Chapter 30
Dorian
K atherine’s confession that she would follow me into Hell has me at her feet. I can’t be sure how I’ve won her love for me, but I plan to savor her half-opened eyes of adoration, her kneading fingers balling the fabric of my shirt, and her clinginess for as long as I’m able…until she comes back to her senses and hates me again.
I try my best not to hang off every word and whim of hers, but the few hours after her confession make it impossible. Compounded by the fact that I nearly lost her not twenty-four hours before, we’re stitched and bound together. It’s a helplessness that I’ll gladly submit to any day.
My mind races with all the ways to worship her tonight. I watch her standing in front of my dresser— our dresser, if I have any say—and I’m filled with affection.
Katherine’s got one of my workout shirts in her hand, her back to me. She stands still as if in thought.
I close in on her, coiling an arm around her waist and feathering kisses along the curve of her neck.
“I hate to be so impatient, kitten, but if you don’t hurry to bed, I think I may drag you there.”
Katherine doesn’t respond but instead sways in my arms.
“Kittie?”
I gently grasp her shoulders and slowly turn her. Her eyes are glazed over. I’ve never seen her face so pale before. There’s a slight tremble running through her beneath my touch.
“I don’t…feel—”
Katherine doesn’t finish her thought before her eyes roll back. Her body goes limp, and she collapses.
I catch her, narrowly preventing her from hitting the dresser as she falls. I gingerly lower her to the carpet, supporting her head.
“Katherine?”
I hold my breath that she’s fainted, but when she doesn’t rouse immediately, I realize she’s lost consciousness and move to her feet. Holding her ankles together, I lift her legs slightly, assuming her blood pressure dropped. A quick pat of my trouser pockets reveals that my phone isn’t anywhere nearby.
I shout for Raney twice. Katherine hasn’t even stirred, and the snarling sense of panic claws at my throat. Just as I’m about to scream for Raney a third time, she rushes into the room, nearly running into the doorframe.
“Oh my god!” she shrieks and falls to her knees at Katherine’s other side. “What happened?”
“She fainted,” I grind out through my teeth.
“Fainted? Dorian, she’s out cold! This isn’t just some fainting spell. Look at her!”
Katherine’s eyelashes flutter when I lower her legs back to the floor. Her lips move ever so slightly, but whatever she mumbles is so quiet and garbled that neither of us can interpret it.
“Katherine, sweetheart,” I call to her, soft but desperate, and press the back of my hand to her face. Her skin’s cold and clammy. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“For the love of God, Dorian—”
I lift my hand to shut Raney up just as more words slip from Katherine’s lips.
“I’m going to be late for school,” she mutters. “Tell mom…I forgot the ladder.”
The string of delirium makes me feel like my head is underwater. My vision narrows as realization slams into me.
A head injury. She must’ve hit her head when she fell from Tucker’s car. Unlike before, this one is a silent threat, maybe a small bleed on the brain. Has she been suffering this entire time and failed to say anything?
You’ve tried this entire time to keep her safe and close, the angel sneers on my shoulder, and here, you’ve killed her.
“ Dorian !” Raney cries, urgency bleeding from her words. She snaps me from my panic. “We’ve got to take her to the hospital now! ”
“I know!” I shout back, lifting my head.
We glare at each other for a few seconds before we both take a second to breathe. I adjust my hold on Katherine and slowly get to my feet, hoisting her up. As I carry her out downstairs and toward the garage, Raney rushes after us on my heels.
“We’re not going to have much time,” I explain in a rush. “I need you to get Cory, and you both need to remove any trace of you ever being here. Make sure both of your rooms look untouched. Find Katherine’s drawings of you and burn them.”
“What about Kittie’s stuff? Shouldn’t we make it look like she was never here?”
I shake my head, not following but not willing to stop to argue the details.
Raney understands my confusion without my explanation. “Wouldn’t the best course of action be to take a discreet vehicle and drop her off at the ER with a note? That way, it doesn’t implicate anyone?”
“You’re not seriously suggesting to me that I abandon her at the hospital emergency room.”
Raney’s face twists. The second we reach the kitchen, Raney smacks my arm as she passes me, throwing open the door. I don’t fail to catch her incredulous, furious face as I take Katherine into the garage.
