“You’re fucking dreaming.” I have another go at jerking myself free, but it seems I’m weaker than I thought. O’Shannessey and Sammy manage to keep ahold of me, though I don’t make it easy for them.
“Speaking of dreams…” Charlie says. “How you sleeping these days, Zeth?” Something sick and suddenly frightened curdles in the pit of my stomach. “After you came to live with me, you never could seem to get a good night’s sleep.”
Fuck. No. I do not want to think about this right now. I do not want to think about him. “You’d better kill me now or shut the fuck up, Charlie, otherwise I’m gonna slit your throat for you.”
He laughs. “You used to say that when I’d come to you, too. Do you remember? Fuck you, asshole,” he says, mimicking the high, reedy voice of a child. “You’re not going to kill me. You’re not going to touch me. I’ll kill you first. I’ll slit your fucking throat.”
I don’t want to remember those words. They don’t appear in my night terrors, but they ring fucking true. I said them. I said those words when I was trying to defend myself…from him. It makes sense, of course. A deep, obvious kind of sense that I should have realized long before now. The thing is I have known. I’ve known all along, even back then, but I could never admit it to myself. When Charlie came for me and took me from my uncle’s place in Las Flores, I thought this strong, powerful man had come to save me. He treated me like a son. I didn’t want to believe it was him coming into my room each night, trying to rape me. Kill me.
When it first started happening, I reasoned with myself that the man in the dark didn’t really want to hurt me. If he wanted to have sex with me so badly, he had to like me a lot, right? I was too young to realize rape and murder went hand in hand. I thought raping someone was an act of tortured love instead of seeing it for what it is—degradation. Humiliation. An act of hatred so vile and evil that even criminals in prison will beat a rapist to death.
“Don’t say another fucking word,” I snap.
Charlie raises his eyebrows at me. The video of my mother has stopped playing again. He lifts his hand, gesturing to whoever’s in the projection room to start it over from the beginning. “Why don’t you want me to talk about it?” he asks me. “Does that mean you won’t want me talking about how I killed your best friend and then let you rot in jail for his murder? Does it mean you won’t want me talking about how I tried to run your girlfriend off the road? Does that mean you won’t want me talking about how I did run your mother off the road?”
“What?” The night Charlie murdered Murphy, he’d been making trashy suggestions about the Duchess. With Charlie’s shitty temper, I’ve always thought that was the reason why he took a machete to his neck and slashed his throat wide open. But that…that barely registers against his last confession. The official police report on my parents’ death was that my father had an embolism that burst. That he drove their car straight into a street sign. But Charlie…Charlie?
“Oh, come on. Don’t look so surprised. Your whore of a mother ran away with my child. I could hardly let her get away with that. I don’t forgive, Zeth. And I sure as fuck don’t forget.
“Sloane. Sloane, wake up.” Someone’s shaking me. Roughly. It’s possibly the worst feeling in the world. I don’t feel like I should be waking up yet. I probably shouldn’t wake up for a really long time. “Sloane, you need to get up. Now!”
The urgency in the person’s voice breaks through the fog clouding my head. It all comes flooding back to me—the church, the casket, the bomb. The azure blue of the cloudless sky spinning into the industrial gray of the street below me. The pain and the heat and the panic. I open my eyes, and Lacey is staring down at me, concern creasing her face.
“Oh, thank god. You’re alive.” Her hands are trembling as she pats them over my torso, fingers gently pulling pieces of my shredded dress together. I look down my body to find I’m a mess. A seriously big fucking mess.
“What the hell’s going on?” I croak.
“Charlie tried to have you killed. Didn’t work, though,” Lacey explains. I try to sit up and fail. Lacey hooks one of my arms over her shoulder and heaves me upright. The room spins a little, but then slows and stops altogether. Michael’s laid out on the floor a couple of feet away. Looks like he’s in the recovery position.
“Oh, shit! Is he alright?” I scramble forward on all fours, hands fumbling at his collar, trying to unbutton his shirt so I can check for a pulse. It’s there, strong and steady if a little slow.
“His head was bleeding when they brought you here,” Lacey says. “It stopped a while ago, though. I didn’t know what to do.”
She’s right—Michael’s head is wounded, just above his right temple. The blood’s already congealed there, forming the beginnings of a scab. I tease open his eyelids and try to see if his pupils respond, although in the darkness of the room it’s hard to tell. I think they do. His body is probably just trying to heal itself, but he still needs medical attention. The first thing I do is scan the room, not for a medical kit or an exit, but for the one person who can make this okay. For the one person who will be able to fix all of this. But he’s not here.
“Where’s Zeth, Lacey?” She gives me a guilty, torn look. My stomach begins to fizz, like I’m about to throw up. “Lacey, where is your brother?”