Page 20 of Blood Ties
He shoots me a hard look. “Believe it or not, this isn’t how I wanted things to go down. I liked those kids.”
I grimace, tongue the cut inside my cheek. “You just handed one of them over to Dad.”
“Would you rather have him take it out on us?”
My gaze darts to the scar on his cheek. Normally I forget it’s there, but now it seems stark against his skin. I still remember the way he screamed when Dad cut him all those years ago.
“Or the girl?” he prompts.
I shake my head. Maybe he’s right, but it leaves me with a sick feeling in my gut.
But there’s nothing to do now but clean up the mess.
“Let me look at your shoulder when we get inside,” I say, glancing at the knife wound Riley left on him.
He grins, recognizing it as a peace offering. “Sure. She got you too, didn’t she?” He leans over, prodding at the slash in my shirt.
I jerk away. “Barely.”
I’m not sure if it’s true, but I don’t want him tending to me and seeing all the scars under my shirt. I’ll stitch my own wounds. After that there’s blood to mop, belongings to burn, a car to crush in the scrapyard.
And then I’ll have to face the girl in the basement.
?
Chapter Nine
Riley
Time slips past withoutme noticing. There is nothing but darkness, the faint creak of the floorboards above my head, and my shallow breathing. But gradually, the trembling in my body eases and the numbness fades.
What comes next is much worse.
Awareness starts in my body: the pain in my cut-up bare feet, the ache in my back from being tackled to the ground by Kai, the dried blood coating my arms and torso, the dirt under my cracked fingernails. I am bruised and scraped and battered. But I almost relish the physical pain, because it is a distraction from the weight of my grief.
I feel it like a gaping hole in my stomach, a loss that makes me hunch over in my chains and shudder and gasp for air. Felix, Caleb, May. They’re all gone. Gone forever. I fist my hands in my lap and let out a low cry that echoes off of the cement walls.
