Back to business, Cal.
Mr Crane’s background check was vague, and while he wears a wedding ring, we found nothing about a wife in his records. Death records are a little harder to come by, but with any luck, Ezra’s new business partner should come up with the goods in the next few days. At this point, we had reviewed every guy Ebony had come into contact with since arriving back in Hells Haven, and Mr Crane had nothing more than a few parking tickets to his name. Some of the guys we’re actively checking off our list are more concerning—namely one Bobby Masters Jr. Daddy’s money had got him off charges ranging from disturbing the peace to sexual assault and a litany of misdemeanours in between—the details of which were struck from his official record. If you dig into someone’s life deep enough, you’ll be amazed what you find. Every freshly unsealed document we got our hands on had one common thread: each one was signed by Police Chief Silas Turner, a man so corrupt he’d happily turn a blind eye no matter the crime if the under-the-table payment was large enough.
Cooper had been willing to kidnap Bobby when he tried it on with Ebony in the cafeteria last week. Proposing the idea of removing each of his fingers with a rusty blade as we watched him slowly bleed out was one I was happy to get on board with, but my brother’s follow-up message that Ebony and her roommate had held their own saved him from the chopping block. For now, at least.
Sitting two rows back with my wide-brimmed hat dipped forward to cast my face in shadow, I listen to Ebony whispering to her friends, the seats around them filling up as more students enter the auditorium. I’m close enough to catch her sweet peaches and vanilla scent that has me leaning forward in my seat and biting back the contented sigh that threatens to tumble from my lips. This is why I convinced Coop to follow her alone; I couldn’t be trusted to continue hating her when I was this close. Transfixed by everything about this girl, I could feel my anger waning the longer I sat here. Even six years isn’t long enough to break the spell she has over me it seems.
Severing the invisible connection between us, I rise from my seat and hastily retreat down the stairs to the door that leads to the back of the stage, where I know Cooper is hidden away as he loads up the photos we selected into the slideshow projector that was about as old as Mr Crane and in desperate need of an upgrade—the machine, not the man.
Hiding in the shadows, I peer out into the crowd where I immediately find her face. Drawn to her like that sad sap moth whose wings are frazzling, but yet he can’t help but comment on the beauty of the flame’s colours. The lingering memory of her sweetened scent still fills my nose as the ghost of her refuses to abide by the laws of distance. I shouldn’t be able to remember how soft her hair was beneath my fingers, or how mouth-watering it was to taste her skin as I ran my tongue over the hollow of her throat. I shouldn’t hear her voice in my head so vividly, myname on those kiss-swollen lips easily the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard. But I do; I remember it all like it was yesterday, and that is why what she had done hurt as much as it did. She’d betrayed us. We’d protected her the only way we knew how, and she’d stabbed us in the back. We had slayed her monster and got six years locked up in Blackwood for our efforts, while she went on with her life.
“All set?” I ask Coop tersely, anger now my motivation as the day she turned us in plays on repeat in my head. Chewing on my lip, I watch Mr Crane hurry into the room, dropping papers and almost falling over his own feet as he hurries towards the stage. The man is like a tornado—all chaotic and frenzied as he mutters to himself under his breath, the four decades of teaching showing in the saggy jowls and crow’s feet on his face. Got to hand it to the man, for someone nearing sixty-five, he sure is quick.
I can’t imagine us fucking with his presentation is going to calm him any, but if we get a rise out of our Dove, it will be worth it; there are always unprecedented casualties in war.
While my dick isn’t playing ball and hardens at the mere thought of Ebony, I’m very much determined to see this through to the end. Punishing her—that will be the sweetest revenge for her betrayal.
The first slide is brief; the photo of the lake behind our father’s farm where we would spend our summers flashes across the gigantic screen. I watch the moment her mouth pops open with shock as she recognises it. Her wide eyes glued to the screen now as she leans forward in her seat. Her friends still animatedly chattering on either side of her. When I told Cooper I hadn’t visited Ebony, Iwasn’t being entirely truthful. I had visited her the night before last, broken into her apartment, and sat in the chair in the corner of her room as she slept. I didn’t count the hours I sat there—that felt like a redundant reminder that I was too obsessed with her, that I wasn’t in control of how I felt about her. I sat there taunting myself as the nervous energy I have felt over the years without her by our side dissipated, the wash of calm satedness taking its place. As the dawn sun broke over the hills, I left quickly and quietly the way I came and swore to the devil that I would never do it again. I would fight the urge to repeat my mistake. Pulling the simple cotton underwear I’d stolen from her wash basket out of my pocket, I bunch it in my fist and pull it up to my nose—inhaling her sweet scent with a muted groan of appreciation. The breaking and entering charge that would have been handed down if I had been caught would have been worth it for the scrap of material I’m holding tightly in my hand.
The second and third slide depict a house long since destroyed, a house where she spent her formative years, a house of horrors that carries more sadness and secrets than any of us know what to do with.
“It’s a misconception to believe that all folklore began as stories, bedtime tales of monsters told to children to make sure they behaved and listened to their parents.” How right Mr Crane is as he adjusts his microphone to get a clearer sound out to his students.
