Silas (36 page)

I nodded. “Yeah.”

“
Huh.” Sloane furrowed her
brow.

“
Listen, Christa is putting
on an act, but she’s not as okay as she seems. She’s been through
too much shit. Do you know that she’s the one who killed
Rolf?”

Sloane gave me a funny look.
“Oh my god. Silas, you’re worried about her.”

“
Of course I am. She stabbed
him in the neck with a sharpened piece of wood, and he bled out in
front of her. Then two minutes later, she’s like, ‘Let’s have a
wedding.’ But the minute the sun goes down, she can’t sleep alone.
So, you just tell me that there’s not something wrong with
that.”

“
You care about her,” said
Sloane. “Like really care about her.”

“
So?” I said. “Is that so
hard to believe about me?”

“
Kind of,” she said.
“Generally speaking, I’d say that besides me, you don’t care about
anybody at all.”

“
I do,” I said. “We have…
friends and stuff. I care about Leigh and Griffin and…”

“
Not really, you don’t,” she
said.

“
Well… well, maybe I want
to.”

She shook her head. “What
happened to you out there?”

I sighed. “Forget me. What
about Christa? Isn’t anybody going to do anything?”

“
What should we do, Silas?
Cancel the wedding again? Tell her she can’t help Leigh with flower
arrangements? Look, every single one of us has been through hell.
And we all know that there’s no way to wave a magic wand and fix
everything. If she can feel good, I say let her.”

“
I don’t think she
really
does
feel
good. I think she’s forcing herself to act that
way.”

“
Silas, she killed someone.
So have I. So have you. So has Griffin. So has Leigh. We’re all
functioning, okay?’

Damn it.

“
I know it’s a big deal. But
she did it in self-defense, and she seems all right. So, as sweet
as it is that you’ve developed empathy or whatever, you’re being
kind of creepy.” She patted me on the shoulder. “It’s going to be
okay. Calm down.”

* * *

I couldn
’t “calm down.” It wasn’t that easy.

Everyone was back at the
house that day. It was Thursday. The wedding was set for Saturday.
According to Sloane, the entire house needed to be cleaned from top
to bottom and the yard needed grooming.

I thought that I’d be able
to lose myself in hard work.

But the problem with working with your
hands is that it leaves your mind free.

So, I mowed the lawn, but I
didn’t think about the grass I was cutting. Instead, I thought
about Christa telling me that she felt sticky from blood…
mostly.

I trimmed hedges, but I
didn’t think about whether or not I was getting them squared
enough. Instead, I thought about the sound of her sobs in the cave
as I stroked her hair.

I vacuumed the entire two
top floors of the house, but I didn’t pay attention to the coins
and paper clips that the vacuum cleaner occasionally picked up.
Instead, I thought of Rolf kneeling next to me and telling me that
I was beaten.

He was right.

He’d beaten me.

He was dead now, but he’d
still won, and I’d lost.

Before he’d tied her to that
tree, I’d still contemplated things like whether or not I believed
in the idea of romantic love.

Now that seemed so silly and
abstract that I couldn’t believe I’d ever bothered to think about
it.

He’d stripped me of all the
armor I’d used to protect myself, and I now realized that human
emotion was visceral and raw.

In the woods, Christa had
been mine. Mine to protect, mine to watch over, and, yes, mine to
fuck. Hadn’t I been inside her the night before it happened? It
wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t poetic, but it was the truth I felt in
my bones.

My Christa.

You could call it possessive
and misogynistic if you wanted. You could say that what I felt for
her was barbaric and that a modern man had to evolve in terms of
his relationship to the role of women.

But the thing was that being
out there in the woods had been barbaric. And so I’d responded like
a caveman.

She was my woman, and he took her. Hurt
her.

And I was in pain, because I was a
failure as a man.

And because I…

Fuck
. I tore the vacuum cleaner plug out of the wall.

The machine cut off, leaving me in
silence.

It wasn’t about my failure.
It was about her.

She was hurt.

And it hurt me that she
hurt.

I didn’t know if that was
romantic or poetic or anything.

But I thought it was love.

Maybe it was barbaric, but
it was real. It was true. It was the rawest, most powerful feeling
I’d ever felt.

She was hurt, and she was
running from it, and she wasn’t ever going to heal if she buried
it.

She might hate me for helping her, but
I had to do what I could.

Because I didn’t help her
before. I couldn’t help her before, when Rolf had her tied to that
tree. I didn’t know if I’d ever recover from that. But I did know
that not helping her now would only make it worse.

* * *

“
Griffin, we need to talk,”
I said.

Griffin was standing outside
on my stone patio. He was scrubbing the top of the outdoor table
with a wad of paper towels. “Sure, what’s up?”

“
You’re probably going to
want to stop doing that,” I said.

“
I can’t stop doing this,”
he said. “Didn’t Sloane give you a really long list of shit to
clean too?”

Okay, fine. I took a deep
breath. “The thing is, I, um, wasn’t exactly honest with
you.”

“
About what?” He moved the
paper towel in wide circles over the surface of the
table.

“
I didn’t keep Christa safe
out there.”

He stopped his movement. He
looked up at me. “What are you talking about?”

“
She doesn’t want me to tell
anyone about it,” I said. “And I told her I wouldn’t, but I have to
say something to somebody, because she can’t bury it forever. And
you’re her brother. And you’d probably understand what she’s going
through better than any of us, because of the shit that happened to
you. So, I’m telling you anyway.”

