Chapter 20
TWENTY
RUIN
Ipark in the driveway, and before I even step out, I know Catherine and Judge Harrington are inside. Their cars are parked in the driveway.
I pass by the garage. A shuttered window is ajar, with glass shards on the outside and tiles inside. I pause and listen. No one is here, and the house seems to hold its breath. A shiver runs through my spine as the wind blows through the shattered window as I enter.
I pass the pool and head for the hallway. Just before I reach the stairs, a voice shouts from the kitchen.
“Carmen.”
I turn toward the living room.
“Catherine,” I call back.
“Carmen,” she says again, closer now.
I pass the living room, and I enter the kitchen.
She sits at the kitchen table. Judge Harrington stands behind her, one hand resting on her shoulder. The moment Catherine sees me, she’s on her feet, crossing the room in three fast steps. And she pulls me into her arms.
“Baby, we were so worried about you.”
“I know.” I ease her away, my hands wrapping around her wrists.
He just watches me. His face is calm, like this is a courtroom and I’m a file he’s already closed.
I used to wish I knew who my dad was. I used to build him in my head, piece by piece.
Sometimes he was a pilot who lifted me into the sky, sometimes a king with a crown and a throne and a place for me at his side.
But reality stands in front of me now. He is just a judge who locked me up, then adopted me, not to save me but to keep me close.
A case that never really closed because, somehow, he still needed me.
I wanted to love them once. Both my mom and my dad.
I thought love was something you earned if you tried hard enough.
Now I know better. We don’t choose our parents.
They don’t choose us. We’re stitched together and told to call it family.
We grow around the stitches, and when we finally break, everyone asks what went wrong, but no one asks who broke us.
“Where were you?” he asks, folding his arms.
I step closer. Catherine’s hands slip from my sleeves. “Why do you even care? Was it so important to get your face on the news?”
“Carmen, for Christ’s sake,” he snaps. “We were worried about you. We came here, and the place was wrecked. You were gone for two days.”
“People leave,” I say. “Judas did.”
He strides toward me. His fingers catch my chin, tilting my face up. He pries my eyelids open with his thumbs, forcing me into the kitchen light.
“What did you take? Are you on drugs?”
I shove him. He stumbles back a step.
“No,” I shout. “And even if I did, why would you care? You’re never around.”
“Of course we care,” he says. “We’re your parents.”
“On paper.” My voice breaks on the words. “You were never my parent.”
Catherine moves between us, but I don’t stop. “If you cared about your children so much, why didn’t you care about Judas when he left?”
“Judas died, sweetie,” Catherine says softly.
“No.” The word rips out of me. “Judas is alive. And not because of either of you. The moment the cops showed up here, you stopped looking for him.”
“He’s dead, Carmen,” he says.
“He isn’t.” I tilt my head. “I know he’s alive because I was with him for the past two days.”
His face drains. “What the fuck, Carmen? Why didn’t you tell us?”
He grabs my shoulders, shaking me once. “Judas is dangerous. He’s killed before, and he’ll kill again.”
“Judas saved me from Axel that night,” I say. “And he saved me from my stepdad in 2014.”
He shakes his head. “Judas didn’t save you, Carmen.
And that cop might have been a bad person, but he didn’t deserve to die.
Judas followed him that night. He convinced himself he was the serial killer who got caught in 2005.
Everything he told you was a lie. He killed that man and your mom just because he could not, because he had to. ”
“No,” I say. My head keeps moving back and forth. “You’re lying.”
He pulls his phone from his pocket and lifts the screen toward me. “I’m calling the cops. They’ll track your location and find him.”
I slap the phone out of his hand. It skids across the floor and clatters against the cabinet. “How can you do that?”
“How can I?” he shouts. His eyes go wide, veins rising at his temples. “Ever since he came to this house, I’ve been protecting him. But you can’t protect a boy who was raised by a serial killer for a year. A boy who was taught how to kill.”
He drags both hands over his head. “God.” Then he looks at me again. “You know why maids don’t stay here? Because he killed every single one. I ran out of excuses. Nobody asked questions because we pretended there weren’t any. And believe me, Carmen, when I tell you this. You’ll be next.”
Something inside me breaks when he bends to grab the phone.
I can’t lose Judas again.
My palms slide back against the counter. My fingers find the handle of the knife. Cold metal presses into my skin as I turn.
Catherine stands by the window, staring into the garden. She looks like a statue, locked in place.
“Don’t,” I shout towards him.
She doesn’t turn. She doesn’t flinch. It’s like she already knows.
My heart is beating. My eyelids blink too fast, like I’m slipping into someone else’s body, someone I can’t control.
I surge forward and drive the blade into him.
He crashes into the chair and falls to the floor. I drop on top of him, my knees hitting hard by his side, and I lift the knife and bring it down. Again. Again.
Eleven times.
I can’t feel my hand. I just watched it move. Blood sprays my face. His mouth opens and closes, a wet sound gurgling out as he looks at me for the last time.
The knife slips from my fingers and lands beside his body.
My hands start to shake as I look down at them. The room tilts and the walls fade, and I’m not here anymore.