“I’m not saying leave her there, dummy. Just don’t implicate yourself like a moron.”
“Katherine’s going to tell them the truth. I’ve already accepted that.”
“Don’t tell me you’re still this blind. She’s not going to tell anyone! She’ll lie to protect you.”
“No, she won’t,” I say, nodding toward the BMW and gesturing toward the back doors.
Raney flings open the back door and stands back. Her hands come fluttering back into view, hovering over Katherine’s head as if to cushion any potential bump against the car. I’m careful enough to lay her across the back seat without incident. Before I shut the door, I lift my eyes to my cousin.
Agony rips across Raney’s features as I climb into the driver’s seat.
“I can’t blame her in the slightest,” I continue with a sigh and start the engine. “It was a beautiful moment while it lasted.”
Raney doesn’t respond. She spins on her heels and hurries back into the kitchen, hopefully intent on following my orders.
Katherine stirs on the drive to the hospital. She calls out to me now and again, and I quietly assure her that I’m close by and to hold on.
Neither the angel nor demon on my shoulders are pleased with me. After all, this is all my fault. The first moment she stepped into my orbit, her entire life was damned.
We reach the hospital, and I throw the car into park. I watch Katherine lift her head slightly in the rearview. She hasn’t regained a drop of color on her face. Cracking one eye open, she glances out the window and seems to notice the corner of the yellow building.
“What are you doing?” she demands in a whisper.
“You need a hospital,” I explain thinly and climb out. When I round the other side and open the door, she tries to fight against me. “Please, Kittie. Let me take you inside.”
“You…can’t!” she gasps and drops her head against the seat, squinting her eyes as if she’s dizzy.
The disorientation proves too much for her to maintain any affective squirming. Before long, she lets me scoop her up, turn, and kick the door shut behind us.
The lobby of the emergency room is mercifully empty, or mostly. The dread of the situation affords me enough of a look of despair that two nurses hustle from behind the receptionist’s desk with a wheelchair. I hastily explain to them what I believe to be happening, and I’m grateful that we aren’t relegated to the waiting room with her in such a critical state.
I watch them wheel Katherine away, masochistically hoping that she can manage to turn back and look at me one last time. Never seeing her face again is a haunting certainty. But the doors close before I can savor one final glance.
“Sir, can I just get some information from you?” the receptionist calls, tearing me from Katherine’s magnetic pull.
I nod, lowering myself into the chair across from her.
“What’s her name?”
“Katherine Marie Starling.” My voice doesn’t feel like my own.
The name doesn’t pique her interest as she types it in. “Do you know her date of birth?”
“May 2nd, 2004.”
“And you said she was your friend, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“Do you happen to know her next of kin? Someone we can contact?”
I hesitate before pulling my phone out of my pocket and giving her Dana’s phone number. A myriad of different paths form in my head, but in the end, the simplest solution seems to be the easiest. Instead of leaving or lying to the receptionist, I accept my fate.
The time for lies has passed. I’ll face the proverbial reaper.
I wait until the receptionist dials Dana’s number and gets her on the phone before I turn away. I take a seat in one of the plastic chairs in the waiting area and listen to the receptionist. She only manages to get a few words out; when she mentions Katherine’s name, she stammers as if Dana keeps cutting her off.
People come and go. I have too much going on in my mind to be concerned with the continuous coughing, the low murmur of talking, and the paradoxically upbeat radio overhead. People shuffle around and get up and down from their seats, but they all become a blur.
I wait for the police. I expect them to arrive at any moment with handcuffs, disturbing the quiet of the emergency room, but minutes tick by, and nothing changes.
I expected to see Dana, but I didn’t think she’d beat the cops to the hospital. She rushes in with bloodshot and puffy eyes, bringing a warm burst of wind through the sliding doors. For some reason, I expect her to come storming at me to beat me with her purse.
Instead, she runs past the waiting area to the front desk, ignoring the young mother and her fussing toddler speaking with the receptionist. Dana hasn’t noticed me. I don’t exist; nothing aside from her daughter matters.
“I’m looking for Kittie Starling,” she tells the woman behind the desk, cutting the young mother off. “Please! She’s been missing for two hundred and fifteen days. I need to see my daughter.”
