Conner wasn’t just evil, he was twisted and cruel. He knew that telling my parents that I had arranged for a murder, that I had sold my soul to Novak, would effectively end any feelings they had for their surviving daughter. This wasn’t about hurting me so much as it was forcing me to rip their world apart once again, effectively making me as bad a person as he was. He wanted to remind me how alike we were, which was also a way of reminding me how different Titus and I were. That wounded. It burned and festered inside of me. I didn’t want it to be true but there was no denying that it was.
I called a cab and decided to turn my phone off. It wouldn’t keep Titus at bay forever, but it would hold him off long enough for me to get the dirty deed done. I figured if the marshals were still following me around looking for Conner, they would fill him in on the fact I was on the move. I sent Titus a text telling him I was going home before killing my phone, hoping it would give him a vague idea of what I was up to. I knew he would have a million questions once he caught up to me, but for now I couldn’t let him or his rightness flavor the discomfort and unease I was tasting as I headed toward the outskirts of the city.
My parents still lived in the Point. They had a town house behind a strip mall that had long been abandoned and left to rot. The side of the building where they lived was covered in graffiti and all the windows had vertical bars running across them. My parents didn’t have a drug problem, and neither one had ever gambled a day in their lives. They had been two young kids that had fallen hopelessly in love, had a baby way too young, and never managed to get ahead enough in any job to invest in their future. My parents were the working poor, they always had been, and the Point fit them like a comfortable old shoe. My mom worked as a waitress, had since she was a teen, and my dad was a janitor for some big building on the Hill. He tended to jump from job to job, and while there had never been anything extra growing up, there had always been enough.
As I looked at the faded paint on the front door memories flooded in. All I could see was my sister. All I could feel was the loss and the emptiness that always lingered when it came to Rissa. I had to fight back more tears when I lifted my hand to knock on the door.
When my mom pulled it open I guess I expected her to look older, still drawn and ravaged with grief. She didn’t. In fact she looked so much like she had before Rissa was murdered it made me fall back a step. The distance between us didn’t last long as she reached out and wrapped me up in a hug. I was so shocked by the contact I didn’t even hug her back. The warm reception stunned me and made the reason I was here after all this time even harder to choke down.
“You look so pretty. It’s been so long.” She led me through a familiar hallway littered with pictures from my youth. Picture after picture of me and Rissa growing up. The memories knocked me sideways so hard I had to put a hand on the wall to stay upright. My mom gave me a concerned look and took my elbow to guide me the rest of the way into the tiny and cluttered living room, peppering me along the way with questions about where I had been and what I had been up to. My father was lounging in his easy chair watching TV. He looked so normal, just like my mother did, that I practically fell into the couch when the backs of my legs hit it. How had life just gone on for them? How had they battled down the grief and sorrow without doing something about it? I shifted my gaze from one to the other in shock. This was not the family I had left behind. This was a family that had healed and moved on without me.
I gulped as my mom patted my knee.
“It was lovely to hear your voice today, Reeve. Your father and I missed you. We wonder how you are doing every single day.” There was so much kindness and love on her face that I wanted to fold over and clutch my stomach because I felt like I had been kicked in the guts.
My dad grunted his agreement and turned back to the television. I took a deep breath and curled my fingers tightly into my palm.
“I missed you guys too. It was just hard to be here. Too many memories.” I was going to have to tell my mom that I nearly suffocated on them and ask her how she hadn’t.
“Well, the memories are all we have left, so we try and hold on tight to them.”
Conner knew just what he was doing. This was going to kill me more effectively than a bullet to the brain or a knife slipped between my ribs. He was killing my soul, murdering my spirit, and the bastard knew it. I was going to tarnish the remaining good my parents held on to from Rissa and from me. Those memories would be forever tainted once I told them the length I had gone to, to exact vengeance against Rissa’s killer.
“We were so excited when that handsome agent knocked on the door and told us there was new information. We just knew Rissa wasn’t into all that horrible stuff they said she was when she died.”
A cold sweat broke out across my skin and I had to blink slowly and force air in and out of my lungs. “That agent lied to you, Mom. He doesn’t have anything new on Rissa. She died because her boyfriend was a drug dealer and a pimp. She died because she loved a bad man and he hurt her. She died because she made really bad choices for herself and she was just as messed up as he was at the end.”