2014.
Justin was on the floor when a man in a ski mask burst through the front door. The crash of it drew Mom to the kitchen. Her hands shook so hard she could barely keep the phone steady as she tried to dial 911.
But she didn’t think someone else was here, she just looked at me and screamed, “You fucking brat. What have you done?”
“Me?” I whispered. My knees barely held me up.
No matter what happened, I knew I would take the blame. I always did.
The knife lay on the counter. My fingers closed around the handle. My legs trembled as I lunged toward her, knocking the phone from her hand. We went down together. And by the time we fell down, the blade was already buried in her chest.
Her eyes locked on mine, and she begged.
I yanked the knife free. I drove it back in. Again. Again. Again. Eleven times. The same number of times I had told her about my stepfather’s fists, his abuse, and how he sneaked by my side every night. Eleven times she had turned away.
A laugh tore out of me as I staggered back. The knife slipped from my grip and clattered across the floor. Blood spread around her. It smeared my hands, my arms, my clothes.
It was everywhere.
The hallway shifted, and my vision blurred as tears filled my eyes. I caught myself on the wall and slid along it, leaving streaks of blood behind me. The taste of blood was still on my tongue. I smiled. I laughed, breathless and shaking, because for the first time my chest felt light.
No more beatings. No more scrubbing floors and burning dinners.
I could run. I could finally run from here.
Then a thin cry drifted down from the bedroom upstairs.
“Sofia,” I gasped.
I snap back into the present, my eyes dropping to judge Harrington. I killed him. I killed my mom, too. I remember now.
I lean back, and Catherine is there beside me. She is cutting his left hand. When I tilt my head to the right, his right hand is already gone.
She hums under her breath as she takes what is left and lowers it into the long iron pot at her side. The metal rings softly as she drops his severed hand inside. She lifts her head and looks at me.
“I have to cook them. Judas said it’s the best way to get rid of the body.”
The hum never stops. She lifts the pot and carries it toward the kitchen. Her voice floats back to me. “I cooked the maids, too.”
My stomach twists. I turn away. My throat burns, and I gag, air scraping down my lungs.
A buzzing fills my ears. The house blurs, and I drift through it like a ghost. Catherine shows in the doorway as I tilt my head back. Her lips move, but no sound reaches me. All I see are the yellow rubber gloves pulled up to her elbows and her steps coming closer.
I can hear the hum of the melody as she grabs my shoulders and shakes me.
“Carmen, listen to me. You have to run.”
The hallway spins in front of me. She moves to the cupboard, yanks open a drawer, and presses a white envelope into my hands. “There is enough money for you and Judas to disappear.”
I nod. My heart is still beating, but the rest of me feels so numb.
“Run, Carmen,” she shouts, snapping me loose.
My legs finally obey. I stumble past the pool, through the garden, and down the driveway.
I look back at the house. A woman with dark brown hair stands in the window.
I rub my eyes, trying to make sense of it.
She is gone. For a second, I see my own reflection in the glass, like I am leaving whatever is left of me trapped inside those walls.
I rush to the bike. My clothes are soaked with blood. But nothing matters anymore. The wind cuts at my skin, numbing everything it touches.
It is freezing, but I have to get to Judas.
I shove the envelope under the seat, and I swing onto the bike. I pull the helmet over my head, and I twist the throttle. The engine turns on. I move forward.
I lean into the wind, my vision smearing through the visor.
The world rushes past, but I feel stuck in one place. I push faster than my own thoughts. And when my chest starts to become too tight, and my thighs start to shake, I slam the brakes. The front tire lifts, and the bike bucks. I force it back down, and a scream rips out of my chest.
“Fuck,” I scream again, my heart pounding.
I fold over the bike, fists slamming into the tank. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
Everything is a lie. Everything. We are ants in a paper town someone folded for us, following a script we never asked to read, living and living until we rot and die.
Promises mean nothing. Words lose their shape the moment you look too close at them. You can’t trust anyone, not even yourself. Trust shatters. And all of it is one big, brutal illusion we are taught to believe is real.
Because how can this much bad be real? How can someone write so much pain into the story, and we just swallow it, until something inside us finally breaks?
How are we all so blind, not seeing that we are pawns in someone else’s game, waiting for someone else to win? And we are always losing, because the ones who win stand above everything else.
One day, we will face each other and twist knives into each other’s backs just to survive. Everything is a competition. Hunger games that dressed us up as hope.
And me? I am a small ant speeding toward someone I trusted with my life.
Racing to a paper house he built for me, to a future he wrote together with his lies.
I go faster because there is nothing behind me.
Nothing to pull me back. I go faster, knowing I have no idea what his next chapter holds, because I fell for the version of him I built inside my own head.
Don’t we all do that? We paint people into perfect pictures, smooth the cracks, until one day it collapses around us and melts in our hands. That’s what our minds do. They turn into chaos. And we turn into the ruin that lives inside it.
I turn the bike back on. I feel it vibrating underneath me.
I ride to see him. Because I would rather live in a paper house and be a small ant beside him than be anything else without him.
We are all the same. We just stare at different pictures.