For the Bond (Romantic Suspense) (Beyond Blood, #3) (14 page)

Images ripped through my mind. Awful things, dark and twisted and full of cruel words and sweat. No, of course I couldn't forget. I'd tried since the beginning. I'd struggled in every way to make what was happening bearable.

The result was a brittle boy who flinched and ran and hid from everyone.

“Kite,” he said gently, putting a hand on my arm. I jerked away, but he kept right on talking. “Your uncle is hurting you. You need to tell someone.”

Jumping down, I shoved past him. Rage was turning my muscles into weapons. I wanted to kick and punch everything around me. “I
tried
telling people! You don't think I did?” Scowling sharply, I jammed my heel into a log and sent it tumbling. “No one cares! No one around here gives a shit what happens to me.”

He hovered by the fence, staying back like I'd attack him next. “Who did you tell?”

“My fourth grade teacher.” Snatching up a branch, I shattered it over a knobby knee. “Know what
he
did? He visited my house, and my uncle smoothed it over with beer and money.” Another stick snapped violently. “That night, he was worse than ever.” Through my anger, the hot pricks of disgust made me shiver. “I tried to run away, once. The cops brought me back when he called them. They found me that same day. I can't hide, I have no where to go. He'll never let me escape and there's no proof but my word. Everyone always think I'm lying. Jacob, there's
nothing
I can do!”

Stepping my way, my new friend—my only friend—studied me with something strange in his blue eyes. He looked... thoughtful. The face of someone with an idea. “He's been doing this to you for a long time, then. Touching you—”

I whirled on him. “Not out loud!”

Jacob was stunned. He looked me up and down. “It isn't your fault! What he's doing is on him, not you.”

Hugging myself, I sat down heavily. Leaves rustled under me in the mild sun. “This stuff isn't supposed to happen. Not in real life.”

Jacob crouched beside me. His attention went up to the sky. “Real life is terrible. I kind of hate it these days.” He watched me from the corner of one eye. “But right now, I hate your uncle the most. Lots of people deserve to live. He isn't one of them.”

My heart stalled. “What do you mean?”

He lowered his tone, soothing and calm. “If no one else will save you, I will.”

Adrenalin began to seep into me. I've heard people brag before. Sitting beside Jacob, a kid no different than me, I believed his every word. “How?” I asked in a dazed whisper. “How will you do it?”

Jacob put his chin in his hands. He didn't look like a young boy, he was too calculating. In a way that had been subconscious since the start, I felt myself idolizing him. This kid, this smart, strange kid...

He was really going to save me.

“If we do this,” he said. “It will change everything. You understand that, right?”

I spoke with hardly a tremor. “We're going to kill him. Aren't we?”

Jacob nodded, fast and brief. “Yeah. But only if you're sure. Once we do this, you won't be hurt by him ever again... but we'll lose everything here. Both of us.”

Both of us.
“I have nothing to lose.” My cheeks were wet. The possibility of getting rid of the man who had been touching me in ways no one ever should, it was pushing relief into my body. I wiped at the tears, they kept coming. “What could be worse than this?”

Jacob didn't smile. All he offered me was a hand. “There'll be no going back. No summers here, no anything here. We'll end up on the streets. It might not be a better life.”

The seriousness in his stare, the odd patience in his eyes, it was meant to give gravity to the situation. Jacob was offering me a deal. He'd help save me—help rid the world of my putrid uncle—but doing so would change our lives.

He'd told me about his little brother. Jacob had said he had no family besides his sweet, but senile, Gram. If you thought about it, neither of us had anything to lose. Not really.

Maybe he expected me to think longer. Years of sexual abuse had readied the answer on my tongue.

Gripping his fingers, I shook his hand and squeezed. “Tell me what we need to do.”

****

I
'd never planned a murder before.

It occurred to me that, if we messed this up, we were going to become a giant headline. When was the last time a pair of ten-year-olds had killed someone?

We weren't normal. Through different sources of hurt and darkness, we'd been shaped into similar monsters. Kids shouldn't hurt or kill anyone.

I was ready to do this.

I was actually excited.

Jacob took the lead, I was happy to let him. He showed me the place where we would do it. He thought, if we surprised him, we could overwhelm my uncle together. It had to be fast, he explained. We couldn't be seen.

