The girls eyed him warily, but both nodded their heads in agreement. I frowned over at them, biting my tongue.
Every time this happened, it was like being fed a spoonful of vinegar. They were me once. I was disarmed by the pretty eyes and pretty smile of a perfect liar.
“All right, we’re going to go to the dining room.” He stood up, holding out his hands to them. They each grabbed a side and allowed him to lead them out of the room, shooting Molly and me uncertain glances.
“Come on, you two,” Justin ordered, turning to follow his brother.
“Rose, I can’t,” Molly whispered, tears forming in her eyes. “I can’t watch him—”
“Shh, you know what will happen if he hears you.” I brushed the wetness from her cheeks, taking her face in my hands.
“We’re going to be okay,” I assured her.
It wasn’t a lie.
He may hurt us, play games that made us question our sanity, and make us prove our devotion to him, but he would never let either of us go. He said we were a family, and nothing was going to break that apart.
“Come on.” Standing, I reached down and clasped her hand again to help her up. She hung her head, walking slightly behind me with slumped shoulders and her chin tucked to her chest, utterly defeated by the knowledge of what was coming next.
When we entered the nearly empty dining room, the two girls were already sitting in old wooden chairs with their eyes covered by bandanas, both surprisingly calm.
Con stood off to the side, leisurely smoking a cigarette. He liked to make people’s minds race, to jump to conclusions about what was going to happen. He got off on the smallest amount of fear.
Our eyes met as I walked across the room, his exquisite blue colliding harshly with my dark brown, and my stomach dipped. It was pure insanity to feel love for him. That message wasn’t clear to my heart, though. I knew no one would ever understand how I felt—how could they? I didn’t even want Con to know. The affection I harbored for him was just another secret I tucked away inside myself.
Averting my gaze to the floor, I went and sat in a rickety chair, keeping Molly close to my side. We were used to this routine, too.
Justin sat on a stool in the corner, serving as centaur. Vicky was off doing god knows what, and Julie had mysteriously vanished four months ago. I was almost certain she was buried with all the others in the woods.
“Are you two ready?” he asked the girls, snuffing out his cigarette in an ashtray.
“What do we do?” the one closest to him asked, fidgeting in her chair.
“Nothing; just sit there,” he responded, picking his large bowie knife up from the buffet side table. He began circling around behind us, gently touching the tops of our heads.
On his third lap, the words I was expecting to hear began to pour from his mouth. Justin stood up to join him in walking around our chairs.
“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe," he started to sing softly.
The girl across from me immediately began to cry. I rested my hands in my lap, balling them into fists and digging my nails into my palms until they punctured the skin. Molly mimicked my stance, shutting her eyes until the rhyme ended.
“My mother said to pick the very best rose. And you…are…not…her.”
He stopped behind the girl who had begun to cry and grabbed hold of her hair, pulling her head all the way back to expose her neck.
“No!” she screamed, failing to dislodge him before he drew the serrated blade across her throat.
She fell from the chair, choking on her own blood. I reached over and took Molly’s hand, letting her squeeze mine as hard as she needed to. She’d never gotten used to this part, while I could bear it without batting an eye. Maybe witnessing brutal deaths before had given me the ability to cope with them better.
Justin had his hands on the other girl’s shoulders, keeping her in place as she struggled to get away. Con completely ignored her, walking back to the buffet table.
I stared down at the lifeless body on the floor. The girl’s green eyes were still wide open.
Her head was tilted at an odd angle, allowing me to see straight into them. I wondered what her name was and where she came from. My vision was blocked when Con came to stand in front of me, pinching my chin and lifting my head so that I was looking up at him.
He looked down as if he were studying me, tracing the pad of his thumb over my lips before pushing it between them. His mouth tilted up at the corners when I flicked my tongue across it. I knew he was a sick, twisted asshole, but his smile never failed to make my heart soar. His next words, however, quickly made it crash and burn.
“I want you to do that one, okay?” He was asking, but it wasn’t really a question.
The last and only time I refused to take a life, he made me deeply regret it.
“Here.” He removed his thumb from my mouth and offered me a hammer with the claw part pointed at the ground.
I kept my eyes locked with his and wrapped my hand around the wooden handle. He stepped to the side, taking hold of my elbow and pulling me to my feet. I didn’t risk glancing over to see Molly’s face. She swore she didn’t hate me for the things I did, but I didn’t want to find out if she was lying or not.
Inhaling a quick, shaky breath, I approached the girl who was still crying and stuck in Justin’s grasp.
I’d done this a total of eight times now, and each time made me a little more numb. Killing them was getting easier, because I knew it was their only way out.
My palms began to sweat, so I adjusted my grip and stopped a few feet away from the girl. Justin nodded at me to let me know he had a tight hold on her. What almost looked like sympathy was always reflected in his hazel eyes.
This girl looked around my age, which meant she could have been anywhere from fifteen to eighteen years old.
Given that Con said he saw me when I was fourteen, and he was already twenty-two by that point, I knew he didn’t care about such trivial things.
I nodded to Justin and then swung the round part of the hammer into her head. An ugly, terrible screech shot from her mouth. My heart jumped into my throat and I swung again, harder than the time before.
This time, there was a satisfying crack on the frontal lobe. When Justin let her go, she fell from her chair, landing motionless beside her dead friend in a growing puddle of blood.
Chapter Sixteen
Past
He took me back to our room and told me to wait inside. I stood watching from the window as he and Justine dragged the girls through the woods until I couldn’t see them anymore.
Running my fingers through my hair, I went and sat down on the bed, eventually lying back so I was staring at the ceiling. If my life had taken a normal course, I wondered what I’d be doing right then. While some people were settling down to watch television, eating a late dinner, or preparing for a good night’s sleep, I was waiting on bodies to be buried.
Out in the middle of nowhere, we were free to commit whatever carnal acts one could imagine.
No one came onto the land to check on us. We had total privacy. When Con went hunting, he never took girls from the same area or with the same look, but, in the end, they always wore a red wig. There were times he’d be gone for days, searching for his next victim.
I had just shut my eyes and began to doze when the soft click of the door had them flying back open. Con was standing over me before I could fully blink, stripping his shirt off and undoing his belt.