Page 96 of Haven't Killed in Years
“Why are you guys even doing this? Torturing me and killing me, then what?”
“First of all, there’s noyou guys,” he corrected me.“Dominic has nothing to do with any of this. He really is just as pitiful as he seems. Second of all, though, I want you to think really hard about this victim narrative you’ve spun for yourself.”
My head was pounding and my wrists were starting to chafe. I was struggling to stay on board with his self-righteousness—to follow the logic of his motivations.
“My head hurts,” I mumbled.
He laughed almost maniacally at that, which I found quite rude.
“Yourhead hurts?” He hit his hand on the steering wheel,1-2-3.“Yourhead hurts?!”
“Yeah, you hit me in the fucking head,” I reminded him.
“Marin!” he screamed, looking back at me, taking his eyes off the road for way too long.
He turned back in time to slam the brakes and narrowly avoid rear-ending the car in front of us. Once we were safely stopped, he reached up to his hair—the slicked-back black hair I used to think was so edgy. Just as Natalie had done, he pushed it away from his face, lifting the long pieces off the shaved part underneath and revealing a thick scar where no hair could grow. “Myhead fucking hurts!” he shouted.
Fifty-Six
It wasn’t possible. Thatwas all I could think to myself, staring at that scar right where I had landed the rock over and over again. It wasn’t possible he was sitting in front of me, all grown up with cool-guy tattoos and an apartment and a life. It wasn’t possible that he was anything other than a corpse, buried in a coffin, rotting away into the abyss.
“Gruesome scar, right?” He laughed. I wished he would stop laughing. It was hard to try to convince myself he wasn’t completely batshit when he kept laughing like that.
“How?” I managed to ask.
“Surprise! I didn’t die.”
I could see that, but processing it was something wholly different. What did it mean that Cody Abbington was alive? How was Cody Abbington alive?
“I know you’re thinking…” His face twisted, feigning bewilderment, preparing to mock me. “But, but, but you died in the hospital.” His voice was too high-pitched, too shaky—a horrible impression,but he was pleased with it. He grinned as he transitioned back to his grandstanding. “But that’s only what they said happened. You think you’re the only kid they hid to protect?”
I didn’t understand. They’d faked his death? For what? Witness protection? And then he’d just stewed all these years, waiting to come back and exact his revenge? Starting with chopping the arms off the two people who’d tried to help him? I’m sure James and Oswald had come from a selfless place, at least James had, but the answer to every problem couldn’t be giving the kid a new identity and sending them far away to pretend nothing had happened to them. Clearly it hadn’t worked.
“And you just went along with it?” I asked. “You said,Okay, sure, and went off and lived with a new family?”
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I did have some brain damage.” He ran his finger along the scar and I thoughtsomedamage was quite the understatement. “I didn’t remember what happened. I woke up in a hospital in Maine with a lady telling me she was my mom. Turns out Oswald and her were old family friends and she was desperate for a child. She told me that I had an accident. I was ten. What was I supposed to think? That she was lying and really my whole family had been massacred two hundred miles away?”
“Not your whole family,” I pointed out, and my stomach flipped at the thought of Elyse. He had sought her out, seduced her, oh my God. “Elyse. What did you do? Oh my God!” I exclaimed, repulsed.
“Calm down,” he said. “It’s not like that. It’s just a cover.”
“She knows?”
“That I’m her brother? Yes.”
I leaned back in the seat. This was all too much. Elyse did know? Elyse was part of this? I had always assumed she was involved, until I hadn’t, and now I didn’t want her to be. “Is she…a part of this?”
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch; it’s not like that either.”
“How though?” I continued with short, vague questions, unable to narrow anything down to specifics.
“I had no idea, right? The whole time—when my mom died, through my teens, later when my stepdad died—nothing. A few years ago I was experimenting with a lot of psychedelics. I’d suffered from horrible headaches my whole life—well, since someone had bashed me in the skull.” He paused for effect. “Pieces started to come back. Eventually I remembered them, glimmers of their faces—my family. I couldn’t place them, and the only person left to ask was good old Oswald.
“He was around a lot when I was a kid, trying to sleep with my mom before she married Mitchell, so I figured he might know something. I fed him liquor until he confessed that my mom had basically stolen me—not that anyone else wanted me. That’s when he told me my real name but suggested I leave it at that. Of course I didn’t listen, and that same night the internet told me all I needed to know. I had a sister who was still alive, living in Boston. Lucky for me, I had a stepbrother who lived there, so I called him up, rekindled our nonexistent bond, and moved in with him and his buddies a couple months later.
“I didn’t rememberyouat first,” he clarified. “I was focused on my sister and trying to remember my family. It took me a while to approach her. You can imagine how awkward it would be to tell her the truth, right?” He glared at me in the rearview mirror before accepting I wasn’t going to react. He smiled and forged on.
“She took it well,” he explained. “She’s a lonely soul. It was weird at first, but we just needed time. Elyse and I needed a plausible reason to be spending so much time together. We were inseparable. She was really clingy—just like when we were little. No one questions it if they think you’re fucking.
