18. Cassidy
EIGHTEEN
CASSIDY
It’s past midnight when I ease through the front door of the foster home and close it softly behind me.
The hinges still squeak, causing me to hold my breath, my heart thudding against my ribs.
But the house is drowned in silence. Usually Randall is passed out on the couch, but when I pass by the living room it’s empty.
No late-night TV, no rattling furnace. There’s just a half-empty beer bottle and an overflowing ashtray sitting on the table, but no sign of him. Where the fuck is he?
I shrug it off, because if he had been up, he’d catch me coming home much later than allowed, and I wasn’t really in the mood to explain why.
Deadman’s MC approached me one day while I was trying to talk some homeless guy into buying me a pack of cigarettes from the gas station, and ever since then I’ve been doing little jobs for them to earn some quick cash.
If Randall knew that, he’d make me fork over some of it. And that wasn’t happening.
My hands are still stained from work—dirt under my nails, blood dried and crusting in the lines of my knuckles.
It’s not much, but I still need to clean up before I head to the bedroom.
I use some dish soap from the kitchen and scrub what I can manage off of my arms and hands then head to the bedroom.
As soon as I enter the hallway upstairs I hear a pained whimper followed by the muffled creak of bedsprings.
Our shared bedroom is open just a sliver.
What the fuck?
Bindi never leaves the door open. Every instinct in my body screams that something is wrong when I hear the tiny, choked cry again. I yank the door open and the scene in front of me causes me to freeze.
Bindi is on the bed, my band tee she loves to wear pushed halfway up her stomach.
Her red hair is splayed over her face, but her eyes—god, her face—it’s turned toward me, her eyes squeezed shut and her bottom lip bitten raw in a desperate attempt to stay silent.
Her legs are twisted up in her own sheets, one knee raised as she tries to wriggle her way out of Randall’s hold.
Our foster father—the bastard who was supposed to protect us.
He’s on his knees over her, one of his big, greasy hands clamped around both her thin wrists, pinning them to the mattress above her head. His other hand is tugging at the waistband of her pajama shorts.
For a moment, I’m too shocked to move, my mind blank with horror. She lets out a sound—an animalistic sob that is strangled halfway out of her throat—and something in me detonates.
“Get away from her!” I roar.
He whips his head around. His eyes are glassy, but they widen in surprise and then twist in anger. “You little?—”
I don’t let him finish.
Rage propels me forward. I lunge for the first thing I can grab: the heavy ceramic lamp on Bindi’s nightstand. The cord rips free from the outlet as I swing it high.
For an instant, Bindi’s terrified, tear-streaked eyes flicker toward me. “Cass . . . NO?—”
I bring the lamp crashing down on his skull.
The impact is a sickening thud as the ceramic base shatters against his head with a dull crack.
He collapses sideways off Bindi, cursing and stunned.
I stumble, dropping the broken lamp. A shard slices my palm, but I barely feel the pain, only the hot rivulets of blood running down my fingers and onto the carpet.
My hand closes around the jagged piece of the shattered lamp base as Randall sits up from the floor, groaning and shaking his head. One hand gropes blindly, probably reaching for me or Bindi. But when his filthy fingers brush her bare leg and she flinches, I see nothing but red.
A buzzing in my ears drowns out everything. I smash the jagged chunk into his face. Once. It crunches against bone and he howls. Twice. Something cracks and a warm spray hits my arm. He tries to shield himself, feebly raising an arm, but I shove it aside and hit him again.
Three times.
All I can see is him on top of her. All I can hear is that stifled whimper she made. I hit him until he finally falls limp.
My arm falls to my side, trembling. The bloody shard of ceramic slips from my fingers and thuds to the floor as I stagger back. A strange, harsh rasp fills the room. Only after a second do I realize it’s the sound of my own breathing.
He’s down, sprawled on his back between the bed and the wall. His face is a ruin of blood—barely recognizable. A dark pool spreads on the carpet under his head.
Fuck.
I killed him.
My stomach lurches and I push down the urge to immediately hurl.
I turn to the bed. Bindi has curled into a ball, knees to her chest. She’s yanked her T-shirt down, covering herself, and is pressed into the corner where the bunk bed meets the wall. Her eyes are wide and glassy, staring at the broken lamp on the floor, at Randall’s motionless body.
