Stone

Rage shakes me from deep inside as I watch the fear flash through Brooke’s pretty eyes. All I want to do is crack every bone in this man’s body. I want to run him over with his fucking 18-wheeler, forward and back, again and again until he’s paid the price.

Something deeper than vengeance keeps me steady.

I know too well the kind of pain, the shame that can follow an experience like this. And I’m more concerned with making sure Brooke is okay than with beating this man even more.

The realization takes me by surprise—her well-being is more important than the darkness inside me.

“We’re leaving,” I tell her. “I’ll take you back to school.”

She lets me lead her out of that dirty bathroom, a place she never should have been. Even the air here doesn’t have the right to touch her.

I’m trying not to limp, not to show her how messed up I am. Nate would have a fit if he knew I went out beating on a guy in this condition. Kind of a shock the man didn’t rearrange my face. Well, he would’ve had to do more to get through me to Brooke.

Sunlight beams onto the sidewalk, almost blinding, unaware of what tragedies unfolded only a few yards away. This is where we stood when I told Brooke I’d never see her again, when I mocked her school uniform and little-girl problems.

Guilt is acid in my veins. If I hadn’t said that, she wouldn’t have felt the need to get away from me. She would have stayed near me.

I guide her to the passenger door and open it. Is this what it feels like to be a gentleman? To take care of a young lady, to have her look at me with trust shining in her eyes.

“I’m not driving?” she asks, her voice small.

She’s not in any shape to drive. And somehow I feel compelled to take care of her. Not to order her around, to tell her where to go, but to kill for her. Except a bloody body is the opposite of what she needs…much as I’d like to end that guy in there. “Get in.”

“Are you okay? Did he hurt you?” she asks.

She’s worried about me? “I was hurt already. Now get in.”

Her eyes turn shiny. Is she going to cry? She should. She’s been abducted by me, multiple times. Attacked by that fucker in the bathroom. This girl who deserves only silk and lace. It’s a miracle she’s lasted this long by my side. I never should have gone near her.

She surprises me by straightening her spine. Not a single tear escapes down her cheeks. “Is this the last time I see you?”

I wouldn’t have thought less of her if she’d cried. My brothers in the basement cried when they were little. It’s how humans cope with horrible things, which is how I know I don’t have a heart. I’ve never shed a tear. I don’t think I would know how. My body isn’t built that way.

“I told you this would be the last time.” The words rip out of me. It’s not what I want. It’s what she needs.

She turns, eyes huge. Wary.

Christ, this girl. I want to rip her to pieces so she can’t look at me, so fucking innocent and brave. “I’m not angry at you. I’m angry at the world. You haven’t figured that out yet?”

“Then why is this the last time?”

There’s a shadow on her cheek. That fucker touched her. It’s going to be a bruise. “Because all I do is hurt you.”

“You don’t hurt me.”

“Have you forgotten what just happened in that bathroom? I’m not good for you.”

“You protected me.”

“I brought you here. I made you come here.”

“I wanted to come.”

“I don’t have anything you want, little bird. You need to get that. There’s no taking me to the movies. You can’t bring me around to your prep-school friends or put my picture in a locket. And you sure as hell can’t bring me home to Mom and Dad.”

She touches my arm. “This is what I want.”

I have to laugh, because women have wanted to use me for my dick before. I can rough them up a little in bed and walk away before morning comes, a dark little memory for them to use with their vibrators when their husbands can’t get them off.

But this girl isn’t using me for my dick. She doesn’t want to fuck me—or more to the point, I can’t let myself fuck her, even though there’s nothing I want more.

She wants me for my company, and that feels strange. Satisfying. Sickening.

I pull away.

“Fine.” She spins on her heel and gets into the car. “Take me back to school.”

I love the imperious way she says that. Like I’m a fucking chauffeur. That’s more like it.

In a matter of minutes, we’re back on the highway, cruising toward town. Except I’m not planning on taking her back to school, not at first. Because I know what she’s thinking—that we’ve still got something going on. That all she has to do is wait and I’ll show up again.

I almost never see her with guys her own age. It’s always made me happy. The idea of her being with a ham-handed high school boy who can’t appreciate her, some kid looking to get his rocks off, it fills me with fucking rage.

But what does it mean for her that I never see her with a boy alone? What if she’s waiting for me? Comparing boys her age to me? Am I making a mess of her life without even being around? The thought horrifies the fuck out of me.

You don’t hurt me. You protected me. I wanted to come.

