Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SHILOH
Iggy.
All I can think of is his little face and the way he always wants a hug when he comes to class. All I can think of is the bruises that were on his cheek one week, and the smile he had after when he said his dad was gone again and his neighbor had been babysitting him.
When I asked him where, he told me he’d taken him there a few times—an old building close to the water that no one knew about.
He said it was scary.
And now he’s in the hospital and they don’t know if he’s going to wake up.
There’s a part of me that feels bad for leaving Donovan’s apartment the way I did, because I know he realized who Iggy was too…
But he doesn’t know him the way I do.
When I looked at him, all I could see was myself—young and bright and so full of life, with a dark shadow ready to fuck it all up. I’d thought about killing his dad before, but then he’d said he was gone.
This is my fault. It’s my fault for not taking care of it earlier… and I don’t trust the world well enough to make sure that if they catch him, the fucker is going to actually pay for what he did.
I have to make sure he can never do something like this again.
I have to do this for Iggy.
The problem with living in a city is that there are a few abandoned buildings close to the water, so I spend half the night searching before I finally find one that has the chains to the door cut and a light on.
Iggy’s dad is a fucking asshole, and he isn’t smart—he should have been out of the city by now, since the police were looking for him.
By the time I’m finished, he’ll be leaving in pieces. By the time I’m done, he’ll never be able to hurt Iggy again.
My breath comes out in a curl of white escaping my lips, and it takes me a moment to realize the puffs are coming a little too fast, too rapid.
It takes me a second to realize my eyes are burning with tears.
I force myself to take a deep breath and pull up my hood, dragging on my gloves so I can at least try to do this cleanly.
I’m not even sure if I’m at the right place.
There’s every chance more than one person squats in these abandoned buildings by the water.
I’m going on instinct alone—instinct and the fact that when I push open the door, I see Iggy’s painting on the wall.
Small streaks made by his fingertips, heavy blacks and reds, because he noticed that’s what I use.
Something inside me fractures, and I pull out my knife and move forward without thinking.
It’s not careful.
It’s not planned.
It’s the image of Iggy’s art on these dingy, dirty walls and the thought of his tiny body lying in a hospital bed, hooked to wires.
My body in a hospital bed, hooked up to wires after my dad…
Fuck.
“Fuck,” I hiss as soon as I see the man come around the corner. He’s easily as tall as Donovan and all muscle covered in fat.
I know at that moment that if I didn’t have the element of surprise, I’d die here.
So I do the only thing I can do… I fling myself forward before he realizes what’s happening and slam my knife as hard as I can into his inner thigh. There’s no way I’m climbing him to slit his throat… but the femoral artery is right there. Nearly fucking eye level with how tall he is.
That still leaves me with two minutes of his drug-fueled adrenaline as he swings at me, his huge fist taking me in the side hard enough that the air punches out of my lungs, and I wonder if he broke a rib.
“Who the fuck are you?” he snarls, but I see him sway as red starts to pool against the light color of his jeans.
When he stumbles for me again, I do my best to swing out my knife.
It catches him across the forearm… but the fact is, I’m small.
I’m not some high-class assassin in a book, capable of taking out people twice my size without breaking a sweat.
I’m usually good at the element of surprise and turning a situation in my favor.
But my anger… my emotions? Everything I’ve worked my entire life to pretend I couldn’t feel?
It’s going to be my undoing, and I know it when he picks me up and throws me across the room hard enough that my head rings and my vision goes hazy.
By the time it’s back, he’s on me. His hands are around my throat, and my knife is somewhere on the floor…
and I think the only reason he hasn’t killed me is because I didn’t answer his question.
“Who the fuck are you?”
I look up into his blue eyes, and all I can see is my dad—my dad standing over my mother’s dead body… my dad with a knife, trying to make sure he ties up all the loose ends.
My dad… my body… hospital rooms. Iggy laid up in a hospital room, probably with this fucking face as the last thing he saw.
“Iggy deserves better than you.” I manage to get it out around the squeeze of his fingers, then I dig my hand into my pocket. I come out with the key ring Donovan gave me earlier. Fuck, what would my sweet boyfriend think of me now?
“You little—fuck!” He screams the last word when I lift the key to Donovan’s apartment and jam it as hard as I can into his eye. It’s enough to send him toppling back. That and the blood loss make him stumble, tripping over a chair so he’s flat on his back.
Even though I’m in pain, even though my head is spinning… I recognize an opportunity when I see it. I scoop my knife from the ground and fling myself onto his chest.
It’s messy when I stab down, messier when I lift up and jam the blade down again.
And again.
Again into his chest, his throat, his face.
Again, and I have to admit, at least to myself, that it’s not just Iggy’s dad I’m trying to kill while I do it.
My demons are laid out in front of me, and I’m no more capable of dealing with them now than I was when I was a kid, because I’m making a mess. I’m being irrational.
