Luke didn’t know much about Naomi, or about the conditions that had brought her to the Templeton Heights Rehabilitation Center. He only knew that her job was the one Shayla currently occupied. Admittedly, he had little respect for drug addicts and thought that her story was guaranteed to be just as pathetic as the next.
It was a harsh way to operate, and he knew that. It was probably unfair to Naomi as well. But, for the short amount of time that Trojans MC had sold drugs, Luke had come in contact with enough unsavory characters to know that addiction was something even he found distasteful.
The rehab center looked exactly as he pictured it would. A fountain out front seemed designed to remind visitors that the people they were visiting were the moneyed version of addicts. These weren’t the sort that had to get clean on their own on the streets. These were the kind whose parents and loved ones sacrificed thousands of dollars to send off to do yoga and write in journals for weeks at a time.
The excitement of the girl beside him, who clearly cared for Naomi, was the only thing that kept him from staring around in distaste at everyone he saw and surely getting kicked out. Yes, the people there had made the decision to better their lives. To get better. But how many of them would relapse before long? And then how many more thousands of dollars would bring them back here?
After signing in at the front desk, Shayla and Luke headed into the elevator and up to the third floor. The bright, cheery surroundings were part hospital and part hotel. He saw room service trays outside some of the doors, with the half eaten remains of gourmet meals stacked on them in disarray.
Naomi’s room was different, somehow. Everything was neat and tidy, and there were no personal effects to clutter the space. She was a slight woman, and she greeted them at the door with a kind, if tired smile, and led them over to the chairs by the window at the back of the room.
Naomi’s brown hair had been shorn close to her head, and Luke doubted that it was by personal choice. At least not a sober personal choice. She had angular features, made even more angular by her half-starved appearance. Shayla seemed shocked to see her like she was.
“I didn’t realize…” Shayla began to say, trailing off.
“I know.” Naomi smiled, resting a frail hand on Shayla’s. “It looks worse than it is. I probably weighed the same when I was still at the station, but I just wore a lot of makeup.” She laughed, a tinkling sound that reminded Luke how she had probably gotten into television.
“Why did you decide you wanted to talk after all this time?” Shayla asked. “I thought you didn’t want to see anyone from your old life anymore.”
“Is that what Anthony told you?” Naomi said with a scowl.
Shayla nodded briefly.
“That man is a lying sack of shit.”
The abrupt nature of her comment and the delivery of it endeared Naomi immediately to Luke. He had never met her before, but at least they could form a bond over how much they hated Anthony.
As if sensing he was thinking about her, Naomi turned her head and looked at Luke. Her gaze was appraising, and she finished it with a smile. “I watched all of your segments, Mr. Cinder,” she said. She turned back to Shayla and addressed her next. “You did a great job. Both of you. But you especially, Shayla.”
“It was nothing…”
“I meant in snagging this one.” Naomi winked, trying to lighten the mood of the room. “Nicely played.”
Shayla laughed and grabbed Luke’s hand. “Yeah. It kind of just happened.”
“You can tell me all about it at another time,” Naomi said. “But I’m starting to clear my head a bit more, and there are some things I want to set straight. I asked you to come because I know that you took my position.” Her gaze shifted downward. “I’m worried that you might end up in some of the same...problems.”
Shayla looked confused, but didn’t contradict Naomi. “I’m listening.”
Naomi took a deep breath, gazing out the window. “I know that I’m the only one responsible for the way I’ve turned out. I’m not a fool.” She turned back and smiled wryly at the pair. “But I also know that there were factors pushing me to the actions I took.”
She was every bit as calm and composed as the room around her. Luke wondered if all the rooms looked like their inhabitants. Perhaps high tech gadgets strewn across the surfaces of the more jittery patients, their hands constantly reaching from one thing to the next. Maybe in the rooms of those crippled by depression and mental anguish there would be dark drapes and bottles of water in the bed, on the floor, beside the window, left there by their despondent inhabitant carelessly, then forgotten about.
Naomi started to speak again, and only the briefest twinkle in her eye gave away how much it pained her to do so. “Anthony was the one who suggested it. Well, pushed me to it. Did you know we were a couple?”
