Chapter 39 Violet #2
She stared down at me, her bottom lip trembling as she stroked my damp hair back away from my face. “Oh, Vi. That’s wonderful.”
I struggled to sit up. It was only wonderful if we were alive.
I blinked in the darkness, trying to adjust my eyes, but the only slivers of light that came were from little splinters of sun piercing through the wooden floorboards above our heads.
I stared at them, completely unable to make sense of any of it. “Where are we?”
Nyah bit her lip and opened her mouth to answer, but the floor, the one over our heads, slid open.
Francine stared down at us.
All of it came rushing back. Francine bringing me here. The gun at my back. Falling…
I tried to stand, but pain kept me down. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Francine was at least ten feet above us, and even at almost six feet myself, I knew I would have never been able to pull myself up and out, even if she’d stood there and let me.
We were completely at her mercy.
“Why?” I whispered to her.
She squatted on the edge of the hole and cocked her head to one side. “Didn’t your mama ever teach you to keep your man happy?”
I blinked, those words not at all what I had expected her to say. “I didn’t have a mother.”
She snorted and leaned the tip of her gun to the floorboards beneath her feet as she stared down at us at the bottom of the trap she’d laid.
“You’re lucky. I unfortunately did.” Her voice turned high-pitched and mocking.
“You’ll never keep a man with your hair like that, Francine.
Francine, why don’t you put some more makeup on, cover up some of that ugly?
Francine, if you just lost some weight, you’d be so much more attractive to men. ”
I flinched at the familiar words. I might not have had a mother, but I’d had a foster mom who had said much the same things. “I know what—”
Francine cut me off with a sharp laugh. “Don’t tell me you know what that feels like, Violet. You have so many men falling all over you, you can’t even keep up.”
I nodded, not stupid enough to argue with the woman with the gun, who clearly didn’t want to hear the truth. “Skinny girls are what men want, Francine,” she mocked. “Not girls who look like they could eat a man whole.”
If I hadn’t been lying at the bottom of an oversized coffin, I might have felt sorry for her. Her mother sounded like a piece of work. “She shouldn’t have said that to you. It’s not true.”
But Francine laughed bitterly. “But it is true, Violet. You don’t know it yet, but they’ll leave. Those men, they’ll leave you. No matter what you do.” Her eyes darkened. “I did everything. Everything he wanted. And he still left.”
I glanced at Nyah.
Her mouth pulled into a grim line; her gaze trained on that gun in Francine’s hands.
I didn’t know what to do, other than to keep her talking. To give the guys time to find me.
Because unlike whoever Francine was talking about, I knew my guys were never leaving. The realization, the strength of that knowledge, fueled me, pushing away some of the fear.
I wasn’t that girl back in Paul Jeddersen’s house on Olympic Drive. I wasn’t the girl in the warehouse. I wasn’t the girl on the bluffs.
I wasn’t alone.
They would come.
“Who left, Francine?” I asked, voice clear and strong.
She stared at me. “Paul. I sent him girls. Watched him have sex with them. Watched him…” She shook her head. “I did everything he wanted, and he still left.”
My blood ran cold. “You sent me to Paul Jeddersen’s house, knowing he was going to rape and kill me?”
Francine shrugged. “You. Elizabeth. The women before. I kept their bodies for him. But it was never enough, was it? He always wanted more.” She sniffed. “I just wanted him.”
Bile rose in my throat, anger stirring up from deep inside me. That same anger I’d felt the night I’d killed Travis. “He didn’t leave you,” I hissed. “We murdered him.”
In reality, it had been X’s kill, but in the moment, it didn’t feel like it mattered.
Francine pointed the gun at me. “You think I didn’t know that? You think I didn’t watch the entire thing happen? You took him from me, Violet!” She laughed bitterly. “So I took something from you.”
“Toby,” I supplied for her.
Francine nodded. “With a bit of help. I wanted to go after all of you. Everyone who was there that night. Everyone who helped cover up Paul’s murder.
Everyone who had ever meant anything to you.
I knew all about your men and their little murder squad.
They laid it all out for me, all the details of the list. I have it all on the fucking nanny cam Paul made me watch through. ”
My stomach twisted at the thought of someone having video of X killing a man in cold blood in the most violently brutal way. “Why not just go to the police and have him arrested?”
“Because you were all to blame!” She pointed the gun at me again. “You most of all, you slut. But if I’d taken that footage to the cops, they would have said, oh poor Violet. Wouldn’t they? And you would have walked away, scot-free!”
I didn’t understand her twisted ramblings. The lies she’d let herself believe.
“I was a victim, Francine.” I cleared my throat. “Maybe you were too.”
“No, don’t try to make me feel sorry for you. You were a slut, with your pretty blond hair and big blue eyes. I saw the way he stared at you. Saw the way he stripped your clothes and touched your body.”
My skin crawled at the memory. “He attacked me. I didn’t want him.”
“But I did,” she said miserably. “I wanted him, and you took him from me. So I have to take everything away from you. I zoomed in on the footage of your little list, made out as many names on it as I could, and then tracked them all down. Offered them all a bribe to take you all out, one by one. Not that I had to incentivize them much, considering they weren’t too happy to hear they were targets themselves.
They were more than happy to turn the tables and come for you.
I just added some theatrics to the game, writing rhymes, making sure you knew you were being hunted. ”
I let my anger get the better of me, remembering the men who’d stalked X in the darkness. He’d avoided death only because he was skilled and because Levi and Whip had his back. We’d known someone was paying people on the list to come after us.
