Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
LELAND
Age: Seventeen
There’s a girl crying. It’s all I can hear as I stand in the middle of the room surrounded by blood and bodies.
They let me in because I was young, I looked innocent, and they wanted to take advantage of me. And now they all lie dead while I stand over them, watching the blood pool.
I look down at the playing cards scattered across the floor. They were very involved in a game when the first man tried hitting me after I wouldn’t listen to him. They even had their guns out on the table, like peacocks trying to show off, and still…
Not a single one came close to hitting me.
The sound of crying hasn’t stopped. It’s the only noise in this otherwise silent room.
For some reason, I start walking toward it, well aware that Lucas will be irritated if I do and would think that I should leave the child here to rot.
More than anything, I shouldn’t be showing my face to anyone who I don’t plan to kill.
I mean… really, there’s no reason she can’t escape on her own; she doesn’t sound that young.
I push the door open and realize there’s not one, but two of them. A girl of about seven is sitting on the floor, hugging her knees to herself while she cries. The moment she sees me, she immediately stops crying and stares at me with wary eyes.
The other person, a boy of about fifteen, is leaning against a wall… just standing there. He has a knife in his hand, but his hand shakes and two of his fingers are bent at wrong angles. There are a variety of bruises on his face, some old, some new, and one eye is swollen completely shut.
He seems to stare through me. Like he doesn’t even see that I’m there, that I’m holding a gun, that I could kill him.
He takes a step toward me and I watch him closely, waiting for him to attack me, but he just walks forward. Does he want something from me? Or does he plan to attack me?
But his eyes don’t even seem to see me, and I realize that he wants to walk past me.
I step to the side and he moves through the doorway as the young girl springs to her feet and runs after him. She grabs his shirt, but he shoves her off him.
Then he walks over to the man who tried to hit me and looks down at him before he laughs.
It’s such a chilling sound in this hell of a world.
And when he kneels down, it’s not to grieve for the man I killed, but to plunge his knife into the man’s chest. I watch him stab the lifeless body again and again while the girl curls up on the floor and cries into her knees.
I know I should leave them, but it feels wrong to leave them here. All of this feels wrong.
“Get out,” I snap.
The boy freezes and looks back at me, his expression unreadable.
“Get out of here. Find someplace else to go. Go to the hospital. Someone will help you, find you a home, do something.”
Still, he stares at me, and I don’t like the look he’s giving me.
But he’s not moving. He’s not listening.
So I grab the girl’s arm and begin dragging her toward the door.
She screams and reaches for the boy who stands up and starts to trail after me; only then does she calm down and allow me to lead her from the bloodbath.
I pull her outside and release her, but I find that she now has hold of me and doesn’t let go.
“There’s a hospital that way. Now go,” I say, trying to shoo them off.
They both stare at me as I pry the girl’s hand off my clothes and disappear into the distance.
“Why are you here?” I ask, planning for my voice to be sharp.
The girl looks up and smiles when she sees me. At least she’s not sobbing this time. Instead, she’s watching me closely, like she’s excited to see me.
I noticed her a few days after I’d killed the people she’d been with and had learned that the man who tried to hit me was her—and the boy’s—father. The bruises the boy wore were all presents left behind by his father.
When I’d asked Lucas about them, he’d punished me for fixating on something that was irrelevant to the case at hand. I’d been reprimanded and reminded why we remain focused, but when I went out to collect something from the same area three days later, I saw her sitting alone on the street.
Questions raced through my mind:
Did her brother leave her?
She’s seen my face, could she tell someone?
Why wouldn’t she have gone for help?
What would have happened if I’d sought out help and hadn’t ended up in Lucas’s hands?
It’s now been five more days of the girl sitting there, which is why I’ve walked up to her and asked her why she’s here, but I’m met with silence.
And a smile.
She rushes up to me, making me shy away from her. It’s like even though my mind is telling me that what she wants is a hug, I want nothing to do with her touch. I want nothing to do with anyone’s touch, honestly.
The girl seems uncertain what to do with me, but she’s smart enough not to go for me again.
“Where’s your brother?” I ask.