Shyla shook her head, shocked. “I knew you were close. I didn’t realize you were actually a couple.”
Naomi snorted. “Close. We were never close. The only thing that man has ever been close to is the devil when he sold his soul.” She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, trying to regain her composure. “He was really sweet at first. We started up around the time I started at KTMA. He wanted to keep it quiet at work, said it was personal.” She smiled wryly. “Just between him and I.”
Naomi picked a stray thread off of her mustard yellow cardigan. She examined it in the light and let it fall, drifting to the ground.
“I found out much later that he wanted to keep it quiet because it left his options open to sleep with whomever he pleased behind my back. By then it was too late, though. I was too far gone.”
“Too far gone?” Shayla’s eyes were as wide as dinner plates.
Naomi nodded. Luke noticed how she subtly clenched her fist, though she tried to hide it beside her in the armchair. “It started out simple at first. We’d have wine together on an evening, and he’d ply me with it anytime I had a bad day. Or a good day. Then just any day. I never noticed that he didn’t drink his.”
Shayla interrupted. “But he said you were hooked on cocaine, not alcohol.”
Naomi was clearly sensitive about the subject, and the look on her face made it clear that she resented the ungraceful way Shayla had interrupted. Luke knew that wasn’t like Shayla, and that she was just on edge because of her own experience with Anthony. He wondered whether Shayla would tell Naomi or not. Nevertheless, Naomi slid back her calm expression and inclined her head toward Shayla’s direction.
“The alcohol didn’t last long. I had a figure to keep in mind, and there are so very few things one can accomplish while they’re drunk. Besides, I was happiest in that mild stage of buzzed, when the world seems just right but hasn’t begun to blur at the edges.”
She hardly sounded like any alcoholic Luke had ever met. He supposed that’s why she wasn’t in here for that.
Naomi must have caught his expression. “I’m an alcoholic now, I won’t deny it. I still yearn for it all the time. I can almost taste the wine on my lips just talking about it. If it were up to me, I would’ve stayed with the booze. I was happy there, if lowly functioning.”
“Anthony made you give it up?” Shayla cocked her head to the side. “But I thought it was his idea?”
Naomi shook her head. “It was his idea of a gateway. He made it out that I had done wrong to myself. That I should be ashamed. He told me that I needed to stop before things got out of control.” She chuckled darkly. “I didn’t realize that things would always get out of control with him. Would continue getting out of control.”
She took a moment to take in a deep breath, stirring the dust motes in the air around her. Lit up by the sun as she was, Luke could see why she was made for TV. She glowed from their attention and the backlighting. Everything about her screamed storyteller. It was something he’d noticed about Shayla, too, though he’d never heard her tell a story of her own. He vowed to remedy that.
“So he took away my wine and I cried. I begged. But he had me so under his thumb that I knew I had to submit. What was I going to do? Complain to my friends that my secret boyfriend had taken away the fuel of my addiction? And I was too terrified of him to drink anything behind his back. He was obsessive. He followed me places. He smelled my breath. He looked through my things.” She glanced down at her hands. “It didn’t mean I didn’t try, at first.”
Shayla reached out and gently laid a hand on Naomi’s. “What happened?”
Naomi looked back up. “I got a punch to the gut. I threw up everything, everywhere.” She scowled. “When I was finished, he came to me and told me he was sorry. That this was his fault and that he would fix it for me. He slipped a bottle of pills in my hand and said they would accomplish the same task, but that I wouldn’t gain weight. I wouldn’t become undesirable. And I wouldn’t lose my job.”
Shayla gasped, horrified. She pulled back her hand like Naomi had burned her. Luke felt like his insides were burning too. Everything in him ached to get up and go to Anthony’s house right now and kill him. Maybe he didn’t know this Naomi woman at all, but Anthony had his sights set on his Shayla now. He wanted to end him before he got the chance to even try.
Naomi’s eyes hardened as she looked at Shayla, and Luke could see why. She was gaping like a fish, a face of pure disbelief on her face. She couldn’t believe that Naomi had stayed with him. Probably that she’d fallen for him in the first place, either. And Luke couldn’t blame her. After his experiences with the greasy fucker himself, it was difficult to imagine any situation where a person could put up with that.