But when my eyes flick up and I see another drawing on the floor, spattered in blood… one Iggy and I did together in class…
I realize that I’m willing to die in the arms of my past if I can keep him from living my present.
If he wakes up.
“You never deserved him!” I snarl the words out and bring the knife down one more time, hard, to the center of his chest.
He lets out a death rattle that spatters blood across Donovan’s hoodie… and I only just manage to move before I feel a wave of dizzy exhaustion overtake me. I scramble away on hands and knees and then fall back to the ground, incapable of catching a breath.
I can’t breathe.
My lips feel numb, my scalp is tingling… and the adrenaline pulsing through me isn’t enough to push away the panic that’s clawing up my throat with sharp talons that leave me helpless. My demons, still alive and breathing and not dead at all.
I can only curl myself into a ball, my arms around my knees, my eyes fixated on Iggy’s art splattered with blood.
Just like before, except my art was covered in thicker things.
And just like before, I lie beside a dead body while I wonder if I’m going to die here.
“Fuck… fuck… fu…” I can’t draw breath fast enough to get the curse out. I can’t close my eyes to try to escape what’s in front of me because it just flashes images of the night my mother died behind my lids in streaks of black and red.
Past and present. It’s all colliding together, and my fingers clenching my stomach, pressed against scars that suddenly feel split open, aren’t enough to hold me together.
I’m shivering so hard it aches, my teeth chattering, my vision going out in gray and fuzz that makes me wonder if I’m dying after all.
I need to get out of here.
I need to go home.
No… not home…
I need…
I want…
“Fuck…” I whisper one more time, and force myself to unclench my arms. I’m not sure how long I stayed balled up like that—long enough that my muscles are aching and my arms feel weak.
It’s hard to force myself to roll to my back so I can take a deep breath that feels like an anchor in my lungs, weighing me to the bloodstained concrete beneath me.
I need to focus.
I need to breathe.
I need to survive this moment, because there are more I desperately want to see… I want to see… to see…
I inhale.
I can see the ceiling. I can see a spider nestled in its web in the corner… and when I roll my neck and let my eyes drift to the side, I can see the keychain Donovan gave me still dangling from the key embedded in the asshole’s eye. He saved me, and he wasn’t even here to know he did it.
I exhale.
I can hear my shaking breath, proof that I’m still alive even though I feel like I’m dying in tiny, painful pieces.
I can hear the quiet wind outside, telling me I need to hurry up and get the body beside me to its depths…
and I can hear Donovan’s voice in my head telling me that I have to get out of here. Get back to him.
I inhale.
My fingers clench and unclench as I pull off my gloves so I can feel my palm, my shaking, sweat-slicked hand as I slide it beneath my shirt. The scars aren’t split open when I feel them. They’re healed, they’re proof I survived this before, and I can survive it again.
My hand slips up and presses over my chest. My heartbeat. Thundering, alive. Wanting to live. Donovan’s favorite place to lay his head.
I can do this.
I exhale.
“I can do this.”
Shit… I haven’t had a panic attack in years.
My side is burning, and my entire body is one unbroken line of shivering. At least the man beside me is dead as I lie next to him on the cool concrete, far enough away that the pool of blood beneath him isn’t soaking into my clothes.
He’s so big, though, and moving hurts. I drag in a deep breath, forcing my lungs to expand. It aches—fuck it aches—but nothing feels broken. My head hurts where he slammed me against the wall, but with the hood of my coat pulled up, I don’t think any blood got anywhere.
I glance down at my hand, to my swollen wrist, and flex my fingers.
At least it’s my left hand.
When I try to push myself into a sitting position, the overwhelming urge to vomit nearly makes me fuck up trying to keep the crime scene clean. I don’t know if it’s pain, or adrenaline… I don’t know if it’s all the memories trying to surface…
I just know I can’t do this.
I can’t move the body. He’s twice as big as I am, and he needs to be in pieces and weighed down somewhere in the water outside… and I…
I blink away another wash of heat caught in my lashes and use my good hand to feel around in my pocket. I scroll to the last person I texted and punch call before I can talk myself out of it.
Donovan’s voice is concerned when he answers, and I hate that I’m going to make that worse.
“Loh? Are you okay?”
I don’t speak, dragging in another ragged breath… because this is going to change everything.
He already changed everything… and now he’s finally going to get his wish.
He’s going to see me in all my fucked-up glory.
Maybe I am broken, but I have a feeling this is going to break me even more.
I crawl across the room and yank my keychain from his eye, avoiding the blood on the floor.
Donovan doesn’t need to see what I used his gift for.
“Shiloh… baby?” He sounds so… worried. I wonder if he’ll still feel that way once he’s seen what I’ve done.
I swallow hard and inhale one more time before I answer. “No, I’m not. I… Donovan, I need your help.”