I felt my heart stop, and my lungs felt like cement, but I let none of it show on my face. Swallowing down the relief that came upon me from out of nowhere, I closed the door slowly and walked through my room as casually as I had any other time.
“You said you knew where my sister was,” Thais spoke up from the desk. “You lied to me before, when you told me you didn’t know anything about her.”
I went over to my bed where I removed my gun and placed it inside the nightstand drawer; I took off the holster afterwards and tossed it on the floor.
“Why didn’t you leave?” I asked without looking at her.
“Because I believe you about Farah.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just do.”
I shook out my bed sheet and then stripped off my shirt, tossed it on the floor with the gun holster.
Thais stood from the chair, her long dress pooling around her ankles, and she came toward me.
“I want to know why you would do something so cruel to a blind girl—to any girl, but to a blind girl. I-I don’t understand.”
I looked right at her, and she stopped.
“What’s not to understand?” I asked indifferently, pretending that her accusations didn’t bother me.
Baffled by my response, or lack thereof, she took a moment to get her own response together. She crossed her arms and tilted her head to one side, her eyebrows drawn together.
“What I don’t understand the most about it,” she said, “is why you seem so different from everyone else. I-I can’t put my finger on it, but…I don’t know, you just don’t fit in this place.”
That wasn’t something I wanted to hear—if she could see that, then Marion and Rafe and Overlord Wolf and every other soldier in Lexington City could, or would eventually, see it. And that was a death sentence.
I walked past her and went toward my desk for no reason other than to keep my distance and pretend to be busy.
“Your sister is where she belongs,” I said, though it was difficult for me to say because it was a lie.
Thais’ shoulders stiffened and her lips drew together in a hard, angry line; her arms came uncrossed and fell at her sides; it seemed like it took everything in her not to cry, or to shout at me, or to hit me, or to do all three.
I turned toward the desk, still trying to pretend to look busy and unaffected, when I was a wreck and my act was getting harder to fake.
Then out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed the barrel of a gun—the gun I had given her.
“Why did you do it?” she demanded, her hands shaking, her finger dancing precariously on the trigger. She pushed the gun forward. “Why?!” Tears tumbled down her cheeks.
I raised my hands slowly in surrender.
“Put the gun down before you accidentally shoot me.”
She shoved it forward instead, making my heart stop and start back up again frenetically. It wasn’t the dying that scared me—I often thought I’d be better off dead—it was the thought of her shaky trigger-finger and the gun going off when she didn’t mean for it to—if I was going to die in an unnatural way, I at least wanted it to be intentional. An accidental death would be pathetic.
“Tell me why!” she roared.
“Thais—”
She made another move forward, cutting off my words.
I pushed the palms of my hands outward, trying to show her I would do whatever she wanted.
Inhaling a deep breath, I said, “Your sister is fine. No one has touched her.”
“You’re lying!”
“No!” I threw my hands up higher. “Just listen to me!” I gritted my teeth with frustration.
THAIS
I stood my ground, but the tears were blurring my vision, and the weight of the gun was a heavy burden in my heart. I had never shot an animal for food, much less ever shot a person before. And I didn’t want to. I wasn’t so sure that I could.
Atticus sighed.
“I’m not lying to you,” he said. “The first time I spoke to you in the room across the hall, when you told me that your sister was a danger to herself, I immediately went to find her. I put her with a friend of mine at the brothel where she’d be safe.”
“But you still put her in the brothel!”
“I had to!” he shouted, and took another step back.
Then he lowered his voice, tried to be calm. “No one has hurt your sister,” he said. “I’ve been there to check on her myself several times. She’s fine.”
I lost my focus. I wanted to believe him, and a part of me did, but I also didn’t want to fall for his tricks.
“Then why did you lie to me?” I said. “Why didn’t you just tell me the truth in the beginning?”
Atticus shook his head glumly and looked at the floor.
I shoved the gun toward him. “Tell me!”
“It was better for you both that you didn’t know!” he shouted back. “You needed to get on with your new lives here, to accept them. If you knew your sister was under my protection, your hope of being reunited with her would’ve strengthened. And I didn’t need you strong; I needed to break you—”
“Break me?” I shoved the gun in the air toward him vigorously. “Break me?” I was repulsed and confused and a million other things I couldn’t name—and it was enough to distract me.
Before I could react, Atticus dropped to the floor and grabbed me by the ankles. I shrieked as gravity betrayed me and my body fell backward; I heard the gun clank against the tile. My arms went up instinctively above my head as the ceiling zipped by in my vision; my hair swished across the floor like a mop as my body was pulled toward him. I screamed, writhing in his grasp, and tried to roll over and crawl away, but found myself effortlessly wedged between his powerful legs, his knees pressed against the tile on both sides of my waist.
“Let me go!” My arms went wild with movement; my flimsy fists beat against his chest until he grabbed both of my wrists in only one of his hands and bound them in front of me.
“I said let go of me!”
“Be quiet!” he roared into my face. “Just stop!”
“LET ME GO!”
“NO!”
Finally, I relented, having no other choice.
I glared up at him as he hovered over me like a giant. I watched his strong, sculpted jaw covered by a week’s worth of facial hair move rigidly behind his cheeks; his blue eyes pierced me intensely; I could feel the strength of his hands, one binding both wrists, the other now around my throat, just under my chin, though he wasn’t putting enough pressure on it to hurt me.
ATTICUS
“I didn’t want to do what I did,” I ripped the words out. “And I’ve been wracking my goddamned brain since that day, trying to figure out a way to make both of your lives, and the lives of other women here, right and fair!”
What the fuck is happening to me? I thought. Am I confiding in this girl? Am I forcing her to listen to my confessions as if she could somehow absolve me of them? But I knew she couldn’t—no one could. I knew I deserved no absolution; and even if by the Grace of God she gave it, I wouldn’t accept it. Because, fuck that.
Slowly my hand fell away from her throat. Her bright eyes looked up at me full of heartbreak, pain I had caused her, and I wished she had just pulled the damn trigger.
I glanced over at the gun on the floor, and then moved off of her to retrieve it. I checked the chamber and found it was loaded, then I shoved it underneath my mattress.