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calm sleep.
DEREK AWOKE ME A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER. Ilooked at the sky. The sun rode high—it was just past noon.
I didn’t want to die.
Derek’s face was grim. “Jim has something for you downstairs.”
He took me to the first floor and held the door open for me. I entered a small room, where Jim sat in a chair, testing the edge of that same knife with his thumb. In front of him, on the floor, sat Red. He was filthy. His left eye was swollen shut with a magnificent shiner. A long metal chain stretched from the wall to clutch at a metal collar around his neck. God help you if you offend the Pack, because they didn’t need a K-9 unit to find you.
I crossed my arms and looked at him. He was only fifteen. It didn’t excuse his betrayal of Julie but it precluded me from doing all of the things I would normally do under these circumstances.
Red squinted at me with his good eye. “You gonna beat me, go ahead.”
I leaned against the wall. At the first hint of my movement, he ducked, covering his head. “Why didn’t you tell me about the necklace?”
“Because you’d steal it.” He bared his teeth. “It was mine. My power! My chance.”
“Do you know what happened to Julie?”
“He knows,” Jim said.
“Do you feel responsible at all?” I asked.
He scooted back from me. “What the fuck do you want me to say? Am I suppose to make nice and cry and tell you how sorry I am? I took care of Julie. I watched out for her for two years. She owes me, okay? They had their claws on my throat. Right here!” He clamped his neck with his grimy fingers. “They said, you get the girl or die. So I got the girl. Any of you assholes would’ve done the same. You gonna stand there and look down on me like that, well fuck you.”
He spat on the floor.
“If you didn’t care for her at all, why did you ask me to guard her?”
“Because she’s an investment, you dumb whore.”
He wasn’t a person, he was just a ball of hate. We could beat him, we could starve him, we could lecture him, but no amount of punishment or education would make him understand that he was wrong.
He was lost.
“What are you going to do with him?” I asked Jim.