But I never would have expected it to be the woman perched above us now, staring down at us with hate and malice in her eyes.
“That’s how you met Travis, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Travis never made the booking for Paul Jeddersen’s place or for Nyah to come to this house, did he?
That was you. You just threw him under the bus when you realized we were getting close to working it out.
” I shook my head. “And we killed him for it.” Not that I felt an ounce of regret over it.
He might not have made those bookings and lured Nyah and me into houses where danger lurked on the other side of the front door, but he was hardly innocent.
There was no guilt. I’d seen the haunted look in my daughter’s eyes after she’d been left alone with that man for days.
The world was a better place with Travis dead.
Francine’s mouth flattened into an angry line. “Don’t say his name.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Why not? You don’t want me to speak ill of the dead?”
“Vi!” Nyah clutched my arm.
I knew I was being wild and reckless, antagonizing the woman. And yet I was so angry. So deeply, bitterly hurt. So fucking over people underestimating me because I was the fat, ugly, gentle girl who never made a fuss and never wanted to be seen.
Levi, Whip, and X had seen me anyway.
Will and Ari had seen the good in me, even when I’d stabbed and killed a man right in front of them.
This baby growing inside me would never hear me call it fat or ugly or useless.
I wasn’t going to stand here and let Francine walk all over me. If she was going to kill me then she would, but I wouldn’t go down being scared.
I wouldn’t go down without a fight.
“Travis was a piece-of-shit rapist and murderer, Francine. But you already knew that when you tracked him down, didn’t you? You knew that’s why he was on the list.” It wasn’t really a question. More of an accusation.
“He was a genius,” she hissed.
“He was a high-school dropout who killed cats for fun.”
She shook her head. “He rigged that warehouse perfectly, just like I asked him to. He planted those explosives on the cliffs. He created this trap for you to fucking rot in, you stupid bitch! Is it familiar? He said it’s just like the one your foster parents kept him in when you were kids. The one you never let him out of.”
I’d known nothing about that until Travis had mentioned it the night we’d killed him. Though I didn’t doubt it.
I also knew, if I had known I wouldn’t have let him out, only for him to peep on me in the shower, torment me, hurt me.
The gun in Francine’s fingers shook, but something in her words clicked puzzle pieces together in my head.
She might have delivered me on a silver platter to Paul and Travis. She might have watched it all through the nanny cams.
But the kills weren’t hers.
She had helped facilitate them. She’d written the rhymes. The one he’d uttered that night in the park before we’d followed him back to our childhood home had never sat right with me. I remembered thinking at the time that they hadn’t sounded like his words.
Francine had blood on her hands, no doubt, but she’d never actually pulled the trigger herself.
Judging from the way her entire body shook right now, she knew she couldn’t.
“You took Travis from me too,” she whispered. “We were supposed to be together. We were a team.”
Oh, that was rich. “You don’t really believe that, do you?
He strung you along, let you write your letters, made you think he needed you when all he really wanted was for you to supply him with girls to rape and kill.
Just like Paul did. I bet he got real excited when he realized it was me whose life you wanted to ruin.
I’ll give you that, you had that in common.
Is that what you bonded over?” I curled my lip at her in disgust. “But your mother was right, Francine. Men like Paul and Travis will never love you. Men like them don’t know how to love anyone.
That’s really why you’re mad right now, isn’t it?
It’s not at me, or Levi or Whip or X. You hate yourself for believing their lies when really you knew better. ”
I knew I was right when a tear dripped from her eye, splattering on the dirt floor beneath me. She swiped at her face with rough, jerky motions to prevent it happening again.
“What’s your plan here, Francine?” I asked.
“If you’d been able to kill, you would have already killed Nyah a week ago, am I right?
Clearly you were happy to drug her because otherwise the guys would have found her when they checked this house out after you gave us the address.
But this is a much nicer neighborhood than Saint View.
The neighbors would have called the cops if they’d heard shouting.
You would have had to keep her quiet while you were at work somehow. ”
Nyah’s exhausted, raspy voice lent itself to my theory. “My brain is so foggy,” she whispered. “But how… She never came down here. I don’t think…”
I remembered the lovely case of food poisoning X had given us. Whatever Francine had given Nyah to keep her quiet, she’d probably put it in her food.
It only deepened the theory that Francine could be an accomplice but not a murderer. I stared up at her. “I know you aren’t going to pull that trigger.”
She laid the gun down on the edge of the trapdoor. “You’re right. I can’t kill you.”
I nodded. “So just let us go.” I reached a hand toward her. “Just grab my hand and help us out, and this will all be over.”
For a split second, I thought she was going to agree.
But then the hurt and anger disappeared from her features, and she was no longer the broken shell of a woman Travis and Paul and her mother had turned her into.
She was something far more dangerous. She blinked and then laughed. “Oh, Violet. Sweet, sweet Violet. You misunderstand. I can’t kill you now. You or Nyah. Hasn’t she told you all about the nice food and drinks I’ve been giving her? Hasn’t she told you about all the prenatal vitamins?”
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Francine to look in Nyah’s direction to confirm if any of that was true.
Francine’s voice was practically a snarl when she leaned down once more, her beady eyes staring into mine.
“I don’t care about Paul or Travis or any man.
Not anymore. I gave up on that when Travis said he was done with me.
” She cocked her head to one side, her gaze dropping to my belly.
“All I want now is a family, Violet. Children. And you and Nyah are going to give me yours.”