Page 5 of Freaks
“I have a proposition,” Zeth offered.
“If you’re about to tell me you’ll do me a kindness and put me out of my misery, you can go fuck yourself.”
He laughed again, drawing in a ragged breath. “I need the information off the thumb drive. You need the information off the thumb drive. I say we bust our way up onto the roof, fuck this Oscar guy up, take the damn thing and get the fuck out of here. We can make copies and we both get what we need. Simple.”
I stared him down, narrowing my eyes, which was really fucking easy since both of them were nearly swollen shut at this point. What he was proposing made a lot of sense. But was he lying? Was he going to fuck me over the moment we got our hands on the drive, or was he the type of guy who kept his word? I knew he was a seasoned fighter, and I knew he was pretty quick witted, but beyond that I knew nothing about the fucker. Gears were turning in his head. He could have been plotting ways to bring Oscar down, or he could have been planning on ways to put me down. There was just no knowing. That was the thing about the men who visited The Barrows: typically, they weren’t the type of men you could trust. Myself included.
Pacing, circling Zeth, making out as if I was just biding my time, waiting for the perfect moment to hurl myself into another fully-fledged attack, I heaved in a breath and ran my tongue over my teeth, checking to see if any of them were broken. Looked like I’d been spared that misery this time. “All right,” I said. “But a word of warning,Zee. My life means very fucking little to me. I don’t care about pain. I don’t care about suffering. I don’t care if I have money in my bank account, or a roof over my fucking head. There is only one thing that matters to me in the entire fucking world, and that’s the woman currently waiting for me in my apartment. If I don’t get that drive, she isn’t safe. And if anything happens to her, I will stop at nothing to bring down the fieriest vengeance upon the heads of the people who stood in my way. Do we understand each other?”
Prowling around me, his eyes flashing, a cat-like, calculating smirk pulled at Zeth’s mouth. He huffed lightly down his nose—the barest hint of amusement. “Don’t worry, Priest. I got it. Now. I’d say it’s about time we put an end to this bullshit and move on with our lives, wouldn’t you agree?” He held out his hand. An obvious sign of peace, when we were meant to be tearing each other limb from limb.
“Hey!” The floor boss snapped, growling under his breath as he stalked over toward us. “Are you fuckers stupid? Haven’t you heard of Oscar Finch? He’ll fucking kill you if you don’t stop fucking around.”
Zeth arched an eyebrow at me, glancing down at his hand.
Sighing, I slapped my own hand into his, briefly shaking it. I’d been a lone wolf for so long now that striking up an accord like this felt alien and unwise. Ididknow one thing, however: there was nothing deadlier than a lone wolf. Unless you hadtwolone wolves, and they were prepared to fight alongside one another. Regardless of whether I had issues with Zeth after we were done here, things were set in stone now. We weren’t laying another finger on each other for Oscar Finch’s entertainment.
The floor boss’s mouth opened, irritation flickering in his weak, watery blue eyes. But before he could say anything, Zeth spun around, faster than lightning, and hit the bastard so hard that I heard his skull crack before it had even had chance to bounce off the dirty concrete.
TWO
SERA
Before
I waited out on the curb for the black SUV, my back rigid, my chin held high, knowing Sixsmith was watching from the upstairs window. He’d taken to doing that these days—observing me from his bedroom, standing a foot back from the dirt-streaked glass, as if he figured I wouldn’t know he was there if he were cloaked in shadows. He didn’t realize that I’d spent the better part of my life fine-tuning every sense I owned to detect when his attention was turned to me. My skin was so sensitive to the weight and pressure of his eyes that I could almost feel his gaze burning through the dusty, threadbare carpet that covered the splintered floorboards in my bedroom whenever he suddenly remembered I was up there and not in school.
My jaw was still hurting something fierce from the last time I’d gone visiting with Sam Halloran. I was still bruised from the encounter. A deep, offensive purple shadow marked my jaw, and down my neck four smaller bluish marks chained the column of my throat.“For the life of me, Seraphim Lafferty, I don’t know what gets into you girls at your age. Those ugly things on yo’ neck ain’t love bites, y’know. They be hickeys, markin’ you out as a woman of loose morals.”Mrs. Merrit, our neighbor three houses down, told me when she’d come across me walking home with the groceries yesterday. She’d chosen to frown and tut at me, chastening me for the marks, when she knew full well the bruises weren’t fucking love bites. It was plain as day that they were finger prints.
