Faithless Read Online Free PDF Page B

again.
    No one knew how to help you deal with it when death came into your own life. No one could take away the grief you felt knowing that your own actions had ended a life- no matter how nasty that life was. That was the kicker. As a cop, you learned pretty quickly that there was an “us” and a “them.” Lena never thought she’d mourn the loss of a “them,” but lately, that was all she could think about. And now there was another life taken, another death on her hands.
    She had been feeling death inside out for the last few days, and nothing could rid it from her senses. Her mouth tasted sour, every breath she drew fueling what smelled like decay. Her ears heard a constant shrill siren and there was a clamminess to her skin that made her feel as if she had borrowed it from a graveyard. Her body was not her own, her mind something she could no longer control. From the second she had left the clinic through the night they spent in an Atlanta hotel room to the moment she had walked through the door of her uncle’s house, all she could think about was what she had done, the bad decisions that had led her here.
    Lying in bed now, Lena looked out the window, staring at the depressing backyard. Hank hadn’t changed a thing in the house since Lena was a child. Her bedroom still had the brown water stain in the corner where a branch had punctured the roof during a storm. The paint peeled off the wall where he’d used the wrong kind of primer and the wallpaper had soaked up enough nicotine to give it all the same sickly jaundiced cast.
    Lena had grown up here with Sibyl, her twin sister. Their mother had died in childbirth and Calvin Adams, their father, had been shot on a traffic stop a few months before that. Sibyl had been killed three years ago. Another death, another abandonment. Maybe having her sister around had kept Lena rooted in life. Now she was drifting, making even more bad choices and not bothering to rectify them. She was living with the consequences of her actions. Or maybe barely surviving would be a better way to describe it.
    Lena touched her fingers to her stomach, to where the baby had been less than a week ago. Only one person was living with the consequences. Only one person had survived. Would the child have had her dark coloring, the genes of her Mexican-American grandmother surfacing yet again, or would it have inherited the father’s steel gray eyes and pale white skin?
    She lifted up, sliding her fingers into her back pocket, pulling out a long pocketknife. Carefully, she pried open the blade. The tip was broken off, and embedded in a semicircle of dried blood was Ethan’s fingerprint.
    She looked at her arm, the deep bruise where Ethan had grabbed her, and wondered how the finger that had made the swirling print in the blade, the hand that had held this knife, the fist that had caused so much pain, could be the same one that gently traced its way down her body.
    The cop in her knew she should arrest him. The woman in her knew that he was bad. The realist knew that one day he would kill her. Some unnamed place deep inside of Lena resisted these thoughts, and she found herself being the worst kind of coward. She was the woman throwing rocks at the police cruiser. She was the neighbor with the knife. She was the idiot kid clinging to her abuser. She was the one with tears deep inside her throat, choking on what he made her swallow.
    There was a knock on the door. “Lee?”
    She folded the blade by the edge, sitting up quickly. When Hank opened the door, she was clutching her stomach, feeling like something had torn.
    He went to her side, standing there with his fingers reaching out to her shoulder but not quite touching. “You okay?”
    “Sat up too fast.”
    He dropped his hand, tucking it into his pocket. “You feel like eating anything?”
    She nodded, lips slightly parted so she could take a few breaths.
    “You need help getting up?”
    “It’s been a week,” she said, as if that