She doesn’t get it. She thinks I can give her something I can’t. She needs to understand.

I’m heading there, of course. Without really even thinking about it.

She begged me to let her in. Careful what you wish for, I think.

Most of the guys have never been back there. A few try not to think about it. It’s possible Nate goes entire days without letting his mind sink into the pain and hell and twisted-up feelings of that place. Working on his animals. I’ve seen him work all night to repair a broken wing on a fucking crow. And Knox, losing himself in all his tech. But I never turn away. Not ever.

We head southeast. To Ferndale, the scrubby little suburb with boxlike homes fronted by grass gone to seed. And near the very end of an especially decrepit block, the burnt remains of the house, jutting up from the ground like charred teeth on a long-buried demon.

She was a witness to me killing Madsen. Hell, she had a front-row seat to me almost killing her, for fuck’s sake, but she still has things twisted around in her mind—I’m getting that now. Her and her campfire fantasy.

You don’t hurt me. You protected me. I wanted to come.

She’s looking at me like I’m a fixer-upper that maybe needs some sanding to smooth the rough edges. Maybe a bright coat of paint. She doesn’t get that I’m wrong from the inside out.

“This place,” she says. “Have we been here before?”

I pull around the corner, park along the side. No sense in having her car connected with this place. She doesn’t want to get out. I go around and open her door for her, but she just stares up.

“Out.”

She doesn’t move. She senses something’s wrong. She has no fucking idea how wrong. “Isn’t this what you wanted? Me opening the car door for you? Me taking you home to where I grew up? A visit to the folks?”

“That night you killed that guy. We came here.”

“Come on, little bird.” I pull her out. Not rough. She comes. She just doesn’t want to.

“This is where you grew up?”

“Grew up might be a nice way of putting it.” I help her over the wrecked part of the fence, which is posted with no-trespassing signs, and lead her to the edge of the place. To the spot where you can see beyond the charred remnants of walls and into the basement.

It’s just a deep, dark pit with a few cinder-block partitions here and there. There are dried leaves and garbage in the corners. Some scrub brush looming up toward the sky. “Come on.”

I jump onto what’s left of the steps, surprised when she willingly follows. I lead her all the way down and help her as we near the bottom.

She’s too pretty, too pure to be down in this open pit grave where the best parts of us died. What the fuck am I doing?

Teaching her a lesson about me, I remind myself. Showing her what’s in me. She won’t wait for me once she sees this. Won’t get in a car if I’m inside.

I flick on my iPhone light, play it over the dank walls, weathered and cracked. “You have your whole life ahead of you, but this is where mine started and ended.”

She says nothing. I can’t look at her. Already the place is closing around me.

I walk around the familiar corners, so different but so much the same.

I kick a rusted paint can aside and kneel by the metal carcass of the hot-air furnace, a rusted box just a bit smaller than a coffin, once painted blue, but now it’s mostly gray from years of dirt and weather. I crouch there, remembering how it would heat up like a motherfucker in the winter.

I touch a rivet on the side. Cool. Dirty. “We’d be down here twenty-four seven. Well, more like twenty-three seven. They’d keep us down here except when they needed us. You know, when a guy like Madsen would show up. Sometimes women, but mostly men. They’d make us go upstairs. Clean us and dress us like little whores. Me and my brothers. And they were my brothers. Never mind that I’d never seen them before. That we came from different mothers, from different cities. We were a fucked-up family.”

“Stone.” Her voice is shaky. She’s finally getting a clear picture of me.

“It’s cool. While you were getting aspirin and Band-Aids for your skinned knees, we were getting the good stuff. I don’t know what it was they gave us, but it made it like you weren’t there. Sometimes we’d even get off with the customers. The line between feeling good and bad was pretty thin in this place.”

I hear the soft intake of breath. This is hurting her, but it’s better that I tell her what I am all at once. She needs to take on a little damage, or she’ll keep holding out hope.

“This rivet would get really hot in the winter. I’d make the boys touch their finger to it. Like when they came down from up there in a bad way. Or like if they wouldn’t stop crying. I’d tell them that if they touched this really hot rivet, it would take whatever happened up there and suck it out their fingertip and burn it inside the firebox. I convinced them that if they touched their finger to it long enough, it would make it like it didn’t happen.”

There’s a sob from behind me, but I don’t stop.

“It actually worked. Got a lot of burnt fingers, but I made them believe it.” I scrub away the area around the rivet, revealing blue metal. “Took us six years to get out of here. We fought our way out. We were getting fucked before we knew what it meant, but when we killed, we knew what we were doing. Fucking bloodbath like you’ve never seen.”

