“I already did. Now let’s stop talking about him. Let’s order me a T-shirt online that says I RULE, MEN SUCK. I need to raise my bar higher. I need to really make them prove themselves before I give them a chance. Let’s go see Brooke today.”
Brooke’s baby was born premature in New York over a month ago, but since her fighter husband is currently off-season, they’re living in Seattle while they plan a small church wedding.
Pandora grabs her backpack as we get ready to leave for the day. “Have you noticed the way daddy holds the baby? It’s like the baby’s head is half the size of Remy’s biceps,” she says.
God. I hope I can take seeing the way Remington Tate looks and smiles with his dimples and his loving blue eyes at Brooke.
“By the way, I asked Kyle to go with me to the wedding. I just want to put those lesbian rumors to rest, you know?” she tells me on the elevator.
“Really?” I ask, suddenly feeling abysmal. “Great. I’ll be a third wheel then.”
SEVEN
* * *
MARKED FOR A LIFETIME
Greyson
It’s always the same dream.
Never varies.
Always the same number of men.
It’s always 4:12 p.m.
I’ve been dropped off by the bus.
A line of cars is in our driveway.
My mother’s words ring clear as a bell in my head: One day he will find us, Greyson. He will want to take you from me.
I won’t let him, I’d promised.
But right then I know, he’d found us. The father I didn’t know. The one my mother didn’t want me to end up like.
I pull the strap of my backpack from my shoulder and hold it with my fist, ready to knock someone out with a hundred pounds of homework and textbooks.
Ten men stand in my living room. Only one is seated, and I know it’s him when the blood in my body starts rushing faster. It’s just blood, but my entire being recognizes him even though I’ve never seen him before. He doesn’t have my eyes, but I have his eyebrows, sleek and long and almost in a perennial frown. I have his lean nose, his dark looks. He sees me, and a parade of mixed emotions marches across his face, more emotion than I allow him to see in my own expression. He gasps, “God.”
I see my mother then. She’s also seated in one of the single chairs, her honeyed hair in a tangle, her ankles bound, her arms pulled tight behind her. She’s trembling, gagged with a red bandanna, and trying to talk to me, words that get muffled by the cloth.
“What are you doing to her? Let her go!”
“Lana,” my father says, ignoring me, his attention now slowly turned on my mother. “Lana, Lana, how could you?” He looks at her, his eyes filled with tears. But for every tear my father sheds, my mother sheds a dozen, trails of them.
“Let her go,” I say again, lifting my backpack, preparing to launch it at him.
“Set that down . . . we will.” My first mistake was listening to him. I lower my backpack. My father kneels before me and holds out a black weapon, then lowers his voice so that only I can hear. “See this? This is an SSG with a suppressor, so nobody will hear it. It’s got no safety—ready for use. Shoot one of these men, any man, and I will spare your mother.”
She’s crying hard, shaking her head, but a slimy, bald man behind her forces her neck still. I step away from my backpack. It’s close to me, close enough to kick like a soccer ball. I play, and I can send it flying across the room. But to who? What if I hit my mother?
I inspect the weapon and wonder how many bullets it has, not enough for all these men but for the one holding her, yes. I take it, confused that my hand doesn’t shake. It’s heavy and there’s no fear, only the need to free my mother.
I look at the one holding her neck still.
Her eyes crying.
One day he’ll find us Greyson . . .
I aim farthest away from her to the largest body part of the man that I can.
I fire.
A clean dark hole appears in his forehead. The man drops.
My mother screams inside her gag, and cries more hysterically, kicking both her tied legs in the air.
My father takes the gun from my hand with a look of wonder and he pats my head.
More men pull my mother up to her feet and drag her down to the garage staircase.
“What are you doing? Where are you taking her?” I grab my pack and swing it at one man. Another comes and grabs me, squeezes my arms as he talks and spits in my ear, “Son, son, listen to me, they made a deal, she lost you. She lost you!”
“She’d never lose me. Mother!?” I grab a knife from his belt and stick it into his eye, twisting. He releases me with a howl and a spurt of red blood, and I go running down the stairs as I hear a car start.
My father catches me. Slaps me. Then cocks the gun at me. He smiles when I go still.
“Greyson, my son, even your instincts made you stop. You know this just killed a man. You’re not going to die. If you die, you can’t save her. Can you?”
My whole body is paralyzed. He smiles sweetly at me and hugs me, keeping the gun against my temple.
“I knew you were my son. I told your mother, it wasn’t nice to keep you from me. Thirteen years, Greyson. Thirteen years looking for you. She insisted you weren’t my son. I told her if you proved to have my blood in you, you were coming with your father, where you belong.” He eases back and studies me with pride. “I gave you a choice to shoot a man.”
He looks up the staircase, where I know there is a motionless body. A body that won’t move again because of me.
“You killed him. Bullet straight to the head. You’re my son, every inch of my son; you will be powerful and feared.”
His voice chills me. I don’t feel anything when we go upstairs and I see the dead man, no remorse, nothing. I want to kill more, kill everyone who hurt my mother. “Where is she?” I ask, my voice odd. I killed something else with that man. Me.