Chapter 8
Mehar
My arms were dead. I couldn’t feel anything from the shoulders up except a dull, pulsing ache that had settled into my joints and made a permanent home there.
I didn’t know how long I’d been hanging.
Hours. Maybe more. The fluorescent light was still buzzing.
The warehouse was still dark. And I was still here, which meant I was still alive, which meant I hadn’t quit yet.
I shifted my weight to the left and swung.
Slight, controlled, testing. I’d been doing this since I woke up.
Small movements that Thad couldn’t see from his angle, micro-adjustments that looked like a woman struggling to get comfortable but were actually a woman working a problem.
Because I’d felt it about thirty minutes ago.
A give. Barely anything. A creak in the beam above me that was different from the other creaks, softer, with a splintering sound underneath it that told me the wood up there was old and tired and didn’t sign up for this either.
I swung again. Harder this time. The chain rattled and the beam groaned and I felt it shift a quarter inch. Maybe less. But it moved. Something up there was giving and I was going to help it along until it gave all the way.
Thad had fallen asleep. His chin was on his chest and his breathing was shallow and ragged and he’d finally stopped running his mouth about twenty minutes ago when his body decided that being awake took more energy than he had left. Good. I didn’t need an audience for this.
I pulled my knees up toward my chest, let my full body weight hang, and swung hard.
The beam cracked. Loud, sharp, a sound like a bone snapping, and then I was falling.
The chain came with me, the beam gave way in a shower of dust and rotted wood, and I hit the concrete on my side so hard the air left my lungs and my vision whited out for a second.
I lay there gasping. Everything hurt. My shoulders felt like they’d been pulled from the sockets and put back wrong.
My wrists were raw and bleeding and still bound, the metal cuffs connected by the heavy chain that was now pooled on the concrete around me like a dead snake.
But I was on the ground. My feet were flat on the floor. And that changed everything.
Thad’s head snapped up at the crash. His eyes went wide when he saw me on the floor instead of hanging from the ceiling, and I watched the color drain from his face in real time.
“No. No no no. Mehar, listen to me—”
I was already up. My legs were shaking but they held. I gripped the chain between my bound hands and wrapped it once around my right fist. It was heavy. Industrial. Cargo chain, meant for securing equipment and towing machinery. It was going to do just fine.
“Please.” He was trying to wheel himself backward, but his arms were too weak and the chair barely moved. “Please, I didn’t do anything. She brought me here. I didn’t have a choice. Mehar, I got kids. I got two kids. Please don’t do this.”
I stood in front of him and looked at this man who had killed my sister.
Who had crawled into my life pretending to be something worth loving and used me while Kacey was at home pregnant.
Who had destroyed my family before I ever destroyed his body.
He was sitting in a wheelchair with tears running down his hollow cheeks and snot on his lip invoking his children the same way men always invoke their children when the consequences finally arrive.
I thought about Zahara. My big sister. The one who braided my hair when our mothers were too tired or too beaten to do it.
The one who left our father’s house first and made it possible for the rest of us to imagine leaving.
She was dead because of this man. And I’d kept him alive in a cage for months because I wasn’t ready to let him go, because holding him gave me something I could control when everything else was spinning.
But I didn’t need that anymore. The cage was gone.
The control was gone. All that was left was the math, and the math had been settled since the day Zahara stopped breathing.
“My sister didn’t get to beg,” I said.
The first swing caught him across the temple and knocked him sideways out of the wheelchair.
He hit the concrete and the chair toppled over on top of him and he was screaming now, high and thin and broken, and I swung again.
The chain connected with his ribs and I heard something crack.
I swung again. His arm. Again. His shoulder.
He curled into himself on the floor, trying to cover his head with hands that couldn’t grip anything, and I kept swinging because every impact pulled something out of me that had been lodged there for years and the only way to get it out was through the chain and into his body.
By the fifth swing he’d stopped screaming.
By the seventh he’d stopped moving. I stood over him breathing hard with the chain hanging from my bound hands and blood on the concrete and blood on my clothes and blood on my face and I felt nothing.
No satisfaction. No guilt. No relief. Just the quiet that comes after you finish something you should have finished a long time ago.
I dropped the chain. My hands were trembling. My whole body was trembling. But my head was clear and my legs were working and I needed to move because Janelle was coming back.
The warehouse had one door. I pressed myself flat against the wall beside it, on the hinge side where the door would swing open and block me from view.
I picked the chain back up because it was the only weapon I had and it had already proven effective tonight.
Then I waited. My breathing was loud in my own ears so I slowed it down the way I’d learned.
Shallow and steady. My heart was slamming but my hands were still.
I’d done this before. Hidden and waited and struck first. It was my oldest skill.
I don’t know how long I stood there. Ten minutes.
