Chapter Five #2
“Kill who?”
“These animals,” I answer, not taking my eyes off him. “The heads. Did you…”
No expression passes over his face at my question. “Most o’ them.”
For this next question, instead of the door wood, I dig my nails into my thighs. “Did you… kill…” I close my eyes for a second. “Did you kill him? Did you k-kill Bo?”
Again, nothing flickers through his features. They are cool and aloof as he replies, “No.”
A breath escapes me.
Probably the first one since I came to that’s not been broken or choppy.
I open my fists and press my sweaty palms to my thighs. “So then, he’s… okay? You didn’t… You didn’t hurt him? You didn’t—”
“There’s no Bo,” he says, cutting me off.
Since we started this conversation face-to-face, this is the only time his features have changed. There’s an expression lurking there that I can’t name for sure, but it looks akin to… irritation, with lines around his mouth and his eyes clenched tight.
“What?” I breathe out.
His jaw clenches for a second. “The man you’re getting so bent out of shape about doesn’t exist.” Then, “Or rather, he does but he doesn’t care that you do. So you should probably save your concern.”
“What? What does that m-mean?”
“It means he sold you out.”
I go back to holding on to the door, my nails digging into the wood.
As if bracing for something, something big and life-changing, as he speaks.
“Bo Porter, the guy you think is your little boyfriend and who you thought would be a safe choice because of his drug bust, is a fuckin’ junkie.
It’s hard to score coke when you’re on the inside.
Can’t do it without some serious help. He knew I could provide him that help.
Usually I don’t like to give people like him the time of day, but fortunately for him, he came into possession of something that he knew I’d want. ”
My legs are sliding against each other, sweaty and sticky. My palms are slipping along the door, but somehow I hold myself up and parrot, “Something you’d want.”
He dips his chin. “Your letter.”
“My…”
“The very first one.” Then, with his jaw pulsing, he goes on, “So you see, you really wouldn’t wanna meet a junkie in a back alley.
Because he’ll sell you out for a bag of coke while you’re standin’ there with your pretty little mouth open and your eyes wide in shock, ready to pass out at the betrayal. ”
That’s what I look like right now, I think.
He just described me.
He forgot to mention, though, how I’m shaking right now. How my sweaty limbs are about to buckle under the pressure of what he just revealed. How I’m about to all but collapse. And not just from the betrayal but from something else I just now realized.
It was always there, in the back of my mind, hovering. I refused to acknowledge it. I refused to think about it because I wanted to be smart. I didn’t want to be like my mother, who fell in love with a man who was wrong for her. But I can’t deny it anymore.
I love Bo.
I’m in love with Bo Porter.
I’m not sure when it happened, but it did. Somewhere along the last six months, the stranger who made me feel safe right from the beginning somehow became the very first man I fell in love with.
“So it’s been…” I blink and breathe. “You?”
His dark eyes go back and forth between mine. “Me.”
I blink and I breathe again. Then, “This w-whole time?”
Something moves across his face again, but I’m too dizzy to puzzle over what. “Since the beginning.”
This is when I break.
Or my mind does, because all the thoughts, all the feelings, all the emotions I’m capable of come to the surface and run rampant.
They run from one part of my brain to the other.
They run through my veins and fill the corners of my body, making me feel so heavy, so, so heavy. So achy. So riddled with pain.
God, it’s so much pain that I have to let go of the door and press both my hands on my belly. I have to clench my thighs, tighten my muscles so I can withstand it. Withstand the truth.
That there’s no Bo. There never was. The man I fell in love with doesn’t exist. Or he does but everything about him was a lie. I fell in love with a lie. An illusion.
My first love wasn’t a love at all; it was a betrayal.
But I don’t… I still don’t get it.
“Why would you want my le…”
My subconscious catches up before my brain does, and my words trail off. He would want my letters. Because he thinks Peyton was writing them.
He thinks I’m Peyton.
He didn’t kidnap me because I’m associated with the Turners. No, he kidnapped me because he thinks I am a Turner. He thinks I’m his enemy. He thinks I’m something to kill and destroy.
Because that’s what the Graysons and the Turners have been doing to each other.
Everyone in town, in the whole state of Montana, knows about the two feuding families of Black Rock.
They’ve been warring with each other over land for years, for decades.
The feud doesn’t involve just trivial disagreements.
It doesn’t even stop at ambushes in the middle of the night—cutting fences and stealing cattle.