She’s not screaming, or even crying. She just looks . . . gone. But that’s the thing about Bindi—she doesn’t go silent, ever. She’s loud when she’s happy and even louder when she’s pissed. So this version of her, this still, shattered little thing, is wrong.
So fucking wrong.
“Bindi,” I say gently, stepping over Randall’s legs, moving to put myself between her and the monster I just killed for her. “Binx.” My fingers reaching out slowly as they graze her shoulder. “Hey, Binx . . . look at me.”
She flinches like I burned her. Maybe from the touch. Maybe from the blood on my skin. Or maybe because part of her still thinks it might be him.
“Binx, it’s me. It’s Cass.”
Her eyes twitch, barely, then flick toward my face like she’s surfacing from deep water. “Cass . . . ?”
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s me.” My throat tightens at the sight of her tear-streaked cheeks. I try to smile, but it crumples. “You’re safe now. I promise. I got him. I stopped him.”
A shudder runs through her and her lip quivers. Then, all at once, she lunges forward and throws her arms around my neck. I nearly fall off the bed, but I catch her, wrapping her up in my arms. She buries her face in my chest, and I feel the hot wetness of her tears soaking through my shirt.
“It’s okay.” I breathe, my hand cradling the back of her head. My voice is shaking. Hell, my whole body is shaking. “ It’s okay. I’m here. I got you. He’s gone. He can’t hurt you. I won’t ever let anyone hurt you again.”
She clings to me as I rock her gently, the same way I used to when she woke from nightmares. Her sobs are muffled against me, but I can feel each one like a knife in my ribs.
I wish I could hold her forever and shut out the rest of the world.
I wish I could kill him all over again. What if I was just ten minutes later?
Would I have walked in on a completely different situation than what I did?
Eventually, her sobs start to ease and she pulls back just enough to look at me.
Her eyes drift over my face, then down to my arms. She touches my right arm with a trembling finger. “Y-you’re bleeding.” She hiccups.
My forearm’s slick with red—some of it mine, most of it his. The cut on my palm is still bleeding.
“It’s nothing,” I say, moving to wipe it off on my jeans, which are caked in Randall’s blood.
Bindi sniffs and looks past me, toward the floor.
I shift quickly, blocking her view with my body. With one hand, I grab an old throw blanket from the foot of her bed and drape it around her shoulders, covering her up, hiding the awful scene behind us.
“Don’t look,” I whisper.
She nods against me, clutching the blanket around herself.
“Binx, I’m so, so sorry. I should’ve been here. I . . . I should have never left you.”
She shakes her head in tiny, frantic motions and grips me tighter. “You came back,” she whispers into my shirt. “You saved me, Cass. You saved me.”
“I should’ve been here sooner,” I whisper. “If I’d just?—”
“No.” She pulls back just enough to look at me. Her eyes are red-rimmed, swollen from crying. “He never . . . before tonight, he never touched me like that.”
She swallows hard, the words sticking. “He looked—I knew he looked. I hated it, but he didn’t touch.
Not until tonight.” A tear slides down her cheek.
“And he didn’t get far. I swear. You came in before he .
. . before—” Her voice cracks, but she keeps going.
“He didn’t win, Cass. You stopped him. You got there in time. ”
I nod, choking on relief and fury all at once. My throat burns.
“I needed you to know that, so you don’t carry it like it’s your fault.”
I can’t speak. I just cup the side of her face with my shaking hand and press my forehead against hers.
For a second, everything else disappears until it’s just her and me. Breathing. Alive.
In the distance, a siren wails. These walls are paper-thin; of course the neighbors heard. My body goes rigid. Another joins it, growing louder. Red and blue lights begin to flicker through the thin curtains, painting the walls in a ghostly purple.
Bindi’s head jerks up, her eyes suddenly wide with a new fear. “Cassidy . . . the police . . .” she croaks.
“Kelly’s gone. Remember? She took the littles to that overnight church camp thing—she won’t be back ‘till tomorrow morning. No one else is here. No one but us. One of the neighbors must’ve heard the shouting.”
I hear car doors slamming and voices outside.
My mind kicks into gear. The blood, the body—I killed him. Self-defense or not, no one will listen to a seventeen-year-old foster kid covered in blood. And Bindi . . . if they find her here like this, they’ll take her away.
I grab Bindi by the shoulders, looking hard into her panicked eyes. “Listen to me. We have to get you out of here.”
She stares at me, not understanding. “What? No. No—we have to tell them, Cass. He was hurting me. They’ll understand?—”