Naomi wasn’t having any of it. “You have no idea what it was like,” she snapped. “Either of you.”
Shayla recovered quickly. “Naomi...I didn’t mean to...I don’t—”
“You do.” Naomi flexed her hand and forced it onto her thigh, open and splayed.
Luke felt the heat of Shayla’s shame, and it was accompanied by his own. After everything he’d been through in life, he had no right to judge this woman.
“I’m sorry for snapping,” Naomi said after a moment, her voice more even. “I’m still quite irritable from my withdrawals. And I’m furious at myself.” She took a deep breath, even as Shayla tried to protest that she had nothing to be sorry for. “No, no. You’re right to be skeptical of my character.” She sighed. “I am too.”
Shayla still hung her head in shame. “I guess I just never saw Anthony in the light that you did.”
Naomi smiled ruefully. “And I hope you never do. Because the light I saw him in was so false but so bright. He was my protector, saving me from myself. While I had fallen into a hole of darkness, he brought me mercy and forgiveness.” She shook her head. “I took the pills like a goddamn olive branch and swallowed them down greedily. In no time at all I was hooked, happier to wind my days away in that blissful, fuzzy state than I was anything else. I stopped going out and seeing friends. I stopped going out in general. All Anthony’s idea, of course.”
“But why?” Shayla furrowed her brow. “Why did he do that?”
Because he was a masochistic bastard, thought Luke. But Naomi had a different explanation.
“I don’t know if you’ve had many conversations with Anthony, Shayla, but that man lives and breathes power. He can’t get up in the morning if he doesn’t think he’ll have the chance to subjugate at least one person throughout the course of the day. He couldn’t get it up in bed if he wasn’t in complete control.”
Shayla’s hands began to tremble, and Luke thrust out his own and grabbed them. He wouldn’t let her find that out on her own. He simply wouldn’t. Luke would go to prison for Anthony’s murder if it meant never letting Shayla find out what kind of monster Anthony Blake truly was.
Naomi picked up on the shift in the air, and stared at Shayla quizzically. “Don’t tell me he’s got you too?”
Shayla sniffled. “I—” She broke off, her head diving between her hands. Luke reached over and pulled her to him, sliding her into his lap. He didn’t care that their intimate embrace had an audience. He only felt the dull wracking sobs of his tiny firecracker as she curled against him, broken. The only thing stopping him from getting out of that chair and raging all the way to KTMA right now was her weight on his thighs. He held her there for both of them.
Naomi’s face was blank, but she was trying too hard. Luke knew that it was taking everything she had, everything she’d learned here, not to crack in the same way. It was happening all over again, she must have thought. Anthony’s cycle repeated, like a night terror without the mercy of morning.
“I didn’t know,” Naomi said, her voice hoarse.
Shayla leaned up against Luke’s bracing arm, wiping under her eyes. She was trying so hard to be brave. It broke Luke’s heart.
“You couldn’t have. It’s a new thing.”
Naomi looked questioningly between them. “And he’s okay with this?”
Luke snapped. “Of course I’m not okay with it. Anthony’s trying to blackmail her.” Us. But he couldn’t reveal that to Shayla now. It would break her.
Naomi nodded with understanding. “I want to help.”
Shayla shook her head grimly. “I don’t think there’s anything you can do,” she said. “Even if Anthony backs down from what he has on me, he’s not the only one with ammo.” She looked up at Luke. “I know that if the Reapers MC have the video, then somebody’s been trying to rope you into this to.”
He smiled lightly down at her, brushing away one of her tears with the pad of his thumb. “I didn’t want to add to your problems.”
Shayla shook her head. “I want your problems.”
Naomi interrupted them, her eyes widening. “Reapers MC?” she asked. “The ones with those big oaf brothers?”
Luke’s eyes slid over to hers hesitantly. “How do you know that?”
“Anthony was working with those bastards,” she said. “It’s where he got my drugs. He was helping them ‘rebrand’, he used to say.”
Luke looked down at Shayla. “I think I have an idea how we’re going to get out of this mess.”