Shane's Fall (The Escort Series Book 2) (20 page)

“No! They’re the ones that lied,” he said.

“Because I asked them to.”

“No!” he said again.

“They had to choose between us Logan because I put them in that position. They knew you were stronger than me – that you’d find a way to deal with their betrayal.” She glanced down at her arm which she had finally stopped hiding with long-sleeved clothing. “They were worried about what I might do to myself if they told you the truth about the rape and the cutting.”

He pressed his fists against his head as he considered her words. “Why didn’t you just come to me in the first place? I would have protected you. I wouldn’t have let anyone take you from me.”

“I couldn’t risk losing you too, Logan.” Tears stuck in her throat and she swallowed hard. “I should have had more faith in you, but you’d already given up so much for me. I didn’t want to take your dream too.”

“I’m going to kill him,” he whispered coldly, his buzz seeming to fade.

“I need you in my life Logan. I need my brother back.” He sighed and fell silent. It was like he knew what was coming, but she said it anyway. “I need Shane too,” she said quietly, firmly.

“Savannah, you know what he is,” she began.

“You mean what you are?” Logan looked up at her then and his expression went blank when he figured out that she knew the truth about him. “I’m not judging you Logan. I think I know why you did it, but the truth is, it doesn’t matter to me. I love you.”

“He’s messed up, Savannah. I mean, really messed up,” Logan said. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on with him, but he’s changed since you left.”

“I know that, but we don’t get to pick who we fall in love with.” Logan sighed at her admission. “He wouldn’t give up on me, Logan. He was willing to give up his friendship with you to give me what I needed.”

Savannah shifted in her seat. “Did you ever think that maybe he only shows you what you want to see?” At Logan’s thoughtful silence, she continued. “His life is about conforming – being who the person he’s with needs him to be. You see him as what? A guy who likes to fuck for money? A spoiled, rich kid who’s had his whole life handed to him on a silver platter while you’ve had to work for everything you’ve got? Happy go lucky asshole without a care in the world? Shameless flirt? Whore?”

“Stop it!” Logan said, but he didn’t deny it and she saw the color in his face drain.

“You pretend to be someone you’re not for what, a couple hours a month? He has to do it every day, even with the friends he thinks of as family.” She leaned back in her chair. “And he’s so afraid you guys will reject him if you find out who he really is that he’d rather push you away first.” She fell silent and watched her brother process her words. When he finally leaned his head back against the bar, there were tears in his eyes and she realized she had managed to get through that thick head of his after all.

Chapter 16

Shane hurried through the sliding doors of the hospital and scanned the signs for the patient room numbers. He checked the text from Savannah again to confirm the room number and then rushed up the stairs. He hadn’t heard from her since he’d dropped her off at her brother’s bar. He’d watched her until he was sure she was safe inside and then he’d started driving. Between his mother’s confession this morning and Savannah showing up, he was a jumbled mess. Everybody kept fucking with what he expected. Gabe and Riley refused to let him go even after he unleashed his cruelty on them, his mother had actually begged
him
to forgive
her
after he’d dumped all his shit on her and Savannah came back to him every time he needed her and pulled him back from the brink.

The text had come twenty minutes ago, but he hadn’t seen it right away. When he finally did check his phone, his heart had caught in his throat at the message.

They found Gabe’s Mom. It’s bad.

A couple of minutes later she’d sent him the room number. He ached for Gabe, especially now that he knew how depraved Abby had become as a result of her addiction. He remembered her before the drugs too – she’d been fun and loving, a soccer mom type who adored her only son. She and Gabe had been a team and Shane had actually found himself envious of their relationship at times. But a handful of pills had changed all that and she had become a monster who destroyed everything in her path.

When he finally reached the room, he came to a crushing stop at the sight before him. Gabe stood by the head of the bed, Riley clutching his hand in both of hers. Logan and Savannah were on the side closer to where he stood in the doorway. But it was the woman in the bed that caused a shudder to do a slow crawl through his body. He hadn’t seen her in years, but it didn’t matter because he recognized nothing in the shell of a body lying under the white sheet. Tubes stuck out of her arms and another was down her throat, a machine nearby clearly pumping oxygen into her. She looked like a skeleton, her joints sticking out sharply against the material of her hospital gown. Her skin was gray in pallor, her closed eyes sunken into her head. Thin brown hair hung in clumps around her face. There were track marks up and down both her arms and between her fingers. Even her neck had several fresh lesions where she’d clearly used her jugular as an entry point for the heroin that had stolen her life.

He felt Savannah’s hand close over his and he forced his gaze away from the horror in front of him. Gabe nodded at him briefly in silent greeting and he could tell that his friend was torn between hating the woman his mother had become and loving the one she’d once been.

