Page 108 of Locke 2

“You would take me to him?” I asked.

“Of course.”

The next words burned my throat. “Is he alive?”

“You’ll know if you play.”

“Where would you take me?”

“To him.”

He wasn’t telling me where he was, and that made me crack.

“Where the fuck is he?!” I screamed, shaken by the vehemence exploding out of me now as I glared at this sick fucker who smiled cruelly at me.

He pressed his face against the window, peering at me intently. Feasting on my torment. Enjoying every bit of it. “He’s somewhere very dark.”

The hole.

“He was so easy to lure,” he continued, thoughtfully. “Give the kid no one cares about some attention. A sucker when he’s sick and afraid of the doctor. Dangle some crayons. Show up at his window when he’s locked in there at night. Yeah, a boy like that will think you’re their hero.”

I’d never felt so much intense hatred for another human being until that very moment.

My nostrils flared as I stared back at him, refusing to look away, even when every inch of me was screaming to run.

But running never got me closer to home.

And home was a place inside my soul that I let get rundown and dilapidated.

The more I ran, the further away I got from that hopeful girl I used to be.

“Come home,” chirped Aurora. “We have a party to go to!”

If I was going to die, I was going to die going home.

Forty-Five

Kali

Istared into a monster’s eyes and unlocked the doors of my safe prison. I wondered how many people could say they did the same thing. I wondered if it even mattered in the end. I was going to find out, playing a game I was already rigged to lose.

The sick prick didn’t even open the door. He watched me, waiting for me to do the honours. This was fucked up. My hand tightened around the knife one last time before letting go. Then I opened the door and forced my body to cooperate. Stepping out on trembling legs, I’d barely felt the ground at my feet when something hard crashed into the side of my skull.

I fell into darkness, unconscious.

I was outside my body.

Floating for a while in the blackness.

Then I suddenly came to, whipping my eyes open as my body was being pulled apart around me. Pain throbbed in myskull. My hips ached. My legs burned. It took me too much time to figure out I was being dragged ruthlessly across the forest floor by my arm. Twigs and branches skimmed harshly along my body. I was cold. Too cold. The violent wind ripped through me. I gasped, aware now that he’d removed my jacket, and I was in just my thin shirt and jeans.

I felt like vomiting again. The world spun. My arm was going to pop out of its socket if he didn’t slow down. And throughout it all, words trickled down to me. Words from the doctor I had thought once charming.

“I would have liked it if you'd chosen to run,” he said. “That game is my favourite. I could have ignored your wishes, Kari, but I’m a man of my word.”

I didn’t speak. There was blood in my mouth. Why was my mouth bleeding, though? Why did everything hurt? What had he done to me?

A groan slipped out of me. I didn’t mean for it to happen. I would have preferred to be silent because groaning in pain would have stroked this man’s ego and I wanted to die without doing that.

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