Perfectly Broken Read online

  Perfectly Broken

  By: Jullian Scott

  Copyright©2017 by Jullian Scott

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jack

  The small town of Dayton was only about a hundred miles away from downtown Chicago. The highway wrapped around Lake Michigan and the scenic drive wasn’t a bad way to spend a Friday afternoon in early October. Jack drove with the windows down, loosely following the driving instructions on his phone.

  He had never been to Dayton. In fact, Jack had never even heard of the town until Cassie moved there. He could still perfectly remember the day she had told him she was leaving. It was July 5, almost nine months after the day he found her. Jack hadn’t anticipated the news of her impending departure, but he also wasn’t exactly surprised. If anyone had a reason to leave town suddenly, it was Cassie Miller.

  Jack first crossed paths with her a year ago on an abnormally cold October day. In contrast, it was at least seventy degrees today. The weather wasn’t the only thing that had changed dramatically in the last year.

  The farther that Jack moved away from the city, the more he began to understand why Cassie had chosen to move to that area. As the sun danced over the surface of the lake, Jack took a deep breath and savored the fresh, unpolluted air. Following the directions that Cassie had sent him, Jack pulled off the highway at the exit that looped around Dayton. On the outskirts of town, he took a right onto an unpaved road and found Cassie’s home at the very end, over a hundred yards back from the main road. If she hadn’t given him explicit directions, Jack never would have found it. That was probably the whole reason she had chosen to live in that house.

  It was exactly the kind of home he could picture Cassie living in. Crisp white paint and a large wrap-around porch with two rocking chairs where Jack could imagine her drinking her morning coffee. He climbed from the car and stretched, enjoying the feeling of the sun on his skin. There would only be a few more days like this before a chilly autumn would make a brief appearance, only to be replaced by a brutal winter.

  A movement in the house caught Jack’s eye and made his heart flutter. He could see Cassie’s silhouette as she moved behind the thin curtains. When she finally opened the front door, Jack’s eyes found her face and his breath caught in his throat. She looked so flawlessly beautiful that Jack could hardly believe it was the same woman he had found in a filthy alley just a year ago.

  When she smiled, he knew it was the same Cassie that had captured his heart so long ago.

  “Jack,” she said, her soft voice causing his head to spin. It was then that he realized just how much he had missed Cassie. It was also that moment that he let himself remember Cassie, really remember her, and the terrible circumstances that had brought them together.

  The day Jack met Cassie he had already been a detective for five years. He had seen a lot of terrible things on the job, but none of that compared to what he would see that day. For six months, he had been hunting for a deranged serial killer that was targeting young women in Chicago. The killer was brutal and efficient. He had left a trail of three bodies and zero evidence pointing to his identity or motive. When the call came in that another body had been found, Jack wasn’t expecting much.

  His shoes crunched loudly over the dead leaves when he stepped into the alley. A neighbor throwing away his trash had found the body next to the dumpster. Over the last week, the news had been playing endless loops of Cassie’s disappearance, so it hadn’t been hard for the man to identify her. He claimed that he called the police immediately and hadn’t disturbed the body. Jack had the faintest glimmer of hope that maybe he would find something useful at the scene.

  A pair of feet was just visible around the corner of the dumpster and Jack recognized the red and purple sneakers. Cassie Miller’s boyfriend, Ben, had mentioned them at least a dozen times during questioning. He had been the last person to see her alive, but had never seriously been considered a suspect. Cassie’s disappearance had been too similar to the others and it had to be connected to the serial killer, but that didn’t stop Jack from grilling Ben. They were racing the clock to find Cassie while she was still alive and Jack had believed that Ben would be able to remember a key detail that would crack the case open. Instead, it had been a man taking out his trash and Cassie’s signature running shoes that had brought Jack to her.

  At the beginning of the case, right after she went missing, Jack spent hours staring at pictures of Cassie. He memorized her face, knowing that when times got hard and felt hopeless he would be able to rely on that to keep him motivated. It wasn’t hard to stare at Cassie. She was breathtakingly beautiful. Dark, flowing hair and wide green eyes with plump, pink lips that became slightly crooked when she smiled. But the Cassie he found by the dumpster was unrecognizable.

  She was lying on her back, her head facing away from Jack. He walked slowly around her outstretched feet to get a better look. When he saw her face- that once lovely and captivating face- a wave of nausea hit him. That face was now mangled, bruised and bloody, with her dark hair covering part of it. As Jack got a good look, he fought the wave of sickness rumbling in his stomach. To be good at the job, you learned to bury that part of your humanity. It was the only way to survive. But that day, all of Jack’s training disappeared.

  He crouched next to Cassie slowly, careful not to disturb anything while staring at her battered face. Swollen eyes surround by dark bruises and a busted lip. This wasn’t the woman he had spent days studying- this was evil personified.

  Another wave of nausea rolled through him and he fought back the urge to vomit. He thought that he saw the slightest movement of Cassie’s hand, but blamed it on his dizziness. But then Cassie opened her eyes. It was almost impossible to tell considering they were nothing more than slits surrounded by swollen tissue, but Jack detected a sliver of green.

