Page 65 of Unorthodox
“If you don’t want to talk and want me to leave you alone, give me a face card.”She’d shown me the jack, queen, king.“If you want me to hold you, give me an ace.”
I had gestured to the numbered cards, my eyes meeting her big blue ones in question.
She had smiled, kissed my head as we sat side by side in my bed, the cards fanned out between us.“When you don’t know what you want, Max, give me a number, just so I know you’re still in there, okay, baby? Then, I’ll wait for you to decide.”
Ollie had been watching.
Sometimes, Ollie used the cards too.
After she died and he went missing, the different cards lost their significance.
Instead, they became a way to remind myself thatI’m still in here.
A way to remind myself that I’ll never let anyone take from me what my father and his men took from me.
Not again.
Not even for a girl like Addison. A stupidly brave girl, just like my mother. In the end, it didn’t work for either of them.
I grit my teeth when she doesn’t move, then I lunge for her, grabbing her wrist and yanking her toward me, her trembling body flush against mine.
I bring my arm around her, gun against her spine.
She stiffens, pressing further into me as she stares up at me, her lips parted.
“Don’t be scared, love,” I tell her, my fingers tangling in her hair, yanking her head back. “I’m only going to show you your future.”
Dante sits against one wall,without his pants, in only his boxers. His wrists are on his knees as he stares straight ahead at the white wall.
The one I stared at for too long the night after I failed to use a knife to put Max Bennett in the grave, where he belongs.
Dante is unarmed, but I know if he wanted to, he could do some serious damage to Max. Considering we just got ourselves fucked up, now might be the time to do just that.
But he doesn’t move.
“Sit,” Max orders me, so close behind me that I jump. As tall as he is, I never seem to be able to hear him coming.
I glance at the shackles along the wall adjacent mine, and wish he was only going to tie me up here again and walk out, leaving me alone. At least then, I’d know what to expect. A night cramped and uncomfortable, but with Max on theoutside.
Keeping a healthy distance between me and Dante—I’m still concerned about his legs and Max’s promise to break them—I sink to the cement floor, pulling my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around my calves.
It’s only then I notice something black in the middle of the floor, a cylinder with buttons on top.
A capsule projector.
Danik had one of those, and sometimes, when things got really bad, I’d sneak into his room in the night and we’d watch conspiracy theory documentaries, one entire wall of his room lit with facts and figures of alien abductions, comical renderings of extraterrestrial beings based on witness accounts.
Before that, with my father, the documentaries were an escape. Almost their own out-of-body experience, to stop me from feeling all the things my own dad did to me.
The sight of the projector is almost comforting.
Until I remember what Max said.“I’m only going to show you your future.”
I hug my knees a little tighter to my chest.
Max closes the door to the room and locks it, and we’re shrouded in darkness. It was like this when he left me before. No light enters from under the door and there are no windows.
Just darkness, and for a moment, silence, save for the sound of my pulse beating in my ears.
