“Oh no, are you okay?” Lucas asks as he kneels in front of her. “Did you hurt your knees?”
She looks up at him and shakes her head.
“That’s good,” he says, helping her to her feet and dusting her pants off.
Then he leads her over to me before he sets his hand on my head and fluffs my hair. “This your friend?” he asks me, and the touch feels so menacing. It makes my entire body stiffen.
“No.”
“You sure?” He leans in real close. “Looks like Harry Brown’s daughter, doesn’t she? Sure looks like it.”
I swallow hard as I realize that none of this is going to go well. She’s seen my face. She knows that I killed them. I watched her. I interacted with her. I fucked up. I really fucked up.
And now Lucas is going to kill her.
Or will he make me kill her?
“This your friend?” Lucas repeats while he fluffs my hair some more. “She looks hungry.” He turns to her. “Are you hungry? I was going to make some chicken for dinner. Let’s get you fed and cleaned up.”
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
“The better question is… what are you doing?” he asks, and the shift in his tone makes my blood run cold.
I close my eyes and Lucas yanks my head back.
“Don’t ignore me.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Well, we’re going to eat some dinner with your new friend, aren’t we?”
“Why are you doing this?” I ask.
“She might be of some use,” he says.
She runs forward and grabs for my hand, and I try to pull it out of her reach, but she snatches it before I can. Her grip is deathly tight, and even though she looks happy to be doing this, the way her hand shakes tells me that she’s not so naive to this world.
“Go find someone who can help you,” I plead.
“Do you like potatoes? Maybe we’ll have baked potatoes with it. That sounds good,” Lucas says.
The girl looks back, and I get the feeling that someone is following us. When I glance back, I realize that it’s her brother, but what exactly does he want?
And what is Lucas going to do to him?
“What did he do to her?” Jackson asks, drawing me back to the present.
“He fed her,” I say. “He took us to one of his safe houses… and he fed her. And just… left her alone. I didn’t know why, but I have to assume he had some use for her. He just… let her stay there and she became a part of the daily routine.”
“And her brother?”
“I only saw… moments of her brother. I don’t know whether Lucas kept him away or he chose to stay away. She hung on me, and I didn’t know what to do with it. Every day, I assumed it was some trick and Lucas would just… take her away. I was afraid of getting closer to her. I was afraid of what interacting with her meant.”
Micah muses, “I wonder if he was planning on grooming her just like he did with the rest of us. It wasn’t often he had more than one person at a time, but he did it a few times.”
“But what was his plan with her brother?” Everly asks.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I don’t know what any of it was. I just know that for about two weeks, she was there… and then… one day she was gone.”
