“Enough,” he snaps, holding his hand out to the men who’d dragged her up here. “No la toques.”
His tone meets silence and he continues to watch her as she lifts herself from the floor. Her limbs shake, her lip quivering, but her gaze is steady.
“We meet again, Moira,” the man from the woods says, pacing in front of her parents.
Both of them are gagged and bound and the sight is one to behold.
She never believed she resembled her mother. Eleanor’s eyes were too cold, her face too still and time weathered.
But here, with fear warming her mother’s features, Moira sees herself in them. And it strikes a match, setting her soul on fire.
“Are you afraid?” he asks, coming to a stop just behind them before placing one hand on her father’s shoulder, the other on her mother’s.
When the woman attempts to jerk away from his touch, he arches a brow before digging his fingers into her shoulder.
Eleanor’s muffled cry fuels Moira’s fire, its flames licking at the edges of her lips until she’s wearing a whisper of a smile.
The dark stranger stares at her, his stoic face breaking for a second. He wears confusion in his squinting eyes and on his frowning lips. And he banishes it, just as quickly.
Because what kind of young woman smiles in the face of pain? Smiles with grueling death dribbling with desire nearby, waiting for a chance to bite?
“I’ve heard rumors,” he tells her, looking down at her mother again, “that the MacQuarries are an unkind people. That they have a daughter, kept locked away, with beauty so pure, it could blind your eyes.” He glances up at her again, a brow raised and a smirk curving his lips, as if he’s unimpressed by what stands before him. “Are you untouched?” he asks.
Her father grunts from where he sits, his eyes wild.
There is no reaction from her mother. It’s as if she no longer sits before her, those vacant eyes too far from this moment.
“I am,” Moira answers.
“And your first touch will be death’s.”
She doesn’t understand.
Does he mean to kill her?
Or is he death personified?
“I welcome it,” she answers, her fingers twitching at her sides.
Either way, she would fare far better than being her mother’s victim.
She would rather die than be anyone’s victim ever again.
He laughs, incredulous, with eyes that stay on her, wide and alert.
It is the strangest laugh she’s ever heard.
“Do you hear that?” He leans down to whisper to her parents, and her father whimpers. “Your little girl wants to die.”
The dark stranger straightens and inhales deeply through his nose, nostrils flared, eyes closed.
“I’ve killed people slowly. I’ve taken my time and fallen in love with their shade of fear.” His eyes are still closed as he speaks. “But I can’t say that I’ve killed someone so slowly that they welcomed the end without already being close to it.”
Finally, he opens his eyes and moves to step between her parents, approaching Moira with easy steps.
She stops breathing when he grips her chin to peer closely into her eyes.
What does he see in them?
“I am a monster,” he whispers, a hiss that sounds like a violent reminder to himself and a warning to her.
His teeth are bared and she is so wholly in his grip but fear still does not come.
“You’ll have to work harder to prove that notion to me,” she challenges, and his lips spread into a smile.
His eyes glitter like polished onyx as he lets her chin go and steps back. “Your one brother is dead. We will find the other two. Before the sun rises, there will be nothing left of the MacQuarries, including you. You will cease to exist.”
His arms are spread and she stares, only using her eyes to keep track of him, her body still.
“Unless…”
He utters the word and she jerks her head to see him, head on.
Moira watches the man stand before her, his left arm facing her.
He reaches behind him with his right hand and reveals a gun, one that she assumes was tucked into the back of his waistband.
He aims it at her father and looks back at her, his body a straight line, allowing her to witness her father’s fear.
How many times did he witness hers?
She looks down at her shaking hands, at her bare feet covered in blood.
This is what survival looks like.
And she glances at the man from the woods, his eyes black with the promise of a different kind of life. The kind of life that could make her forget from where she came.
“Have you decided?”
Bloody feet meet brown-booted ones as her body answers for her.
“Do it,” Moira whispers, kissing her life goodbye.
A bang fills the air, but she doesn’t react. Her father’s head is tipped back, and Moira hardly saw the moment of impact.
A quick death for a coward.
“Your turn, girasol.”
She doesn’t know the man she’s standing in front of, doesn’t understand where she will go from here.
But she knows what she came from. And she’s never going back.
Warm metal is pressed into her palm and she grips it, never having touched a gun before.
The first time her mother ever beat her, she stood over Moira’s tiny trembling frame and whispered, “I’m doing this for your own good.”
It’s a mantra Moira heard many times over the years, as if it were some form of a salve for the knuckles that bruised her and the switches that split her skin.
These words were not uttered for Moira’s sake, but for her mother’s.
Moira understood this on the day those words stopped coming. Because even then, she could still hear them in her head.
And so, as she stares at the woman who birthed her, she reasons, “I’m doing this for my own good,” before lodging a bullet in her mother’s chest.
6
Moira can’t remember when walking away from her home in the company of a man she did not know—who’d just killed her family members—felt like a good idea.
That she doesn’t know what to call him has her pulse racing.
They are complete strangers. And he informally introduced himself without his mask in place; the one he’s wearing now in the backseat of his SUV. The windows are so tinted, she can hardly make the moon out. But when she does, she focuses on the perfect roundness of it.
“What will you do with me?” she asks, knowing there’s no going back now. Moira peels her gaze from the glowing sphere in the sky and stares at him.
He doesn’t answer, his fingertips pressed to his lips as he too gazes out of the car. She wonders if there’s longing in his eyes. As if he himself wishes to be cloaked in the darkness that surrounds the moving vehicle.
“You lack simple survival instincts,” he mumbles behind his fingers, eyes still watching the passing night.
She wants to point out that she’s here, living and breathing and questioning. But before she can find her words, the driver pulls over, pressing on the brakes so quickly that Moira lurches forward.
A hand shoots out in front of her, and the stranger’s arm keeps her from flying into the front seat.
When she glances over at him, his eyebrow is raised as if this is what he meant exactly.