Chapter Forty-Eight Blake
Chapter Forty-Eight
Blake
“So, it’s done? The whole war thing that you never told us about.”
We were at home, all of us, including Levi. He stayed in the hospital for a couple days, but he’d been sleeping in Palma’s room ever since. She didn’t want him in the basement in case there was a chill down there. She’d been quite the nurse to him, and Levi was eating it up.
I was in my room, studying since I had a big test coming up, before Palma knocked on the door.
Nodding to the bed, I said, “Hey. Come in. I need a break anyway.”
She sat on the end.
“How’s Levi?”
“Oh.” A softness came over her, one that was showing up more and more regularly when Levi’s name was brought up. I was happy for her. I was happy for Levi too. “He’s good. Getting better. A few more months and his jaw will be back to being a smartass.”
I snorted. “Only way Levi would not be a smartass was if he were . . .” I gulped. Wrong word choice there. I couldn’t finish that statement.
“Yeah,” she said quietly, clearing her throat. “Good thing it didn’t come to that. For any of us.”
The people who died were Spence and his two brothers. West was fine. Walden was fine. Their people were all fine. Levi had fractured ribs and a broken jaw. Marshall’s family came up to take him to their home. As far as I knew, he was going to finish school online, at least for the semester.
“Have you been in contact with Marshall?”
She hesitated before nodding, then shrugging. “Just a phone call here and there. He’s okay. Being shot, being—what was done to us—it’s not normal. It can be traumatizing. You know?”
I almost laughed. “I’ve always been in foster care, but Miss Marcie’s house was the first where I felt safe. Before her place, the family—that foster mom shot herself.”
Palma gasped.
“I was in the room.” My throat was burning. “She killed herself because her husband was doing things. To her. To some of the other girls.”
“To you?”
“No.” A small blessing. “The family before that, well, they put locks on our doors, and we were only allowed out when our social workers showed up. I was lucky. I got a good social worker. He recognized something was wrong and got me out of there.”
“Did anything happen to either of those places?”
I wanted to tell her that my social worker helped shut them down, but that would’ve been a lie. They did get shut down, but it hadn’t been anyone legally doing it. I didn’t want to say the words. Add to the pile of bad things Creighton did for me.
I didn’t feel bad about those casualties.
I tried, telling myself that maybe they would’ve changed. In the end, though, I just couldn’t summon whatever emotion I needed to believe that.
“I’m glad.” Palma surprised me. Her voice was hoarse. She covered her hand with mine. “Seeing your boyfriend in action, seeing who he’s going up against, I know you’re a good person. You don’t like shouldering what he does to protect you, but you’re not responsible for what another person does.”
“I am if he’s hurting others.”
“But is he really? Levi told me about the rules you gave Creighton. Only bad. Only the guilty.”
“He violated that when he took those four people.”
“But he didn’t hurt them.”
“He was going to.”
“But he didn’t.” She leaned forward, her hand gently squeezing mine. “The stories I’ve heard about him and that guy I’m seeing now, I don’t think he’s the same guy. I think he’s changing. He’s changing for you. That’s what I think.”
Yeah. Maybe.
He let me go into that office building alone. The following Monday, Satya and her sister came to the center. She informed me that her foster parents were able to take her sister in, said they got an emergency call Saturday morning that lined everything up. Creighton did that.
He hadn’t followed me the last week either. I didn’t think anyone else had either.
He’d been giving me space. He listened to me, actually gave me what I said I needed.
That was all in my head, just ruminating.
I missed him.
Fuck it. I really missed him.
“It’s done, though?” Palma pressed her original question.
My throat grew thick with emotion.
Heath and Palma never got mad. At me. At Creighton.
When I tried pushing it, apologizing, both shut me down.
“It wasn’t your fault.” That’s what they both said.
I guess it was true. Sometimes I was so twisted up that I no longer could identify what was and what wasn’t my fault.
When I offered to move out, both shut me down on that too.
Niko as well. She arrived at my bedroom that night and threatened me.
“If you ever utter those words again, I will cut up all of your bags and shred them into tiny pieces. And I won’t feel sorry about it.
