CHAPTER 50 CADEN
CADEN
Elodie starts shivering, her mud-coated arms coming up to hug herself, so I turn up the heat in the car. She doesn’t say anything to me, but I feel compelled to fill this silence, even though it doesn’t feel awkward.
I just don’t know what to say.
I guess now we have a specific reason to work together, to continue to be in each other’s lives, there’s not much need for me to explain these feelings I have for her, even though I have no idea what these feelings actually are.
What possessed me to drive after her in the middle of the night?
It wasn’t just because of my devotion to this whole marriage thing.
And I want her to know that. I just have no clue how to voice it.
We’re listening to some Sleep Token songs now and I see her bobbing her head slightly.
“You like this music?” I ask her.
“It’s not bad.”
“What music do you like?” My chest tightens a little. Is this nerves? I’m suddenly a nerd attempting to talk to the prettiest girl in school.
“I like rock music. Country. Folk. Anything, really.” Her voice quiets as she adds, “Lewis liked rock. We used to listen to it all the time.”
I swallow hard. “Max was more of a rap guy, couldn’t stand it.”
I glance over to her and see a small smile on her lips. “Lewis liked rap, too. They would have had that in common, as well as dying together.”
The words cast a bitter air over us. She’d convinced herself they could still be alive, but it seems logic is settling back in now adrenaline’s wearing off. It’s devastating, but they’re not alive. And she shouldn’t hold on to that futile hope that they are. Max’s body was identified. Just about.
“Did you have much in common with him?” I ask, finding myself eager to keep her talking.
She sighs. “Yes. We shared a lot. Music, books, movies. We had a saying between us, one he’d tell me when things were bad. From one of our favourite childhood movies.”
“What was it?”
She waves a hand. “Nothing. It’s dumb.”
“Tell me.”
She inhales slowly. “I can go the distance. It was Lewis’s favourite song from Hercules. He believed we could find a better place than what we had with our dad.”
I purse my lips, clench my jaw.
“That’s what I picture him saying to me sometimes.”
God, my chest hurts.
I swallow hard. “Is that who you talk to? When you talk to yourself, do you picture it being him?”
I’d always thought it was odd, catching her mumbling stuff under her breath. But if she thinks it’s Lewis…
“Sometimes,” she hesitantly admits. “But mostly it’s…”
She doesn’t finish. “What?” I urge.
She shakes her head. “You’ll think I’m mad.”
“I already do.” I give her a sidelong glance. One I hope comes across as encouraging. “You did just dig up your brother’s grave in the middle of the night. I don’t think it can top that.” My attempt at jest falls flat. I’m not good at this shit like Fiz.
I just want her to keep talking.
Finally, she speaks again. A lot quieter. “The darkness.”
“The what?”
“The darkness… from my cell.”
“You had a cell?” What the actual fuck?
“Dad preferred to keep me in the castle dungeon. After taking away my mattress as punishment for disobeying wasn’t enough to stop me resisting him, he started locking me up there.”
She takes a breath, and it’s all I can do to take one too.
“Living like that at any age is horrific, but as a kid… it swallowed me. Devoured and ripped into me. Being terrified of the dark and having no way to get any light.” She pauses.
“It wasn’t a great time. Then it began to change.
My brain altered. I guess from so much isolation, but my brain personified it.
It started talking to me. It warped into something that brought me comfort.
Lewis couldn’t always be there with me, and I suppose it was a self-preservation thing.
“It brought me solace in a place where no such thing existed. The pitch-black didn’t seem so bad, after I realised every time light flooded that cell, it always meant pain.
It always meant something that would leave a scar.
The darkness never did that. Sure, it was scary, but it can’t actually hurt you.
It’s not a tangible thing. It never left a single scar on my body. Or my heart.”
Jesus Christ. What am I supposed to say to that? I had no idea her life was… like that. Even seeing her in that state when I picked her up. I just couldn’t have imagined.
“Would you ever get them covered up?” I stupidly ask. “Tattoo over them? So you don’t have to look at them.”
“No,” she says with earnest.
“Why?” It can’t be good for her to be constantly reminded of that shit.
“So I never forget.”
I look out to the horizon, painted in the pinks and purples of a new day, mulling this over.
I believe I know that feeling better than anyone.
I stay silent for too long, scrambling for the right words to say to her and distracted by my own drifting thoughts, because she adds, “So yeah, I guess sometimes I think it’s Lewis, because he never hurt me either. ”
I run a hand down my face while I dabble with my next words. She’s tried more than once to talk about our brothers, to attempt to share her grief with me, perhaps bond over it. I always shut her down. I don’t mind talking about Max, I just can’t talk about him dying.
She interjects my growing anxiety over starting a new subject by doing it herself. “Did he look like you? I’ve seen the pictures on the mantelpiece and around the house, but you both look a lot younger.”
I nod. “We had the same eyes, hair and skinny build. Dad was so mad neither of his sons inherited the bulky Blackwood genes. Max didn’t get the height though; he never made it past six feet.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah. Think that was why he was so short-tempered.”
My attempt at humour earns me a small, sharp exhale.
“Lewis was tall. I think about your height. It’s funny how our parents seem so huge when we’re kids, but Lewis overtook Dad at sixteen.
