Slow Agony (30 page)

He was kneeling behind me. “Show me your hands.”

With effort, I managed to move so that I had my back to him. “It’s hard to move.”

“Yeah, I know that stuff. It’s a cocktail of truth serum, muscle relaxants, and some special secret stuff that Op Wraith put in for fun. It’s good for subduing prisoners.” He tugged on my handcuffs. “Had to be cuffs, didn’t it?”

He straightened.

I fell back into the couch, happy to be able to relax.

“French, where are the keys?” He went over to her, holding his gun to her head.

She smiled up at him. “Why should I help you, Griffin? You’re going to blow me up and kill me. You can see you don’t have a lot of leverage.”

He glared at her. “I might just shoot you for fun.”

She closed her eyes. “If it would make you feel better, try it.”

Griffin considered for a second. “Okay.” He pulled the trigger.

I flinched again. He really was careless, wasn’t he?

He was behind me again in a second, and I had to haul myself forward again. “Have to try to pick the lock, I guess. All I’ve got is this knife.”

I let him work at it for a minute. “Griffin, I’m not sure if we should kill them.”

“What?” he said.

“I’m not sure that killing people so much isn’t changing us in bad ways.”

“Is this really the time to talk about this?”

“I don’t like the person I’m becoming. And I don’t like the way you are when you’re doing it.”

He went still at my handcuffs. His voice was soft. “I know. I can tell.”

I tried to turn to look at him, but it was hard to move my head. I only made it a few inches.

And then my gaze settled on my father, who was lying on the floor with blood spilling out of his chest. And a
key
spilling out of his pocket. “Griffin, there’s the key to the handcuffs. In my father’s pocket.”

“Good eye, doll,” he said. He placed the hilt of the knife in one of my hands. “Hold this.” He scampered over to my father, picked up the key, and was back to unlock the cuffs.

My hands free, I pulled them in front of me. I was still holding Griffin’s knife. I contemplated the sharpness of the blade, thinking of the way I’d cut Marcel. About how easy it had been. How good it had felt.

Griffin took the cuffs across the room. He knelt down next to French and handcuffed her to her desk. Then he walked over to my father. He nudged him with his foot. “They could wake up at any second.” He got his phone out of his pocket. Dialed. “I’ve got her. Go ahead and start the ignition sequence.”

“No,” I said. “Griffin, I don’t think we should—”

My father was moving. He lurched up from the floor, his movement stiff and unwieldy. “Griffin Fawkes, you’ll pay for what you did to my daughter.”

Griffin fumbled for his gun.

“Don’t!” I cried out.

And my father tripped over my foot, and he came down with his back to me. He ran into the knife.

I swear he did. I didn’t do it. It was an accident.

I didn’t cut his spine on purpose. He was going after Griffin, and I wanted to protect Griffin, but I didn’t mean to kill my dad. I promise I didn’t.

I dropped the knife. “Oh.”

“Shit.” Griffin was next to me, pulling me to my feet.

“I didn’t mean it,” I said.

“I know you didn’t, doll,” he said. “I know that.”

I was crying. “Oh, Griffin, I didn’t mean it.”

“Can you walk?” he said. “We have to get out of here.”

“Call him and tell him to turn it off,” I said.

“Doesn’t work like that doll. Once he’s started it, he can’t turn it off. We
have
to go.”

I shook my head, moving it as best as I could. I was having trouble standing, too. “I don’t want us to kill people.”

“What? You want me to drag French out of here? There’s a bomb going off, doll.”

“I...” I bit my lip. I wasn’t sure.

“We have to go.” He looked into my eyes. “French deserves it, doll. And she’s going to come after us again if we don’t stop her. We have to stop her.”

“Griffin...”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He let go of me and stalked across the room.

I couldn’t keep myself standing without him. I fell in a heap.

Griffin set the key to the handcuffs next to French. He turned to me. “Best I can do, doll.”

I closed my eyes.

I felt his strong arms gather me up. I laid my head on his chest, and he carried me out of the room. Through institutional hallways, up stairs, through doors, until finally, we were outside again, in the woods.

The explosion was like fireworks.

Fireworks that rippled through the air and knocked us down.

