46. Ellie
Ellie
The car starts to slow while the field is still just a name on Cyrus's map, and there's still a mile or more of dark road left between us and the location on the pin Todd sent me.
"Let's go over the plan one more time," Kade says, twisting around to look at me from the front seat.
Even half-broken he still talks like he's never once doubted he'd be obeyed.
And yet I disobey him constantly. I'm choosing to find it funny.
"Tank and I stay with you. Cyrus and Jinx come in through the treeline on the west side, and you—"
"Stay behind you," I recite, because we happen to be on the same page about the plan. "The entire time. I move when you move, I stop when you stop. I heard it the first time, Kade."
He grunts. "You're going to hear it until it's tattooed on the inside of your skull."
I roll my eyes, but I'm too focused on what lies ahead to worry about his overprotectiveness. It's kind of cute anyway.
Then Cyrus kills the engine, and all four doors open at once. The guys all get out, so I follow, confused.
"Wait, why are we stopping?" I ask. "This isn't the pin location."
Kade reaches under the seat and comes up with a small black object I barely see in the dark, until he puts it in my hands.
A gun.
It's smaller and lighter than I expected, but still heavy in my palms.
"You know how to use one of these?" Kade asks.
"I've watched you do it enough times."
"That's not the same as doing it." He moves around to my side and folds his good hand over mine.
"Both hands. Like this. Put your thumb here and not behind the slide unless you want it to take a chunk out of you.
" His fingers guide mine into place, patient to a degree Kade almost never is except when it matters.
"Safety's here. If it's switched off, it fires, so don't fucking switch it off until you mean to use it.
And you don't point it at anything you're not willing to put a hole in. "
Tank steps around to my other side. He doesn't sign, but he nudges my elbows up a fraction and taps the back of my wrist until I lock it the way he wants. His huge hands close around my smaller ones to adjust the angle of my arms.
"Line up the front sight in the notch," Kade murmurs against my ear. "Breathe out and squeeze, but don't pull."
I aim at a fence post pale against the dark and do exactly what he says.
The crack of the shot punches through the dark and travels up my arms into my shoulders way more forcefully than I expected from the movies. I gasp, but I don't drop the gun somehow. Tank's hands are already there steadying me before the recoil's even finished.
"Again," Kade says while Cyrus and Jinx watch, quiet smirks planted on their faces as if they've already taken bets on something.
I fire twice more. The third one eats a splinter off the top of the fence post and Jinx, leaning against the hood with his arms crossed, gives a low whistle.
"Annie Oakley over here," he calls.
"You won't have to use it," Kade tells me. His one good eye is steady, the bruising around the other going green at the edges now. "I promise you that, but it's better you have it and never touch it."
Cyrus is already pulling a vest out of the trunk, the same type I wore at the warehouse.
He wraps it around me himself, cinching the straps until I can barely even breathe.
Then Jinx peels off his jacket, the nice battered denim one that smells like his pricey cologne, and settles it over my shoulders on top of the vest. He fusses with the collar, tugging the hem straight like we're about to walk into a party and not a field where my stepfather waits to kill us all.
"There," he says quietly. "Now you're just a girl in a jacket."
I want to make a joke but I can't think of one, so I wrap my arms around him instead.
We drive in the dark, headlights off. The only light coming from anywhere is the moon occasionally peeking out behind the clouds.
Cyrus and Jinx slip out before we reach the field and melt into the trees on the west edge of the forest, vanishing so completely I lose sight of them in three steps.
Tank has the wheel and Kade is in the passenger side with his gun in his lap.
I sit in the back with my own gun cold in my hands and Jinx's jacket swallowing me whole.
The field opens up through the trees and in the middle of it, parked at an angle in the dry grass, sits a car.
A cheap one. It's a boxy sedan that barely even has a color, a car I'd never look twice at if I saw it abandoned on the side of the road.
Todd Waterson, who would not typically be caught dead in anything that didn't have a hood ornament, is driving a beater.
I'd alert the press, but they've already got more than enough ammo against him.
