She sneers. “You really have no clue, do you?”
“Why the fuck don’t you clue us in then, you psychopath,” Hayden snaps.
“Why?” I whisper again, my voice broken and raw. “We were friends.”
Or at least, I thought we were.
I don’t even recognise the person standing before me. Am I really that blind to those around me?
You’re an embarrassment.
You are so fucking clueless.
Are you blind?
They are laughing at you.
Your family wouldn’t understand.
Why do you have to make my day harder?
You should try harder.
You aren’t who I thought you were.
All the things Scott threw at me come rushing back, but then, like a hurricane wind, Drew’s float inside, pushing the negative away.
You aren’t a fool.
You are strong.
You are beautiful.
You are special.
You brighten up my days.
I love being with you.
I love being around you.
I love you.
Her laugh bounces off the library walls and a cold chill slivers down my spine. She must be able to see the conflict running over my expression. I was dumb in listening to Scott. I was a fool to believe Sophia’s intentions.
“We were never friends, you silly bitch.”
“Then what were we?”
“I wanted you to be the last.”
“The last?”
“I wanted to show him girls like you are weak. That they break easily. He wouldn’t listen. Every time he said it was the last time, but I knew him. Knew him better than he knew himself,” she tells me, banging the fist holding the knife against her head. “I was meant for him. He was meant for me.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me? Why did you let him keep cheating? I would have ended things,” I assure her.
Her eyes glass over. “Because he would have just found another one. It had to end with you. He needed to see I was the only one for him.”
“Another redhead?” Madison asks.
The look she gives Madison is enough to make me step in front of my cousin. Madison grips the back of Hayden’s jacket when she goes for Rose—Sophia. I don’t know what to call her now.
“Let me at the fucking bitch.”
“Come near me and I’ll slice you fucking open.”
“Why are you doing this?” I blurt out. “Why are you here? Scott is dead.”
She laughs without humour, reminding me of every witch I have ever witnessed laugh in Disney movies. “I know he’s dead. I’m the reason he’s fucking dead. He pushed me too far. He wanted to come back.”
“Come back?” I whisper.
“To you,” she sneers. “He wanted to make it right again, said he was going to leave me.”
I take a step back, bumping into Madison’s side. “No.”
“You were easy to bend to his will. You, the person I was going to break, to show him how weak you were, and that you’d never understand him, was the person who broke him. I understood him. I loved him. Me. But you got in the way.”
“He hurt me.”
She spits, her face flaming red, and the veins in her neck bulge. “You know nothing about being hurt,” she screams.
“You are a raging bitch,” Hayden spits.
“Shush, you aren’t helping,” Madison hisses.
Hayden grunts. “I’ll help in a minute. I’ll help shove her face through that desk.”
“Rose; Sophia, you don’t want to do this—whatever this is. It’s not worth it. He’s not worth it.”
“We were meant to be together,” she tells me, more lucid than she was a moment ago.
I close my eyes, the anguish in her heart hitting my chest. A thought occurs to me. I’m not sure if it’s something I read or something I watched, but I remember once learning to speak to your kidnapper, to keep them occupied until help arrived or let them get to know you enough that they let you go.
Sophia already knows me. I can’t go down that route with her, but I can listen to her; I can keep her talking.
“I don’t understand.”
“We saved each other. Scott had strict parents. They would never leave him unsupervised, nor his little sister. He was sixteen, but you would never know since his parents sheltered him that much. They were religious too, and the only time he socialised was when they went to church functions. They left a babysitter to care for him and his sister. She abused him. Every day she babysat, she abused him. First, she made him touch her, then she touched him, and then she began to fuck him.”
“Sophia,” I whisper.
“I don’t need your fucking pity. He doesn’t either.”
“He isn’t fucking getting it,” Hayden snaps.
“Stop antagonising the psycho,” Harriet pleads.
“What happened after that?” I ask before Hayden can make a remark.
“He never felt clean. Never. It broke something in his mind. I would watch from my bedroom window, hearing his cries.”
“You never helped him?”
“I saved him,” she spits out. “He knew my uncle was beating me. He heard my cries too. We would sit at the bedroom window at night, just staring at each other. We both knew right then we were kindred spirits, lost souls who had found each other.”
“Touching,” Hayden spits out.
“One night my uncle went too far. He was going to do to me what Scott’s babysitter was doing to him. Scott witnessed it and saved me. He came through the window, took the whip of the belt for me.”
“So you repaid the favour?” I guess.
She nods, her expression turning blank. “The day she brought over one of her male friends, I helped him. He was lying face down on the bed when I walked in, bloody and soiled. The guy was grinning, bragging about having a virgin, saying nothing had ever felt that good.”
I clutch my stomach as bile rises in my throat. “I—”
“We killed them. We killed them for hurting him. I hit the guy first, hit him over the head with the bat I grabbed from my uncle’s shed, and something snapped in Scott that day. He gripped Bea by her red hair and slammed her into the window. It shattered, slicing through her perfect porcelain skin. We didn’t stop; we butchered them long after they took their last breath.”
“And you were never arrested?” Olivia asks, still holding pressure on Harriet’s arm.
“No. We locked his sister in her bedroom so she wouldn’t see them. We took a lot of money from his dad’s safe box and took his spare bank cards. I did the same at my uncles, taking all the money I could find and pieces of jewellery I could sell along the way. We never looked back. Not once.”
“How? How did you get away with it for this long? He hadn’t just hurt Charlotte or those people who hurt him. There were loads of women.”
“All of them fucking deserved it.”
“No, they didn’t,” I reply, straightening my shoulders.
I didn’t deserve it.
Amber didn’t deserve it.
None of them did.
I didn’t deserve it.
The thought knocks me back a step and my eyes clench shut as I let it really hit me.
I didn’t deserve it.