Chapter 9 #2
He blows out a breath and dodges my question.
“She’s maybe two months out. A female of this species drops only ten or twenty at a time.
” His voice deepens, clearly in his element.
I wonder how many customers come through here actually looking for bugs and reptiles.
He beams when he gets to flaunt his expertise.
“So please, for the love of fuck, be careful with them. You let this breed and get loose, you’re not looking at a dead man.
You’re looking at a dead town. There’s no antidote. ”
I look at the fat one for a long moment.
Then I unlatch the terrarium lid.
“Whoa.” He leaps backward, causing the jars on the shelves behind him to rattle. “What are you—”
I reach in and pick her up. The pregnant one. I close my thumb and two fingers around the base of her tail, just behind the stinger, the way I was taught, and lift her out into the open air. Oh, she’s pissed. She twists and curls and searches for something to punish severely.
The owner has gone the color of the scorpion. He’s fully backed himself into the shelf, knocked a box of cricket food to the floor, both hands up.
“Lady. You fucking crazy? Put her down— That’s not— One sting, I told you—”
“Let me educate you, Doctor,” I say, calm, watching the scorpion work against my grip.
“There is an antidote.” I tilt my head. “It’s the venom itself.
Teeny-tiny doses. Drops smaller than a period at the end of a sentence…
then a little more, then a little more, for years and years, until your nerves work with the venom instead of against it.
It becomes a pleasant little high. Better than indica. ”
He stares at me like I’ve started speaking in tongues.
“You’re nuts. Don’t try that. You’ll die.”
“I’m speaking from experience.”
I’m still holding her, watching the scorpion get angrier by the second. Her stinger stabs the air, but my hand is just out of her reach and the teasing is a new level of fury. It reminds me…of…shit…
I don’t mean to go there…
But the memory comes up on its own, uninvited…
Studied is the word I’d use out loud, if I ever explained it, which I don’t. Studied is a kindness I do myself.
The truth is they captured me. After my father’s slaying, after the fire and the shooting and Fiona, my big sister screaming at me to run for my life. And I did. I ran as fast as my feet would carry me, only stopping when a bullet punched a hole through me.
I was sixteen years old and certain I was already a ghost.
But when my eyelids fluttered open, I saw what would become my new family, nursing me back to health.
They came through the gray before dawn, raiding what the Accardi, the most lethal Italian mafia, left behind of my family.
Rebels. Vigilantes, but without a noble cause.
A drifting Romani clan who’d made themselves into a knife the world couldn’t see, and they took me in, and they saved my life, while also ruining it.
I’d been afraid my whole life up until then.
Afraid in my father’s grand house with its armed men, afraid the night it all burned, afraid of the dark and the dogs and the size of the world.
They took the fear out of me the way you’d take a splinter out of a child.
Through torture much worse than death, they made me into what I am now.
They fed me poison until it couldn’t touch me. They fed me worse things than poison. They taught my hands to curve around weapon handles, they taught my heart to beat slow, my soul to crave chaos.
Somewhere in the years of being morphed into a monster, the meek, second daughter of the once great O’Leary clan left me, and something fearsome took her place.
I stopped flinching at the world. The world started flinching at me.
For the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of anything, and I thought—fuck, I actually thought—that meant I belonged to them.
I didn’t. That was the lesson they saved for last.
When the metamorphosis was done, when I was exactly the blade they’d wanted, they left me behind.
No goodbye. No warning. I woke up one morning to an empty camp and the understanding, arriving all at once, that I had never been one of them.
I’d been a project. An experiment. A stray they’d revived and sharpened and made sure could survive on its own, precisely so they could set it down and walk away as if they’d done some good deed.
Better they left me dead in that field to find my papa and sister on the other side.
I wish they would’ve.
Instead, they gave me everything I am and then reminded me, in the cruelest grammar, that I was at best temporarily adopted. Never blood. Never theirs.
That broke something in me that the bullet never touched. You can survive being shot. It turns out you can be revived, and remade, and still have your heart quietly removed by the people who did the reviving.