Chapter 3
Saoirse
Leaving the laundromat, I briskly walk six blocks farther from O’Rourke territory, as if that distinction means anything for my safety.
Why is it that some people seem to have such simple, easy lives without danger lurking around every corner? What would it even feel like to not have to live in fight or flight mode all the time?
What’s worse, every time I look down, my hand is wrapped around my own wrist, touching myself the way he touched me.
I walk the streets in the rain with my duffel over my shoulder, my head down, and the phone he gave me pressing against my hip through my jacket pocket. It’s a small rectangular device that feels like a thousand-pound weight.
There’s a shelter on Western with walk-in beds and no questions, but they closed their doors at midnight.
I’m not gonna sleep tonight anyway. I make a few stops, a few attempts, but every time I close my eyes—standing in a doorway, sitting on a bench, leaning against the wall of a parking garage where the concrete still holds a little of the day’s warmth—I see the murder play out behind my lids.
A man on his knees. Muffled begging. Declan O’Rourke’s face in the faint glow of the security light, flat, hollow, and mechanical.
But that’s not what keeps jerking me awake.
It's the laundromat. The scrape of the plastic chair. The way his hand closed around my wrist.
I rub the spot again without thinking—left hand circling right, pressing where his fingers were.
The skin isn't bruised. He didn't grip hard enough to bruise, which is telling.
The heat of his palm. The way his fingers overlapped with room to spare.
How my pulse hammered against his thumb. He felt it. I know he felt it.
I catch myself pressing my wrist again and yank my hand away.
My backstory sucks. It’s the story of a girl who had to fight to survive before she learned to read.
I've lived in fourteen foster homes.
Fourteen. Including the Bradleys, who locked the pantry and counted the slices of bread.
The Morales family was decent until Mr. Morales lost his job and started drinking.
The Petersons had four other fosters and treated us all as a workforce.
Mrs. Calvert used a hot curling iron as discipline.
I trace the small burn scar on my forearm without looking at it—automatically, the way a Catholic touches a rosary bead.
Then there was the last foster father. I don't say his name.
Not even inside my own head. He is footsteps, heavy and deliberate, pausing outside my door in the dead hours of the night.
The turn of the doorknob, testing whether I'd remembered to wedge a chair under the handle. Loud breathing that carried through the wood when the chair held. Patient breathing. Breathing that said I’ll wait. There will come a time.
And a time came.
The night the chair didn't hold, I went through the window.
From the second story. The drop jarred my knees and stung my ankles, and I ran barefoot for six blocks before I stopped to vomit in someone's flower garden.
I was fourteen years old with no shoes, no bag, and no money.
I had nothing but the nightgown I was wearing and the understanding that I was alone in the world. No one was coming for me.
Not to hurt me. Not to save me. No one was coming at all.
I have a system now. Refined over many years. Field-tested and reliable. Never unpack. Sleep near the door. Know two ways out. The system has kept me alive in shelters, squats, the back seats of unlocked cars, and twenty-four-hour laundromats like the one where Declan O'Rourke found me.
Declan O'Rourke.
The man’s a cold-blooded murderer.
I can’t stop replaying the controlled economy of how he moved to sit in that plastic chair, every shift of weight deliberate.
The breadth of his shoulders. The low register of his voice when he told me he wasn’t there to kill me—not gentle, not kind, but factual.
The way an average person might state the time.
I'd cataloged all of it in the two seconds before I tried to run, the same way I catalog every man who enters my space—measuring the threat, calculating the distance to the door, estimating the damage his hands could do.
Except my body filed a separate entry alongside the threat assessment.
It surfaces now as heat across my chest when I replay the moment his hand closed around my wrist and a tightening below my navel when I remember his eyes tracking my face with that unnerving focus—not predatory, not leering, it was…
attentive. No man has ever looked at me quite like that.
The phantom touch of his thumb against my pulse point keeps intruding, so vividly I can almost feel the pressure of his skin against mine.
I shove it down. Hard.
My body is only doing what bodies do—responding to proximity and adrenaline and the biological confusion of being touched by a dark, dangerous, virile man. It means nothing. It's noise. I file it in the same category as the fight-or-flight tremors I can't always control—involuntary and meaningless.
When dawn arrives, I sit in a Dunkin' Donuts with my hands wrapped around a small coffee as I weigh my options. The math is the way it has always been—simple and brutal.
I have forty-six dollars and an expired ID.
I can try to run, really run. Like, leave the city and start over.
I know the arithmetic of homelessness. I know how many calories you can stretch, how many nights you can go without real sleep, how long before the cold or the exhaustion or the wrong person in the wrong doorway catches up.
But I also know this city. Somewhere new, somewhere foreign… I won’t survive more than a few weeks.
If I go to the police, I'll end up in a system. Not the foster system—I aged out of that particular hell. A system of paperwork, interrogation cubicles, and courtrooms. But I know better than to trust any bureaucratic system.
Regardless of either option, the O'Rourkes will find me. I wouldn’t be walking free for twenty-four hours unless Declan O'Rourke was a hundred percent sure he could find me when my time was up.
But there’s a third option.
I could stop. Stop struggling, stop clawing, stop fighting so damn hard.
Not in the dramatic way. No jumping off a bridge, or downing a bottle of pills, or anything that requires the kind of courage I'm not sure I have.
I could just walk out of this Dunkin' Donuts and let the clock run out on Declan O'Rourke’s offer. Let whoever he sends find me in whatever doorway I end up in.
No more exhausting, grinding, minute-by-minute work of staying alive in a world that has never once made staying alive feel worthwhile.
The thought doesn't even scare me.
As I hold my coffee in both hands, absorbing the warmth, I turn over the idea. Examine it from every angle. Would it be so bad? Eighteen years of survival, and for what? Another corner in an all-night laundromat, another shelter cot, another temporary job that pays under the table?
I've been running since I was fourteen, but before that, life wasn’t much better. Before that, I was a small, voiceless nobody in a system that processed children the way a warehouse processes inventory—intake, placement, return, repeat.
And I'm tired. Not sleepy-tired.
Tired in my bones, in the marrow, in the part of me that's supposed to want things. Like a future. I can't remember the last time I wanted anything more than a warm blanket, a hot meal, or one more day.
One more day. I've gotten that, over and over, thousands of them stacked end to end, and not one has been a day I'd choose to repeat.
So, to the question of marrying a cold-blooded psychopathic killer, or dying. I’m not sure there’s anything left in me that still wants to live.