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  TOTALED

  Copyright © 2014 by Stacey Grice

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  All rights reserved.

  Edited by Erin Roth of Wise Owl Editing

  Photographs by Kristina Maor Photography

  Cover designed by Stacy T. Grice

  Cover models: Claire Gardner and Marvin Short

  DEDICATION

  For my dad,

  who would have loved that I am doing this.

  Prologue

  BREE

  Walking away from that hospital room didn’t feel right. I should’ve stayed with him. I shouldn’t have left his side. If he…when he woke up, I needed to be there. I couldn’t imagine waking up from a coma to unfamiliar surroundings and the realization that you’re alone. How terrifying. We had to make this quick.

  I followed behind, letting Drew lead the way to the elevators, mostly because I was too emotionally and physically exhausted to even pay attention to where I was going, but also because it felt nice to be led. I always appreciated that with Drew—I didn’t have to take charge.

  He held my hand firmly and confidently, softly rubbing his thumb over mine, each pass making me more aware of just how much I had missed him. I ached for him when we were apart. Allowing my head to fall to the side and rest onto his massive upper arm as the elevator descended, I felt the stress of the situation dissipating with every deep breath I finally permitted my body to take. With the obnoxious ding alerting us that we had arrived on the ground floor, Drew looked down at me and smiled a warm, comforting grin. I returned it with a slight curl of my lips and followed him out into the main lobby.

  We headed toward the hospital entrance, aiming to cross the street to the small sandwich shop. The very second the automatic double doors swung open, the chaos erupted around me. Activity and noise hit me with the force of a tsunami and before I even knew where it was coming from or to whom it was directed, I found myself hiding behind Drew’s large form. My Drew, safeguarding me from threat as always.

  My fists gripped the back of his shirt tightly in an attempt to shield my eyes from the blinding barrage of flash bulbs. I couldn’t see, and we weren’t moving. We were surrounded, unable to even take two steps forward. I was being nudged forward, probed and prodded aggressively as the noise became less of an unintelligible blur, the words clearing and turning into questions.

  The questions.

  The questions came, rapid fire, hurled at Drew from every direction.

  “Drew, over here! Are you injured?” came from my left.

  “Why are you in the hospital?” from my right.

  “Is this your girlfriend? Who’s the pretty girl, Drew?” from somewhere in front of me, as flashbulbs erupted again in quick succession, seemingly focused on me.

  When neither of us responded, the questions and comments turned a corner. They were awful. Rude. Ruthless.

  “Drew, who did you put into a coma? Is he going to live?”

  “Is it true that you’re under review by the UFC Commission after last night’s bar fight?”

  As the horrific scene escalated, I felt Drew getting angrier and angrier, his body stiffening and his arms pushing his way through the onslaught of people, me in tow.

  “Drew, is your real name Brian Dougherty?”

  Drew continued to move through the madness and I followed closely, my head ducked down as his was, watching my feet progress forward by baby steps. Drew finally yelled in response, “Please move! Leave us alone!”

  The flashes continued to blind us as the cameras snapped away. In a split second of clarity, a pause in the commotion, a loud baritone voice spoke the words that would change my world forever.

  “Brian Dougherty, did you really murder your parents?”

  Chapter One

  BREE

  Six months prior…

  “Come on, Bree! We’re burning daylight and wasting precious sun! How am I ever going to get rid of this pasty white, Casper the Friendly Ghost hue if I have to wait on you all morning?” I heard her screaming from the living room.

  That would be my closest friend, Sue. Her real name is actually Sloane, a beautiful Irish name, despite the fact that she’s half Puerto Rican and half German. She’s the girliest girl I’ve ever known; dainty, prissy and always the perfect picture of femininity, even wearing heels to the beach. I look like a giraffe on stilts when I try to wear high heels. My gorgeous friend has the body and confidence to attract the attention of every guy at the gym when she stops by. It’s slightly annoying, yet I envy the attention in some weird way. Guys don’t ever pay attention to me; probably because they see me more as a sister. They also know that if they ever looked at me for two seconds more than were absolutely necessary, my father would have their testicles in a vise. I live perpetually in the friend zone. Story of my life.

  “Oh, pipe down. I’m coming! Just one more minute!” I shouted in response, dumping the raw baby carrots into the crockpot, followed by the onion soup mix and water, then programming the cook time and placing the lid on the top. “I need to leave Liam a note so he knows we’re going to the beach!” I yelled from the kitchen into the living room. “He’ll get home, see that I’m not here, and immediately freak out if there’s no note. The second he calls my dad, we’ll find ourselves surrounded by whatever search party of hot-headed fighters they can manage to round up from the gym on short notice. I just don’t really want to deal with my overbearing, over-protective father today. I get one day off a week and I would prefer to limit my annoyance as much possible during it.” Just picturing the scene gave me anxiety as I dried my hands on the hand towel.

