15. Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Fifteen
“You…” Xander paused, cleared his throat.
I couldn’t read his face, but something flickered behind his blue eyes. Something cautious. Something controlled. Something he was barely holding on to.
He swallowed thickly, then: “You poisoned your mother?”
I snapped my gaze up to meet his. My eyes were waterlogged, my vision blurry from the tears, but there was no mistaking the naked skepticism on his face. He didn’t believe that I would…
Wait.
Poison her?
My thumbnail felt raw, aching—I hadn’t even noticed I’d been gnawing at it. How long had I been doing that? Slowly, I brought both my hands into my lap, balling them into fists.
“No, I didn’t poison her. I… What the fuck are you talking about, Xander?”
“Maybe you should tell me everything.”
“Aren’t you going to call the police?” I asked.
He gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. “As it stands, this is a…Whispering Ivy matter…that we’ll be handling internally.”
His gaze flicked to Connor.
“A murder off-campus is a college matter?” I asked.
Xander exhaled a slow breath. “Just…go on, darling. When you’re ready.”
I looked down at my knuckles. “We got in a fight.”
“That wasn’t unusual with you and your mom. Not unusual with teenagers,” he said. “And their mothers.”
“This was a bad fight. She’d been on my ass about me coming here.”
“To Whispering Ivy.”
I looked up at him. “No, to your office. She wanted to know what kind of décor you were into now.” I scoffed. “Yes, to Whispering Ivy.”
Despite everything, a tight smile played at the corners of his mouth. “Your sarcasm always did shine its brightest when you were frightened. No need to be, love.”
What was up with the groundswell of terms of endearment?
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Connor—who’d been slouched very un-Connor-like in his chair—go rigid, sitting up as if someone had him on a leash and yanked it taut.
“We’re all on the same team,” Connor said stiffly.
I nearly choked on my own tongue.
I think I’d rather serve life in prison for matricide than be on the same team, thanks.
Jerking a thumb at Connor, I asked Xander, “Is he serious?”
“Why don’t you finish your story,” Xander suggested.
Connor let out a breath through his nose that practically shouted barely contained irritation. His fingers tapped once, twice, against the armrest of his chair.
He was unraveling again.
And Xander was still unreadable, his mask still firmly in place. The only tell was the way he steepled his fingers, pressing them against his lips like a lock.
Whatever this was… Whatever they weren’t saying to me…
It wasn’t just about my mother.
“Mom wanted me to enroll here,” I continued. “I have no idea why. It’s not like she was still hung up on you.”
“And you didn’t want to come,” Xander said.
“I did not. But she kept…just…nagging at me about it.” I grew heated just thinking about it.
The anger rising. The feeling of being trapped, like somehow I didn’t have a choice, and my relationship with Mom had never been like that.
“And one night, she came to me with this envelope full of one-hundred-dollar bills like this thick.”
I held up my thumb and forefinger as far apart as I could get them to indicate the thickness of the stack.
Slowly, deliberately, Xander stuffed his hands in his pockets, moved behind his desk, and opened a drawer. From it, he extracted the envelope—the exact envelope I’d held in my hands that very night with the one-hundred-dollar bills inside.
My breath quickened. If I could somehow get it back, I could go on the run. Get away from here. Get away from the consequences of…
“Oh, pet. Don’t even think about it,” Connor said.
Casual. Too casual.
I turned towards him, a chill in my blood. “The fuck did you just call me?”
Xander cleared his throat. “This is the envelope in question, I presume?”
I swallowed hard and nodded. I felt like a human pincushion, sharp pricks of apprehension and fear stabbing me up and down my arms.
“She presented this money to me like… I don’t know.
You remember what our finances were like.
That morning, I had to eat plain toast for breakfast—after taking off the crusts because they were moldy—because the night before, she’d eaten the last of our jam for dinner.
Right out of the jar.” I shrugged. “The whole thing was just…insane. But she was like…here you go. Go to Whispering Ivy. She was so damn insistent. I said no. She said fine but that I could…”
“She said you could what, Geulia?” Xander asked, rounding the desk to kneel in front of me.
“She said I could come to Whispering Ivy, or I could live on the street.” I released a shaky breath. “But I wasn’t welcome under her roof any longer.”
