6. Chapter Six Lakey
Chapter Six: Lakey
The steak was absolutely divine. It had been a while since the last time I had steak, let alone a rib eye and with the mushrooms and potato, I was in heaven. You'd think the way I ate, I should be a bigger girl, but I was 'blessed' with a metabolism that didn't quit.
Literally.
I was hungry almost constantly. People always commented how nice it must be, but it really isn't. It's not nice feeling hungry all the time. It's not nice feeling like all you do is eat to stave away the next time you're hungry. It sucks, but I can't say that because then I'm seen as 'ungrateful'.
Anyway, I digress. Cam made these perfectly and if I wasn't so curious about what was in the file, I'd have been eating much slower and truly enjoying the way it melted on my tongue.
"Woah, babe, slow down. Jesus Christ, you're gonna choke." Cam was a quarter through his steak, and I was already licking the plate.
I grinned, well aware of the meat sticking in my teeth. "You said I couldn't open my present until I was done eating sooooo..." To make a point I licked the last bit of steak juice up real slow. "All done. Can I open it now?"
He chuckled and looked at me with that twinkle in his eye that I loved so much. He was up to something and if he was this excited about it, I was excited too. Cam rarely got excited about things.
I dunno which one of us was more fucked up at this point. All I knew is that we had both gone through things that other people would choose to die over, or become addicts over, and we hadn't. We were surviving the best way we knew how.
I remember when Cam got released and we found each other again.
His probation officer told him he should go to therapy to process his trauma.
Yeah, that didn't end well. The therapist came onto him, and she was my first real kill.
It was messy as fuck, but it was so fun, we fucked in her blood after and that's kind of how all of this was born.
We realized we both needed the violence.
Needed an outlet for the thing inside us that screamed when we were quiet and clawed when we tried to sleep.
So we built one. We'd find the people who deserved it, the ones who hurt people who couldn't fight back, and we'd take them out.
Cam charmed them. I killed them. It was clean, it was efficient, and it kept both of us from doing something stupid.
It'd been nine years now. Twenty-seven marks. Twenty-seven people who'd earned their spot on the list by being the kind of person who made the world worse just by breathing. And not once in those nine years had I wanted to stop.
Twenty-eight if you count Brinley, which I didn’t because she was random.
"Lakes?"
I shook my head to clear my thoughts.
"Where'd you go? I thought you wanted to open the damn file?" Cam was staring at me, and when I looked down, his steak was almost gone.
"Sorry, babe. Disassociated for a minute, but I'm back. Do you want me to wait for you to be done or can I..."
His lips curled up in that shit-eating grin. "Nah, go ahead babe. Open 'er up."
My hand moved of its own accord as I grabbed the beige file and opened it. My mouth dropped open when I saw it was a list of our former foster homes, and the people who abused us when we were kids. "Is this... is this a hit list?"
I swear to God if I could cry, I would have.
"Yes, baby, it's a hit list. That's what Skeeter was working on for me. It's all of them."
I frantically scanned the page, turning it over and over again.
Names. Addresses. Dates. These weren't strangers who'd hurt someone else's kid.
These were the people who'd hurt us. Carmen Jones.
William Jones. Edward Jones the Second. John and Janine Almine.
Each name hit me in a different place, some in the chest, some in the stomach, some in parts of my body I didn't want to think about.
"Where's the nunnery? That, that... that group home for girls?
Why isn't it listed?" Something close to panic started crawling up my spine.
They were the worst ones. I hadn't even told Cam everything about what they'd done to me.
I couldn't even remember everything they did.
Most of my life was a gigantic question mark.
The only parts I really remembered were bits and pieces and all these later years in this apartment with the love of my life.
After the black-out at SINNER’s… most of my past was missing. Same with Cam. Whatever they’d done to us that night had taken whatever little we remembered.
His face dropped and he looked at his plate, his fork moving the last piece of steak around, almost shamefully. "There's no known address... unless you remember where it was... I don't remember how to find it. Skeeter... Skeeter didn't get any hits. Do you remember any of their names?"
St. Agnes Home for Wayward Girls.