Shane felt a doctor brush past him and he moved back out of the way as a nurse followed. The nurse handed Gabe a clipboard and he heard the doctor’s gentle voice say, “After I turn off the ventilator, it will take a couple of minutes for her heart to slow and then it will stop completely. She won’t feel any pain. You can hold her hand if you want to.”

Bile rose in Shane’s throat as he realized what he was witnessing. He watched Gabe sign the paperwork. The nurse placed two chairs next to the bed for Riley and Gabe and then he felt Savannah tugging his hand as she pulled him out of the room, Logan right behind them. His last glimpse before the door closed was of Gabe reaching out to take his mother’s hand as the doctor switched a button on the breathing machine and then there was only the sound of the heart monitor as it tracked the last minutes of Abby Maddox’s life.

***

Savannah’s worry increased as she watched Shane’s agitation grow as he paced the small waiting room. She’d wanted to warn him about Abby’s condition before he arrived, but there hadn’t been enough time. She and Logan had spent most of the day cleaning up the bar after their talk. It had been nice to work alongside her brother, but he’d been distant and lost in thought. Not that she could blame him – she’d dumped a lot on him in the last few days. But it felt like they had a new place to start from and she was hopeful that he would find a way to start trusting those closest to him again. And she hoped he would start with Shane because choosing between them would be impossible. Somewhere along the way she had already decided she wouldn’t let Shane walk away from her. Now she just had to convince him of that.

Several minutes had passed since they left Gabe and Riley and Shane showed no signs of awareness to her or Logan’s presence. He was pale and his hands shook as he clenched and unclenched them. He looked like how she always felt when the urge to hurt herself overtook her. She finally got up and stood in his path. She was glad that he stopped before mowing her over – it meant that part of him was still there with them.

“Are you okay?” she asked. She was surprised when he shook his head almost violently.

“I can’t do this,” he said softly. “I’m sorry.”

A chill went through her at the resignation in his voice. “Shane,” she began but he grabbed her by the upper arms, his grip almost painful. She saw Logan rise out of his chair but he didn’t intervene.

Shane pulled her into his arms and she felt his rapid breath on her neck as he clutched her almost desperately. He didn’t kiss or caress her, just held on to her. His body was cold and she felt a tremor go through him. “Shane-” she said as panic seeped into her.

“I love you Savannah,” he whispered against her ear. “I love you so much,” he said in an agonized voice and then, just like that, he released her and left the room. She was so stunned by what he had said and the finality with which he had said it that it took her several precious moments to realize he was gone. She felt Logan’s presence behind her, but she ignored the comforting hand he placed on her shoulder. Rushing to the waiting room door, she swung it open and searched the hallway but Shane was already gone.

She snatched her phone from her purse and dialed, but he didn’t answer. She was about to tell Logan she was going after Shane, but then the door across the waiting room opened and a shaky looking Riley and pale Gabe stepped out, hands tightly intertwined. As much as she wanted to leave, her friends needed her too. So she closed the distance between her and the couple and wrapped her arms around them both. She felt Logan’s arms there as well and then the tears began to fall.

***

By the time Savannah convinced the landlord that she was Shane’s fiancé and had gotten locked out of their apartment, a full hour had passed since he’d left her standing in the hospital waiting room. She called and texted dozens of times, pleading with him to call her back, but there’d been nothing but silence. The words she had longed to hear scared the hell out of her now because of how he’d said them…final, permanent. Like he was leaving and didn’t expect to be coming back.

She stayed by Gabe and Riley’s side for as long as she could, but her instincts told her that she needed to get to Shane so she’d excused herself to go to the bathroom and left the hospital. She’d lucked out that Logan had given her the keys to his car to keep in her purse and she didn’t feel even an ounce of guilt for taking it. As soon as she was safely out of the parking lot, she called her brother and told him where she was going. He had ordered her back to the safety of the hospital, but she’d hung up on him. When he called the second time and instantly started yelling at her, she hung up on him again. By the third call, he was noticeably calmer and nicely asked her to call him when she was at Shane’s.

Savannah’s fingers shook as she put the key in the lock and turned. She sighed in relief when the door didn’t catch – she had worried that he might have secured the door further by using the chain above the lock. His apartment was dark and cold and eerily silent. If she hadn’t seen his car out front, she would have guessed he wasn’t home. She locked the door behind her and rushed up the stairs, her feet sounding heavy on the wood stairs.