Griffin’s body covered mine. His gray eyes searched mine as we lay there, everything flames and sparks behind us.

I looked away.

Chapter Eighteen

“You did what?” said Silas.

“I left her a key,” said Griffin.

We were back in the twins’ house in Morgantown. I’d slept for most of the trip back. Whatever drugs I’d been injected with had really knocked me out. Now I was sitting in a chair at the kitchen table, toying with the label on my beer. I hadn’t been talking much since I woke up.

“Why would you do that?” Silas was standing behind a chair, gripping it hard. His knuckles were the color of salt.

“Look, there’s no way she got out,” said Griffin. “Leigh and I barely made it. She was dark, and she was handcuffed to her desk, and there’s no way. She’s dead.”

“She fucking better be dead.” Silas shook his head. “How could you do something like that?”

“It was me,” I said.

They all turned to look at me.

Griffin sighed. “Doll, you don’t have to explain. I made the decision, not you.”

“I didn’t want to kill anyone else.” I got up from the table. “I’m sick of killing people.” I drained my bottle of beer and slammed it down on the table. Then I left the room.

I could hear Sloane behind me, her voice soft, telling the boys not to go after me.

“Doll?”

I was lying on the bed in the room that I’d used at the twins’ house. I didn’t look up when I heard Griffin come in.

He sat down on the bed. My back was to him. He touched me tentatively. “I’m, um, I’m going back to my apartment. Do you want to come with me, or...”

Silence.

He cleared his throat. “Sloane says it’s fine if you stay. But, um, you might want to stay clear of Silas. He’s pretty pissed.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to talk. I felt like I was trapped in a nightmare, one that never ended, and I didn’t know how to deal with it anymore.

“Say something, please,” he said.

“I don’t have anything to say.” I realized that my voice was dull and tired.

He waited.

I didn’t say anything else.

“Okay.” He got up off the bed. Then he hesitated. “Listen, doll, I don’t know if you remember this, but back in Boston last year, when I found you at that club, and I brought you back to the hotel where I was keeping Knox?”

“Of course I remember.”

“Do you remember what I said about the way you were looking at me?”

“Maybe,” I said. I knew that Griffin had stopped torturing Knox because I showed up. I knew that we’d talked later, and we’d decided that we made each other better. But that was obviously bullshit. There wasn’t anything good about either of us.

“It’s why I left the key,” he said. “You were looking at me...”

“She’s dead anyway,” I said. “It’s not like it mattered.”

“Right.” I heard him sigh. His footsteps went out of the room. Then they stopped. He came back. He caught me by the shoulder and turned me, forcing me to face him. “You told me to do it, Leigh. You told me to switch off. In the basement. You gave me permission.”

What was he trying to say? I swallowed. “You were back, though. You were back when you cried in my arms in the dorm. That wasn’t being switched off.”

He ran a hand over the top of his head. “You just can’t understand what I’ve been through, doll. These people need to be dead.”

“I know,” I said. “I know they do. But if we’re the ones who kill them... it’s like, they’ve already destroyed so much. And then by the time we’re done getting rid of them, what’s left of us? We were going to have a baby, and now, I don’t think I want myself around small children.”

“Jesus,” he said. “You’re being way too harsh on yourself.”

“Am I?” I said. “Do you remember what Marcel’s body looked like?”

“Doll—”

“No. Look, maybe we both need to come to terms with the fact that neither of us really ‘turn off.’ Whatever violence is inside us, we carry it around with us all the time. It’s part of who we are. And compartmentalizing it is just... well, kind of schizophrenic.”

He got off the bed. “Maybe it is. I don’t know. It’s what we do, though. It’s what anyone who’s been through this does. Because if I let it out all the time, I’ll go crazy.” He turned to look at me. “You have to put up a wall, Leigh, and you have to shove it back there, or it
will
eat you alive.”

It was basically what Sloane had said. Bury it. But I felt like it was cheating. I felt guilty for a reason, didn’t I? What business did I have running from my guilt?

He sat down with me again. He caressed my cheek. “Look, take a night away from me, if that’s what you need.”

I licked my lips. “I need time to think.”

“I understand,” he said.

