pair of white shorts and an oversized navy t-shirt. Her hair up in a bun, her feet bare, her face tired, it was so quiet that she barely had to raise her voice to speak to me.

“What are you doing here?”

“Um…” I hesitated, my mind having gone blank, and I replied with a shrug, “I—I don’t fuckin’ know.”

She crossed her arms. “I’m not a woman that needs comforting, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m far from a damsel in distress—”

“I didn’t think you were,” I called back quickly.

“Then what?” she asked, her dark eyes narrowed in honest inquisition.

“I could use the company,” I admitted. “Could you?”

Her arms fell by her side, her defensive stature dropped, and she nodded.

“Do you like whiskey?”

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