Pressing the button on his remote, he activates the last slide, and up pops a newspaper article. The sad teenage girl in the singed baby blue summer dress standing in therain in dirty socks, her foster father’s remains still smoking in the ashes of the decimated house behind her.
Ebony wanted the world to forget who she was and the part she’d played that day. This was her reminder that we would never forget; she could change her name a thousand times, hightail it across the world where Hells Haven was just a patch of green on a map—but we would hunt her down and find her. We would be that nagging voice in the darkest corner of her mind that brings her back kicking and screaming to her reality because if we have to suffer with the truth, than so does she.
I don’t need to look at the screen, for the longest time it was the only photo of her that I had. I had every freckle on her face and knot in her hair memorised for the number of times I have fallen asleep looking at it. I watch as a tear tracks down her face now, resting on her shuddering lips as she crowds her small frame with her arms to elicit the warmth she needs. The confusion builds on the faces of everyone else in the audience as they chatter and giggle around her, oblivious to the fact that this is a show intended for one. As abject horror fills her expression, realisation dawning that this sneak attack is meant for her; I try to feel happy, triumphant, vindicated. But I feel none of those things, I feel emptier now more so than I ever have before.
“Technical difficulties,” Mr Crane says, flustered as he locks an apologetic gaze on Ebony who can’t tear her eyes from the screen. I had assumed some of the teachers would know about Ebony’s history. When we’d searched the Dean’s office, there was her change-of-name form with a detailed post-it note tucked away in her permanent file.But in the short time that they have known each other, it seems Mr Crane has come to care about Ebony—and I don’t fucking like it; not one bit.
“You think she knows it’s us?” Coop whispers from behind me as we both watch our Dove fall apart. The silent torment etched into her face as she paws timidly at her watery eyes with the sleeve of her cardigan. It’s hard to love someone and hate them in the same breath—torn between rival emotions that are too strong as they sit thickly in your throat and cause your heart to thump wildly in your chest, not knowing if the tightening of your fists is because you want to strangle them or hug them.
The answer is always both—if I remember correctly, our Ebs likes a little pain with her pleasure.
‘You could hold her down by her throat while Cooper hugs her to him as you both fill her until she’s so lost in her lust that she forgets everything outside of that moment,’my brain offers, and I don’t hate the idea of Ebony being the sweet meat in a Knox brother sandwich.
I glance back at my brother, and his devilish grin has me believing that this twin telepathy shit might actually be a thing. We’re too enraptured with the memory of Ebs, too lost to what was once our happy if not dysfunctional life together.
None of us had ever had it easy.
But we had each other, and that’s what mattered.
CHAPTER NINE
EBONY
Everyone imagines a cult and thinks sex orgies, crazed leader, multiple marriages. Give them a medal—sometimes the initial assumption is the correct one. My father wasn’t exactly creative in his madness. Thankfully, my only role in the Voselle leadership was to read the scriptures and tend to the horses. Adding child bride to my list of traumas might have been the one that tipped me over the edge. My father was many things, but a child molestor wasn’t one of them, child abuser – however , he had that down to a fine art. Tucking myself away in the stables, I experienced some of the most peaceful times of my life; no one to tell me what to do or how to act. When people say animals are better than humans, believe them.
My father’s warped dreams of a self-serving commune would have been fine if he wasn’t also wildly psychotic—convincing his flock to literally drink a Kool-Aid spiked with barbiturates; murdering my mother,and then turning the gun on himself is a seventh birthday I’m sure to never forget. All those people I had considered family who settled in the surrounding campsites that survived my father’s attempt at a Jonestown reckoning moved on pretty quickly once the police showed up. Huddled in the cupboard under the stairs of our modest shack, I stayed exactly where my mother had hidden me as my father downed his seventh glass of homemade moonshine. My father was particular, and he liked numerical cohesion wherever he could find it—my seventh birthday on the seventh day of the seventh month, seven candles on the cake my mother had spent hours making for me, his seventh drink, the seventh bullet he had selected from his holster pocket, each of the others neatly lined up on the fireplace to taunt me.
I was cursed from the moment I had been born into that life, and while I could say I escaped one hell, it wasn’t long before I was thrown headfirst into another.
I had arrived in the idyllic Hells Haven with its backdrop of sprawling hills and pathless country lanes, with holes in my shoes, highly medicated, severely malnourished, and wearing a patchwork dress of my mother’s that she had altered for me shortly before her death. Hanging on the coattails of my social worker fresh out of college, I was a mumbling wreck, too traumatised to really understand what was happening. I hadn’t expected a palace but was immediately charmed by the three-story house that I always thought leaned a little to the left. With the black-painted Louvre shutters, quaint flower baskets filled with daisies on every window, the hand-painted rainbow stone pathway, and the kids’ swing set beneath the large oaktree, it felt idyllic to a child who had only known a life of discontent.
Mr and Mrs Turner appeared kind and welcoming, a ragtag of other kids just like me filling their house with a chaos that somewhat settled me. I was used to sharing my space, every kid was a cousin back in the commune. But I had quickly come to realise that the Turner house was different.
Over the months, I made it my business to learn everything I could about my new home, about the family that had taken me in, to assimilate the best I could to make them like me.