Maybe fifteen. Long enough for the adrenaline to start fading and the pain in my shoulders to start screaming again and the smell of the warehouse to settle back into my nose, motor oil and mildew and now something else underneath it.
Something iron and wet. Thad’s blood pooling on the concrete, mixing with the dust.
Then I heard it. Tires on gravel. An engine cutting off. A car door opening and closing. The footsteps heading toward me were deliberate and unhurried. Heels on gravel, the same rhythm I’d heard a hundred times walking across the hardwood floor of a therapy office in Dupont Circle.
The door opened. It swung toward me and I pressed tighter against the wall.
Janelle stepped inside and I could see her profile through the gap between the door and the frame.
She was looking at the empty chain hanging from the broken beam, then down at Thad’s body on the floor, and her whole body went rigid. Her mouth opened.
I didn’t give her time to close it.
I came around the door swinging and the chain caught her across the back of the skull with everything I had left in my arms. The sound was wet and heavy and she dropped like somebody had cut her strings.
She slammed face first into the concrete.
She didn’t put her hands out and try to stop it.
The bitch just fell instantly and went limp.
Her bag hit the floor next to her and her keys scattered across the concrete.
I stood over her for a second. Her eyes were closed. Blood was spreading from her hairline into her parted hair and pooling on the floor beneath her face. She wasn’t moving. There were two bodies on the ground and I needed to get the hell out of here.
I grabbed her keys off the floor. My hands were still bound, the chain dragging between them, but I could grip well enough to hold a key fob. I stepped over her body and walked out into the night.
The air hit me and I almost collapsed. It was cool and clean after the warehouse and my body wanted to fold, wanted to lie down on the gravel and close my eyes and let somebody else handle the rest. But nobody else was coming. Nobody knew where I was. So I kept moving.
Janelle’s car was parked about twenty feet from the door.
A beat-up Nissan Altima that confirmed every broke thing I’d just assumed about this woman.
I clicked the fob, got in, and turned the key.
The engine cranked once. Twice. Nothing.
I looked at the dash and the gas light was glowing orange.
This bitch had driven here on empty and the car had finally given up.
Of course. Of course she couldn’t even kidnap me with a full tank of gas.
I got out and started walking. Down the gravel road, away from the warehouse, with no shoes and no phone and no idea which direction led to civilization.
The chain between my wrists was heavy and dragged with every step.
The gravel cut into the bottoms of my feet and I could feel every rock and every pebble but I kept going because stopping meant dying and I had done too much surviving tonight to die on a dirt road in Maryland.
The gravel turned to pavement after what felt like forever but was probably ten or fifteen minutes.
My feet were bleeding. My arms were useless.
The chain rattled with every step like I was a ghost hauling my own shackles.
I followed the road until I saw headlights in the distance and I stepped into the middle of the lane and held up my bound hands because I had no pride left, no energy left, nothing left except the need to hear one voice.
The car slowed. A woman behind the wheel, maybe fifty, wearing scrubs, coming off a shift somewhere. She rolled her window down halfway and her face went white when she saw me. The chains. The blood. My bare feet on the asphalt.
“Oh my God. Honey, are you okay? Do you need me to call the police?”
“No.” My voice came out rough and cracked from the gag and the hours of silence. “No police. Please. I just need to call my husband.”
She looked at me for a long second, processing the chains and the blood and the request that didn’t match either of those things. I could see her deciding whether I was dangerous or in danger or both. Whatever she concluded, she unlocked the passenger door.
“Get in. There’s a rest stop about a mile up. I’ll take you.”
I got in her car and bled on her seat and she didn’t say a word about it. She drove me to the rest stop and parked under a light and handed me her phone without being asked. Like she already knew.
I dialed Quest’s number from memory because it was one of three numbers I knew by heart and his was the only one that mattered right now. It rang once.
“Who is this?”
“It’s me.”
Silence. One second. Two. And then his voice came back different, lower and tight and full of something that was trying to be relief but hadn’t gotten there yet.
“Where are you?”
“At the O’Brien Rest Stop off of 97. Please come get me.”
“Stay there. Don’t move. I’m coming.”
I handed the phone back to the woman in scrubs. She was staring at me with wide eyes and her coffee was shaking in her other hand.
“Thank you,” I said. “He’ll be here soon.”
“Honey, are you sure you don’t want me to call somebody? An ambulance? Something?”
“I’m sure. He’s all I need.”
“I can stay with you until he gets here.”
“No, you don’t have to. I really appreciate the ride.”
“I’ll go get you some water and something to eat.”
When she came back she handed me two bottles of water and a small bag of snacks that included Doritos, a honey bun and a chocolate bar. Graciously, she opened the water for me and I chugged with the quickness. I was so thirsty because it had been damn near 24 hours since I had something to drink.