Chapter 52
elaine
Mom’s house was familiar in all the wrong ways. It felt like I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been as I rushed up to the front door, but I didn’t have time to think about it. I knocked hard on the door, shouting into it.
“Mom! Are you there? Can you hear me?”
I heard a weak, thin voice coming from upstairs, not enough for me to hear it. I grimaced, and I tried the front door. Locked. I didn’t have keys.
She usually left the back door unlocked. I raced over damp grass as I went around to the back of the house, through the gate into the fence, and up onto the stoop. I was in luck—the door slid right open, and I shouted into the house again as I got inside. “Mom! Where are you?”
“I’m in the bedroom…” I could barely hear her voice, and my stomach turned as I raced up the stairs, my shoes stomping on the old, creaking wood as I went. I threw the bedroom door open, and I saw Mom lying in bed, her hands folded over her chest.
“Mom,” I gasped, and I stepped into the room, but I stopped short when something pressed into the back of my head.
Cold steel. Gunmetal.
“I… Mom?” I whispered, frozen in place. Mom frowned.
“I had to do this. You abandoned me.”
She lied. To me.
Again.
“Well, well, well,” a voice said from behind me, and it swept like ice through my veins when I recognized it.
Glenn. I dared tilt my head just a little, enough to see the door open to the bathroom, and in the mirror, I saw the two of them behind me—Glenn standing in the corner, and then with a gun to my head, Quayle.
“Your performance was excellent, Ms. Whitner,” Glenn said. “You don’t make promises you can’t keep, clearly. We’ll make sure your compensation is exactly as promised.”
“Mom?” I said, tears thick in my voice. “You… sold me… to them?”
She stood up, cold fire in her eyes. “You abandoned me. You abandoned all of us. This is your fault, Elaine. You think I wanted to do this?”
“Now, now,” Glenn said, walking in between the two of us, turning to me.
His glass eye almost seemed to be watching me more intently than his real one, cold and intense, and I cringed away when he took my chin in his hand, tilting me up to look at him.
“I’m not going to hurt you… as long as you cooperate.
I do apologize for the altercation last time.
I misjudged the situation, clearly. You have my word that I will see no harm befall you if you comply with a few very reasonable instructions.
And then, my dear, we will gladly release you back to your regular life.
It’s really in your best interest to comply,” he said, a smile spreading over his lips wider as I felt the gun barrel pressing into my skin.
“Unless you want your mother to watch you die? I don’t believe you’d do that to her. ”
I gritted my teeth, squeezing my eyes shut.
This was my fault. Running away without thinking, just because Vera had rejected me…
Everything that happened now was on me. Everything.
And I couldn’t let them have me.
I wouldn’t comply.
Not for my life.
“No,” I said. “Pull the trigger.”