We sat and read as many crime novels as we could, all of them dusty and yellowed from his Gram's basement. In hindsight, books weren't helpful. We thought we were ready for what we were going to do.

There is nothing more exhilarating than ignorant pride.

Summer was fading. Soon, I'd be preparing for school, repeating the motions I had for years. Adults who would watch me, notice I was quiet or uneasy, but never stepping in to help. If we didn't execute our plan, then this year, Jacob might be able to join me in class.

His Gram had never signed him up last year. I don't know if she never got the paperwork, or if Jacob hid it from her. She called him Bill a lot. If she thought he was really her son, she probably thought he was already in school.

It didn't matter.

I stopped worrying about our future in this cruddy town. Like a slow storm, the day I'd been waiting for arrived. It rolled in, a heavy air and tension pressing on my body. Jacob didn't look like he felt it, he was always so relaxed.

The stretch of carved earth still held sleeping machines. The construction on the new bridge had gone over a year, most of it barely finished. They'd increased their work lately, though. The sandbags would have a hard time holding back the river after the rainy season, it had swelled since the start.

There was little sun left, an angry purple bruise in the sky and orange as bright as sherbert. It reminded me of Jacob's birthday party. How he had felt bad I hadn't gotten a party for myself, so he'd cut my name into the top of the cake with his finger. His Gram had been pissed, but we'd both laughed.

He was my best friend. I would do anything for him. I knew he would do the same for me.

Voices rose over the hill. My heart was frantic, the familiar sweat dripping down my spine. It always happened when my uncle was near me. In the distance, his eyes were glowing with rage. The sight of Jacob following after him gave me a burst of confidence.

Cresting the dirt road, Uncle Nick started shouting. “So you
are
here, you little shit!” Spittle flew from his greasy lips. His shadow was long, hiding most of his face. He was bending close, moving faster than I expected. “Your little friend there told me you were going to run away again! But jokes on you, he led me right to you, Kite!” God, he was moving toward me like a truck.

Under the fire of my uncle's rage, my plan—
the
plan—peeled back. I was supposed to pull out the gun I'd stolen from his house. I knew he kept it in the bedroom between the mattress springs.

Shooting my uncle was the easy part of the plan. It had sounded so simple, and we'd even hit some cans in the woods for practice before the sound of the blasts made us stop, scared someone would hear us and come snooping. The pistol was weighing me down, doing nothing but giving me a rash where it rubbed between my belt and lower-back.
Take it out,
my mind screamed at me.
Shoot him! Shoot him, do it!

Lifting my hands, I started to cry. “I'm sorry! I wasn't really going to run!”

“Oh no?” he snorted, grabbing for the front of my shirt. We were near the edge of the ravine. If he wanted to, he could throw me right down into the bottom. Would I break into tiny pieces? “You think you're so clever, hiding out here! You're coming home right now, Kite! You hear me?”

My brain smacked around in my skull. He was shaking me violently. If we went home together tonight, he would have no remorse. He'd do things to me that would make me cry and vomit. I forgot I even had a gun. My fear was greater than anything else.

Uncle Nick's grunt was loud; the wet, heavy thunk was louder. He dropped me, the wind kicking out of my body. Sitting there, I stared up as he spun, scrabbling at the back of his skull. The blood there was dripping, smeared on his shirt. Jacob held the rock high.

“
You fucking piece of shit!
” My uncle was breathing heavy, foam on his chin. Bending, he went to grab for Jacob. Those blue eyes shot to me, a beacon of warning. Act now, or we'd both die here. He'd kill us for sure.

I needed to move. It was time.

Fighting to breathe, I climbed to my feet. The pistol was welcome in my hand. There was snot running down my nose. Years of pain and abuse gave me a rush of energy. I'd never felt so light in my life.

I didn't pull the trigger. There was no logic in me, just fight or flight and a visceral need to make him hurt. To make him understand how
I
had hurt. Revenge was all I cared about. The method to get it didn't mean anything to me. Not then.

Gripping the pommel, I raised the gun high and filled my lungs. Metal slammed down, catching my uncle on the neck. He screamed, fell forward in the dirt. Flecks of blood hit my cheek. I didn't stop swinging. I was as much a machine as the ones in the valley below. Again and again, I hit him.

