29. Chloe
Chloe
Iwill never forget the look on my stepdad’s face when I lifted my foot into the air and kicked that ladder out from under him.
I bet it is similar to the look he saw on my face every time he snuck into my room and held me down while I screamed for help that would never come, because my mother was knocked out on the other side of the house.
We’d been home from Hope House for less than an hour when the gold, gawdy ring on his finger split her cheek open.
Her eyes met mine as fast as her hand met her own bloody, bruising face.
I think she knew, at that moment, it was over for us.
It was now or never. I know she could see me shaking with rage.
I came home from the shelter with the deepest desire to have that peace we’d experienced there, forever.
I’m sure she could feel the heat from my body, because I felt like I was going to go up in flames as that motherfucker shook his hand out and disappeared into the backyard like nothing happened.
And then he simply fell.
“A horrible accident,” my mother whispered next to me, wrapping her warm hand around mine as we watched those pretty lights twinkle in that dark red puddle of blood expanding around his smashed skull.
An accident. It was our story. Then, and all the times to come.
My next stepdad, who lo and behold turned out to be just like the first one, I rather enjoyed watching his eyelids grow heavier and heavier as he eyed me in my bikini by the pool and the sleeping pills kicked in—until he fell face first into the water and drowned in his sleep.
The only thing I hate more than my third stepdad, is the fact that his death caused the chain of events that put my mother in prison.
Or maybe I did that.
He never touched me, because I wasn’t a young girl anymore. I wasn’t fresh out of high school. I wasn’t quiet, and malleable, and frightened.
I was hardened by what the last two had done to me, what they’d done to her, and I was not afraid anymore.
Once he realized I wasn’t going to let him look at me however he wanted, he hated the fact that I was always there. That he couldn’t hurt my mother and get away with it. But why would I leave when I had a whole wing of the house to myself? When leaving her meant leaving her vulnerable?
The silent threat in my eyes was clear every time our gazes met, and he was an idiot for thinking it was an empty one: touch my mother, and you die.
The moment the police started asking questions, we lawyered up. My mom brushed her soft hands against either side of my face, pressing her lips to my forehead. It made me feel like a child again, even though I was just shy of thirty.
“You were protecting me,” she whispered.
“And we will protect you so that you can continue protecting others. They need you, Chlo. We won’t let it get this close again.
” She pulled away, her eyes glistening, and I tried to argue.
Tried to tell her that the photos and videos could be argued either way, but she was adamant.
We would use that as my alibi, and she would do the time for my crimes.
And I will not forget the fact that instead of bursting in here, slamming the cuffs around my wrists, and hauling me to the slammer, Colin came through that door quietly, slowly, bent me over in my kitchen, and fucked me while demanding I tell him how many people I’ve killed.
He came inside me after hearing exactly how many lives I’ve taken.
That told me with almost one hundred percent certainty that he wasn’t going to arrest me, despite the fact that he handcuffed me to my fucking kitchen drawer and left me here to die.
He was afraid of feeling indifferent to all I’ve done, and that scared him more than I did.
I felt it with each glorious slam of his hips into my ass.
In each curl of his hand around my jaw. He was taking his hatred for himself out on me, and that’s fine.
I’d allowed him to do that for the past couple of years, waiting patiently for him to come around.
He’s close now. I just need to wait him out a while longer—but he’s out of his mind if he thinks I’ll do it quietly on the cold floor of my kitchen.
I would have waited here for at least an hour, God knows I deserve at least a little punishment, but when I hear the muffled ping of my phone from my purse on the counter, I can’t help but wonder if it’s him.
If he’s texting to say he made a mistake and he’s on his way back.
That he doesn’t care what I’ve done or who I am.
Butterflies spring to life in my stomach at the prospect of him rushing through that door again, a bright light beaming behind him and smoke billowing into the room.
“Rue!” I probably scared the shit out of her with my screaming earlier. She’s likely curled into a scared, tiny ball on the couch or hiding under my bed.
When I don’t hear her tap-tapping across the marble floors, I call her name again, gentler and sweeter this time. “Rue, baby, come here.”
Silence, and then the tentative tapping of her nails against the floor.
“Yes, baby, come here.” I follow up with kissy noises until I see her poke her head around the kitchen cabinets.
Reaching out with my free hand, I wiggle my fingers to draw her closer.
I scratch her behind the ears when she just barely enters my line of reach, and she whines happily as her unease with my previous screaming becomes a forgotten memory.
“Do you like cookies, Rue Rue?” Her ears perk up and her eyes meet mine, clear recognition of the word cookie lighting up her dark eyes. “Cookies!” I whisper-shout. “Yes! Doesn’t that sound so good?” She gives me an impatient tap of her toes in response.
Scooping her under my arm, I muster as much balance as I can to lift us off the ground with my other hand still cuffed to the drawer, and then I set her on the countertop and point to my purse that’s lying just out of reach of both my free arm and my legs.
“Push that toward me, baby, and I’ll give you cookies.
” The furry little pup’s ears perk up again, and she follows the point of my finger in the direction of my purse and back to my eyes, not quite understanding.
I lean forward, coming up onto my tippy toes and pushing my hand further toward the bag.
