Chapter Twenty-Nine:
The One Who Holds the Gun
In that moment, when the last gunshot rang, I felt Cameron leave me. I snapped, like a wishbone. Cameron was the lucky part that was broken off; left behind was the unlucky part, just hollowed marrow, sucked dry. There was so much pain around me. It was as if someone were stabbing me and slashing my skin open. I wanted to be dead. In a way, I already was—without Cameron, there was nothing left.
My face was damp. My hair was sticking to my cheeks. I was still screaming, wailing. But inside I felt and heard nothing. My voice was not mine. In my head, everything had gone silent and black, a dark hole that I would never crawl out of. The old Emily had gone down with Cameron; what emerged from the hole was some sinister thing.
When I looked up, when the Shadow-of-Emily looked up, I saw Carly. She was staring at me, her waterlogged eyes terrified. She had reason to be scared—I was going to kill her, and the rest of them. Hate and vengeance had spread through my veins, my heart, my brain, my skin, like a cancer.
I lunged for Carly. Tiny was holding me back, with difficulty. Carly stood still in a stupor. I was the caged animal waiting for any opportunity, and she was the prey that stood by the bars, entranced.
“How could you do this?” The voice that escaped my mouth was hard and violent. “How could you betray him like that?”
Carly was pale. She was shaking through her tears. “This wasn’t my decision. I didn’t want this to happen. Not like this.”
“Spider worships you. One word from you and he would have changed his mind,” I yelled.
She started sobbing, and I hated her more for it. She had no right to cry for Cameron. She had caused his death. I wanted her to suffer.
“Is that what you did to my brother? You had him killed when he found someone else? Someone who was prettier and nicer than you? He fell in love with Frances, and you and Spider couldn’t control him anymore, so you had him put down like a sick dog.”
Carly’s face turned to despair. “Emmy, please don’t—”
“Don’t call me that! You have no right!” I spat.
Spider had calmly made his way back to us. He glanced at Carly who was sobbing uncontrollably and angrily turned to me. “Carly had nothing to do with this. None of this is her fault.”
The man who had been holding the gun had conveniently decided that I was to blame for Cameron’s death. A fury of adrenaline raged through my body, and I lunged forward, evading Tiny’s grasp. My fist connected with Spider’s face, and he stumbled back from the blow. I managed to throw another punch, though with less force, before Tiny grabbed me by the shoulders and lifted me from the ground. I kicked my legs, and one of them caught, clipping Spider’s shoulder. He swore. Carly stood by his side, between us, in a panic.
“Put her in the car!” he ordered Tiny.
While I continued to fight off Tiny, Spider turned to Carly, pinching his bleeding nose and making stretch circles with his injured shoulder. “Go back inside. Make sure the mess is completely cleaned up.” They glanced at each other for a half-second, and Carly made her way back into the warehouse. In the meantime, Tiny had called for reinforcements, and three men forced me into the back of a black car. I was made to sit in the middle, with my seatbelt tightly strapped to my waist as extra backup, while Tiny and another guard flanked me. Spider sat up front in the passenger side, and the third guard jumped into the driver’s seat.
“I want to see Cameron,” I demanded whipping the never ending tears.
“You’re in no position to be making any requests,” Spider said nasally, his head leaned back on the seat and a bloody Kleenex stuffed up his nose.
He was right. I was squeezed into the seat between two very large, armed men who were nervously watching my every move. I had no energy left to fight them off—the adrenaline had boiled out of me.
We peeled away from the warehouse. We were somewhere in an industrial zone outside Callister. There were gravel pits and rusty abandoned bulldozers, half-submerged. The car was dangerously speeding on a sandy road with the shocks threatening to sever every time we hit fissures in the uneven road. So much sand was being kicked up from the speed that we were enclosed in a fog of our own dust. I turned back toward the warehouse, where I imagined Cameron’s body still lying on the cold, cement floor; I could see nothing but a cloud of brown dirt. My throat was collapsing into itself, like a trash compactor, squeezing the air out from each end. I could barely breathe—but then again, breathing was by that point overrated, just another luxury that I didn’t want.
“Where are you taking me?” I managed to croak out.
No response.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked again with more force.
“Shut up,” Spider said with irritation. He had removed the tissue from his nostril, and his nose started gushing blood again.
“Are you going to kill me?”
“Can’t you keep your mouth shut for two seconds?”
“I don’t care if you kill me,” I blurted.
Spider swore. “If you don’t shut up I will kill you, with my bare hands, in this car. Keep quiet.”
I started sobbing. I wanted it to be over.
He sighed. “I won’t kill you, all right?”
“Why not?” I asked him, looking for a different answer.
“Because I can’t kill people like you without other people like you noticing,” he said angrily.
Spider’s words had hit me like a gunshot through the heart. Cameron died while I cruelly had to outlive him, for no other reason than the circumstances I had been born into, which had put me in a different world than him. Yet Spider, who belonged in no one’s world, was still sitting there, alive and mostly unharmed. There was something despairingly unjust about that. Hate boiled in my veins.
