Unravel Me (26 page)

“
Run, I said to myself.
” Warner has picked up my notebook again.

“Please.” I’m begging him. “Please s-stop—”

He looks up, looks at me like he can really see me, see into me, like he wants
me
to see into
him
and then he drops his eyes, he clears his throat, he starts over, he reads from my
journal.

“Run, I said to myself. Run until your lungs collapse, until the wind whips and snaps
at your tattered clothes, until you’re a blur that blends into the background.

“Run, Juliette, run faster, run until your bones break and your shins split and your
muscles atrophy and your heart dies because it was always too big for your chest and
it beat too fast for too long and run.

“Run run run until you can’t hear their feet behind you. Run until they drop their
fists and their shouts dissolve in the air. Run with your eyes open and your mouth
shut and dam the river rushing up behind your eyes. Run, Juliette.

“Run until you drop dead.

“Make sure your heart stops before they ever reach you. Before they ever touch you.

“Run, I said.
”

I have to clench my fists until I feel pain, anything to push these memories away.
I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to think about these things anymore. I don’t
want to think about what else I wrote on those pages, what else Warner knows about
me now, what he must think of me. I can only imagine how pathetic and lonely and desperate
I must appear to him.
I don’t know why I care.

“Do you know,” he says, closing the cover of the journal only to lay his hand on top
of it. Protecting it. Staring at it. “I couldn’t sleep for days after I read that
entry. I kept wanting to know which people were chasing you down the street, who it
was you were running from. I wanted to find them,” he says, so softly, “and I wanted
to rip their limbs off, one by one. I wanted to murder them in ways that would horrify
you to hear.”

I’m shaking now, whispering, “Please, please give that back to me.”

He touches the tips of his fingers to his lips. Tilts his head back, just a little.
Smiles a strange, unhappy smile. Says, “You must know how sorry I am. That I”—he swallows—“that
I kissed you like that. I confess I had no idea you would shoot me for it.”

And I realize something. “Your arm,” I breathe, astonished. He wears no sling. He
moves with no difficulty. There’s no bruising or swelling or scars I can see.

His smile is brittle. “Yes,” he says. “It was healed when I woke up to find myself
in this room.”

Sonya and Sara. They helped him. I wonder why anyone here would do him such a kindness.
I force myself to take a step back. “Please,” I tell him. “My notebook, I—”

“I promise you,” he says, “I never would’ve kissed you if I didn’t think you wanted
me to.”

And I’m so shocked that for a moment I forget all about my notebook. I meet his heavy
gaze. Manage to steady my voice. “I told you I
hated
you.”

“Yes,” he says. He nods. “Well. You’d be surprised how many people say that to me.”

“I don’t think I would.”

His lips twitch. “You tried to kill me.”

“That amuses you.”

“Oh yes,” he says, his grin growing. “I find it fascinating.” A pause. “Would you
like to know why?”

I stare at him.

“Because all you ever said to me,” he explains, “was that you didn’t want to hurt
anyone. You didn’t want to
murder people.
”

“I don’t.”

“Except for me?”

I’m all out of letters. Fresh out of words. Someone has robbed me of my entire vocabulary.

“That decision was so easy for you to make,” he says. “So simple. You had a gun. You
wanted to run away. You pulled the trigger. That was it.”

He’s right.

I keep telling myself I have no interest in killing people but somehow I find a way
to justify it, to rationalize it when I want to.

Warner. Castle. Anderson.

I wanted to kill every single one of them. And I would have.

What is happening to me.

I’ve made a huge mistake coming here. Accepting this assignment. Because I can’t be
alone with Warner. Not like this. Being alone with him is making my insides hurt in
ways I don’t want to understand.

I have to leave.

“Don’t go,” he whispers, eyes on my notebook again. “Please,” he says. “Sit with me.
Stay with me. I just want to see you. You don’t even have to say anything.”

Some crazed, confused part of my brain actually wants to sit down next to him, actually
wants to hear what he has to say before I remember Adam and what he would think if
he knew, what he would say if he were here and could see I was interested in spending
my time with the same person who shot him in the leg, broke his ribs, and hung him
on a conveyor belt in an abandoned slaughterhouse, leaving him to bleed to death one
minute at a time.