Still I’m not looking at her. I keep my attention fixed on the dirty furnace box. I listen to the hum of traffic. A distant train blows its horn, long and low. She’s probably wanting to get the hell away from me right about now. Probably going to throw up just looking at me.

“We set this fire. We burned this place. Three men toasted to a nice crisp, but I can pretty much guarantee you, they were dead beforehand.” I sniff. “Whatdya know, folks? Turns out that when a boy touches his finger to a bolt on a furnace, it doesn’t actually suck out all the murderous fucking darkness.”

I’m breathing hard.

I meant to use the story as a club to beat her off, bring her down here to make it all more awful. Instead she’s diluting the darkness of it somehow.

She’s making the memories almost bearable.

I rub the dirt off the rivet. “Sometimes I would touch my finger there when my brothers weren’t looking. I knew it was bullshit. I mean, hello, I made it up myself, right? But it worked with them, and sometimes, when I was feeling like shit, I wanted it to work with me, too—to suck out the bad and burn it away. I wanted to believe my own stupid lie.” I lower my voice to a whisper. “I really wanted to. I almost sometimes could.”

I don’t know why I’m telling her. I’m supposed to be making myself scary, not pathetic. I turn, finally, because I have to.

Because she’s the one bright thing in my life, even if she’s not really in my life.

She’s there, straight and tall, brown eyes shining, but not with tears. She’s looking at me with admiration. “That’s the bravest thing I ever heard.”

I give her a cockeyed look. Like she made a joke. “You caught the bullshit about the rivet, right?”

“That’s my favorite part. You helped them when they needed it most. When you needed help as much as any of them, but you were the leader, weren’t you? You made it better for them.”

My heart thunders. I absorbed all the darkness. She’s not supposed to be making it into a good thing.

“How old were you when they…trapped you?”

I shrug. “Nine or ten. Most were younger. Grayson—the one in prison—he was like five.”

She sucks in a breath and comes to me, throws her arms around me, as if to shield me from the world. She puts her face to my shirt.

This is wrong. I should shake her off, get her out of here.

I don’t.

I rest a tentative hand on her back. “Shit, sweetheart,” I say softly. “I’m ruining you.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, a broken litany. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“For what?” My voice sounds remote to my ears. “A lot of bad shit happened in that basement. Which part are you sorry for?”

I feel her flinch. I unwrap her arms from me and step back. “You don’t even know.”

“Don’t,” she says.

“Are you sorry we missed out on hopscotch and multiplication tables or the class where they teach you to write in that curly way? Or that we got our souls ripped out our assholes? You really should try to be specific.”

“I’m sorry for all of it,” she says softly. “Mostly that part of you is still here.”

My heart thunders. I see what she’s doing. Trying to absorb the darkness. “We’re outta here.”

“You were brave. You saved those boys.”

I push her toward the steps, help her up. “You only say that because you haven’t met those boys.”

“You still know them? That’s cool that you stay in touch.”

Stay in touch.

“What do you think, like we send each other birthday cards or something? We’re fucking criminals. We’re like a pack of wolves roaming the goddamn city. We’re not even official people.”

“What about your parents? Didn’t you try to find them once you were out?”

“You don’t get it. They changed us into monsters down there.” I kick a rusted hinge with part of a shattered door still clinging to it. “None of our folks much wanted us before we went down there. You think they wanted us after? A few of my guys found that out the hard way. It can only be us guys. We’re each other’s family now.”

“You don’t imagine a future? Something you want to be?”

“We want to be the ones who slaughter the people who did this.”

She sucks in a breath. “That man you killed. The first night. Madsen.”

I hadn’t expected her to connect it so quickly. Hadn’t expected to hear absolution in her voice. “Don’t get the wrong idea, little bird. I’m not some kind of vigilante. This isn’t about justice. This is revenge, pure and simple.”

Her pretty brows lower. “What’s the difference?”

“The difference is, I don’t care if they swear never to hurt another boy. And hell, you want to know the truth? I don’t even care whether they knew what was happening. If they were involved, if they looked the other way, if they even did business with the assholes who ran this place, they’re going to die.”

A sad light in her eyes takes my breath away. “This is all you do? Track down the people connected with this and kill them?”

“What else should I do? Take up knitting? This is the only reason I made it out of the basement alive. The knowledge that I would make them suffer. There’s nothing else. There can’t be anything else. No distractions.”