Tank stops us fifty feet out. He and Kade get out first, then Kade motions for me and I slip out behind him.
That's when I see the tires.
All four of them, flat in the grass, the rubber turned to ribbons. It looks like someone took a fucking machete to those things. At first, I think the car has been abandoned, but when I realize it's still running, I decide staged is a better word.
And then I hear it.
A sound coming from inside the car, muffled and frantic. Fists pound against the glass as someone screams, and I'd know that voice anywhere, even muffled from inside the car, because it's the first voice I ever knew.
"Mom." I'm already running. "MOM!"
An arm hooks around my waist and someone yanks me off my feet. "Don't," Kade hisses in my ear.
Because Todd is here.
Because it's a fucking trap.
I know both these things, but knowing them doesn't mean my feet would stop moving the second he put me on the ground.
Just like a demon being summoned, Todd steps out from behind the car, and there's a gun in his hand, and it's pointed at us.
Tank and Kade move at the same instant, both their weapons drawn, both of them stepping between me and that barrel so all I see is their backs forming a shield in front of me.
Todd just smiles. In his other hand, he's holding something. A little black box with a stub of antenna and a single raised switch under his thumb. He lifts it so we can all see it, and then he tips his head lazily toward the car.
"It's wired," he says. "A lovely little package under the chassis, so I'd put those down, gentlemen, unless you'd like to find out just how fast this can end."
Inside the car, my mother throws herself against the door. The handle rattles but it doesn't open.
The bastard locked her in.
"Baby, I'm sorry." Her voice comes thin and broken through the glass. "I'm so sorry, I didn't know what he wanted to do."
"Mom." My voice sounds like it belongs to someone who's not having a complete meltdown, somehow. "Stay there. Don't move. Everything's going to be fine, but you can't fucking move."
Kade hasn't lowered his gun an inch. "You want to talk, Senator?
" His tone is conversational, which is usually how it gets right before something terrible.
"Let's talk. There's no version of tonight where you walk away from this field breathing.
None. But there are a handful where you don't spend your last hours screaming in agony, and every one of those is a version where your thumb stays off that switch. The choice is yours."
Todd laughs and my skin wants to crawl right off my bones.
"I knew you were nothing the second I laid eyes on you.
" He says it to Kade, but he looks at all of them, that cold blue gaze sliding over my boys like they're trash washed up on his lawn.
"All of you, nothing more than gutter rats playing dress-up.
I gave this family everything you never could.
A good name, a beautiful home, a world-class education for Ellie, and a real future.
And you threw it all away." His eyes find me past the wall of their shoulders.
"Even your mother knows it. Why do you think she helped me write that letter, all those years ago?
" His voice drips with false sweetness as he looks over at her in the car. "Didn't you, sweetheart?"
My mother goes still in the driver's seat, and her face is the same as it was that day in the hospital. Guilty.
My heart sinks anyway, even though I already knew. Even though I found the drafts in her drawer with my own hands.
"Why, Mom?" The words barely make it out of me. "Why did you do it?"
She presses her palm against the window and her face crumples.
"Your father," she whispers, and I should have known.
Even now, even now it's about him. "He got into trouble with the company.
He just made some bad decisions, that's all, because that woman wanted too much from him.
She always has. She pushed him into things he never would have done on his own, like sending us away.
But Todd promised he'd make it all go away.
" Her voice breaks so hopefully as she says it.
"And he did. He made it disappear. But I did it for you, too, baby.
So you'd be safe. So you'd have a good life. "
All the air leaves my lungs at once. Somehow, out of all the reasons I came up with in my head, this is the worst one. Knowing she sold me out for a man who doesn't give a damn about either of us and told herself it was for me.
"No." I shake my head, but I'm not even crying.
I'm past it, somewhere clear and cold. "No, Mom.
You didn't do it for me, you did it for him.
You've always done everything for him. He left us in a trailer park with nothing and you still sent him letters, just like you still answer when Todd calls!
