“Because what you’re doing is important. It matters. Like you said, I got a Band-Aid when I fell down. A sweet-sixteen party. But you were suffering.”
I’m already shaking my head. “I don’t need your fucking pity.”
“I’m not offering you any. I’m offering to help.”
“Help? You going to help us feed a few guys through the ol’ wood chipper?”
She flinches but persists. “If that was all you needed to do, you’d be done, wouldn’t you?”
I shouldn’t find her persistence so fucking hot, but I do. “We need to find them,” I admit. “The boys and where they’re being held. And the men who are running this shit.”
“I can help.”
God, I shouldn’t even be talking about this with her. “All the deals are done with a wink and a dirty fucking handshake. There’s no paper trail. No records. Except…”
She puts a hand on my shoulder. My muscles flex beneath her touch, my body glad for her even while my mind tells me to shake her off. “Tell me.”
“You know how they say follow the money? This is like that, except with land. There are a bunch of different owners of these houses. A network organized in secret by whoever is in charge of this operation. Buildings that are abandoned, where no one will ask questions. An endless supply of them.”
“So it’s someone who owns a lot of real estate.”
“Not just one man. Five. Ten. Twenty? I don’t fucking know. If we can find one of them, though, if we can get him to talk, that would be the key we need.”
“Okay,” she says, her voice matter-of-fact. “What do you know so far?”
What do I know so far—like this is a school project she’s going to help me with. “It’s someone with connections in the city. The kind of person who can get permits rubber-stamped and cops to not drive down a certain street. This is way too dangerous for you to be a part of.”
“I’m already a part of this. I stood in that basement. I touched that rivet.”
She touched the rivet? Fuck. There’s a strange sense of comfort I get from that, despite how fucked up it is. That she’s one of us now, even though I know it isn’t true. “We don’t actually know that much. He’s a goddamn ghost.”
“Let me help.”
I need to get her off this track, so I do the one thing that should work: insult her. “You’re a high school kid, little bird. Unless you know someone named Jimmy Brass or Johnson or Keeper, you can’t help.”
A pause. “Keeper?”
“They have nicknames they use underground. That’s part of what helps them hide. No one knows his real identity, so even when we question them, when we torture them, that’s all they can tell us.”
She’s quiet behind me, and I turn to see her looking in the direction of the fireflies. She isn’t seeing them, her eyes distant. What’s she thinking about?
When she turns to me, her expression is guarded.
There’s a strange sense of loss inside me.
But this is what I wanted, isn’t it? For her to pull away from me. This is why I brought her here. Now that it’s happening, my chest feels like it’s being crushed in a vise.
“I’m ready to go home,” she says softly.
I pretend like it doesn’t hurt. “You drive.”
It will be the last drive we take together.
She stops at the driver’s-side door before we get in. “Stone.”
“Yeah, little bird?”
“Thank you for taking me here. Thank you for…trusting me.”
It’s only then that I realize how much I do trust her. The world is full of liars and cheats. Full of monsters with pretty fucking smiles. I’d never have taken anyone else here, even to push them away.
She’s more than a distraction to me. She’s a knife wound. A gunshot. A burn across every inch of my skin, making me weak.
How can I talk about revenge when she’s stepping into the car, turning the key in the ignition, straightening the rearview mirror?
She’s the rivet, taking away the darkness.
But without the darkness, there’s nothing left inside me. I’m hollow.
Chapter 15
Brooke
My parents rent a party room at the Highline Country Club for my birthday dinner the Saturday after my actual birthday. Seventeen years old. It seems like a lifetime since my sweet-sixteen party, even though it’s been just a year. Luckily, nobody’s paying much attention to me. Nobody notices my fake smiles, or how much concealer went into covering the bruise on my cheek from when the trucker attacked me. Everybody believed my lie about losing track of time and missing class.
Is he dead? Somebody would’ve found him by now. Or maybe he dragged himself back to his truck. It feels weird to hope that he’s dead.
Most of all, nobody notices how I can’t quite look my father in the eye.
You’re a high school kid. Unless you know someone named Jimmy Brass or Johnson or Keeper, you can’t help. His words stay with me even when I’m smiling and answering questions about how it feels to be seventeen.
It feels like I’ve aged a hundred years, but that has nothing to do with three hundred sixty-five days passing. It has everything to do with what Stone told me.
My family doesn’t have much money. We’ve been holding things together for a long time, sewing in the bottoms of designer bags to hold them together, paying for lavish parties like this while we live on plain chicken and rice. Which means we’re trading on something else—our name. Our connections. It’s almost a kind of lore, the stories about my father.
There was one story about him, my mother tells it every Christmas, about how a pregnant woman had come to his motel on a dark night. How the front desk had turned her away because they were full, but my father saw her. He gave her a room in the employee section, because it was too rainy to go anywhere else. She gave birth that night.
“The Innkeeper,” my mother says, fond and definitely proud. “Except unlike the one in the story, this one has a heart.”
My father grimaces and shakes his head. I thought it was because he was embarrassed that she brags about him. But what if it’s because he’s trying to hide the name? The Innkeeper is a distinctive name. How many guys would have nicknames like that? And would people call him Keeper for short?
It was a whole thing at our Christmas parties, Mom telling the story. Dad as the innkeeper. And Uncle Bill as a shepherd; our family a whole Nativity set.
That kind of detail, it makes it hard to forget.
Hard to pretend I don’t know.
Maybe it’s a coincidence.
I toy with my steak, but it tastes like sawdust.
Our ride was three days ago, but after what Stone told me, I’ve barely slept. When I close my eyes, I’m awash with images of defenseless boys, trapped in the dark. Of Stone as a kid, with that same thick black hair, those same piercing green eyes, making them believe in fairy tales about rivets.
I dream about Stone beating that trucker who dared to touch me. Or Madsen, that guy he killed the night we met, bloody and half alive in the back of the van.
Except now it’s my father. My father’s groans. My father’s garbled pleas for mercy.