  “She’s alive!” he yelled louder than he had ever yelled. He completely forgot that he was in the middle of a crime scene as he scooped her into his arms. It was then that he realized that she was covered in blood. It soaked through his suit jacket and stained his white dress shirt a vibrant shade of red. For the blood to be that fresh, she couldn’t have been out there very long. Her body was cold and frail in his arms as he searched for the source of the blood. Dozens of shallow cuts covered her body, but none of them appeared to be life-threatening.

  Jack yelled again for help and Cassie raised a shaking hand, touching his cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered. “You saved me.”

  Now Cassie was standing before Jack, looking more beautiful than he remembered. The bronze tinge of her skin made her look alive and full of energy. She looked stronger, too, and Jack speculated that she had taken up running again. She was wearing a pair of faded jeans with a white tank-top, her feet bare. Her hair was longer and it fluttered in the breeze.

  Jack was completely frozen- paralyzed by her beauty. He wanted to run to her and pull her into his arms. He wanted to tangle his hands in her hair and kiss those perfect lips. Most of all, he wanted to tell her how much he had missed her and that he was madly in love with her. But he didn’t do any of those things. He didn’t have to, because Cassie acted first.

  She tilted her head at him and her smile grew as she repeated his name, “Jack.” Then she sprang forward, t
aking the porch stairs two at a time as she closed the distance to his car in three long strides. Her feet left the ground as she jumped on him, her arms circling like a vice around his neck. Jack caught her easily, laughing into her neck and hair. He didn’t ever want to let go.

  Cassie stayed in the hospital for one week. Jack visited her every day, sometimes twice in a day, under the guise of the investigation. The truth was that he wanted to make sure she was doing okay. She had just barely gotten away from her captor. During questioning, Jack learned that she had been kept in a house not far from where she was found. She had managed to escape, but she hadn’t gotten far because of the blood loss. When she felt her body beginning to fail her, she tried to hide behind the dumpster. The neighbor had just barely found her in time.

  She was lucky, all the experts said so. Not only were her wounds superficial, but she also didn’t remember all the gory details about her time in captivity. For twelve days, she had been beaten, sexually assaulted, and starved. Once she was released from the hospital, it became clear that the psychological wounds had left deep scars. For weeks, she couldn’t sleep for more than a few minutes at a time and she couldn’t leave her apartment alone, and definitely not at night. Cassie had survived, but she was barely living.

  At first, Jack spent nearly all his time searching for her abductor. Whenever he finally took a break, he used the time to check in on Cassie. Sometimes it was just a quick call, but other times he stopped by her place with Chinese food or pizza. Her boyfriend stuck around for a while, but he couldn’t take the night terrors and the way Cassie flinched every time Ben touched her. After a few weeks, he split. When she told Jack about their breakup, her eyes were vacant. It may have taken Ben a few weeks to call it off, but Cassie had been checked out of their relationship from the beginning. Neither of them was really to blame. It was an impossible circumstance.

  After Ben left, Jack spent more and more time at Cassie’s place. He worried about her being there alone and the recluse lifestyle she had adopted. Reintroducing her to the world became Jack’s mission. He arranged trips to museums and coffee shops during the day. Eventually, dinners and movie nights were added to the repertoire. Jack worried that he might be pushing too much, but Cassie claimed that she felt safe with him. It probably didn’t hurt that he carried a gun.

  Just three months after he found her by the dumpster, everything changed. It started as Jack’s marriage ended. Lillian and Jack had been separated for almost six months at that point. She was tired of sharing Jack with his job and Jack was tired of share her with her boss. Cassie took the divorce harder than him. She felt guilty about the time he was spending with her when he should have been working to save his marriage- Cassie’s words, not Jack’s.

  At least a dozen times he explained to her that the marriage had ended long before Cassie came into his life, but Jack wasn’t sure that she ever believed him. Even though she felt guilty, Cassie never pushed him away. She needed him. In a perverse way, Jack needed her just as much. Before Cassie, his life was consumed by his job. One murder at a time, one criminal at a time. He had stopped seeing the victims, focusing only on the perpetrators. Jack had trouble sleeping and usually passed out after one too many glasses of scotch. He was angry all the time and was becoming his own worst nightmare- he was turning into his father.

  Cassie brought him back to life. She gave him a purpose and a reason to straighten out his life. In many ways, she was so much stronger than him. But she was also incredibly broken and he wanted nothing more than to help put her back together. Somewhere along the way, Jack fell in love with Cassie Miller.

  It was wrong. Jack knew that. He just didn’t care.

  She may have figured it out before he did. One night, he went over to her place determined to admit his feelings for her, but she stopped him. That was when she told Jack that she was leaving town. She claimed that she didn’t feel safe in the city, which was understandable. But part of Jack wondered if she was really leaving because of him. Regardless, he didn’t try to stop her. If leaving was what she needed to do to feel better, Jack had to let her go.