I’d attempted to cover the bruises with makeup before I’d left the house; Sam hated seeing the evidence of his own brutality on me. He liked to pretend he was a kind, caring lover, and I came to him twice a week of my own volition. But covering bruises was tricky, because Sixsmith would tan my hide raw if he ever saw me wearing makeup.
Keeping the two of them happy was impossible. If I made sure Sam was placated, then inevitably Sixsmith ended up laying into me for one thing or another—wearing the skimpy clothes Sam had me parade around in for him, or smelling of the perfume Sam insisted I spritz all over my body. And if I, instead, made sure Sixsmith was as happy as Sixsmith ever was, then Sam would strap that goddamn ball gag into my mouth so tight it felt like the corners of my mouth would rip open. He would punch me so hard it felt like landmines were detonating inside my skull. He would do far, far worse things than that as he shoved my legs apart and forced his way inside me.
I was constantly balancing on a tightrope of hatred and abuse. Every morning when I woke up, I found myself curiously wondering which one of them was going to send me toppling from that rope, plummeting to my death far below. Strangely, I wasn’t scared. In point of fact, I was actually kind of looking forward to it.
The sky was hazy and white, a thin layer of clouds stretched thin between horizons like teased out cotton wool. And hot. It was too damned hot. The afternoon air was cloying and thick, threatening to choke me as it shoved its way down my throat. I’d already sweat through my thin, gauzy white shirt by the time the SUV pulled up and hugged the curb. Thankfully Sam didn’t bother sitting in the back of the car and making the journey across town to come and get me anymore. He waited for me back at the apartment above the bar, usually throwing back shot after shot of whiskey and singing along to old Frank Sinatra tunes that he blasted from an ancient Sony stack system in the living room.
As always, Peter sat in the driver’s seat, drumming his fingers against the wheel. I climbed inside and he didn’t even turn around to look at me. He’d played ball in high school, but he’d never been truly athletic. God only knew why Sam had hired him. He was hardly body guard material. I often thought about it: what would Peter do if I reached forward, grabbed the handgun he always wore in a holster, strapped to his side? What would he do if I pressed the muzzle to my temple and I pulled the trigger?
There had been a thousand opportunities for me to grab his gun over the weeks that I’d been taken back and forth to the bar. Weeks that had turned into months. And still, I hadn’t done it. Every time I contemplated how heavy the weapon would feel in my hand, I thought of Amy. Every time I daydreamed about the bullet firing from the chamber, exploding down the barrel, meeting my flesh and ripping through me like it was a hot knife through butter, I remembered that I’d be leaving my sister behind.
So, I didn’t grab the gun. I didn’t kill myself in the back of the SUV, and I didn’t kill myself in any one of a hundred other ways I imagined when I was at home or at school, either, because I knew Amy wouldn’t survive without me.
That didn’t stop me from daydreaming, though. Most teenaged girls fantasized about the boys they liked, becoming famous pop singers, or being the most popular kid in school. I regularly daydreamed about downing a quart of bleach and passing into a blackened abyss that no one would ever be able to wake me from.
But Amy.
Always…
Amy.
I didn’t believe in any sort of afterlife. If there was an afterlife, Mom would have come back somehow and told me she was all right. Nothing would have stopped her; she would have found a way. But even though I didn’t believe in heaven or hell, I knew I’d never be able to rest easy in my grave if the burden of Sixsmith and Sam’s attention fell to Amy once I was gone. She just wasn’t strong enough to bear it, and that’s what I loved about her most. Her innocence, and her softness, and that sense of oblivious fairytale that lingered over her, as it had since she was seven years old.
“You…you’d better be careful today.”
I looked up from my hands—knuckles white, fingernails gouging into my palms—to find Peter glancing nervously at me in the rearview.
I cleared my throat. The air conditioning in the SUV was cranked up as high as it would go, and the frigid air made me want to cough. “What?”
