14. Eli
FOURTEEN
ELI
Igave her my jacket.
Again.
I grip the steering wheel at ten and two and focus on the road. Left on Ocean. Right on Broadhurst. Merge north.
My hands are wrapped around the wheel so tight the leather creaks under my palms.
I ease my grip one finger at a time.
Too much.
I tighten it again.
I told her.
Not everything. I didn’t tell her the whole machinery of it. Didn’t tell her about Odin or the protocols. About every body, every rope, every clean exit. But I did tell her the part I never tell anyone. The beginning. The ugly root. The thing I built the rest of my life around pretending not to be.
My sister. What happened to her. What I did to the man who did it. What I’ve become since.
I never do that.
For years, I’ve kept that shit locked down. Haven’t told a single soul besides Knox. Even Holden doesn’t know all the details.
I used to be proud of that, like secrecy was discipline. Like silence was proof I still had command of myself.
Like I could keep the monster inside its cage if I never admitted I built the cage because something needed locking up.
Then I handed it to Sage.
I sat there in the park and opened my mouth and let the worst parts of me spill out between us, and in return she reached over and held my freaking hand.
That’s the part I can’t get past.
Not the telling. I’ve rehearsed the telling in my head a thousand times, run the variables, imagined the face people would make if they knew. Horror. Disgust. Fear. The little backward shift of the body before the mind remembers to be polite.
I was prepared for all of it.
I wasn’t prepared for her to hold my hand.
I should have pulled away.
That would have been the smart thing. The clean thing. Smile, redirect, get her home, hand her off to Knox, and put every necessary wall back where it belonged.
Instead, I sat there and let her fingers curl around mine like I was something worth touching.
Like I was safe.
My jaw aches from how hard I’m clenching it.
Safe is a lie people tell themselves because the alternative is admitting monsters can sit beside you in parks and eat sandwiches and remember to say thank you.
The road is quiet this time of night. Sunday traffic has cleared, and it’s that dead hour between people coming home and people going out.
I drive the speed limit, letting faster vehicles whiz by.
Forty-five means forty-five. Stop means stop.
Yellow means slow, not push through because there’s no one around to see.
Control isn’t a virtue.
It’s a lock.
Locks exist because something wants out.
My phone lights up on the passenger seat. I glance at it.
Knox:
You good?
Knox is watching her, which means nothing will get within a block of her building without us knowing. I trust him with her more than I trust myself.
That’s the problem in a nutshell.
I want her under me.
The thought hits so hard my hands tighten on the wheel.
No.
Not after what happened to her. Not after she sat beside me and let me pretend I was the kind of man who could offer comfort without wanting to turn it into possession.
I want to possess her.
I want to find the edge of her and press until she shows me what’s on the other side.
I want to know if she’d fight or fold, and which one she’d hate herself for wanting most.
I want to take her apart slowly enough to watch the moment she realizes there’s nothing soft about me. Nothing safe. Nothing gentle that doesn’t come with teeth.
No.
Stop.
The wanting always has teeth with me.
That’s the part I keep behind the wall.
Because I’m not built for comfort. I’m not the warm body at the end of a long day. I sat with her on that bench, her hand in mine, and even then—even with her crying—part of me was running the math.
What does she know?
What can she prove?
What’s the exposure if she talks?
How far could I push before she breaks?
How far before she pushes back?
Tactics. Need. Tactics. Need.
I never fully switch it off.
I’m not sure I can.
That should scare me.
What does scare me is that she saw enough of it to flinch and still didn’t let go.
I pull into my driveway and sit in the dark with the engine running.
My house is small. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen where I eat standing up because sitting down to a meal alone is depressing as fuck.
My legitimate jobs are teaching kids at Hunter Elementary and GED prep at Westlake Adult Learning two evenings a week.
Between the two paychecks, I cover the mortgage and not much else.
That’s where the third job comes in.
At least Odin pays well for what we do.
None of my students—the small ones, the older ones—know that the man teaching them about morality and justice and the human condition has seventeen men’s deaths on his hands.
Eighteen, counting Brock.
My phone lights up again.
Micah:
You gonna answer Knox or do we need to send out the search party?
I stare at it.
