Page 86 of Till Death Do Us Part

“Your father?” she whispered. I nodded.

“He’d gotten word that Anton had received the package. Alive. He tracked my steps and found me before I could do it.” I gripped the fence tighter. “Kalman Farkas was a terrible, wrathful man who spoke only in cruelties. The cycles of his anger dominated every aspect of my daily life. Every time he had his explosive rage, I feared it would be the last time, that he’d finally kill me. Anger was his mother tongue, and the only language I’d ever heard him speak. But this… this was the worst I’d ever seen from him.”

She put her hand on my back, caressing softly. I gripped the fence tighter, feeling the metal digging into my fingers like it had back then.

“The exposed metal points at the top of the fence,” I said. “He grabbed me by the back of the head… and he drove my face down into them. And he dragged. I remember the pain like it just happened. I remember the way my skin tore, how I felt it bunch like fabric.”

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, three words with an ocean of grief underneath.

“He wanted me to have a reminder. Something that would follow me for life, and I could see it every time I looked in the mirror… so I would know what happened if I disobeyed.” Slowly, I released my grip on the fence, angry red lines left on my hand. “Six months later, I disobeyed him again. I pointed the gun at his head, and I fired. Just like that, the man who had tyrannized me all my formative years… one pull of a trigger, and he was gone. I remember it felt so small, so pathetic in the end, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. I shot him in the head, and he was dead before he hit the floor, but I shot him again. One bullet split his jaw. One ruptured his throat. Two went into his chest, and one went into his stomach. I remember screaming as I kept going after the chamber was empty, kneeling over his dead body, the gun clicking… clicking… as I kept trying to fire. Nothing left. So I hit him instead. I hit him once for every time he’d hit me. My belt was the handle of a gun, slammed down into his fractured skull, over, and over, and over. I kept screaming at him. I don’t remember what I said. Just that I couldn’t stop. I was more afraid than I’d ever been in my life. Like somehow he would get up and attack me again, like my brain couldn’t accept that he was dead, that he was gone, that he wasn’t going to do that to me anymore. I killed my father. I cleared part of the debt, the three of us who were supposed to die. But there was still one left. There was still me. The scar was still there. And every time I’m on a high ledge… I’m not afraid I’ll fall. I’m afraid because it reminds me I still have that debt to pay. This nightmare can only end when I finally fall, too.”

Elaine pulled me out of the spiral and into an embrace, wrapping her arms tight around me. I clenched my jaw, something inside me shattering like thin glass no matter how hard I tried to hold it in one piece.

“You don’t have to fall, Vera,” she whispered. “You aren’t a debt. You’re a human being. You’re a person. You’re just a little girl who had everything taken away from her and has been scared ever since.”

Nobody had ever gotten close to me like this before. My guard was down, and Elaine had every advantage on me, her arms wrapped around me, hands close to my vitals.

But she didn’t want to kill me. She didn’t want to extort me, didn’t want to blackmail me.

She didn’t want to hurt me.

She didn’t want to remind me what happened if I disobeyed.

She wasn’t disappointed.

So that was how the Wolf fell. Not to bullet or blade, but to a few whispered words and a soft embrace.

“I’m not supposed to be alive,” I whispered.

“None of us are supposed to be here. It’s a miracle for each of us to be born. It’s a miracle for us to find each other. But we are. And we do.” She buried her face in my shoulder. “And I’m so grateful that you are alive. That you did find your way to me.”

I gripped fistfuls of the back of her dress, and I pressed my face against the side of her head, holding her close to me as I cried.

I’d never been supposed to cry. He would never have let me.

But Elaine would.

Chapter 41

elaine

The industrial district was haunting by nighttime.

I stuck close to Vera in the backseat as Petra drove, tapping anxiously on the seat cushion. I couldn’t pin it down, but I felt like something terrible was going to happen.

Maybe it was that the past few days had been too nice. After Vera’s confessional on the roof, she’d been softer around me, more tender, and when Petra declared we were all cooped up too much and took us out for a day to see a movie and get some food, I felt nervously like I was out with a partner when I brought Vera with me.

I mean, I was. She was my wife. That was just still a little hard to get my head around.

But now we’d gotten everything ready, and Vera and Rail had finished their work together with the harbor operations, and the atmosphere in the car was heavy and loaded as we headed out under the cover of twilight for the South Yard.

Clara had been especially clingy and hadn’t wanted to let Vera go today, going so far as to bite her shoelaces and pull one of them loose. It was probably just that she recognized that once the three of us were going together, she was going to be left alone at the house with Caitlyn and Jenna for a long time, and she was antsy, but in the back of my mind, I was thinking how animals were good at detecting danger.

It might have just been the brick of explosives Vera was bringing, hidden cleverly inside her jacket, though. In case they’re building anything that needs to be destroyed. The detonator had sent chills down my spine.

Vera must have sensed my worries, because she put her hand on top of mine and squeezed. I smiled gratefully at her.

“South Yard, on your left,” Petra said, slowing down and coming around a big industrial building with a complex series of chutes around it, up to a tall barbed-wire fence that surrounded an empty lot.