I must be insane.

Still, I don’t move.

Warner relaxes against the wall. “Would you like me to read to you?”

I’m shaking my head over and over and over again, whispering, “Why are you doing this
to me?”

And he looks like he’s about to respond before he changes his mind. Looks away. Lifts
his eyes to the ceiling and smiles, just a tiny bit. “You know,” he says, “I could
tell, the very first day I met you. There was something about you that felt different
to me. Something in your eyes that was so tender. Raw. Like you hadn’t yet learned
how to hide your heart from the world.” He’s nodding now, nodding to himself about
something and I can’t imagine what it is. “Finding this,” he says, his voice soft
as he pats the cover of my notebook, “was so”—his eyebrows pull together—“it was so
extraordinarily painful.” He finally looks at me and he looks like a completely different
person. Like he’s trying to solve a tremendously difficult equation. “It was like
meeting a friend for the very first time.”

Why are my hands trembling.

He takes a deep breath. Looks down. Whispers, “I am so tired, love. I’m so very, very
tired.”

Why won’t my heart stop racing.

“How much time,” he says after a moment, “do I have before they kill me?”

“Kill you?”

He stares at me.

I’m startled into speaking. “We’re not going to kill you,” I tell him. “We have no
intention of hurting you. We just want to use you to get back our men. We’re holding
you hostage.”

Warner’s eyes go wide, his shoulders stiffen. “What?”

“We have no reason to kill you,” I explain. “We only need to barter with your life—”

Warner laughs a loud, full-bodied laugh. Shakes his head. Smiles at me in that way
I’ve only ever seen once before, looking at me like I’m the sweetest thing he’s ever
decided to eat.

Those
dimples
.

“Dear, sweet, beautiful girl,” he says. “Your team here has greatly overestimated
my father’s affection for me. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but keeping me here
is not going to give you the advantage you were hoping for. I doubt my father has
even noticed I’m gone. So I would like to request that you please either kill me,
or let me go. But I beg you not to waste my time by confining me here.”

I’m checking my pockets for spare words and sentences but I’m finding none, not an
adverb, not a preposition or even a dangling participle because there doesn’t exist
a single response to such an outlandish request.

Warner is still smiling at me, shoulders shaking in silent amusement.

“But that’s not even a viable argument,” I tell him. “No one
likes
to be held hostage—”

He takes a tight breath. Runs a hand through his hair. Shrugs. “Your men are wasting
their time,” he says. “Kidnapping me will never work to your advantage. This much,”
he says, “I can guarantee.”

Time for lunch.

Kenji and I are sitting on one side of the table, Adam and James on the other.

We’ve been sitting here for half an hour now, deliberating over my conversation with
Warner. I conveniently left out the parts about my journal, though I’m starting to
wonder if I should’ve mentioned it. I’m also starting to wonder if I should just come
clean about Warner being able to touch me. But every time I look at Adam I just can’t
bring myself to do it. I don’t even know
why
Warner can touch me. Maybe Warner is the fluke I thought Adam was. Maybe all of this
is some kind of cosmic joke told at my expense.

I don’t know what to do yet.

But somehow the extra details of my conversation with Warner seem too personal, too
embarrassing to share. I don’t want anyone to know, for example, that Warner told
me he loves me. I don’t want anyone to know that he has my journal, or that he’s read
it. Adam is the only other person who even knows it exists, and he, at least, was
kind enough to respect my privacy. He’s the one who saved my journal from the asylum,
the one who brought it back to me in the first place. But he said he never read the
things I wrote. He said he knew they must’ve been very private thoughts and that he
didn’t want to intrude.

Warner, on the other hand, has ransacked my mind.

I feel so much more apprehensive around him now. Just thinking about being near him
makes me feel anxious, nervous, so vulnerable. I hate that he knows my secrets. My
secret thoughts.

It shouldn’t be him who knows anything about me at all.

It should be
him
. The one sitting right across from me. The one with the dark-blue eyes and the dark-brown
hair and the hands that have touched my heart, my body.