She shakes her head but never speaks. She’s still wearing the clothes I’d found her in, with dirt smeared across her face.
I scrutinize her while I think about what to do with her, and I find myself looking back on my life with Lucas and questioning what it would have been like if I started again. Would I make the same choices?
I’m afraid I would have.
And I’m afraid I’ve made a mistake coming here.
I turn and hurry from her, but she follows me. I whirl on her and shake my head, hoping that she’ll listen if I’m stern enough. “Don’t follow me!”
If Lucas finds out, if he learns that I’ve been watching her or worrying that I’ve caused this child to starve to death and die out on the street, he’ll know I’ve fucked up.
And what if he gets rid of me?
I run and she dashes after me, though she’s a child and I can lose her in seconds, but just as I’m about ready to, she falls and hits down on her knees. I hesitate and turn, but when I do, I see the last person I want to see walking up behind her.
“Oh no, are you okay?” Lucas asks as he kneels in front of her. “Did you hurt your knees?”
She looks up at him and shakes her head.
“That’s good,” he says, helping her to her feet and dusting her pants off.
Then he leads her over to me before he sets his hand on my head and fluffs my hair. “This your friend?” he asks me, and the touch feels so menacing. It makes my entire body stiffen.
“No.”
“You sure?” He leans in real close. “Looks like Harry Brown’s daughter, doesn’t she? Sure looks like it.”
I swallow hard as I realize that none of this is going to go well. She’s seen my face. She knows that I killed them. I watched her. I interacted with her. I fucked up. I really fucked up.
And now Lucas is going to kill her.
Or will he make me kill her?
“This your friend?” Lucas repeats while he fluffs my hair some more. “She looks hungry.” He turns to her. “Are you hungry? I was going to make some chicken for dinner. Let’s get you fed and cleaned up.”
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
“The better question is… what are you doing?” he asks, and the shift in his tone makes my blood run cold.
I close my eyes and Lucas yanks my head back.
“Don’t ignore me.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Well, we’re going to eat some dinner with your new friend, aren’t we?”
“Why are you doing this?” I ask.
“She might be of some use,” he says.
She runs forward and grabs for my hand, and I try to pull it out of her reach, but she snatches it before I can. Her grip is deathly tight, and even though she looks happy to be doing this, the way her hand shakes tells me that she’s not so naive to this world.
“Go find someone who can help you,” I plead.
“Do you like potatoes? Maybe we’ll have baked potatoes with it. That sounds good,” Lucas says.
The girl looks back, and I get the feeling that someone is following us. When I glance back, I realize that it’s her brother, but what exactly does he want?
And what is Lucas going to do to him?
“What did he do to her?” Jackson asks, drawing me back to the present.
“He fed her,” I say. “He took us to one of his safe houses… and he fed her. And just… left her alone. I didn’t know why, but I have to assume he had some use for her. He just… let her stay there and she became a part of the daily routine.”
“And her brother?”
“I only saw… moments of her brother. I don’t know whether Lucas kept him away or he chose to stay away.
She hung on me, and I didn’t know what to do with it.
Every day, I assumed it was some trick and Lucas would just…
take her away. I was afraid of getting closer to her.
I was afraid of what interacting with her meant. ”
Micah muses, “I wonder if he was planning on grooming her just like he did with the rest of us. It wasn’t often he had more than one person at a time, but he did it a few times.”
“But what was his plan with her brother?” Everly asks.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I don’t know what any of it was. I just know that for about two weeks, she was there… and then… one day she was gone.”
Leland: Age seventeen
I’m tired.
I’m so tired.
I’ve perfectly tracked down a man, so well, in fact, that even Lucas found little to bitch about my technique.
But taking him down was another thing entirely.
He was well trained, but worse yet… he was paranoid.
It felt like everything he did was a way to keep anyone from ever getting close enough to hurt him.
He did a phenomenal job of that.
So I had to do a better one.
I’m the one still alive, so I guess I succeeded, but I hurt after he slammed my head repeatedly into the wall and sliced me multiple times. When Lucas sees me, he frowns, and I know I did a bad job.
I need to be better. I need to get better.