“There are cookies in there! Can you…” Fuck.
I’ve never actually had a dog before. I’m drawing a blank on the things people teach them.
“Can you retrieve that, Rue? Cookies.” I wiggle my hand in the direction of the bag when I say cookies, and she looks from me to the bag, taking a couple of steps toward it.
“Yes! Good girl, Rue.” A few more steps. “Yes, yes. Bring it here.” She stops at my purse, and looks back at me. “Bring it here, Rue Rue. Can you…fetch?” I point at the bag in front of her and wave her in my direction. “Fetch, Rue. Bring it here.”
My phone pings again from inside the bag, drawing the dog’s attention to it.
It starts ringing, and Rue’s head slowly turns from side to side as she listens to the music.
My patience runs so incredibly thin I want to explode, but I know that will ruin my chances of getting her to bring it to me.
When the music stops, she leans down and nudges it again, and it moves ever so slightly in my direction.
“Yes!” I tell her, and she does it again. She does it again and again until I can just barely touch the leather strap with my fingertips, and I grab it and pull it across the counter to me.
I wasn’t lying—I did actually have cookies in there.
I pull the bag out first and dump some on the counter for her to munch on while I dig my phone out.
“Good girl, Rue!” I tell her, and then shift my attention to the phone screen.
It starts ringing again, and my heart drops when it’s not Colin’s name on the screen, it’s Maeve’s.
We’d been in touch all throughout the night, and when I made it home at one a.m., we said our goodnights, and I thanked her for checking the train schedule and confirming it wouldn’t have an engineer on board.
I may have caused a shit ton of damage, but I’m nothing if not serious about my desire to keep the innocent as physically unharmed as possible.
“Hi, babe—”
“Chlo,” she whispers into the phone, her voice shaky.
My heart skips a beat against my ribcage, her quiet voice loud with trouble. “What’s wrong?”
“Did you get my message?”
I pull the phone away from my ear, seeing the little envelope indicator of the message that came through a minute ago. “No, I—” I drop my gaze to the handcuffs. “I’m kind of tied up at the moment.”
“Chloe,” she cries, and then the sound of her shouting turns distant before a new voice joins the call.
“Chloe,” he sings. “You’ve been a busy girl.”
“Who is this?” I set the phone down and put it on speaker, fumbling in my purse for the handcuff key I purchased online—because I just had a feeling I would be in this scenario at some point.
The man scoffs into the phone, sounding offended that I don’t recognize his voice. It’s just vaguely familiar, one I’ve heard maybe once or twice before, but frustratingly, I can’t place it.
“Little Miss Maeve means a lot to you,” he says. I picture him looking at her, assessing her small body curled up in a corner somewhere. Is she chained up like I’ve been? Is she hurt? “The question is,” he continues, his voice taunting, “how much?”
“You’re about to find out,” I grit.
I’m enraged that he’s using her against me. She’s so innocent, the best of me and Stella. She doesn’t deserve whatever it is I’ve gotten her into. My face grows hot as I force myself to keep breathing and digging in the bag.
I finally find the handcuff key, and my hand trembles as I struggle to fit it into the tiny hole with the amount of anger and adrenaline surging through me. On the fourth try, I manage to slide it in, and I turn it until the lock clicks and I unlatch the ugly, silver bracelet from my wrist.
“Where are you?” I ask the man, scooping Rue and my purse off the counter.
I’m assuming that he’s taken Maeve because he wants me, and the next logical step is to draw me to her.
It’s an excellent strategy, because my friends, like my mother, are my world.
I will do anything to protect them, and someone has targeted my weakness.
They will come to regret that.
“The warehouse,” the man says. I know exactly what he’s talking about. A quick check of Maeve’s location confirms she’s at the warehouse I usually drop my mother’s Suburban at for Stone to pick up and clean. Whoever he is, he’s been watching.
I thought I’d been lurking in the shadows, watching the bad men. And surprise, surprise, the bad men were lurking deeper, watching me back.
“I’ll be there in twenty.”
Pulling open the door of my Bug, I end the call and toss the phone onto the passenger seat followed by my purse.
I climb into the driver’s seat and settle Rue next to me.
I bend forward and feel around under Rue’s seat, and then mine, feeling victorious when my hand touches something foreign.
Pulling the little black box out from under my seat, I hold the tracker with the green blinking light on it in the air.
It looks exactly like the one I found in my mother’s car, and switched off before I left his mother’s apartment complex.
I knew he was tracking me. Watching me.
The sweep of my house after Colin broke in was in fact, fruitful.
I don’t have that gaming console in my house just as a damn dust collector.
I watched his black and white, ghostly form kneel in front of my entertainment center and dig something out of his bag, and it took me zero seconds to spot it when I glanced in its direction.
Wasn’t hard to spot the glint of light reflecting off a picture frame in my bedroom that had never been there before either.
And he never said it, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how he knew exactly where I was the night of the party.
It’s fine. I wanted him to watch me. To continue spiraling into his obsession with me. He needed to see this side of me, too.
But he didn’t need to hear what went on behind closed doors. That remained mine.
I toss the little tracking box out of the window and start the car.
“Put your seatbelt on, Rue Rue. We’re going to fuck shit up. Again.”