Chapter 18 #2
"Don't." He shoves off the counter and I flinch and he stops dead six feet away, breathing hard, hands in fists at his sides. "You've got a lot of nerve. Standing there. Looking at me like that."
I shake my head. "I don't know what's happening—"
"Yeah. Sure." His mouth twists into something that isn't a smile. "You don't know anything, do you. You never do."
"Killian." Vincent's voice. Flat. "Enough."
"No, he wants to know." Killian doesn't take his eyes off me. "Go on. Ask me what you did."
"Killian."
"Ask me."
My mouth opens. Nothing comes out of it.
"Huh. Nothing to say." He pushes off the counter, slow. "That's new. You had plenty to say last night."
Every drop of blood in my body goes to my face.
"Don't—"
"Why not?" He's smiling now and it’s a genuinely terrible thing to look at.
"Everybody in this kitchen's already worked out how you operate.
You got through both my brother and I inside a week.
What's the plan, work your way up the house?
" He tips his head at his father. "Save the old man for last? "
The room drops out from under me.
Because that was the plan. Not like that—not like that, not even close—but the shape of it is close enough that I can't get my mouth to say no.
"That's enough," Vincent says.
"Look at him. Standing there doing the wounded thing again." Killian laughs. There's no humor in it. "You're good, sweetheart. I'll give you that much. You're really fucking good."
And then he comes straight at me.
I don't have time to move. His shoulder catches mine hard enough to spin me into the doorframe, and my elbow cracks against the wood, and he doesn't slow down or look back or say one more word.
Boots down the hall. The back door goes off like a gunshot.
The glass in the kitchen window rattles in the frame.
Nobody moves.
My chest hurts.
Not like when my heart is beating out of control. No, this pain is different—this is higher up and wider and it's got nothing to do with any medication or illness. It’s like a punch straight to the chest, a deep ache that takes my breath away.
I press my palm flat against my sternum and push, like that's ever helped anything.
Breathe. Just breathe.
I don't chase Killian. I don't go out to the yard. I don't turn around and ask the two men still standing in this kitchen to please, please tell me what I did.
I just breathe, and I look at the fruit and croissants laid out on the table for me, and I process everything. Finally, it all catches up and I think:
Well. Obviously.
This was how it was always going to end, right?
What did I think was going to happen? They kidnapped me. I was collateral. I’ve been nothing but leverage to this family and at some point I forgot that. What… just because they were kind to me that meant I was something important? I was anything more than a means to an end?
What an idiot. How dumb can someone be? How painfully lonely can someone possibly be that–
I shake off the thought, pushing against my sternum again.
And I really thought—I genuinely stood there upstairs in the bathroom and thought—that three grown men were going to want to keep me.
My eyes are burning.
I look at the ceiling until it stops.
"Uh… okay," I say.
Vincent's head comes up. Calder turns to eye me.
"Okay," I say again. "Nine o'clock."
Suddenly, I’m numb.
Something moves across Vincent’s face. It's there and gone so fast I might have made it up.
I definitely made it up. Like everything else that’s happened here.
"There's a bag in the hall. Some things you might need," Vincent says.
Of course there is. Somebody packed my things while I was asleep–and then it dawns on me. Killian. That’s the only reason he stayed in my room last night after…
"Right," I say, nodding. "Thanks."
I turn around and walk out of the kitchen.
I get down the hall and there it is, sitting against the wall by the front door—a canvas duffel, zipped shut.
I sit down on the bottom stair next to it.
The clock in the hall says twelve past eight. Forty-eight minutes.
Forty-eight minutes until I leave this place. And my heart.
I sit there, arms wrapped around myself and I swear my ears are ringing. My vision is blurry. Nothing feels real.
My hand keeps going to my neck.
I can’t help myself. Every few minutes I come back to myself with two fingers pressed against the scab and that deep bruised ache under it, and every time I do, the thing behind my sternum pulls so hard I have to breathe through it.
The pull's getting worse. Every day, every minute, it’s been getting worse.
Calder's about thirty feet away through a wall. Soon, he's going to be three states away and I don’t know what will happen to this feeling. This intensity.
Will it fade? Will it get quieter the further I go, until one day I wake up and it's just gone and I can't remember what it felt like to be this full of somebody?
Or will it stay exactly like this. Forever. This same pulling, in a rented room in a town I've never heard of, for the rest of my life.
I don't know which one is worse.
I hear footsteps in the hall.
My whole body knows who it is before I've lifted my head—the pull goes tight and hot under my sternum and I have to press my fist against it, and I hate that. I hate that my own chest gives him away. Still yearns for him.
Calder stops a few feet from the stairs.
I don't look up.
I can't. I know exactly what happens if I do—I'll see his face and whatever's on it and I’ll come apart right here on this step in front of him, and I'd rather get in that car with my ribs cracked open than give any of them that.
So I look at his boots instead. Count the eyelets. There are nine on the left one and I can't see the right.
Neither of us says anything for about four seconds.
"Your heart medication," he says. "There's a note in the bag. The new dose."
"Okay."
"It's important you—"
"I know how to take my pills, Calder." Another punch to the chest. As if he cares… as if he gives a single fuck about me taking those pills. If I don’t, I’m not a burden to him or his family any longer.