If I’m here, you have to be here.” I hadn’t seen her since that statement, but I figured she had her way to keep track of everything that went on with the rest of us.
So I never left.
And yes, the war was over. Levi kept me up to date.
He told me the terms, but there’d been another meeting just a couple days ago about an AI drone surveillance program.
It was set to launch in one more week, but Creighton’s territory would not be surveilled.
Since West and Walden’s territories were already banned, that only left Staten Island.
Levi said that the entire program was scrapped.
It was going to be moving somewhere else. Creighton suggested Florida.
I nodded. “It’s done.”
“Just like that?”
“I think having my housemates kidnapped and my foster brother put in the hospital was enough.”
Her cheeks pinked. “I know.” She got serious again.
I steeled myself because I recognized the look by now. She was going to say something deep, something that would cut straight to the bone.
“Look, I don’t know if you need me to repeat this, but just in case, I am.
I’ll say this as many times as you need to hear it.
You are not to blame for any of this. The only thing might’ve been a heads-up, but you were trying to hide from it yourself.
So it happened. It just did. You moved in.
You’re in love with a very scary guy, who does what he does, and because of what he does, all of that spread to us.
I get it. Next time going in, we know now.
Heath and me. We’re prepared. We’re ready.
We aren’t leaving. And by the way, Heath gets to see his brothers again.
I didn’t even know he’d been estranged, so I think that part of it is awesome.
” She paused, but I knew there was still more coming.
I waited. She spoke, almost gently because she knew these words might be hard for me to hear.
“I know your thoughts on the kind of guy Creighton is. You don’t condone the lengths he will go for you, but I’m not you.
I’m not as nice of a person as you are. I am okay with it.
I care about you. And obviously he does too.
So I’m okay with what he will do to make sure you’re safe.
I mean, Jesus, he did all of this because of you. Right?”
My insides hollowed out.
She was watching me keenly. “You see that, don’t you?” She motioned around the room. “The war. Him pushing into this city. You told me that you began looking at this college two years ago. According to Levi, that’s when Creighton began making steps for this war.”
Her words were on repeat in my head.
I was the reason for all of this . . .
I never thought about the possibility that I was the reason he started down this path, but he only began to fight for control of the streets after I went to Miss Marcie’s house.
He never said a word.
. . . I won’t be able to guarantee your safety—
I was gutted.
He had done all of this for me, because of me. All of it. Since he was sixteen.
I began hyperventilating. I was the cause for so many deaths.
The pressure was suffocating me all over again. I couldn’t be the reason. I just couldn’t. Who was I? I was a no one. A foster kid. I was someone that was thrown away. I was tossed out like garbage, and then I met a boy when I was eight years old and he decided—Creighton’s words jarred me.
I wasn’t born with a soul, Blake. For fourteen years I was walking around, knowing something was different about me, but I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t care. Then one day a little girl gets out of this car and suddenly I got something in my chest.
My lungs stopped. They just completely stopped.
He’d told me. He had. I just hadn’t realized the ramification of how completely he meant what he said.
I met a little girl when she was eight years old, and suddenly I understood the world. You gave me the world. You gave me everything . . .
I wasn’t worth any of this, much less this responsibility. How could I process this?
Creighton was obsessed with me, but to be the reason for all of this? It wasn’t right.
I had so many conflicting emotions swirling inside of me. Unworthiness. Resentment. Regret. Who was I? I kept coming to that feeling. I was a nobody to the world.
Except to Creighton, a voice kept whispering in the back of my head. I wasn’t a no one to him.
“You okay?” Palma was asking. I heard her voice in the distance. My heart was pounding, thumping loudly in my chest.
He was capable of anything, literally anything. He could destroy the world, and I was either the motivation or the reins holding him back.
My vision began to blur at the edges.
Palma was talking, her voice droning in the distance, until she grew clear again and I heard, “—It makes sense. It’s almost simple. We just want our loved ones safe. He wants to make sure the world is safe for you, so he controls the world you’re in. It’s beautiful, in his twisted way.”
Christ. It was.