“I have some things I have to take care of back in Thomas,” I said. “I missed graduation, you know. And I think I’d like to make a grave marker for my father, even though I don’t have his body.”

“Okay,” he said.

“But I’ll be in Morgantown for the fall semester—”

“Wait a second,” he said. “That’s not a night, doll. That’s months.”

I looked away.

He sighed. “I can’t.”

“I need some time. You have to let me take that time.”

“Well, even if I wasn’t hurt that you don’t want to include me in the memorializing of your father, I can’t let you be alone like that, because there’s a chance that French is still alive and that she’s after us.”

“She’s dead, Griffin. She couldn’t have gotten out. She’s dead, and we killed her.”

He hung his head.

“I’ll be in touch,” I said. “Besides, I’m getting much better at taking care of myself.”

“Please don’t shut me out,” he said. “We need each other right now. You need me, I need you. Please.”

I could hear the desperation in his voice. There was an echo in there of those heartrending sobs. He must feel like I was turning my back on him. But I couldn’t help him if I didn’t know how to help myself. “I’m sorry.”

“Isn’t there anything I can—”

“Please go, Griffin.”

I didn’t take off the engagement ring. I wore it all the time. I thought about taking it off sometimes. To wash the dishes. To sleep. To cut up chicken breast. But I didn’t (no matter unsanitary it was), because it felt as though I would never put it back on if I took it off. Like it would be a step, and it was a step I didn’t want to make.

I did have a lot of things I had to get in order. I had to get another car, considering that I’d abandoned my old one in the D’atri parking lot a month ago. I had all kinds of things to take care of with the college, squaring away my graduation. I had to get my fall schedule worked out. I had to deal with my living situation.

I was glad to find that my apartment had been relieved of both the body of Naomi and the couch she’d died on. I wasn’t sure if Op Wraith had cleaned up or if Griffin and Silas had somehow done it. Whatever the case, I didn’t have any issues with that, or with the law.

I didn’t end up making a fake headstone for my father.

There were too many questions that had to be answered, and I didn’t have the right kind of responses.

Instead, I took to engaging in a practice I’d learned from Griffin. I had a cluster of candles, and I lit them each night, one for all the people who had died. Both the ones I’d loved, and the ones I’d killed.

I spent a moment remembering them each day.

Thinking about Naomi, Stacy, Jack, the girl in the hotel room, and the other people who’d been casualties was easy enough. I remembered them alive, and I remembered who they’d been and why they were wonderful.

The others were harder.

My father... I didn’t like to think about him alive. He’d betrayed me. He’d never been a good father to me. I could think of years of missed birthdays and vacations. Of his repeated abandonment. Or I could think of the way he was happy to sell my services as an assassin to Op Wraith in exchange for reinstatement in his position of power and money. I could think about his cruelty towards Griffin. I didn’t like thinking about any of that.

But I didn’t like thinking about the way it felt to have that knife sink into his skin either.

I decided that things I didn’t like to think about were the things I had to think about.

So I spent each night, staring into candles and thinking of the awful things that I’d done.

And they were so awful that it didn’t quite seem enough.

I upped the amount I lit the candles. I did it in the morning. I did it the evening.

Two times a day to remember the way Marcel had sobbed and screamed. Two times a day to remember the way I’d shot Wolfman over and over again. Two times a day to remember the way I’d laughed at Marcel’s pain. Two times a day to remember that I’d killed my own father.

Two times a day wasn’t good enough either.

I added an afternoon session as well.

Then, I just started doing it whenever I thought of it. I drowned in the memories. I let my shame swallow me. I forced myself to face the darkness in my soul. I was a killer. I was sick and depraved.

It got in the way of things sometimes, but I made it work. It was hardest when I was moving to Morgantown, especially because I was surrounded by the anonymous movers I’d hired to help me. They probably thought I was very strange, lighting candles in the middle of a move.

And when I got to Morgantown, thinking about it didn’t seem like it was enough. After all, I had killed people. I had mutilated, slashed, excised, and I’d done it all with a song in my heart. Sometimes, I remembered my own jeering laughter as I watched Marcel suffer, and I
hated
myself for it. I needed to do penance.