Has it been two hundred days? It hasn’t occurred to me that Dana has been counting each passing day, the hours, maybe even the seconds.
It all passed too quickly for me.
I consider retrieving and calming Dana, but I know it’ll only invite her rage. Luckily, a nurse pulls her aside to speak with her, which seems to sate her, even if it brings more tears. I assume the poor woman has been crying all the way to the hospital. I think about apologizing to her outright, but it wouldn’t be genuine. I feel bad for putting her through this pain, but the only thing I regret is Katherine getting injured.
Eventually, their quiet conversation ends. The nurse—Dana’s age, from the looks of it—pats her shoulders and gestures toward the waiting room.
Then, through the stream of tears, Dana spots me.
I don’t know what face I’m wearing. Would it be appropriate to wave or smile? I don’t feel keen on doing either. I stare blankly at her as she approaches me. She stands there, speechless, with a fistful of tissues crumpled against her cheek. I expect rage or accusations.
Instead, she flops down in the chair across from me.
“They said you brought her in,” she mumbles.
I can only nod slowly.
“You look as bad as I feel,” she says with a humorless tiny laugh that only confuses me.
I watch her, waiting for the torrent of screams and questions, but she only stares out the tinted windows.
When the silence becomes agonizing, I dare to ask, “Did they mention her condition?”
“She’s in surgery. It’s a bleed in her brain. They’re doing Burr holes. Again. Possibly removing a piece of skull.”
The ringing returns to my ears at the idea of someone cutting into Katherine’s head. A wave of nausea rolls over me.
Dana sniffs and finally turns her eyes back to me. “They told me she said you found her on the side of the road…near your house?”
“I…”
I prepare myself to answer barbed and heated questions, but her words feel like they knock my legs from out under me. Had Raney been right at every single turn? Will Katherine grant me this level of amnesty for all that I’ve done?
Dana fights to keep her tears at bay. More fall when an oncoming sob erupts. “It was Tucker.”
I try not to let surprise paint my features. I held onto the possibility that his body hadn’t even been found yet; I expected more police at my door, at the very least.
I decide to play dumb. “How do you know that?”
Dana blots her nose with her ruined tissue. She glares at the floor and says, “They found him in the woods. He killed himself.”
She goes silent, then, as if pain overwhelmed her.
When I sense that she needs encouragement, I ask, “Why didn’t you tell me? I didn’t know you were dealing with that.”
Dana scoffs, tears streaming down her face. “They only found him last night. When the police called me with the news and brought me in to identify his body, I didn’t let myself hope that it had anything to do with Kittie. How could it? Kittie hadn’t spoken to him since she was ten. I coaxed a happy birthday phone call out of him, but he stopped answering my calls after that.
“Imagine my surprise that he didn’t have anyone else in his life even to identify his body. Honestly, good riddance. No offense,” she adds with a sniff.
I hold up a hand. Were I not nearly shaking, sick with worry, I might need to fight laughter at that. Her unblinking anger in the face of death is after my own heart.
“But…the cops questioned if maybe she could be with him,” she says, and her voice breaks. “They found dusty shoe prints on the passenger side that they thought might be hers. They thought maybe he killed—”
Dana cuts herself off, breathing deeply to calm herself. Given how her throat tightens on the last word, I understand why she didn’t reach out. What she assumes is what I intended, but that doesn’t disperse the odd, gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“Then—” she says with a shaky exhale, “—the nurse…just now…told me that Kittie said it was Tucker. She said he’d taken her all those months ago. She’d gotten away just yesterday, while they were out driving.”
I blink. For a second, I don’t fully comprehend her words.
Luckily, Dana doesn’t misconstrue my shock. “They said you found her. Out on the road, walking toward your house. Did she tell you anything?”
I process this gift Katherine’s given me, especially in her disorientation. The more details I provide now, the higher the risk of conflicting with her story. The less I say overall, the better.
“No, she was out of it,” I tell her, “it’s a miracle I was out when I was.”
Dana begins to tear her tissue apart idly, sinking into silence. I have a feeling that the knowledge that her ex-husband was behind Katherine’s long disappearance gives her complicated feelings, far too many to delve into with me in the quiet lobby of the emergency room.
And though worry and heartbreak conquer most of her features, I can only stare at her in confusion.
God help me, the woman believes me.