Wicked Ink by Misty Simon

said the police picked up your body. There was no one to ask unless I wanted to get pinned with your murder. I didn’t kill you but they would have thought I did. The first person I punished and put behind bars was the guy who knifed you. Jesse Santanos was doing time for your murder until some criminal took him out in the shower.”
    “What a pretty story. Unfortunately, it’s bullshit. Don’t lie to me. After I stuck by your side for a whole year, you flitted off without a second thought of me. You think the guy who held me captive didn’t enjoy telling me every time your name was mentioned on the street? He wanted you to come to him, so he could trade me for your loyalty. He even put the word out on the streets. You never did show up. And then I put a hole in his head.”
    Garrett took an involuntary step back. “I never heard anything. No one would even talk about you. I was told your funeral was way over, and they burned you to ashes before scattering you to the four winds. That’s the only story I heard.” And he’d believed every word of it, never knowing she had been out there alone. He couldn’t regret turning into someone good instead of continuing down the path he had been on, but he could regret her suffering.
    “Let me get you some help, Morgan. Maybe a stay in a psych ward will help you heal.” He heard her mention drugs but even that was something she could come back from with time.
    She began to cry, and he reached down to pick her up by her elbow.
    At the last minute, she grabbed the knife out of his chest and stabbed herself in the stomach, angling the weapon up to hit her heart.
    “Son of a bitch! Morgan, stay with me. Morgan!” He caught her before she hit the floor, cradling her while she bled out in his arms.
    Dory was beside him a moment later, the blindfold hanging around her neck as she gripped his shoulders. “Garrett. Garrett.” She shook him hard enough that he came out of his trance. He was full of poison and the need to hurt someone, anyone, right now before hunting down a very specific person. But whoever had taken Morgan’s soul and sanity was already long since dead. How the hell had she gotten out of his blindfold? His concentration had been split, that was how. His anger burned darker.
    “Get away from me,” he growled, not brooking any argument from her this time. “Don’t you fucking touch me.” He wanted to hold on to his fury.
    “Garrett, look at me.”
    “No, Dory, get the hell out of here like I told you to, or I’m going to call Jackson to come and get you. I don’t want you anywhere near this whole mess. It’s bad enough that you got dragged into it at all. I’m not going to let it get any worse. Just go.” He finally looked at her. “Please.”
    She must have seen something in his eyes that frightened her, because she backed up, then got to her feet and turned to flee, leaving him behind with Morgan still in his arms.
    * * *
    Dory did not feel the slightest bit bad for breaking into Garrett’s apartment and looking for Jackson’s number. Once she got him on the phone, she told him everything. Though he had grumbled, Jackson had gone after his friend.
    “You can’t save him if he doesn’t want to be saved, Dory. He hasn’t let anyone in but me for almost eighteen years, and even that’s tenuous at times,” he had told her before hanging up the phone.
    But Dory didn’t believe that. Sometimes you needed someone to tell you that you were worth saving before you asked for help.
    She baked, keeping one ear cocked toward the hallway. She had thought about just staying in Garrett’s apartment, but with little furniture and an empty refrigerator, there had been nothing to keep her occupied. Instead, she had kept her door cracked open to the hallway. There was no way he was going to make it past her to that damn chair.
    By the time her very plain and strictly by the recipe banana nut bread came out of the oven, she was ready to crawl out of her skin.