  That was three months ago. Three incredibly long, lonely months. In that time, Jack’s divorce had been finalized, his worthless father had called to let him know that he was dying, and Jack wasn’t any closer to finding Cassie’s attacker. He had returned to hating life and drinking away his troubles. But then his phone rang, and Cassie’s voice brought him back.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cassie

  Three months. That’s how long it had been since Jack and Cassie had been together. Now they were sitting next to one another on her rickety porch swing, sipping ice-cold beers and making pleasant conversation about the weather.

  “How’s work?” Cassie asked, shooting him a side-long glance. She was only asking to fill the awkward silence. It wasn’t like she enjoyed hearing about the unsolved cases that tortured Jack. She didn’t want that kind of ugliness in her life any longer and she wished it didn’t have to be part of Jack’s life either. But she would rather talk about that than revisit her own unsolved attack. She had moved on in the last few months, even if she would never be able to completely forget.

  “Work is fine,” Jack said noncommittally. Cassie took a long sip of beer, letting the coolness slide down slowly. Whenever she was around Jack, she felt the need to cool down. “You keeping busy?”

  She nodded. “I teach a couple of classes at the local community college. English and journalism. Not exactly glamorous, but it keeps my mind off things.”

  Prior to her abduction, Cassie had been a successful freelance copywriter and a professor at Northwestern University. Teaching a couple of classes at Dayton Community College was a big change, but the step down didn’t bother Cassie. It took a lot to bother her nowadays.

  “That’s good. It’s good that you are getting out.” Jack sounded like he was talking about his elderly grandmother.

  She laughed and slapped his arm lightly. “I’m not an invalid, Jack. I’m just a little crazy.”

  “You and me both.” He reached for Cassie’s hand and she instinctively turned it over, palm facing up. He placed his hand on top and laced his fingers through hers. It couldn’t be a coincidence that their hands fit together so perfectly.

  Jack sighed contentedly and said, “I’ve missed you, Cass.”

  “I’ve missed you, Jack.” She squeezed his hand. “That’s why I called.”

  Those first days and weeks after escaping her captor had been overwhelmingly traumatizing. Cassie hadn’t been able to process what she had endured. Her brain essentially shut down and she felt numb most of the time. It took all her energy to focus on the simplest of tasks. Getting out of bed was exhausting. Showering was nearly impossible. Sleep didn’t happen until her body was so tired she fell into unconsciousness.

  Ben had tried to stick by her in the beginning. They had only been dating a few months before the abduction and it was a lot for anyone to handle. Eventually, he grew tired of her neuroses and inability to open up to him. When he told Cassie that he thought it would be best if they had some time apart, she agreed without protest. At that moment in her life, she didn’t believe she would ever be happy again and it wasn’t fair to impose her misery on someone else.

  Then Jack came along. Technically, he was always there. He was the first face Cassie saw when she opened her eyes that day, but she didn’t really notice him at first. He was just another man who stared at her with pity in his eyes. One big difference though was that when he asked her questions about her ordeal, he kept eye contact the entire time, even when the answers were too painful to hear. The other men didn’t do that.

  At first, Jack would call to see how Cassie was doing. His were the only calls she answered in those days because she knew that he’d already heard the gory details. There was nothing she could say that would shock him. The same thing couldn’t be said for most of her friends who tiptoed around the obvious and flinched whenever they saw one of her scars. Ja
ck was different.

  His calls turned into visits, and the visits turned daily after Ben left. Jack didn’t like her spending so much time alone. Cassie didn’t really like being alone either. She was afraid. But when Jack was around, that fear went away. She started to live her life again. He made her laugh and plan for the future. Sometimes he slept on her couch after a long night of watching movies. He would pretend that he was too tired to make the trek to his own home, but she knew he was lying. Cassie had told him about how she had trouble sleeping and he knew that she felt safer with him there, with his gun there.

  The nights that he slept over were the only nights where she could truly rest. Slowly but surely, Jack was becoming the most important person in her life. That frightened her almost as much as her nightmares. She didn’t want to be dependent on anyone. She didn’t want to feel happy again because then she would have something to lose. Misery was easier.

  The first moment Cassie knew that she loved Jack happened seven months ago. It was a random Wednesday in March, and the weather was unseasonably warm. Jack stopped by to see how she was doing and he convinced her to follow him outside for some fresh air. Cassie’s building surrounded a courtyard with a large stone fountain in the center. She and Jack sat on the stone ledge and Cassie ran a hand over the surface of the water. The fountain was a couple of feet deep, and while the water was cold, it was not unbearable. Since everything had happened, Cassie had been drawn to extremes- too hot and too cold, bitter and sour. It was her way of getting past the numbness and feeling alive again.

  “How long do you think you could last in that water?” she asked Jack, nodding to the fountain. It was around sixty degrees outside, but the water was colder. One of her neighbors had their window open and soft music floated down to them.

  Jack considered her question for a minute and then shrugged. “There’s only one way to find out,” he said. Before Cassie knew what was happening, he was peeling off his socks and shoes. He swung his legs into the water and stood, holding out a hand to her. “You joining me?”