33 SAM
“I don’t know why you don’t just kill me already,” I shouted with whatever strength I had left. The psycho had that brute put a tourniquet on my leg where the bleeding was worst.
“I’m not in a hurry.” She sat in front of me. “But I hope the detective is faster. I’d like him to arrive in time to watch you suffer.”
“You’re sick.”
The woman in front of me was Isis Maddox Cohen. The daughter of that bastard Bradan. And she had his eyes. Soulless eyes.
“You know what? Maybe you are too… little sister.” She’d called me that for the second time now.
At first I thought it was some European slang, but I think it’s more than that.
“You really don’t know? How could you have spent so much time researching your parents and not know how fucked up their relationship was? ”
Isis pulled the chair closer, sitting right in front of me with scissors in her hand.
“Did you think you’d find them someday and be one big happy family?
” She laughed, touching my hair. I pulled my head back but she tangled her fingers in the strands, yanking my head toward her.
“Spoiler… you never would have had a perfect family. The great couple Seth Riad and Catarina Vargas was all one big shitty act.”
Isis ran the scissors beside my eye.
“I’m not interested in your opinion about my parents.”
“Your mother. You mean.”
Isis grabbed her own hair and started cutting it, imitating mine. When she finished, she checked her reflection in the scissors’ blade.
“We actually look alike. I think Connor will love my new haircut,” she taunted.
“He’ll eat you alive,” I snarled.
“I’d love to be devoured by him. Feel those big hands squeezing my neck.” She mimicked Connor’s touch on her skin, and I felt sick. “He’ll look at me and know he chose the wrong sister.”
“I’m not your sister!”
“Ahh… you’re daddy’s little darling.” Her empty eyes burned. “Every time I did something wrong, he cursed himself for staying with me instead of you.”
“I’m not that monster’s daughter!”
“You think I wanted to be either?” She grabbed my neck, pointing the scissors at my skin.
Pressing them in. “I spent my childhood ignoring the bloodstained clothes on the bedroom floor, spending sleepless nights as just a little girl alone in another country because my father couldn’t let damn Detective Connor play this game alone. He was obsessed.”
I felt disgust, panic, and pity for Isis. All at the same time.
“He told me he was going to stop. That he was going to get treatment. That we’d have a normal life. But he never stopped. He thought the world would never be right if he wasn’t there to fix it. Then one day he stopped coming home and I was grateful. I had the best years of my life.”
She pushed me to the floor and I fell sideways. Still tied to the chair. Isis crouched down, turned her head to look me right in the eyes. I couldn’t help looking for any sign of humanity in them.
“When they called me because he was hospitalized after taking a bullet, I wanted to let him die. I had someone pick him up and dump him in some hole in Cairo.”
“You talk about him with disgust, but you’re just like him.”
“Because of him!” she screamed. “He dragged me into this.”
“Was he holding the knife when you gutted Bob? It was you, wasn’t it? It’s what you are. It’s what you people are!”
She laughed.
“No! It’s what we are, Samantha. You’ll realize that deep down, we’re the same.”
Isis got up and left the room. The place looked like an abandoned construction site. Probably near the river.
I thrashed around trying to loosen the ropes, but it was no use.
I was too tired to break free, but I needed to get out of here.
Isis seemed more unstable with each passing minute, and although I was curious about her version of my story, I really didn’t want to be here when her fury finally broke loose.