The pain I’d felt hearing the only person in this world who was mine, unconditionally mine, say those words to me flooded back. Eviscerating me into irreparable pieces.
“Oh, honey…” Xander lifted his hand, and for a second, I thought he was going to offer some token of comfort in the form of physical affection, but he quickly shoved both hands back in his pockets.
“It hurt,” I choked out. “It hurt so damn bad, but then I got pissed. We were on the stairs, outside the house we were renting. I… I don’t even know what happened. Not in an I-blacked-out sort of way, but…she was walking past me to go back inside, and I reached out to her. I…”
I’d intended to grab her. To hold on to her. To make her stop and talk to me.
“I guess I pushed her because…she fell, and there was this awful…this god-awful crack as her head hit the brick wall.” Tears coursed down my cheeks, and I sniffled.
Connor got up. Couldn’t take the emotion, I guessed.
But he didn’t leave or move away. He drew closer. Stood behind me. Handed me a tissue over my shoulder.
I took it gratefully and wiped my nose.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Xander said gently, his steady gaze searching my face. “Your mother hit her head on the wall, and…then what?”
“She was stunned for a minute or two. We were both horrified. I wanted to call 911, but she wouldn’t let me. She needed to go to the hospital, and I should’ve made her. But she said, ‘Oh, babe, it’s just a goose egg.’” My chest caved in on a sob. “I should’ve fucking made her.”
“Geulia, you know as well as I do that if your mother didn’t want to do something, hell nor highwater could’ve made her,” Xander said. “You’re like her in that regard.”
Considering the way I’d been pushed around and bullied since I stepped foot on this campus, that seemed blazingly false.
“Carry on, please,” Xander coaxed.
“We both went back inside, like nothing had happened. I got her some ice, wrapped it in a kitchen towel, and some aspirin. I wanted her to stay awake with me, just in case she had a concussion. But she just wanted to sleep, so I tucked her in. I said good night. She once again got on the Whispering Ivy thing. She told me where she’d put the envelope of cash.
That it would be there if I changed my mind.
She said we weren’t going to spend it on anything else. ”
Connor and Xander were locked in a staring contest, as if there was something far more interesting in each other’s eyes than in my recount of the most traumatic night of my life.
Something passed between them. Something I wasn’t supposed to catch—and couldn’t if I wanted to. What the fuck was up with these two?
“So…” Connor stepped toward my side and exhaled through his nose, rolling his shoulders back like he was preparing to take a hit. “You found her dead in her bed the next morning when you went to wake her up?”
“Jesus, Connor,” Xander hissed. “A little decorum, please.”
“We know that didn’t fucking happen. He’s been back to the little Podunk town you guys were living in.
” Connor came around in front of me, all but pushing Xander out of the way, and bent down in front of me with his brown eyes narrowed into dangerous slits.
“Don’t lie to us. It isn’t helping you. He saw the autopsy report.
Someone injected your mom with antherimyden.
Do you know what that is? Do you fucking know? ”
“Connor, please get control of yourself,” Xander snapped.
“You’d have better luck getting him to morph into a duck,” I said. “I have no idea what antheriwhateveryousaid is. And Mom wasn’t injected with anything. She died from a brain bleed a few days after I pushed her.”
Connor stood, and he and Xander exchanged another cryptic look.
“I’d been working my shift at Subway. The garage door was open when I got home, which was unusual. We didn’t have a car at that point, so we never even went into the garage. I was walking up the driveway when…” I closed my eyes and saw it all unfurl like a movie. “When I saw her. Lying face down.”
More hot tears leaked out of my eyes, snaking down my face. I couldn’t even raise my hands to swipe them away.
“She was”—I hiccupped—“already cold.”
“Oh my God,” Xander whispered.
I snuck a peek at him, and he looked…ashen.
“Geulia,” he said. “I know how that must’ve gutted you, to be the one to—”
“Oh, you found your mother dead after you, you know, were her cause of death?” Each word had sharp teeth, and I immediately hated myself for saying them when I saw the hurt etched on his face. The truth was, I didn’t know who he’d lost, or how. “Sorry. I didn’t mean… I’m being an asshole.”
