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I let Rhylie go, feeling so much regret. I was heavy with it when I tried to move away.
Why us?
“Daniel liked to bring in the people no one would miss. He’d ask questions, feel out the girls. Cat must have said something to him.”
And then he offered tickets to your show.
You need to find her.
Another bloody tear fell, seconds after a regular one from her undamaged eye.
The numbers in this notepad mean you have access to the system.
She was writing around those numbers now.
Find her. Save her, and tell her that I love her and I’m gonna be okay now.
“How about you tell her when I find her?” I was humoring her, pacifying us both with a lie. I wouldn’t find Cat. I didn’t know her number or what she was listed as. It wasn’t pretty red-head in the sexy dress or anything close. I’d already looked years ago. I’d looked through hundreds of redheads’ codes. I tracked them all, and as awful as it sounded, I left them where I found them...in stuffy basements with the creeps that owned them because none of them were my girl.
I won’t be here.
“No,” I agreed. “You’ll be somewhere else, where you can heal and find peace. I’m going to take you there, but I need your cooperation. No fighting. No screaming. Play dead, and I can get you out of here.”
I won’t. I don’t want you touching me.
“You will do as I ask.”
I can’t live with the memories of what’s happened to me.
Her fingers shook as she wrote the note while leaning against my knee, more blood dripping onto my clothes. I didn’t say anything because this was the closest she’d gotten to someone in years, with a choice.
End it for me? You have a gun.
I should. I knew what this cell meant—the Seven Days of Death.
“How many days have you been in this room?”
A bloody finger drew an S, then a poor attempt at a u. She’d been here since Sunday.
Three days.
Which meant no food for three days. No water for three days.
“Please.” I stared at the dry lines on her lips as the distorted word fell out.
My gaze slipped down her bare shoulders to the history of track marks on her arms, almost faded into old news against so much more recent abuse.
It was stupid for me to come here today.
My head wasn’t in the right place, and I was tired. And I wouldn’t have risked this shithole draining the last of my energy if I’d known pieces of my past would be here, in the butchered flesh. I just needed an hour out of the house. Away from my brother and the paranoia that told him the tumor in his throat would kill him if I didn’t. He tested me daily. More than this life. More than the people I worked with. Because he meant more. More than anything, almost.
Almost as much as what Rhylie’s sibling meant to me.
She was the only victim whose face had gotten stuck in my head, along with her hair, personality, and her fucking voice that sang me twisted lullabies every time my fucking eyes closed.
I examined the scars on Rhylie’s brittle arms again, remembering my own struggles with drugs, but that addiction was so much weaker than the other one I suffered. I’d been addicted to a human being.
And like many addicts, I’d thought of only myself throughout the whole addiction.
