Chapter 24 #2
“What happens when you fuck up?” Lucas asks as he comes over to me.
Behind him stands the girl named Sera. While she seems to be unable to speak, she can write…
if she chooses to. What she writes is limited, but she listens to everything, hears everything.
She knows how to blend in, how to be a part of the room without ever being seen.
Maybe that’s what Lucas likes about her.
She can be eyes and ears that he could slip in someplace and no one would expect her, so no one would be careful around her.
It’s like cussing in front of a toddler because you believe they can’t understand.
No one would believe that she could retain every word said and write them down on a paper for us to read.
Lucas drops the first aid kit in front of me, and I’m left to patch myself up.
And still Sera stands there, watching me and waiting.
Only once Lucas leaves does she walk over, sitting on the ground at my feet and leaning against the chair I sit in.
She doesn’t say anything, but neither do I.
Instead… it’s that moment of just… being in the same room as each other that helps me breathe.
Days shift to weeks as this dance we’re playing with Lucas becomes the norm until one day I get back and find her gone.
I try to tell myself that she could be in her room or off playing, but I know something has happened.
There hasn’t been a single day that she wasn’t waiting at the door to greet me when I came in.
I walk through the house, checking every room, and I even go outside as that sinking feeling grows by the second. I find myself in front of Lucas’s office where I stand and stare at the door. For several minutes, I feel incapable of knocking because I’m not sure I want to hear what he has to say.
“Come in.”
“Where’s Sera?”
“Gone.”
“What did you do to her?” I whisper. “I was good. I did as I was told. I haven’t fucked up.”
Lucas grins at me and cocks his head. “My, Leland, I didn’t know that you had such a poor opinion of me. What do you think I did with her?”
“Did you kill her?”
His grin doesn’t even falter; it seems to be reaching his eyes. “Why do you always think I’m so heartless, Leland?”
“Why won’t you answer?”
“I didn’t kill her,” he says.
And the fucking emphasis on that “I.” Something is squeezing my stomach and it hurts. It hurts so much worse than being beaten or punched or stabbed. I want to make a noise, do something to express my sorrow, but I know I can’t. Not in front of Lucas, at least.
“She’s dead,” I state because what else can I do?
“She simply chose to go with her brother. We weren’t enough for her, Leland. You know anyone who walks through these doors is free to go, including you,” he says. And what a laugh. There’s no fucking way he’d just let me leave.
“Her brother came here and took her?”
“He came here… and she went with him. Let’s go. They didn’t get far,” he says, telling me he followed them.
Lucas gets up and heads out the door as I trail after him, but I’m not sure I even want to. I want to go back to my room and bury my face in my pillow where I can scream out all of my rage and heartbreak.
“Did her brother talk to you?” I ask.
“He did.”
“What did he want?”
“Something precious to me.”
When he words it like that, it lets me know that he’s not planning on telling me that answer. “You… didn’t want to let him stay as well?”
“I did not. She could stay. He could not. It was as simple as that. He didn’t find it so simple.”
I want to voice that it was unfair to split the siblings up, but Lucas knows that. There’s really no sense in me saying something he already knows. We walk down the long winding road before turning a corner, and I find that I have no interest in going any farther.
“I’ve seen enough.”
“I don’t think you have,” Lucas counters. “You wanted to be nosy, so let’s be nosy.”
“I’m sure you already checked whether she was alive. If she is dead, I don’t want to see her,” I say, refusing to even look in the direction she lies.
Lucas drags me anyway. “And then her brother jumped off that bridge right there. Leland, I want you to know this is why we don’t trust anyone. We don’t love anyone. We don’t care about anyone. She let her emotions lead her to this place.”
“You act like she’s in the wrong for going with her brother. How could she have known he’d kill her?”
“We gave her everything she ever needed, and still, she chose this path.”
“She was a child who went with her family; she could never have expected that it would end up getting her killed,” I say. “Deep down, she might have known that staying with us was safer, but sometimes people make stupid mistakes when it comes to someone they love.”
Lucas grabs my hair and jerks my head back. “That is right. The moment you start interfering with lives, you run the risk of being killed or getting others killed. You’re unfocused. You never know who you can trust.”
“Including you?” I ask.
“Always include me,” he says with a grin.
“You cannot love. You cannot care for others. The only person you are in charge of is yourself. That is what will make you invincible. Humans are weakest when someone they care for is in danger. Use that to your advantage but don’t ever let them use it against you. Now let’s go.”
“Can I bury her?”
He lets out a huff that kind of sounds like a laugh. “You just don’t learn.”
“I probably never will.”
“I’ll call someone to deal with her. Let’s go. And don’t meddle in others’ lives ever again. That’s weakness, Leland. Weakness. Are you a weak man?”
“I am here to point my gun at anyone you direct me to.”
“That’s a good boy,” he says with a smile. “You might be my favorite one yet.”
And I’m left wondering, not for the first time, what happened to all of the others.