A prayer of thanks went through her at the sight of him sitting on the edge of his bed. Her darkest thoughts had conjured up some truly horrible images of what she might find, so to see him upright brought instant relief. It was short-lived though, when her mind began to process what she was seeing. His head was hanging low, like he was studying his hands which were resting on his legs, palms down. He had removed his shirt at some point so she could clearly see that he had something tied around his left upper arm. The word “tourniquet” registered in her brain and she dropped her eyes to check for an injury, but there was none. That was when she saw the uncapped needle sitting on his nightstand, just inches away. A blackened spoon was next to it, a filthy looking brown substance coating the bottom. There was a lighter too and right next to that, a small bag with what looked like tiny white crystals in it.

She stepped closer to him, not sure if he was even aware of her presence. He didn’t say a word, didn’t look up at her. She dropped to her knees in front of him and put her hands on each side of his face and forced his head up. He was still cold, but his breathing was slow and even.

“I didn’t do it,” he whispered as he slowly covered one of her hands with his. At his words, she sucked in a breath and then looked at the syringe. Sure enough, it was full of the same substance that was in the spoon. A glance at his arm showed no needle marks.

She reached up to release the length of rubber he’d wrapped around his arm and he winced as the blood started flowing again. It made her wonder how long he’d been sitting there like that.

“I’m so proud of you Shane,” she said as she fought back her tears.

“Get rid of it please,” he asked, his eyes staring straight ahead as if he were afraid to look at the drugs. She snatched up the bag and spoon and then carefully capped the needle. She went into his bathroom and looked around, then grabbed the bottle of conditioner from his shower. After unscrewing the cap, she painstakingly emptied the contents of the bag into the half-full container, then squirted the contents of the syringe into it too before finally dropping the needle into the thick plastic bottle. She added some water to the container and then recapped it and dropped it into the trash.

Shane was sitting in the same position she’d left him in. She dropped back down in front of him and reached up to curl his unruly hair behind his ears.

“Tell me what’s going on Shane,” she said.

He was quiet for a long time, silent tears dripping down his face. “I’ve been fighting it for so long, but when I saw her tonight,” he began but then stuttered to a halt.

“You mean Abby,” she prodded.

He nodded. “I’m going to be like her one day. It’s going to win.”

“What is?” she asked gently.

“The heroin. I can still taste it even after eight years.”

“Was that the last time you did it?”

“It was the only time,” he confessed. “I did some cocaine off and on for a few years, but it doesn’t have the same hold on me.”

She did the math in her head. “So you would have been around sixteen?” She was trying to get some of the warmth back into him by rubbing his hands between hers.

“I let my brother shoot me up,” he whispered.

She stilled at his words and then bit back the rage that went through her at the thought of his older brother doing that to him. “It’s okay Shane, you can tell me.”

“I found him using one day in his room. He was really high and he asked me if I wanted to know what it felt like. I let him do it Savannah. I wanted to know what could be worth so much that he would choose it over me, over everything else.” He pulled his hands free of hers and rubbed them through his hair. “From the second it hit my system, I knew it would haunt me for the rest of my life. I loved it – the burn, the taste of it at the back of my throat.”

“But you haven’t done it since then?”

He shook his head. “Michael realized what he’d done and made me promise not to do it again. I saw what it had done to him and Gabe’s mom and I fought it because I knew if I did it even one more time, I’d never be able to stop. When the cravings got too bad and everything would catch up with me, I’d snort some coke and be okay for a while.” When he started to yank at his hair, she grabbed his hands in hers again and was grateful when he didn’t fight her. “Then came the escorting. It was another rush that took the edge off, but it’s always there, taunting me.”

He pulled free of her and stood. He began moving around the room, much like he had been at the hospital. “I’m going to end up like her. There’s going to be a day when I can’t stop myself. When I choose it over everything else and it takes me and everyone around me down.”

“You’re strong Shane. You’ll beat this thing,” she said as she stood.

“Abby didn’t! She chose this shit over her own fucking son! She was one of the best moms I had ever seen and it twisted her into a depraved monster. She raped her own son!”

Savannah gasped at that. She hadn’t asked Gabe the details of his assault and had just automatically assumed it had been a man that had hurt him. She clutched her stomach.

“You can’t stay with me Savannah. I love you, but there will come a day when I choose the drugs over you and it will destroy you. That will be you in that fucking hospital room watching me take my last breath! But not until I take everything else from you – your pride, your strength, your hope. I won’t do that to you. Don’t fucking ask me to,” he shouted as he slammed his fist into the wall and then sank to the floor.

She was watching him slip away from her and the agony of it was tearing her apart. “No Shane,” she said fiercely. “No! You don’t get to decide this for me.” She stormed into the bathroom, grabbed his razor from his sink and went back to the bedroom. Dropping down in front of him, her fingers tore at the housing of the razor as she worked the blade free.