And he doesn’t seem okay right now.

Adam’s head is down, his eyebrows drawn, his hands clenched together on the table.
He hasn’t touched his food and he hasn’t said a word since I summarized my meeting
with Warner. Kenji has been just as quiet. Everyone’s been a bit more solemn since
our recent battle; we lost several people from Omega Point.

I take a deep breath and try again.

“So what do you think?” I ask them. “About what he said about Anderson?” I’m careful
not to use the word
dad
or
father
anymore, especially around James. I don’t know what, if anything, Adam has said to
James about the issue, and it’s not my business to pry. Worse still, Adam hasn’t said
a word about it since we got back, and it’s already been 2 days. “Do you think he’s
right that Anderson won’t care if he’s been taken hostage?”

James squirms around in his seat, eyes narrowed as he chews the food in his mouth,
looking at the group of us like he’s waiting to memorize everything we say.

Adam rubs his forehead. “That,” he finally says, “might actually have some merit.”

Kenji frowns, folds his arms, leans forward. “Yeah. It is kind of weird. We haven’t
heard a single thing from their side, and it’s been over forty-eight hours.”

“What does Castle think?” I ask.

Kenji shrugs. “He’s stressed out. Ian and Emory were really messed up when we found
them. I don’t think they’re conscious yet, even though Sonya and Sara have been working
around the clock to help them. I think he’s worried we won’t get Winston and Brendan
back at all.”

“Maybe,” Adam says, “their silence has to do with the fact that you shot Anderson
in both his legs. Maybe he’s just recovering.”

I almost choke on the water I was attempting to drink. I chance a look at Kenji to
see if he’s going to correct Adam’s assumption, but he doesn’t even flinch. So I say
nothing.

Kenji is nodding. Says, “Right. Yeah. I almost forgot about that.” A pause. “Makes
sense.”

“You shot him in the legs?” James asks, eyes wide in Kenji’s direction.

Kenji clears his throat but is careful not to look at me. I wonder why he’s protecting
me from this. Why he thinks it’s better not to tell the truth about what really happened.
“Yup,” he says, and takes a bite of his food.

Adam exhales. Pushes up his shirtsleeves, studies the series of concentric circles
inked onto his forearms, military mementos of a past life.

“But why?” James asks Kenji.

“Why what, kid?”

“Why didn’t you kill him? Why just shoot him in the legs? Didn’t you say he’s the
worst? The reason why we have all the problems we have now?”

Kenji is quiet for a moment. He’s gripping his spoon, poking at his food. Finally
he puts the spoon down. Motions for James to join him on our side of the table. I
slide down to make room. “Come here,” he says to James, pulling him tight against
the right side of his body. James wraps his arms around Kenji’s waist and Kenji drops
his hand on James’ head, mussing his hair.

I had no idea they were so close.

I keep forgetting that the 3 of them are roommates.

“So, okay. You ready for a little lesson?” he says to James.

James nods.

“It’s like this: Castle always teaches us that we can’t just cut off the head, you
know?” He hesitates; collects his thoughts. “Like, if we just kill the enemy leader,
then what? What would happen?”

“World peace,” James says.

“Wrong. It would be mass chaos.” Kenji shakes his head. Rubs the tip of his nose.
“And chaos is a hell of a lot harder to fight.”

“Then how do you win?”

“Right,” Kenji says. “Well that’s the thing. We can only take out the leader of the
opposition when we’re ready to take over—only when there’s a new leader ready to take
the place of the old one. People need someone to rally around, right? And we’re not
ready yet.” He shrugs. “This was supposed to be a fight against Warner—taking
him
out wouldn’t have been an issue. But to take out Anderson would be asking for absolute
anarchy, all over the country. And anarchy means there’s a chance someone else—someone
even worse, possibly—could take control before we do.”

James says something in response but I don’t hear it.

Adam is staring at me.

He’s staring at me and he’s not pretending not to. He’s not looking away. He’s not
saying a word. His gaze moves from my eyes to my mouth, focusing on my lips for a
moment too long. Finally he turns away, just for a brief second before his eyes are
fixed on mine again. Deeper. Hungrier.