Page 102 of Dollhouse

King’s leaning against the car fuming, and I look silently as Eli walks right up to him and punches him square in the face.

“You fucking killed her!” Eli roars, taking another swing at King which was stopped by him, grabbing his fist and delivering a punch of his own. There, in the middle of the road, they both brawl around like children.

“You’re the one that left her there!” King screams.

“You shot her! This is on you!”

Realization of what they are talking about hits me like a fucking semi-truck.

She’s gone.

Tate’s dead.

She was in that house, and now she’s dead.

I have to grip onto the car handle to prevent myself from falling.

My jaw literally fucking drops as reality sets in. I couldn’t protect her. I swore to her that I would, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t protect her then, and I didn’t protect her now.

“Stop.” My voice is failing me. “Stop!” They don’t even flinch as they continue their fighting. “Enough! That’s enough!” I roar, and both of them shove away from each other and gain their feet at the same time, brushing themselves off. “Are you fucking serious?! What the fuck happened?!” They are too wrapped up in their own feelings and busy playing the blame game.

“Yeah, King, what happened?” Eli shoves him backward, and King pushes back. I step between them, separating them like the children they are. “She bled out from when King shot her.” He shot her four days ago.How was she still bleeding?

“She died because of you! If she hadn’t been kidnapped, she would’ve been able to get proper care!”

“That’s enough! This is on all of us! We all fucking agreed to use her as bait and now her death is a result of it. We’re all to blame for this!” The tears sting my eyes, but the anger prevents them from falling.

Tate survived so much in her life, only to reach her death because of us.

We killed her.

We’re all responsible. We have no one to blame but ourselves. Fighting each other isn’t going to solve anything for us either.

“We share equal blame, but right now, we need to figure out how the fuck we’re going to find the fucker responsible for kidnapping her and then we’ll kill him.”

Tate is gone, and we can’t bring her back.

At this point, all we can do is avenge her death, and that’s exactly what the fuck we’re going to do.

The hunt is on.

Lee is alive.

I didn’t believe it at first.

There was no way she was alive. When I woke up the morning after our fight, I had seen the bloody scene in our bedroom. There was so much blood, there was no way that she was still alive.

She was just gone. Vanished without a trace.

One minute I was holding her slim throat in my hands, feeling her pulse weaken, and the next minute I was waking up to a bedroom full of blood.

Apart from the scratches she left on my arms, there was no blood. She wasn’t bleeding when I was choking her on the floor. She was fine, well, not completely fine, but she wasn’t bleeding.

So where did the blood come from?

Nothing made sense, but I knew I wasn’t the cause for all the blood or her disappearance. And because I’m innocent, I called the police and played the perfect role of the frantic husband whose wife was missing.

I knew how it looked, her blood on my hands, no signs of anyone breaking into our home, and they found signs of her in the trunk of my car.

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