“You must be happy now that Cameron’s out of your way,” I surmised.
Spider fleetingly glared to the rear before turning his eyes to the road ahead of him, without offering response. Everyone in the car was stifled.
I had a captive audience, so I continued, “Looks like there’s conveniently no one else left alive but you to take over the reins. First my brother, now Cameron. How many people do you have to kill before you figure out that you’re not smart enough to lead anything or anyone?”
Spider’s jawbone protruded as he clenched his teeth together. Even if he coolly tried to ignore me, I knew that he was listening to my every word. I was on a path to self-destruction—if he wasn’t planning on killing me, I would make him change his mind or make him regret his decision to let me live.
“What you did won’t change a thing. You’ll never be anything like Cameron or my brother. You’re just another power-hungry street thug with more gunpowder than brains.” My voice was acidic.
Spider’s lips were stretched thin. “You’ve got a pretty big mouth for a little girl stuck in a car with four guys who aren’t afraid of using their guns.”
“I’m not afraid of you.” There was nothing else that Spider could ever do to me that would change this. “I won’t let you control me like you did Cameron.”
Spider huffed crossly. “Control Cameron? No one controls Cameron except for you. You’re a parasite. If it wasn’t for you, none of this would have happened. Things started going wrong from the day you got here. You took Cameron’s focus away—and the business started suffering because of it. If we didn’t do this, you would have gotten all of us killed.”
“We?” I asked incredulously. “I only saw one person holding the gun.”
Spider turned and pointed his finger at me. “You didn’t see a thing. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your mouth shut and stay the hell away from us. Or I swear to God, I will hunt you down and squeeze the life out of you myself—rich girl or not. I’ll take your whole prissy family down too if I have to. None of this ever happened. Forget we ever existed.”
I wasn’t scared. There was a hole in Spider’s plan, and I was happy to bring this to his attention. “What am I supposed to do when Victor comes knocking at my door? Pretend I’ve never seen him before?”
“I don’t care what you do,” he spat back coldly. “Besides, Shield won’t come back. You’re no longer useful to him now that Cameron …” He didn’t finish his sentence.
I looked at him carefully. I had noticed something change in his face as he had said this. He was hiding something.
“You and Victor were in on this the whole time,” I said.
When Spider uneasily shifted in his seat and turned his face as far away from me as possible, I knew I was on the right track. I thought back at that day, in the church, when Spider had finally convinced Cameron to leave me behind. This had provided Victor with the perfect opportunity to take me.
The Shadow-of-Emily pounced. “You were setting Cameron up to fail so that you would have enough to take him out without getting in trouble with the leaders. This was your plan, wasn’t it? To force him to come after me and show that he was a risk because of me. That’s why you let Victor go today.”
Spider chuckled nervously, but refused to look at me. “You don’t know a thing, girl. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Cameron was becoming a risk, but it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with you. We had to recruit other gang factions because you were stupid enough to get yourself caught by Shield. With half our fleet dead, it was the only way that we would be able to overtake Shield’s guards and get you out.” After a moment, he added, “As far as I know, you and Shield were the ones who were playing all of us. He was your uncle, not mine. I had nothing to do with Shield.”
I was far from being convinced. Spider would have been ecstatic to have Cameron show his weakness by going to other gangs and plead for their help in order to save a girl. This had only enhanced Spider’s chances at getting Cameron out of the picture and taking his place at the head of the table without too much huff from the leaders. I glared at the back of Spider’s head. If looks could kill, Spider would have had a stake through his neck by now.
“I’m going to kill you,” I promised. The coldness in my voice left nothing to doubt that I had meant this with every fiber of my being.
Spider didn’t look back. “I’d like to see you try.”
It took me a while to realize that the car had stopped. The third guard had pulled up next to the unleveled sidewalk in front of my house. I had no idea how I had gotten there—everything had been a blur up to that point. But looking at my house was like the nightmare had suddenly poured into my reality, or at least the reality of the old Emily.
The new now being connected with the familiar had only heightened the pain—Cameron hadn’t been just a dream. He had been a real person whom I loved and who had, inexplicably, loved me. Now he was gone because of love, because of me. I was the one who was supposed to die. Not him. There was no waking up from that nightmarish feeling of pain and utter desperation.
Tiny slid down the seat, grabbing my arm, and dragging me out in the process. The breeze as I stepped out of the car chilled me to the bone. My face, hair, and clothes were still drenched with my tears.
Spider opened his door and peered at me without getting out of his seat. “We’ll have your things delivered to you,” he said in a businesslike manner, like nothing had ever happened. “Keep your mouth shut and stay away from us.”
I had expected him to threaten me profusely, like maybe dragging his index finger along his throat or pointing a fingered gun at his head, pulling the thumbed trigger. But there was none of that. They left without another thought. I stood on the sidewalk shivering, watching them drive away.