Setting fire to timber and destroying equipment isn’t enough for them.
It involves making people disappear; spying, shady dealings, and blackmail.
Their enmity was the reason why we left Black Rock in the first place; it wasn’t safe for us to stay there anymore.
Because one night, the Graysons brought years’ worth of fighting to our home.
I know I should be afraid, and Jesus Christ, I am—I am shaking—but I can’t help noticing the irony.
We’ve both been pretending to be other people.
We’ve both been lying to each other. The only difference is that he did it out of malice, the depths of which I’ve yet to find out, while my lie was innocent.
Tell him.
Tell him now.
I open my mouth to do just that, but something else comes out: “So you… you pretended to be”—I can’t say it; I can’t say the name of the guy I’ve foolishly been in love with—“him a-and wrote me letters because you wanted to, what, fool me?”
“More like get you to trust me, but fool you works too.”
I press myself harder into the door, my shoulder blades digging into the wood. “So you could… bring me here?”
He studies me for a beat, as if looking for something, but I don’t know what. I don’t have anything to give him.
I’m not even the right girl.
“Not exactly,” he says finally, shifting on his feet.
“What?”
“Bringing you here wasn’t the plan.”
“The p-plan?”
“All straight As, right? Except sociology.” His jaw pulses. “Thought you were smart. Followin’ me back to my motel though, not so much.”
My eyes are wide. “You… you knew?”
“I’m an ex-con,” he says, his gaze steady and his features neutral except, once again, there’s a hint of irritation.
“You don’t tail an ex-con, especially when you’ve got zero skills to make out your own tail.
” At my confusion, he goes on, “You picked up a couple of guys on your way over. I took care of them later.”
My heart races. “Did you… Does that mean you killed them?”
He gives me a flat look. “No, just knocked ’em out. Can’t kill people in daylight.”
I shake my head. “I’m… I can’t…”
“Thought you would have smartened up when you left but”—his jaw pulses again—“you had to come find me, didn’t you?
I was a little shocked when the front desk guy called, said a girl came lookin’ for me.
So no, it wasn’t the plan to drug you and bring you here.
But I couldn’t take the chance of you runnin’ back to your family and tellin’ them about me either. ”
Family.
He means the Turners. I need to tell him. I need to tell him I’m not the girl he thinks I am. But once again, something else comes out: “I won’t say anything.”
He doesn’t dignify that with a response.
“I won’t,” I insist, clawing my nails at the door. “If you let me go right now, I’ll… I’ll forget about it all. I’ll forget about the letters. About the kidnapping. About whatever you did. About e-everything. You just need to let me go. You just—”
“No,” he says.
Definitively. Decisively.
Like that concludes all discussion. Like he can keep me here. Like he has a right to keep me here.
“You can’t do this,” I say, my voice pitching high. “You can’t keep me here. You can’t—”
“I can.”
“They’ll be looking for me,” I blurt out. “My family. They’ll be… You have to let me go. You have to l-let me go to my family.”
Lie. Lie. Lie.
All lies, but I have to say something, anything to make him let me go.
“And I will,” he says, all calm-like. “In my own time.”
“But this is…” I shake my head. “My f-friends. My—”
“You’ve got no friends,” he reminds me, his dark eyes glittering.
“Your only friend left for the Bahamas for the summer. You’ve got no job, no classes.
Your mother’s tourin’ Europe like she always does and your father and your brother’s in Black Rock.
I took care of your phone and you’ve got no one.
No one is lookin’ for you. No one will miss you.
The only person who’d wonder about you if your letter didn’t arrive like clockwork on Tuesday is standin’ right here. ”
He’s right. No one will miss me. I have no friends. No classes, no job. The only person I thought I had is right in front of me.
“Are you g-going to kill me?” I ask then.
He lets a beat pass by before replying, “No.”
“So then why—”
“You’re no use to me dead.”
“Use me for what? What are you going to use me for?”
This time he stays silent the longest, scrutinizing me as he stands there with his feet shoulder width apart, his spine straight.
His hands are fisted at his sides, and his gaze is as steady as ever.
And even though he’s all the way across the room from me, it still feels like he’s right by my side.
Right where I am.
It feels like I can smell him, his dangerous musk. Like I can hear his heart beat, a threatening drumbeat. It feels like he’s sucking in all the air, leaving nothing for me. Choking me without laying a finger on me.
Finally, dragging a long breath, he answers: “Revenge.”