Faithless Angel Read Online Free PDF Page A

stop.
    “Thanks again,” he said, the words enough to senda tremor along her nerve endings. “You won’t regret giving me this job.”
    She stared at the toes of her worn flats, resisting the urge to turn, to look into his eyes. “I already do,” she whispered, her voice so low she wondered if he could even hear it.
    If he did, he gave no indication. He murmured a quick, “I appreciate the chance,” then let his hand fall away.
    She forced her feet forward, fleeing the office into an afternoon that had turned even bleaker since the early morning. More rain, more rumbling thunder, and the ever-present feeling that somehow, in some way, Jesse Savage was responsible, not only for the storm that raged around her, but for the faint stirring of emotion within.
    Nothing had changed, Jesse thought as he wiped a hand over his rain-slick face and squinted into the darkness. With the sky thick with clouds, dusk seemed more like midnight. But even the darkness couldn’t hide the dilapidated structure that stood at the corner of Walter and Carpenter, smack-dab in the middle of the Third Ward, one of Houston’s high-crime slum areas.
    The condemned building had only three stories, but they seemed to tower over him. Grafitti covered most of the fading brick. Nothing but empty black holes existed where windows had once been what seemed like ages ago, though it hadn’t quite been a year.
    Funny how things could change in the blink of an eye. One minute the building had been modest but clean, home to several families with tight incomes, but now a bitter desolation surrounded the entire place, as if the end of the world had come and thisbuilding was all that remained. No people. No life, just a vacant, intimidating shell.
    Only the faint gleam of a candle from an upstairs window gave any indication that somebody still lived there. Illegally, of course. The neighborhood had taken a nosedive from bad to worse, and the few tenants who stayed inside were here because they had noplace else to go.
    But Jesse had someplace to go. He had something better waiting for him, a chance to ask forgiveness and ease his guilt, and Faith was his ticket to peace.
    He pushed her image aside—her pain-filled green eyes, her delicate features that reminded him of a china doll he’d found in an old Dumpster in back of Restoration, Texas’s only five-and-dime.
    He was far away from his hometown now, from those days when he’d still had a little faith of his own. It didn’t seem right to think of someone like Faith in a place like this. This was Jesse’s own private hell, where his demons lived and breathed. Where the past called to him and beckoned him inside.
    Even as reason screamed for him to leave, to walk on by and go back to the foster home, he couldn’t make his feet move. He knew why he’d come back, and he couldn’t resist the lure of this place. Maybe if he saw the inside one last time, just once, he could quiet the demons and get on with his business at Faith’s House. Maybe …
    He climbed over the board that read KEEP OUT and blocked the main doorway. Inside, the hallway was pitch black. The heavy scent of rotten food and urine overwhelmed him as he moved into the darkness toward the staircase at the far end of the corridor. His boots echoed in a steady rhythm, in tempo with the rain that pounded down outside.
    Jesse climbed three flights of stairs, feeling eyes peer at him from darkened doorways. No one said a word, but he sensed their presence. These were the people with nowhere else to go. Society ignored them. The city wanted them out of sight, and so they came to places like this, to escape the rain and the cold of the streets. Only, inside wasn’t much better, with its filth and the rats and the awful smell.
    The faint glow of a streetlight spilled through an open window, illuminating the faded yellow tape that blocked the doorway to apartment 3B. He stopped and simply stared for a long moment, wondering why he’d come back.