Page 1 of Bullet

Chapter 1

Lynette

“Please, Linny, I need your help.”

Cracking an eye open to find Willa hovering over me in the dark like a specter from a nightmare isn’t how I like to be prodded awake. It’s three in the morning, and I don’t want to be awake at three forany reason.

I roll over just enough so that Willa can slip into the king-sized bed behind me. She wraps her arm around me, snuggling close. I’m half a foot taller than her and slim where she’s curvy. It must be like embracing a sack of bones for her.

Sister cuddles are nice. They’d be nicer if I was ever on the receiving end of them when Willa didn’t want something. But shealwayswants something.

“What happened this time?”

“At that club I went to, there was a fight. It, uh, it might have been over me.”

I’d roll my eyes if my lids weren’t pressed so tight together. “I told you not to go there.”

“We’re not all married to the law. We don’t like to feel up stuffy, dusty old tomes as our idea of an exciting Friday night.”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t go out. You’re a grown woman.” It would be nice if she ever acted that way instead of constantly coming to me to bail her out of scrape after scrape, problem afterproblem. “I told you not to go to that club. It’s seedy. I don’t like it. You promised you wouldn’t.”

I gave her a lecture last year about her fake ID when I found out the hard way after a drunk and tearful middle of the night phone call. I made her promise she’d never lie to me again. She made me promise I’d let her have some freedom and maybe she’d consider trusting me with the truth.

It wasn’t a good agreement, but try stopping someone as willful as my sister.

We might have different dads, but she’d tell me that I’m built of the same stubborn streak and iron will.

“Linny?”

I smother a sigh and turn over so I can see her face. How many nights have ended up just like this, with her sliding into bed behind me, or prodding me awake with a tearful, plaintive expression?

“How do you know I didn’t go to that artsy place you wanted me to go to instead? Or to the salsa club?”

“Because if you had, then you wouldn’t be in here now.”

“Ugh, fine, okay. I went to Balmerano’s. There was this guy…”

That’s how it always starts. There’s always a guy. Willa hasn’t figured out yet that men are one thing and one thing only.Trouble.

When we lost our mom, we suffered that blow together, but I was the one who had to pick up the pieces. I’m not saying she didn’t grieve for years, but she didn’t have the responsibilities that I did. Willa got to be a regular teenager. She had boyfriends.I got her on the pill when she was fourteen and confided to me that she and her first serious boyfriend were starting to explore becoming sexual.

She enjoys her body and she enjoys sex, and that’s not a crime, but the men she attracts aren’t the kind that good boyfriend material is made of. They’re always some kind trouble.

It makes me glad that my own sex life is nonexistent.

“He didn’t look like anyone else. The crowd basically parted around him like he was freaking Moses,” she goes on. “He was scary hot.”

I treat her to the full eyeroll this time. “I think you mean you found him irresistiblebecausehe was scary.”

“Stop it.”

“Am I wrong?”

“Fine, whatever,” she pouts. “He had the whole bad boy thing down. Lots of leather, worn jeans, shorter hair, but this massive beard. Tons of ink.”

“Why do these stories always start the same and end the same?”

“I swear to god, Linny, it wasn’t like that.”

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