Then Dad didn’t seem so big.” She pauses.
“Lewis was big. But that’s because he trained so hard.
The Valor genes aren’t blessed like that.
Lewis refused to look as puny as Dad. He trained like a beast. At least I thought he did until I saw Alfie and Fiz in the gym. ”
I exhale sharply through my nose, light amusement in it as my nerves seem to settle. “They’re pretty intense in that place.”
“I don’t see you in there often.”
“I’m in there a lot. Just before you wake up.”
“Why so early?”
I twiddle my nose piercing. “Me and sleep have never had a great relationship.”
“Why?”
I shrug one shoulder. “Just never have.”
The car fills with silence again and I want to slap my forehead. This is the most I’ve talked to her, most I’ve talked about Max in a while too. I can’t quell this need to keep talking.
Elodie shared something with me tonight, maybe I can do the same for her.
I take a deep breath. “You know, it was Max’s idea to kill criminals.”
Her body shifts as she looks at me. I keep my eyes on the road. “Really? So you killed random people before that?”
I purse my lips. “Yes. Until Max, our family killed random people, no matter the background. It was Max who demanded we change it. When he got old enough to join the job, he refused to kill just anyone. He had more of a moral compass than Dad, who wasn’t best pleased.”
“It’s hard to believe the guy I’ve met is the soulless, evil killer.”
I lick my teeth. “Yeah. Dad’s not what he makes out to be, that’s for sure. It caused a big problem between us. It was much harder to get hold of specific people, much less actually find out who deserved to die.”
“How did your brother convince your dad?”
I blow out a slow breath. “He said if he was meant to be the heir then he’ll do it his way, and if he didn’t, once Dad was dead, he’d run the whole thing into the ground.
It’s Dad’s biggest fear: to have the Blackwood name become meaningless.
He agreed but told me on the side that he planned to convince Max to backtrack eventually, it would become tiresome hunting criminals.
We had to create a whole new agreement with law enforcement just to find out who was worthy to kill.
That’s how we met Drago. Dad knew him, however he did I’m not sure, but he said we could partner up with him to use his connections.
But that meant adding more names to the payroll, harder work.
It created a lot of tension for a while. ”
“So, how did it fizzle out?”
I sigh. “I don’t know. I enlisted in the army for the year.
It was too tense every day, I couldn’t live with that.
So I ran. When I came back, everything seemed fine.
They were working together properly again, so it was obvious they’d sorted it out.
Drago sorted out the connection with the justice system, Max had formed a rapport with them, and they gave us names of criminals released early or found not guilty when the evidence clearly showed otherwise.
The money was rolling in. I guessed that’s what placated Dad.
As long as the money’s there, I suppose he doesn’t much care how it comes in. So, I joined the fun.”
“It doesn’t bother you,” she says, “the killing?”
I twist my snakebite in between my teeth. “Not the criminals.”
“There are others?”
I look out my window, wondering how quickly I can get back home and not have to rip open my body and bare myself to this girl.
“I have these little… side quests.” I nod my head downwards, gesturing to where my stab wound was. “Those don’t necessarily involve guys who deserve to die.”
“Whose? Drago’s?”
I nod. “It was one of the prices to pay. Max had been doing them while I was away, but… it affected him more. He was struggling to live with the guilt. So I stepped up. Dad gives me jobs too, sometimes, now he knows what I’m… capable of. But mostly it’s Drago.”
“Why? Just for extra money?”
“Yes.” I huff a resigned sigh. “He gets what he wants. He only trusts me to accomplish certain things, as does Dad. I’m efficient, tidy, quick.”
“But it bothers you? Killing innocent people?”
I press my lips into a thin line. I think I can get us home in the next five minutes. I press harder on the gas. “I wouldn’t say it bothers me… I don’t know.”
“I wouldn’t say it bothers you either, considering all the death tattoos.”
I look over at her. I remember now the argument in the garage during one of her first days here.
A lifetime ago. Hooked up to an IV pole, looking pathetic and tiny.
She told me I get the tattoos for every murder I commit to basically brag about them.
I know that’s what the rumour is, and I don’t care.
Makes people less likely to fuck with me.
“I don’t get them to celebrate my homicidal achievements, Elodie.”
“So, why do you get them?”
I glance down at my arm stretched out to the steering wheel. I can barely see them through the smears of mud and grime and the lack of light but I see them enough as it is.
“To remind me who I am. What I am. I don’t get them when I kill the people who deserve to die. I get them when I kill the people who don’t.”
A thick silence falls over us as she contemplates this.
“So you never forget…” she says, so quietly it seems like it’s more to herself.
I finally see the turning for my house. “Don’t start seeing me as some nice guy with a conscience. Because I’m not.” It comes out harsher than I intended, but I already feel naked and too exposed.
“I don’t see you as that.” She scoffs. “But then, I also don’t see you as the ruthless, heartless killer I did a few moments ago.”
“Well, then you’re stupid.”
I can hear the smile in her voice as she says, “Don’t worry, Caden, I won’t tell anyone you have a heart in that cold, black soul of yours.”
I pull up outside the house. “Good. Because you’d be lying.”