  I turned to see her rolling her eyes as she entered the kitchen. “Yeah, you’re probably right. I still don’t understand why a 22-year-old adult woman has to ask for permission to go places. I mean, it’s not like you’ve ever even been in any trouble before. You’re the most straight-laced person ever! I don’t see what the big deal is,” she huffed as she tapped her foot on the kitchen tile impatiently before making her way back into the living room.

  Her statement flustered me as I looked for a pen to write a note—it was right in front of me the entire time. “Well, you should understand by now that it’s not about asking permission, it’s about being considerate. I’m the only woman he has left in this world. He doesn’t want to lose me. It would devastate him if something ever happened to me,” I explained. It was really getting old having to constantly drive the importance of this into Sue’s thick skull.

  My family and I own and operate a gym in a small town on the East Coast of Florida. Not one of those fancy chain gyms with Zumba classes and lap swimming pools, a mixed martial arts gym. For forever it was just an old boxing gym, but we’ve evolved into MMA. My father, Patrick Murphy, owns it, and it was passed down from his father. I assume that one day it will be passed on to me. Liam could never handle the responsibility of owning and running a business.

  My mother died when I was thirteen years old in a car accident. Some asshole drunk driver t-boned her and she died at the scene. She was in the middle of preparing dinner for us one
evening and realized she’d forgotten to pick up fresh parsley. God forbid she use dried parsley flakes. Not my mother. She prided herself on her cooking and she was a damn fine cook. Everything was fresh and cooked from scratch. She would still be around cooking for us if it weren’t for her stubborn, fresh parsley loving ways. She ran up to the grocery store to get it and BAM! Our lives were forever altered. It completely wrecked my father, who hasn’t even looked at another woman in nine years. She was the love of his life. He also, subsequently, hasn’t had one sip of alcohol in those nine years. He swore off of the sauce since the accident was caused by some drunk who didn’t have enough decency to call a cab that day. Anyone who knew Patrick Murphy was shocked by his sudden abstinence. I can’t really remember an image of him at home or at any meal in my childhood without a drink in his hand. But not anymore. His drink, his round beer belly, and his rosy cheeks are long gone.

  And then there’s Liam, my twin brother. When she was thirty-five weeks pregnant, my mother went to her OB-GYN for a routine visit. Liam was apparently in some sort of fetal distress and we were both promptly delivered by emergency Cesarean section. We weren’t too terribly premature and should’ve done just fine, but Liam has never been just fine. He’s severely learning disabled; some doctors have even tried to diagnose him with some form of autism, but he was always way too socially appropriate to place him anywhere on the spectrum. He just has an incredibly low IQ. They question whether it’s due to his extended period of oxygen deprivation in the womb or something else, since nobody knows how long he was in distress before they got us out. People have always joked that all of the smarts went to my half of our mother’s stomach and Liam took all of the food because, to put it simply, he’s gigantic. You would never know he was born prematurely. He was born at 5 pounds, 1 ounce, and I was only 3 pounds, 6 ounces. He is now 6′3″ tall and 252 pounds of pure, rock hard muscle. He trains at the gym seven days a week, even though we’re only open six. He eats clean and abstains from alcohol and is hands down the healthiest person I have ever met. And the most disciplined. He lives at home with my father and me, really out of choice. He’s perfectly capable of living on his own, as am I. We just choose not to. Liam doesn’t work. He’s currently training to enter into the national MMA circuit.

  I still live at home because I don’t trust my father to live alone with Liam. He’s a wonderful father, but he has very little patience and I’m afraid they’d kill each other if I left them without a buffer.

  Liam isn’t only my twin, but it’s like our souls are connected. No one understands him as well as I do. That weird interconnected twin ESP thing that people talk about is completely legit. A few months ago, Liam caught a roundhouse kick to the side of his head and got a concussion. I immediately got a migraine headache that lasted two days. And I’m not even prone to migraines. When Liam and I were separated in school (we were in different classes) and he was being picked on or bullied, I could always sense that something was wrong with him. That didn’t happen too often, since Liam’s size has always been intimidating, but once in ninth grade, one of the senior football studs got frustrated with Liam not passing him the basketball in gym class and started pushing him around. That was a mistake. I was in English Lit and got the dreadful feeling that something was wrong with him. Running out of class and sprinting toward the basketball courts, where I knew he would be, I got there just in time to watch Liam, who had always hung around Dad’s gym but never been permitted to train before, perfectly execute a left jab, right hook combination to the football jerk’s face, making him stumble back, dazed and confused. Liam then picked the guy up, pile driving his body into the pavement, and locked up his arms and legs as the idiot tried to recover. He maneuvered his legs in the most beautiful triangle choke hold I’d ever seen an amateur perform. I was thinking that I needed to do something to stop it before he killed the guy, but was simultaneously frozen in admiration at how beautifully smooth the takedown was. The surrounding bystanders were equally shocked and just stood there watching, unsure of how to intervene, I assumed.