I swear to God, sometimes Micah has a sixth sense for when one of us is about to break. My fingers hover over the keyboard, and for one ugly second, I’m this close to sending back an SOS.
The last time I did, they came over with beers and sat on the porch beside me. Not one of them asked a single question. We drank in silence and watched the moon move across the sky, and when they finally drove away, the monster clawing in my chest was pacified.
Not gone.
Never gone.
Just quiet enough to be useful again.
But tonight, the thing under my skin isn’t something they can fix with beer and proximity. It isn’t grief. It isn’t guilt. It isn’t the old familiar hum of violence with nowhere to go.
It’s wanting something with a clarity that scares the shit out of me and knowing I can’t give in.
That’s what people get wrong about control. They think it means I don’t feel things.
I feel all of it.
All the time.
Every urge. Every impulse. Every ugly, hungry thought. Every image I refuse to let become intention.
Control is taking the thing inside me by the throat and holding it there until my hand cramps.
Control is knowing exactly where my hands want to go and keeping them folded anyway.
Control is the difference between being a man and being a warning.
Micah knows.
He’s always known.
He looks at me like he can see straight through the wall to the thing pacing behind it, and the worst part isn’t that it makes my pulse trip every time his name lights up my phone.
The worst part is that he lets me keep pretending.
He never pushes. He just waits. Lets me ration out what I can stand to give and takes it without complaint, because he learned a long time ago that pushing me only makes me bolt.
It’s not fair to him.
I know it’s not fair to him.
I do it anyway.
And then there’s Sage.
Sage, who makes the door rattle louder than it ever has before.
Sage, who I handed my jacket to so I’d have an excuse to picture her in it, like a teenager, like a man who hasn’t killed eighteen people and then driven home wondering what her mouth would look like saying his name.
Idiot.
Sentimental, reckless idiot.
Evidence once. Weakness twice.
I can’t have this.
Can’t give in.
So I do what I always do. I take all of it—the want, the fear, the ache behind my ribs, the image of her hand in mine, the knowledge that I would ruin myself if she asked the right way—and I shove it down somewhere I don’t have to look at.
Because on the surface, Eli is useful.
Eli runs the group, assigns the watches, makes the calls, keeps the bodies buried and the boys pointed in the right direction. Eli teaches children how to read and adults how to pass tests and monsters how to disappear.
Eli does not sit in the dark wanting the one person he should be keeping furthest from himself.
Keep the monster at bay.
I pick up my phone and tap out a text.
Me:
I’m good. At home.
The lie sends blue.
I kill the engine and go inside.
The house is cold. I don’t turn on the lights. I drop my keys on the counter, stand in the kitchen, and look at the phone.
I should call my sister.
Sophie’s in Portland now. She finished college there, stayed, built a life.
She’s a graphic designer at a marketing firm, and her biggest client makes organic pet food.
She spends her days drawing puppies and kittens, and coming up with clever pet puns that she finds hilarious.
I laugh when she does, but really I’m just freaking grateful to hear it because laughter means she survived.
She thinks he got jumped.
Found in the alley behind some bar on the wrong side of town, wallet gone, a mugging that went too far.
That’s the story we built—back when we were still learning how to build one, before the rope and the clean exits and the suicide notes.
When all I’d done was put an end to a rapist and let Knox and Holden take him somewhere to make it look like bad luck instead of what it was.
The cops barely looked.
A guy like that, in a place like that, at that hour.
Open and shut.
I hope it gave her something, knowing he was gone. I hope it gave her peace.
I glance at the clock and hesitate. It’s too late. I’d have to sound normal, and normal is beyond me right now.
Instead, I pull up her Instagram and scroll through her latest posts. Sophie at a farmers’ market. Sophie’s cat asleep on her keyboard. Sophie at dinner with friends, laughing, wine glass raised, face flushed. She’s alive and completely ignorant of the blood her freedom is built on.
She’s happy and free.
That’s the point.
That’s the whole fucking point.
I close the app and put the phone face-down on the counter.
For a second, I stand there with my palms flat on either side of it, breathing through my nose like I can force my body back into obedience.
It almost works.
Then I think about Sage.
I can’t not think about Sage.
She said she didn’t feel like a hero. Said she feels like a monster.
Just like me.
No.
Not just like me.