I rock on the chair, beyond caring that I might fall over.
Then the sound comes. It’s barely audible over the waves, but it rides them anyway, foamy and depleted when it reaches my ears. It’s not a word, or a sob; it’s a wolf cub below a waning moon, soft and desolate in mourning.
“Leo!” I shout. “Is that you?”
Nothing.
Footsteps.
God. She was warning me.
The door heaves open again in another blast of warm wind, and then Blood Honey strides toward me in a streak of stale sweat, heaving a battered brown suitcase behind him. It’s large enough to stuff a body into it—shit, he’s going to stuff Harvey into it, shit—but he flings it about like it weighs the same as a bag of sugar.
He drops the suitcase below one of the windows and makes his way back to me. “Now see, that time, I don’t think you were talking to ghosts.”
“None of your fucking business,” I hiss.
“Isn’t it?”
A whimper spikes on the air—softer than Leo’s, but huskier too. I jerk to look at her door, but it appears to be coming from…the suitcase?
“You’ve never been very good at behaving,” Blood Honey says, “and I guess I’m all out of stickers. Oh well.”
Another whimper.
I know that voice. Fuck.
“Asher!” I scream.
“Shut up,” barks Blood Honey.
As if to punctuate, he shuts me right up with his fist.
***
It’s the heat that wakes me. You’d think it would be the noise, but no, it’s the sun baking through the open windows hot enough to blister the walls.
I waste time blinking, and know this, but it feels like a bridge I have to cross. Only my legs don’t work, the muscles seized and the joints rusted to rot; it seems to take hours for the scene in front of me to sink in.
Harvey’s been rolled against the far wall, and he’s half, slumped, his head tipped half back in some stiff, mocking prayer. The suitcase is beneath the table; every now and then, it jerks and squeaks as if crooning to itself. Fucking weird.
Leo lies a few feet in front of me. She’s naked, dirty—caked in blood and dust—almost iridescent in the painful daylight. Thick rope sits between her teeth; she bleats around it with vacant complaint, her eyes squeezed shut so hard they’re wrinkled. Dull steel handcuffs ring her wrists, her breasts bunched between her arms, and Blood Honey kneels beside her limp body as he binds her ankles. When she stutters and rolls, the other half of her face comes into view: blue and purple, her cheekbone dented with rivulets of marbled ink. The tanned skin of her belly is mottled with an angry, fresh bruise the size of both my hands together.
“You’ve been out a while,” Blood Honey says without looking up. He tugs his knot tight around Leo’s ankles; she makes a faint meep, but doesn’t struggle. “Almost missed the show.”
I go to speak, but the dry flesh of my throat seems to crack. I haven’t been swallowing razors, but truths instead—one of them kills, and the other one leaves you just about alive.
“Did you think I’d spare her?” he asks.
“F—fuck you,” I rasp. Everything’s depleted. Run out. Gone.
I keep trying to remember what the fuck I’m doing here, but there’s just an island in my brain, clouded with thick, smoky mist, and then Tuija appears beside it in that stupid cut-out bathing suit and a floppy sun hat, pointing and smiling like a magician’s assistant. Here’s where you are, Hitler! And here’s where you’re all going to die!
“Did you think I’d ask you to join in?”
How sweet would that have been? Father and son, man and boy, bonding over the disassembly of a girl…