Leland: Age seventeen
I’m tired.
I’m so tired.
I’ve perfectly tracked down a man, so well, in fact, that even Lucas found little to bitch about my technique. But taking him down was another thing entirely. He was well trained, but worse yet… he was paranoid. It felt like everything he did was a way to keep anyone from ever getting close enough to hurt him.
He did a phenomenal job of that.
So I had to do a better one.
I’m the one still alive, so I guess I succeeded, but I hurt after he slammed my head repeatedly into the wall and sliced me multiple times. When Lucas sees me, he frowns, and I know I did a bad job.
I need to be better. I need to get better.
“What happens when you fuck up?” Lucas asks as he comes over to me. Behind him stands the girl named Sera. While she seems to be unable to speak, she can write… if she chooses to. What she writes is limited, but she listens to everything, hears everything. She knows how to blend in, how to be a part of the room without ever being seen.
Maybe that’s what Lucas likes about her. She can be eyes and ears that he could slip in someplace and no one would expect her, so no one would be careful around her. It’s like cussing in front of a toddler because you believe they can’tunderstand. No one would believe that she could retain every word said and write them down on a paper for us to read.
Lucas drops the first aid kit in front of me, and I’m left to patch myself up. And still Sera stands there, watching me and waiting. Only once Lucas leaves does she walk over, sitting on the ground at my feet and leaning against the chair I sit in. She doesn’t say anything, but neither do I. Instead… it’s that moment of just… being in the same room as each other that helps me breathe.
Days shift to weeks as this dance we’re playing with Lucas becomes the norm until one day I get back and find her gone. I try to tell myself that she could be in her room or off playing, but I know something has happened. There hasn’t been a single day that she wasn’t waiting at the door to greet me when I came in.
I walk through the house, checking every room, and I even go outside as that sinking feeling grows by the second. I find myself in front of Lucas’s office where I stand and stare at the door. For several minutes, I feel incapable of knocking because I’m not sure I want to hear what he has to say.
“Come in.”
“Where’s Sera?”
“Gone.”
“What did you do to her?” I whisper. “I was good. I did as I was told. I haven’t fucked up.”
Lucas grins at me and cocks his head. “My, Leland, I didn’t know that you had such a poor opinion of me. What do you thinkIdid with her?”
“Did you kill her?”
His grin doesn’t even falter; it seems to be reaching his eyes. “Why do you always think I’m so heartless, Leland?”
“Why won’t you answer?”
“Ididn’t kill her,” he says.
And the fuckingemphasison that “I.” Something is squeezing my stomach and it hurts. It hurts so much worse than being beaten or punched or stabbed. I want to make a noise, do something to express my sorrow, but I know I can’t. Not in front of Lucas, at least.
“She’s dead,” I state because what elsecanI do?
“She simply chose to go with her brother. We weren’t enough for her, Leland. You know anyone who walks through these doors is free to go, including you,” he says. And what a laugh. There’s no fucking way he’d just let me leave.
“Her brother came here and took her?”
“He came here… and she went with him. Let’s go. They didn’t get far,” he says, telling me he followed them.
Lucas gets up and heads out the door as I trail after him, but I’m not sure I even want to. I want to go back to my room and bury my face in my pillow where I can scream out all of my rage and heartbreak.
“Did her brother talk to you?” I ask.
“He did.”