  My brother had subdued him with amazing ease and grace. It was a sight to see for anyone who knew what exactly they were looking at. As the poor guy’s face was turning a perfect shade of purple, I screamed Liam’s name and begged him to stop. As soon as my screaming reached Liam’s ears, he immediately let go. He got up, ran over to me, buried his head into the crook of my neck, and started sobbing. I just held him and we walked straight to the office. The principal sent us home after a long lecture and the following morning we got the call that Liam was expelled from school. That same day, my father let him start training in the gym. He had commented that if his son wasn’t good at school, he was going to allow him to excel in the one thing he was good at. Fighting.

  From that day on, I homeschooled Liam. Who else was going to do it? When I finished my school day, I came straight home and taught Liam his lessons, looked over all of his work, and helped him make corrections before submitting the final product through an online homeschooling program. We made a great team. I loved seeing my brother finally get something that he had always struggled with before. The problem wasn’t Liam. It was never Liam. It was the public school system. Sure, he isn’t the smartest guy, but you just have to know how to teach him. I know how his brain works and how to get through to him. I understand him and what he needs. We have a soul connection that you can’t possibly understand unless you also have a twin.

  I grabbed a piece of paper from the kitchen counter and quickly scribbled him a note.

  Liam,

  Sue and I are headed to the beach. We are going to the north end, beyond the big dune, to avoid the crowd. Should be gone until about 3. I have my cell if you need me for anything. Also, as you can see and smell, there is pot roast in the crockpot for dinner.

  Tá grá agam duit

  ~Bree

  I ended my note to Liam the same way I always did, Tá grá agam duit, which means “I love you” in Gaelic. It was the way we had said I love you since I could remember. My mother had whispered those sweet words to us even before we could talk or understand their meaning. It was just our family thing. We never left each other without saying it, never ended a letter or note without writing it, never went a day without letting each other know, in our own Murphy way, how we felt.

  “Okay Sue, I’m ready to go!” I called out into the living room.

  She rose from the couch, obviously texting on her phone. “It’s about time. Did you bring your SPF 3,000?” she joked, walking alongside me toward the door.

  “You make fun now because I’m cursed with my mother’s fair complexion,” I replied snidely, “but when we’re old hags, you’ll be all shriveled up and wrinkly. I’ll look twenty years younger than you and I’ll remind you that you too could’ve and should’ve gooped on the SPF 3,000.”

  She led the way down our foyer and opened the front door. “Well, we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”

  “It’s cross,” I corrected.

  “What?”

  “It’s cross that bridge, not burn it,” I responded.

  “Whatever. Before we’re old hags, I’ll just get plastic surgery and chemical peels to refresh my look,” she retorted, truly believing that it was just that simple. She really was a piece of work.

  “And where on Earth are you going to get the money for that?”

  “Hello? I’m going to marry rich, of course.”

  “You are a hot mess. Let’s go.”

  Chapter Two

  DREW

  Just when I thought I couldn’t possibly drive any more, I got distracted by the music. I had heard this song a hundred times, but this time the words resonated and seeped into my soul like never before. My eyes fixed on the white dotted-lined lanes ahead. I didn’t have to look on my dash to see the digital display of the title and artist.

  He sang of being on a journey and seeing visions of his life pass him by with every exit sign, doubting his strength, but wanting to se
e his loved one again.

  I felt the wall that I had built up begin to waver, the agonizing grief overwhelming me. The painful lyrics, ringing so true, hit home and I could no longer fight it. I felt every note vibrate through the speakers and strike through my hard shell like they had a direct electrical link to my heart. I sang along, the weight of all of the emotions cracking my voice randomly in between lyrics.

  As City and Colour’s “Hello, I’m in Delaware” ended, I tried to regain my composure. Zoning out again, I gazed ahead at the highway before me, silently praying for some way to heal. I heard a dinging noise as one of my indicator lights flashed, signaling a problem. It took me a moment to snap out of the emotional cloud I had trapped myself in and notice that something was wrong with my truck. The noises that were coming from the vehicle suggested that it was bad. My dashboard alert lights were on and blinking, screaming for attention.

  Is that smoke?

  My car is fucking smoking?

  No, no, no, no, no.

  This is not happening to me.

  I pulled the truck over onto the side of the road and got out to assess the damage, like I knew the first thing about cars. Smoke or steam, hell if I know which, was billowing out from under the hood and it reeked of burning oil, gasoline, metal, and most importantly, it smelled expensive. I could do nothing but yell.

  So I belted out to the sky, “You have got to be kidding me! I don’t have time for this shit! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I’m literally thirty minutes away from I-95 and this piece of shit car is overheating now? God, when I asked if this day could get any worse, it was a goddamned rhetorical question, NOT A FUCKING CHALLENGE! Christ Almighty, what am I going to do now?”

  “Well, you’d probably have a little more success with yer prayers if you’d stop cussin’ like a sailor!” someone said behind me, making me jump.