“What did he want?”
“Something precious to me.”
When he words it like that, it lets me know that he’s not planning on telling me that answer. “You… didn’t want to let him stay as well?”
“I did not. She could stay. He could not. It was as simple as that. He didn’t find it so simple.”
I want to voice that it was unfair to split the siblings up, but Lucas knows that. There’s really no sense in me saying something he already knows. We walk down the long winding road before turning a corner, and I find that I have no interest in going any farther.
“I’ve seen enough.”
“I don’t think you have,” Lucas counters. “You wanted to be nosy, so let’s be nosy.”
“I’m sure you already checked whether she was alive. If she is dead, I don’t want to see her,” I say, refusing to even look in the direction she lies.
Lucas drags me anyway. “And then her brother jumped off that bridge right there. Leland, I want you to know this is why we don’t trust anyone. We don’t love anyone. We don’t care about anyone. She let her emotions lead her to this place.”
“You act like she’s in the wrong for going with her brother. How could she have known he’d kill her?”
“We gave her everything she ever needed, and still, she chose this path.”
“She was a child who went with her family; she could never have expected that it would end up getting her killed,” I say. “Deep down, she might have known that staying with us was safer, but sometimes people make stupid mistakes when it comes to someone they love.”
Lucas grabs my hair and jerks my head back. “That is right. The moment you start interfering with lives, you run the risk of being killed or getting others killed. You’re unfocused. You never know who you can trust.”
“Including you?” I ask.
“Always include me,” he says with a grin. “You cannot love. You cannot care for others. The only person you are in charge of is yourself.Thatis what will make you invincible. Humans are weakest when someone they care for is in danger. Use that to your advantage but don’t ever let them use it against you. Now let’s go.”
“Can I bury her?”
He lets out a huff that kind of sounds like a laugh. “You just don’t learn.”
“I probably never will.”
“I’ll call someone to deal with her. Let’s go. And don’t meddle in others’ lives ever again. That’s weakness, Leland. Weakness. Are you a weak man?”
“I am here to point my gun at anyone you direct me to.”
“That’s a good boy,” he says with a smile. “You might be my favorite one yet.”
And I’m left wondering, not for the first time, what happened to all of the others.
TWENTY-FIVE
LELAND
“While I thought of Sera often after that, I never thought of her brother again,” I admit. “I honestly wasn’t sure if he killed her. I wasn’t sure if someone killed them both… and some days I wondered if Lucas did it.”
“Everything was a mind game with that man,” Micah says. “Do you remember her last name?”
“Brown, but it’s such a common name… I’ll talk to Cassel; he might be able to find something from what I can remember. Let’s go back and discuss what we should do.”
We head out to the SUV, but before we’re able to pick up some food, Cassel texts us that Ava is making something, so we hurry back to the safe house.
The moment we walk in, Waylon is there, cat in hands. He then tries to act like he wasn’t waiting by the door for us by giving us a nod and a “Yo.”
“Waylon… I’ve gone…” I check my phone and gasp. “Twenty minutes without a cat picture.”
