Chapter 12 #2
"This is the hand you used on Saylor's mother." I don't raise my voice. "This is the hand you used on the two women who put you in prison for twelve years. These fingers have done nothing but hurt people since you learned how to make a fist."
Creedy's breathing accelerates. The chair creaks under him as his body tenses.
"You had chances." I tighten the pliers. "Saylor told you to stay away. Her mother told you. I told you. You smiled and waved and came back every time because you thought nobody would stop you."
I lean closer. Close enough to see my reflection in his pupils. "I'm stopping you."
I twist the pliers slowly.
The metal grinds against the knuckle, and I feel the resistance through the handles.
The joint fighting, giving, then popping with a sound like a green branch snapping.
The sound Creedy makes fills the kitchen. Not a scream. A howl.
Primal, involuntary, ripped from somewhere beneath language.
His spine arches against the chair, his left wrist straining against the zip tie until the plastic slices into his skin and draws a thin line of blood.
Maddox steps behind the chair and presses both palms on Creedy's shoulders, holding him in place.
I don't look away. I watch his face the entire time.
Watch the mask he's been wearing for weeks—the smile, the charm, the practiced patience—peel off layer by layer until what's underneath is the same thing Saylor and her mother have been seeing all along.
A man who hurts people and calls it love.
The pliers move to the second finger.
"This one's for the gas station." I close the metal around the knuckle. "For sitting in your truck and waving at a woman you were terrorizing. For making her feel watched in a place she goes every week."
Creedy is shaking now. Sweat running down his chest, his face contorted, the bravado stripped clean.
"Please." The word comes out broken, wet, garbled around the saliva pooling in his mouth.
His chin is slick with it.
His bare chest is heaving, covered in sweat and the red bloom of Bloodhound's punch, and the man who practiced his smile in parking lots is begging with a face that looks nothing like the one Saylor's mother saw at her door.
Creedy doesn't get patience.
I twist, slower this time.
I want him to feel every degree of rotation, the way Saylor's mother felt every second of his grip on her forearm in a parking lot where she was supposed to be safe.
The knuckle pops. His finger bends sideways at an angle nature never intended, and the sound he makes is something I'll carry with me for the rest of my life and never regret.
The howl is louder this time. Raw, guttural, bouncing off the kitchen walls. Ounce steps to the window and checks the street. The neighborhood sleeps.
Bloodhound crouches in front of Creedy. Their faces are inches apart.
"You're going to leave Morgantown." Bloodhound's voice is the flattest I've ever heard it. No emotion. No heat.
"Tonight. You're going to get in your truck and drive until West Virginia is in your rearview mirror, and you're not going to stop until you've put five hundred miles between yourself and every woman in this town."
Creedy is sobbing. Snot and tears running down his chin, his destroyed fingers curled against the chair arm at angles fingers aren't meant to bend.
"If we hear your name again." Bloodhound stands. "If we hear Dennis Halstead's name connected to anyone in Morgantown. If Saylor Bell or her mother so much as feel a shadow they can't explain, we won't come to your kitchen."
He leans down one more time.
"We'll come to your grave, and we'll put you in it."
Ounce cuts the zip ties. Creedy slumps forward, cradling his right hand against his bare chest.
The fingers don't look like fingers anymore.
Swollen to twice their size, the skin stretched tight and darkening to a purple so deep it's almost black at the joints.
The index and middle finger bend outward at angles that make my stomach tighten even though I'm the one who put them there.
He doesn't look up. Doesn't make eye contact.
The man who smiled in parking lots and waved through windshields is curled in a kitchen chair in his own sweat, holding his hand.
I set the pliers on the table and stand up.
My hands are steady. I hate them for it the same way I hated them during the compound breach, except this time the steadiness isn't ignorance. It's certainty.
We leave the way we came. Single file through the broken front door, down the frozen sidewalk, boots on pavement in the dark. Nobody speaks.
The ride back to Morgantown takes forty minutes.
I think about Saylor's mother in a gas station parking lot, watching a truck she recognized and feeling her stomach drop.
I think about Saylor against her Honda, sliding to the asphalt, her legs giving out because a man used her father's name like a key.
I think about what my hands did tonight and I don't feel guilt.
I feel… karmic.
* * *
The compound is still when we roll in. Truck parked, engine killed.
Bloodhound nods at me once in the parking lot. Ounce claps my shoulder without speaking. Maddox disappears into the clubhouse.
I stand in the cold for a full minute, breathing.
Then I walk inside.
Saylor is in my room. Asleep in my bed, one arm stretched across the space where I should be, her hair fanned across the pillow.
I strip off my jacket, my boots, my shirt, and wash my hands in the bathroom sink.
The soap is white and the water runs clear because the pliers didn't draw blood, but I wash them anyway. Multiple times.
I climb into bed behind her. She shifts in her sleep, pressing back against my chest, making a small sound of recognition.
Her body knows mine even when her mind is somewhere else.
I wrap my arm around her waist and press my mouth to the back of her neck and breathe her in.
Soap and citrus and warmth.
The same smell from the first night she showed up at the compound shaking.
The smell of the woman I love, alive, safe, and sleeping in my bed.
My hands settle against her stomach. She laces her fingers through mine without waking up.
I hold on and close my eyes.
The boy who couldn't keep his mouth shut.
The prospect who washed bikes and swallowed the word "kid" for years.
The man who sat in a kitchen tonight and broke a predator's fingers with a pair of pliers because the predator smiled at the wrong woman.
All the same person, and yet, I drift off to sleep easier than I have in ages.