My brain did that thing it does when it gets too close to something it locked away.
The lights went on but nobody was home. I could see pieces of it, fragments that didn't connect, images that played out of order.
The cot with the wooden frame that dug into my back.
Biting my lip so hard it bled because screaming made it worse.
Father Christopher's shoes on the hallway floor, that slow, heavy walk that meant he was coming and you couldn't do anything but lie there and wait for whatever door he chose to open.
Sister Anne's hands, dry and cold, always cold, grabbing my arm hard enough to leave fingerprints.
The other girls crying. Always crying. At night, in the dark, when the nuns were supposed to be asleep but weren't. Muffled sounds from behind closed doors that I taught myself not to hear because hearing them meant knowing what was happening and knowing what was happening meant I'd have to do something about it.
And Lydia. My roommate. The only one who didn't cry.
She just stared at the ceiling and counted.
I'd listen to her count in the dark, her voice flat and quiet, going as high as she could until she fell asleep.
Sometimes she made it to the thousands. I never asked her what she was counting because I already knew.
She was counting the seconds until it was over.
I don't know what happened to Lydia. One day she was there and the next day she wasn't. They didn't explain. They never explained. Girls just disappeared from St. Agnes, and you weren't supposed to ask where they went.
"I remember..." My voice was a whisper as I looked at the file again.
"Sister Anne... she stripped me bare once...
tied me down..." The words stopped. Not because I chose to stop them but because my brain pulled the plug the way it always did when I got too close.
The memory cut off mid-frame and what was left was just the feeling.
The cold. The helplessness. The specific, precise humiliation of being naked and unable to move while someone who was supposed to protect you did the opposite.
"Sister Anne and Father Christopher. That's all I remember," I finished. It was true. Those were the names I remembered, but the pain was inflicted by more than one. And Lydia.
I’d never forget her.
Cam nodded. "Okay... Did they have last names or...?"
"No, asshole, it's not like they introduced themselves as Anne Hemmings and Christopher Olson."
"Is that their last names?"
I rolled my eyes. "No. But. I do vaguely remember where the church was where they sent me on ‘special Sundays’.
We might have to drive around to find it, but it should be there.
It was super special to these fucking assholes.
Stood for a hundred years or something. Probably some records of it at City Hall. "
His eyes lit up. "You're brilliant! We can search old records to find it! Then we can kill them!"
I smiled, a numb chill settling over me.
"That sounds wonderful. Thank you for this, baby.
" I looked at the list again. At the names of people who were still breathing while we sat here scarred and wired wrong and held together by each other and violence.
"We should go kill one of these fucks tonight. What do you say?"
"Mmmm, does tomorrow work? I need to plan a little. Can't just go in blind."
"Since when do you plan anything?"
"Since I want to enjoy it and not rush through it." He reached across the table and took my hand. "This isn't a mark, Lakes. This is personal. We're gonna do it right."
He was right and I hated that he was right because I wanted to drive to Oakland tonight and gut Ed Jones on his front lawn.
I wanted to feel his blood on my hands and know that it was earned, that this one meant something beyond keeping the monster fed.
The marks were strangers. They deserved what they got, but they were strangers.
These people on this list, these people had touched us.
Had broken us into pieces and then walked away and kept living as if we didn't exist.
The thought of them eating dinner right now, watching TV, sleeping in clean sheets while Cam and I stitched ourselves together with sex and violence and an apartment with a dent in the hallway wall made me want to scream until my throat bled.
But Cam was right. This had to be planned. Savored. We'd spent nine years killing quickly. These ones deserved a slow burn.
I looked at him. At this man who'd spent weeks tracking down the people who'd destroyed us, who'd hired a disgusting hacker and terrorized him into finding addresses, who'd cooked me steak and lit candles and put a file full of revenge next to my plate wrapped up as a birthday present.
And I had an idea.
"You wanna marry me, Cam?"
He didn't flinch, didn't look away. "Yeah, Lakes. I do."
"We're not exactly church-wedding material."
"Baby, we'd burn the church down."
"We literally might." I grinned. "Especially if it's the one connected to St. Agnes."