Valerie
Licking my lips heavily, I knocked on the big, imposing, metal door before it immediately swung open, and Carlyle gazed down at me with guarded eyes. Wordlessly, he gestured me in, and I pursed my lips as anxiety gnawed at my gut. Tension zinged up and down my legs and gripped my spine, and I rubbed my palms together to get rid of the tingles in my hands.
“What’s going on?” My straightforward question earned me ominous silence, and I stepped through the threshold to see Natasha already here, leaning against the wall with her arms tightly crossed. “This is a bad place to stage an intervention.”
“It’s the perfect place for an interrogation, though.” A surprised squeak escaped me when George spoke up from behind me, and I whipped around as Carlyle left the door open. The old man smiled almost sympathetically, but his eyes looked a little dead as they shifted between my sister and I. My mind raced, panic clutching my heart in a vice, and I gulped harshly while Carlyle sat on the table in the corner of the room.
“Okay . . . um . . . if this is about earlier, I can explain. We weren’t gonna do anything, I promise. I was just trying to make Carlyle feel better. Because, you know, it sucks about the b-bomb and my apartment, but, like, I’m totally over it at this point even though he’s obviously not, an—” Drying on my tongue at the amusement playing in the old man’s otherwise stoic features, I clamped my mouth shut and held my breath. Flames climbed up my neck, and my knees wobbled dangerously as embarrassment clung to my ribs like sticky tar.
“Not your interrogation, darling.” I wanted to die. Oh, this was horrible. Carlyle was horrible. What the Hell was with all the quiet? Did everyone in this place just read minds?
Was I being intentionally left out of the loop?
Because I was okay with that! Seriously! I didn’t want anything to do with the loop!
“Val . . . ” Whirling around, I tensed when Natasha frowned at me, and my cheeks threatened to melt right off my face. Her eyes flickered to a corner of the room, her head tilting, and I almost didn’t look because I was a scaredybitch.
But I did look, and goosebumps blanketed my entire body at the frail body huddled in the corner. I hadn’t noticed the small cries coming from under that stringy, brown hair, and impressively thin legs riddled with track marks pulled up. There were even marks on her feet, straining as they curled against the cold concrete, and my pupils blew as the air knocked from my lungs.
“I-I don’t understand.” The declaration rolled thickly off my tongue, but I couldn’t tear my eyes off the pathetic creature cowering in the corner. “Why . . . why is she here?”
“I had her brought here. Why and what you do now is up to you.” My head snapped up and to the side, and Carlyle crossed his legs under him to lean against the wall. His expression was unreadable, his voice flat, and even his eyes didn’t portray any sort of emotion too strong to identify. “Natasha decked her in the face. If you need ideas, I have a few.”
“Um . . . oh, I-I . . . ” Sputtering, my words failed me completely when I turned back to my mother, and she rocked back and forth. Her clothes stuck to her and made her look skinnier. Even bunched up, it was obvious she was underweight. The drugs she used gave her a greenish hue, and she shook viciously. Blinking in disbelief, I wrapped my arms around myself as I shuddered a rasping breath, and my lips stuck together as the moisture on then dried.
“No one will judge you for anything you feel, Valerie.” I was struck with the notion that these people assumed I would feel something in the first place, which was preposterous. I mean, my mom abandoned us and sold us and lied and cheated and stole and . . .
Looking at her now, the only emotion swirling in my chest was . . . disgust.
“I’m not touching that.” Shivering from the powerful wedge between my lungs, I shook my head and scrunched up my nose. “I’m not touching that.”
“You don’t have to.” Carlyle slid off the table smoothly, and my eyelids fluttered closed when he gripped my shoulders in his strong hands and squeezed reassuringly. “I have tools for that.”
My stomach roiled when I made the mistake of looking at my mom, and I covered my mouth with the back of my hand. She fuckingstunkto high Heaven of ammonia and general body odor, and her shaking just agitated it all. Her thin skin crackled around her track marks when he gripped her legs, and she looked around through glassy, doped up eyes.
Eyes that swept right past me . . . as if I wasn’t even there.
Cold metal pressed against my palm, and I sucked in a sharp breath when Carlyle’s warmth left my back. My eyelid twitched as my mom’s gaze focused on Natasha. She was so bad that the punch to the face my sister had supposedly dropped on her didn’t change anything about her features. My mom didn’t swell up. The only difference was her sickly green color turned grey.
“Nat, baby . . . ” Hoarse, barely a collection of sounds, my mom’s call squeezed my heart and made my brain pound against the backs of my eyes. Tightening my grip on the . . . what even was it? Glancing down, I frowned at the gun in my hand, the silvery piece glimmering in the moderate light streaming from above. When I looked back after what couldn’t have been more than a second, my mom was still staring dazedly at Natasha.
Blood drummed in my ears, and a cold sweat broke out on my body when my mom opened and closed her mouth a few times. Watching her actively try to make noise was surreal. I’d never been so close to someone so degraded my drugs, and the fact that this was my own mother only made me more numb.
“Did you bring Val like I told you?” My body went cold, and I twisted as Natasha clenched her hands into tight fists, rage painting her face and bulging the veins in her neck. “I have to pay rent. You don’t want to be homeless, right? You’re the good one.”
“You didn’t . . . ” Croaking as my throat closed completely, I shook my head weakly, and my sister glared at the floor. “No, no, no, Nat-t . . . you didn’t . . . ”
“I’m older, so it was my responsibility.” Tears sprung to my eyes at thelackof bitterness of resentment in her voice, but all I could do was continue shaking my head. “Six minutes really is a big difference.”
“You . . . how could you, Natasha?” She shrugged stiffly at my whisper, and I tightened my grip on the gun Carlyle had given me. Was I really going to shoot my mom? The question wasn’t one I’d ever contemplated before, but now . . .
“To be honest, I didn’t hate it. If I did, they’d just go after you. So, I guess, after a while, I managed to just . . . let it go. Besides, I wouldn’t be so hilarious without a little trauma.” Hiccupping a shallow breath as my tears streamed down my hot face, I struggled not to sob as Natasha walked over to me. Slowly, she turned me around, wrapping her arms around me, her palms gliding down to smooth the bumps on my arm. “It won’t change anything, Valerie, but it won’t make it worse, either. There’s not much worse it could get, and we have each other.”
“Y-you made me go to a different college because . . . ” Trailing off as my mind went blank, I leaned my head back against Natasha’s shoulder and closed my eyes. Her smell flooded my brain, and she hummed softly in my ear as she lifted the gun in my hand. Mine stayed hugging the grip, and her finger hooked on the trigger.
“Life without you isn’t a life at all, Valerie. Together in the womb . . . ” Her palm flexed, and our free hands tangled together as I turned into Natasha’s neck. “Together in the tomb.”
Bang!