You've spent my whole life choosing other people, chasing men, and I'm the one person who never left. I'm the one who stayed."
She has nothing to say to that. For the first time in twenty-one years, my mother is struck completely silent.
Todd isn't silent for long, though. He never fucking is. "I knew if I let you keep crawling around with these degenerates, their filth would rub off on you and taint everything I built." His thumb shifts on the detonator and my heart stops. "What would any of you know about building an empire?"
"More than you." Kade's voice cuts him off flat.
"You think you're so fucking different. Mr. High-and-Mighty Senator from the good side of town.
I thought we were different, too, but you know what?
We're not. I took her freedom, too. Put a collar on her like she was something I owned.
" His jaw works as he says it. "The only difference is, I get to spend every day for the rest of my life regretting it.
And you…" His mouth curls. "You don't have any more days left. "
He lunges.
It happens too fast for me to scream or for Todd to react.
Kade hits Todd full-body, broken ribs and all, and they go down in the grass in a tangle, the detonator flying out of Todd's hand into the dark.
The gun goes off somewhere, deafening. I have mine up in both hands, safety off, but they're rolling in a knot of limbs, and there's no clear shot.
I can't fire without hitting Kade and…
Todd twists on top and his gun swings toward Kade's head.
"TANK!" I cry.
Tank is already moving. He throws an arm out and shoves me sideways, off my feet and out of harm's way, and then he dives for Kade and Todd.
A hail of gunfire bursts out from the trees, and all I can do is pray Cyrus and Jinx are better shots than I am at that distance.
But Tank is heading right toward the fire, a human wall of solid muscle that flies across the gap.
Todd staggers back and red blooms on his shoulder, but he's already taking aim at both Kade and Tank.
The engine roars.
The slashed tires scream against the dry earth, rubber shredding off the rims, and the dishwater hued sedan lurches forward in a spray of grass and sparks. My mother's face is behind the wheel, looking more determined than she ever has.
It hits me in that split second that this is the first time I've seen her stone cold sober since I can remember.
Maybe the first time in my whole life.
Kade and Tank throw themselves clear of the car's path in opposite directions, landing hard as they roll into the grass.
Todd looks up a fraction of a second too late.
The sedan barrels into him and takes him with it, his body folding over the hood. It doesn't slow or stop, just keeps barreling on toward the black wall of oak trees at the field's edge.
I scream her name but my voice sounds hollow and far away.
"MOM, NO!"
I'm already running and the ground rips out from under me as someone tackles me into the grass.
Jinx.
His arms lock around me just as Cyrus skids down beside him out of the trees. The two of them pin me flat against the cold dirt and shield me with their bodies as the car hits the trees. It sounds like the world is ending, and a part of mine has.
And then the night turns orange.
The blast lifts the back of the car off the ground but Tank surges to his feet and starts toward it on instinct anyway.
He runs into the fire and toward my mother even though there's nothing left but a blown out metal shell and a raging fire.
Kade grabs a fistful of his jacket with his good hand and hauls him back with everything he has left, screaming something I can't hear over the roar.
The second explosion destroys what was left of the car. The gas tank blowing from the fire, probably. Heat rolls across the field and even from this distance, I feel it on my face. The oak is burning now too, and there is nothing left in that fire that was ever a person.
They're both gone.
Gone.
My mother is gone.
I stop fighting and only realize I managed to stand up halfway when I drop to my knees in the grass.
The four of them close around me, Jinx and Cyrus still holding me as the sobs rack my body.
Kade says something and Tank's hand finds my arm through the others, but I can't feel or hear anything.
An ember from the blast burns a hole in the shoulder of Kade's jacket before he strikes it out.
It all happens in slow motion, and then all at once.
I watch the car burn and I think about every letter I wrote and every one that came back, about a pink lipstick in a drawer, and a hand pressed to glass.
She killed him.
My mother killed the man who's been tormenting us both for years. He trapped her in that car and rigged it up and she did the one thing he never thought she'd have the courage to do.
For the first and last time, she chose me.