We went quiet for a minute. I blew my nose. Connor handed me another tissue and began to pace. Xander returned to his chair behind his desk and sat down.
“So…you didn’t inform the authorities,” Xander said.
The guilt hit like a tidal wave.
I’d known I couldn’t get away from it forever, right? That this moment would hunt me until I was in its claws with nothing but the horrifying truth to tell.
“I was terrified.” I searched Xander’s blue eyes, looking for some kind of compassion I didn’t deserve.
But he looked shaken. Shaken to the fucking core.
“She’d been having headaches since she hit her head.
Since I pushed her. So I knew… I mean, it was my fault.
There’s no excuse.” I sat up straight. “But I was terrified, and I wasn’t thinking, and I’d lost the only person I had, and my life was over, too.
I got the envelope with the cash. A shit ton of it.
I didn’t know where I was going or…why. A person with a conscience would’ve called 911 and told the truth, right?
But there was a note from her in the envelope with the cash.
Telling me again to come here. I threw together a bag, and I ran all the way to the bus station. ”
A single nod from Xander. “And you came here.”
“And I came here.”
To find out about the Lifewell, a mission which I’d failed miserably.
Almost as if choreographed, we all three sighed.
“I know you have to turn me in,” I said. “Out of all the things I’ll hold against you, that won’t be one of them.”
“Geulia, you didn’t kill your mother,” Xander said.
“But—”
“What Connor said was accurate. She was injected with a lethal dose of antherimyden. Was she still having headaches from her fall at the time of her death? Perhaps. But it was the antherimyden that killed her.”
“No, you’re wrong.”
“Love,” Xander said, leaning forward. “Listen to me. Did you turn her over? Did you see her face after she died?”
“What the fuck kind of weird-ass question is—”
“Did you?” Connor demanded.
“No! She was cold. I didn’t want to see her eyes with no life in them!”
Xander opened a manilla folder on his desk and lifted something… A picture? He folded it and passed it to Connor.
“This is a picture of the crime scene. Of your mom,” Connor said, his voice empty as he studied it. “You can’t see her eyes in this part. Just her forehead.”
I shook my head frantically, pressing my back up against my chair. My stomach pushed into my throat. “I do not—”
Connor held up the picture. Too close.
My breath caught. It took a second for my vision to focus, and then I let out a strangled gasp.
There was a mark—no, a carving—in the center of Mom’s forehead. A sigil, something old, wrong, too precise to be random.
And I knew what it meant.
“Next of kin,” I muttered.
The words slipped from my lips before I even knew I was saying them.
Xander stilled. Connor swore under his breath.
And my stomach turned inside out.
How did I know that?
I clutched the arms of my chair, my fingernails biting into the wood. The room suddenly felt too small, the air too heavy. My vision swam, memories pressing against the edges of my mind like something trying to claw its way through.
Dark hands reaching.
A whisper in a language I didn’t understand.
A door slamming shut.
I gasped, sucking in air like I’d been drowning, but the pieces scattered before I could hold on to them. That wasn’t a memory. Wasn’t a dream. But…
“What did you just say?” Xander asked, his voice tight.
I shook my head. “I-I don’t know.”
Connor’s head whipped around towards Xander, who stood.
“Fuck,” Connor hissed.
“That… That symbol or whatever it is means next of kin,” I said, certain of it, but completely, absolutely without a clue how.
“Have you…seen that, uh, symbol before?” Xander asked. “Are you familiar with that language?”
“No, I…” I pressed my fingers to my temples. This was all too much. “Why would anyone want to kill my mother?”
I stared at Xander, daring him to say a fucking word about the company my mom kept, ready to remind him he was once among that company.
“The symbol is a sigil. It indeed means next of kin.” Xander took a deep breath and let it out. Then he said, his next words shaky, “It means your mother wasn’t the intended victim of the person who murdered her. It’s a warning, an indication of the life they wanted to take.”
I blinked at him while I tried to comprehend the storm raging in my head. “What?”
“It means your mother wasn’t the intended victim of the person who murdered her,” Xander said, too quietly. “It’s a warning. A claim.”
The realization hit like a punch to the face.
“Next of kin,” I whispered. “They wanted me.”
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