She regards me solemnly, like she’s a hundred years old, ancient with patience and understanding, but so damn young it makes me want to punch the wall. Because she’s living proof that I let distractions interfere with my mission. Well, only one distraction. Her. Driving her around as if I’m the one taking her hostage, but really it’s the other way around. She’s the one who keeps me coming back, even knowing I shouldn’t.

We had to fight our way out of this basement, killing and yelling and half sure we’d end up in a shallow grave before breathing in free air. Yet it somehow feels harder to turn my back on her. To ascend the ruined stairs, get back into daylight.

All the times I came here, it was to remember. Now I have to leave to do the same thing.

She doesn’t follow right away, and I don’t rush her. Let her look her fill. Let her remember how cold it is, the stench of metal and stale sweat that never quite dissipates. It’s not like there’s any other way out of there.

This is the first time I ever noticed the fireflies in the yard. Were they always here, mindless witnesses to men coming and going? Were they here the night we escaped?

The stairs creak with her ascent, shaky even under her slight weight.

“I want to help.”

Her words hit me harder than a physical blow. There are a hundred things I might have expected to hear from her. Disgust or anger. Disappointment. “Why?”

“Because what you’re doing is important. It matters. Like you said, I got a Band-Aid when I fell down. A sweet-sixteen party. But you were suffering.”

I’m already shaking my head. “I don’t need your fucking pity.”

“I’m not offering you any. I’m offering to help.”

“Help? You going to help us feed a few guys through the ol’ wood chipper?”

She flinches but persists. “If that was all you needed to do, you’d be done, wouldn’t you?”

I shouldn’t find her persistence so fucking hot, but I do. “We need to find them,” I admit. “The boys and where they’re being held. And the men who are running this shit.”

“I can help.”

God, I shouldn’t even be talking about this with her. “All the deals are done with a wink and a dirty fucking handshake. There’s no paper trail. No records. Except…”

She puts a hand on my shoulder. My muscles flex beneath her touch, my body glad for her even while my mind tells me to shake her off. “Tell me.”

“You know how they say follow the money? This is like that, except with land. There are a bunch of different owners of these houses. A network organized in secret by whoever is in charge of this operation. Buildings that are abandoned, where no one will ask questions. An endless supply of them.”

“So it’s someone who owns a lot of real estate.”

“Not just one man. Five. Ten. Twenty? I don’t fucking know. If we can find one of them, though, if we can get him to talk, that would be the key we need.”

“Okay,” she says, her voice matter-of-fact. “What do you know so far?”

What do I know so far—like this is a school project she’s going to help me with. “It’s someone with connections in the city. The kind of person who can get permits rubber-stamped and cops to not drive down a certain street. This is way too dangerous for you to be a part of.”

“I’m already a part of this. I stood in that basement. I touched that rivet.”

She touched the rivet? Fuck. There’s a strange sense of comfort I get from that, despite how fucked up it is. That she’s one of us now, even though I know it isn’t true. “We don’t actually know that much. He’s a goddamn ghost.”

“Let me help.”

I need to get her off this track, so I do the one thing that should work: insult her. “You’re a high school kid, little bird. Unless you know someone named Jimmy Brass or Johnson or Keeper, you can’t help.”

A pause. “Keeper?”

“They have nicknames they use underground. That’s part of what helps them hide. No one knows his real identity, so even when we question them, when we torture them, that’s all they can tell us.”

She’s quiet behind me, and I turn to see her looking in the direction of the fireflies. She isn’t seeing them, her eyes distant. What’s she thinking about?

When she turns to me, her expression is guarded.

There’s a strange sense of loss inside me.

But this is what I wanted, isn’t it? For her to pull away from me. This is why I brought her here. Now that it’s happening, my chest feels like it’s being crushed in a vise.

“I’m ready to go home,” she says softly.

I pretend like it doesn’t hurt. “You drive.”

It will be the last drive we take together.

She stops at the driver’s-side door before we get in. “Stone.”

“Yeah, little bird?”

“Thank you for taking me here. Thank you for…trusting me.”

It’s only then that I realize how much I do trust her. The world is full of liars and cheats. Full of monsters with pretty fucking smiles. I’d never have taken anyone else here, even to push them away.

She’s more than a distraction to me. She’s a knife wound. A gunshot. A burn across every inch of my skin, making me weak.

How can I talk about revenge when she’s stepping into the car, turning the key in the ignition, straightening the rearview mirror?

She’s the rivet, taking away the darkness.

But without the darkness, there’s nothing left inside me. I’m hollow.