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He pauses for a moment, searching my face. “I don’t know what I know.” He breaks down, a tear slipping down his cheek. Under different circumstances, I would feel bad for him and, in a way, I guess I still do. He’s too young to end up in this life. He can’t be more than nineteen or twenty.
“What’s your name?”
“Dawson,” he says through tears.
Sucking in a deep breath, I reach into my bag and pull out a tissue. When I reach forward to dab at the blood oozing from his nose, he flinches, but he doesn’t move.
“Why did you try to kill me, Dawson?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I can’t remember much. Just that they dropped me at your house and said you had the cure.”
“The cure for what?”
“Poison. Whatever they were giving me.”
Black Dahlia.
“And who’s they?”
My line of questioning runs short because I can see in his eyes, he doesn’t know.
“Where did you come from, Dawson?”
“Bel Air.” He pauses, looking back at the two-way mirror. “I really don’t remember anything. I swear. It’s all just pictures.”
I move to the cut on his lip next, dabbing at that and he seems to relax when he realizes I’m not going to hurt him.
“What’s in those pictures?”
He takes a shuddering breath and I realize his mouth is bloody, too. I reach into my bag and grab the bottle of water I’d brought from home—Mason’s home, I guess—and hand it to him.
“Why are you being nice to me?”
He’s suspicious. I would be too in his situation.
“Because I’ve seen enough people die and I get the feeling you didn’t actually want to kill me,”
He shakes his head. “No. I’m sorry I did that to you.” He nods to the faded bruises on my neck and takes a drink of water. They’re so much lighter now, I’d almost forgotten they were there.
“I survived,” I murmur. “So did you. Now, tell me about those pictures.”
He shakes his head, confusion on his face.
“My . . . sister. They took my sister. I can’t remember why, but I just know they had her and they made me agree to meet them or they wouldn’t give her back.”
“And what happened after that?”
He pauses, wracking his brain.
“Dawson, they won’t stop hurting you if you don’t tell them what you saw.”
He shivers as if the memories are haunting him, even if he can’t remember them.
“I remember a warehouse. Some dusty dirty place. I remember my sister lying on the floor. Her eyes—” He waves a hand in front of his face “—they were glassy. Reflecting some kind of fire. She didn’t look like her, though. Pieces of her weremissing.” He looks up at me, his eyes wide with horror as an uneasiness settles in my stomach. “I think she was dead.”
Tears burn in the backs of my eyes as one slips down his cheek to mix with the dried blood under his nose.
“Fuck . . . my sister’s dead.”