He straightened. “Silas,
what are you going on about?”

“
Rolf…” God, now that I was
here, it was so hard to figure out how to say this. I scuffed my
toe against the patio. “You know that he was angry with me because
of his wife, right?”

“
No, I guess we didn’t
really get into his reasonings,” he said. “What’s this have to do
with Christa?”

I took a deep breath. “Well,
it’s a long story, but Rolf’s wife was one of the, you know,
clients for French’s little side business. You know about her side
business, right?”

“
The prostitutes,” he said.
“Again, I thought this about Christa.”

“
Right, well, so Rolf found
out that I’d slept with his wife—”

“
You
were one of French’s prostitutes?” he said. “I
thought they were all women.”

“
Not all of them,” I
said.

“
So, Rolf’s wife paid French
to sleep with you, and then Rolf found out, and that’s why he
wanted to kill you?”

“
Yeah,” I said. “When he saw
Christa with me at that bar, he assumed that she and I were…
together, and told me that he was going to show me what it felt
like to have a woman stolen from me.”

“
Wait a second,” said
Griffin. “Sloane said he hunted people. You said you were in the
woods, running for your lives.”

“
Oh we were,” I said. “But
he caught us. And I… I tried to stop him. I—God, I tried, but he
shot me, and I went dark, and they’d been shooting me so much, and
my body was exhausted, and it took me so long to heal, and when I
did…” I dragged a hand over my face. “I’m so sorry.”

“
Silas, are you saying
that…?” Griffin left the question unformed.

I nodded.

He shook his head.
“No.”

“
Yeah,” I said, my voice
breaking. “He tied her to a tree, and I was trying to get up, and I
was bleeding, and I couldn’t make my fucking muscles move, and when
I woke up, it was done.”

Griffin’s expression was
stony. “What was done?”

I felt a sob starting to form in my
throat.

Griffin stepped closer to
me. “
What
was
done? Say it.”

I looked into his eyes. “He…
he fucked her. He fucked her, and I didn’t do anything.”

Griffin’s fist slammed into
my face.

I stumbled backwards. Okay,
I hadn’t been expecting that.

He hit me again, driving his
knuckles into my jaw. “You fucking bastard.”

The impact knocked me off balance
further.

He punched me in the
stomach.

I doubled over, my center of gravity
completely fucked. I went down, landing on my back in the
grass.

Griffin leaped onto me. He
pushed my face to the side, grinding it into the ground. “You were
supposed to take care of her.”

“
I know,” I said. “I failed
her.”

He put pressure on my
cheekbone.

There was a crunch. Searing pain shot
through my face.

It woke something up in me.
My training. My bloodthirsty spirit. I don’t know what. But
suddenly, I was
on
.

My fist shot up into
Griffin’s midsection. It wasn’t a hard enough hit to dislodge him
completely.

But he did lessen the pressure on my
face.

Enough that I was able to get my hand
around his wrist and wrench it away.

He was leaning too much of
his weight on me, and he couldn’t recover. He came down on top of
me.

I dug my fingers into his eye
sockets.

He wrapped a hand around my
neck.

We rolled over and over on the grass,
grappling with each other.

He was on top for a minute. He slammed
my head into the ground, stunning me for a moment.

I recovered enough to roll
over. Now he was under me. I drove my elbow into his
nose.

He brought his knee up into my
groin.

I gasped.

He knocked his head into the
cheekbone he’d already broken.

I roared in rage as the pain
consumed me. I rained blows down on him. His nose was crushed and
bleeding. I pummeled it again and again.

He cried out in frustration and
pain.

And someone was screaming.

Someone else.

A female someone.

“
Stop it right fucking now,”
shrieked a voice.

That seemed to snap me out
of it. What the hell was I doing? I had been trying to apologize to
Griffin, to get help for Christa, and to make things better. I
hadn’t meant to get in a fight with him.

I rolled off of him.

Leigh was standing over us.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing to my fiancé?”

Griffin got to his feet,
breathing hard. “It’s my fault, doll.” He offered me his
hand.

I took it, panting as well.
“No, I shouldn’t have hit back. I didn’t mean to. I was all about
taking it.”

He helped me to my feet.
“Shouldn’t have hit you at all. Saw red for a minute
there.”

Leigh crossed her arms over
her chest. “What’s going on?”

He patted her on the
shoulder. “It’s fine, doll. Guy stuff.”

“
Fuck that,” she said. “And
you’re bleeding all over me.”

Griffin pushed me ahead of
him, back into the house.

“
Jesus, you’ll bleed all
over the kitchen too,” said Leigh.

Griffin stopped, pulling me
back. He sighed. “Fine. Then you think you can bring us some paper
towels or something?”

She marched over to the
patio and picked up the roll that he’d been using to clean the
table. She hurled it at him. “Sometimes, I could kill you, Griffin
Fawkes. Do you not realize we are getting
married
in two days, and he is
the
best man
?”

Griffin ripped off a paper
towel and handed it to me. “I’m really sorry, doll. I promise not
to beat him up anymore, okay?”

I wiped at my mouth, which
was bleeding. “Hey, I think I was kind of beating you
up.”

He raised an eyebrow at me.

“
But you would have
definitely gotten me in the end,” I said.