He was bigger, powered by the realization that he was about to die. His leg came out, knocking me down. The gun bounced away, jingling on the gravel. My uncle slobbered drool and strings of red. “You're dead,” he huffed. “You're fucking dead. I'll kill you, you hear me?”

On hands and knees he crawled towards me. Jacob's rock collided with his temple. With a pitiful groan, my uncle toppled sideways. The boy who wanted to save me, who
had
saved me, bent over the fallen monster and kept going. His arm was red by the end. The rock fell away, sticky and wet.

He stood over the body of my uncle.
My uncle.
That face was mutilated, he looked more horrible than the nights he had spent tormenting me in my bed. Now he was dead. I'd killed him.

We'd killed him.

Holding my stomach, I shuddered and vomited. Any joy I had felt evaporated. The fibers of my shirt clung to me, I was pouring sweat.

Jacob put a hand on my back. I jumped, gawking up at him with my lips slack. “Kite,” he whispered. He rubbed my shoulder, trying to soothe me. He was breathing heavy, flushed and pale like me. The calmness had melted away. “Are you alright?”

“Yes. No. I don't know.” Hugging myself tight, I tried to stand—failed and sat down. “Is he really dead?”

My friend didn't look away from my face. He didn't need to check. “Yeah, he's dead. Kite, we need to finish this. Can you get up?”

Spitting into the dirt, I buried my puke under the gravel. I was irrationally upset at my reaction. “I'm fine,” I said, forcing my breathing to slow. “I... I'm sorry I freaked out. I should have shot him. I just froze up.”

Retrieving the gun from the dirt, Jacob dusted it off. “Shooting cans was easier than this.”

“Yeah. It was.”

Together, we rolled his body down the slope. The angle did most of the work. Jacob brought the crimson rock he'd used as a weapon. “No evidence,” he said flatly. The crime stories had been clear, we had to make sure no one could pin this on us.

In the long gorge, we walked past the bulldozers and cranes that stood like dinosaur skeletons in a museum. It was dark out, everything eerie and quiet. Our ears strained, but there was no one around for miles. No one had heard my uncle scream. Just like no one ever heard
me
scream when he was torturing me.

People kept to themselves up here. They always had.

“This one.” Jacob nodded at the hole in front of us. It was one of many, a long line of cavities that went straight down into the earth. Far away, we could see a few that had been completed. Metal supports had been jammed inside, cement filling the gap all the way to the top. There were bags of the stuff nearby, a sign this hole would be filled next.

Crouching beside my uncle, I lifted a hand. “Wait. Just one second.” It was getting hard to see in the rich blue of the evening. The spray of stars overhead and the moon were our only light sources.

Hovering over Nick, I studied his features—his open eyes that saw nothing. I'd vomited before, the excitement and terror too much when combined. Now, as my heart hardened and my mind found comfort in my new freedom, I felt... good. The fear was fading. “You'll never touch me again,” I whispered to his corpse. “You can't hurt me anymore. Years of it... and this is what you get.”

Jacob was silent, looking to the side to give me privacy. When I nodded at him, he tossed the rock down into the pit. Some firm shoving, and my uncle toppled into his new grave. We didn't speak again until we'd finished kicking debris and gravel into the hole, covering up the body from any prying eyes. “It's done,” Jacob said, wiping sweat from his forehead.

There was a chill in my blood. It flowed deeper, protecting me, telling me what we'd done was right. “No one can ever know about this.” Lifting my head, I stared Jacob in the face. Starlight glistened in his blue depths. “We're murderers now. Both of us.”

The knife he slid from his pocket was like fresh silver. “Right. We can't ever let anyone know about this. They'd lock us up. They wouldn't understand.” Jacob closed the distance. The knife was wicked, my heart pounding. But I wasn't afraid of him. Jacob would never hurt me.

I let him take my wrist, holding my palm open. “Will you promise to never tell anyone?” he asked.

“I promise.” The cold pit in my belly spread further. What we'd done, it was changing me faster than anything ever should. My flinching, wincing former self was blossoming into a creature that had shown it could fight back. I only had one fear now, one thing above all else.