Then Jez, the woman who’d killed my abusive stepfather by caving in his skull with a table lamp—and left me alone afterward to face the resulting music—met my gaze with a shocked gasp.
SEVEN
Tony
I DIDN’T EVEN FEELthe shopping bags slip from my numb fingers and hit the polished wooden floor. I took a hasty step back as images from the past crowded into the present. My foot slipped on a plastic bag stuffed with clothing, and I nearly tumbled down the steep stairs for the second time in less than two minutes.
“No,” I said, a bit desperately—then I turned and half-ran, half-fell down the staircase, clutching the intricately carved banister to keep myself upright.
The stairs seemed to telescope outward, taking me ten times as long to go down as they had to go up, even as I leapt down two and three steps at a time. The elegant, well-lit hallway on the main floor flickered in and out of my vision, the image of a damp and dingy basement bedroom superimposed over it.
My palms slapped against a heavy front door, stopping my forward momentum. I scrabbled clumsily at locks and deadbolts until I could tear it open and stagger outside, sucking in great lungfuls of humid midday air.
Even with the sun shining through patchy gray clouds overhead, I couldn’t get the dark afterimages of my childhood out of my senses. Angry footfalls pacing overhead... the floorboards creaking beneath them. A door opening at thetop of the stairs... a silhouetted figured stalking down, step by deliberate step. A doubled belt held between two fists, the leather snapping with a threateningcrack.
I stumbled toward the old Volvo station wagon parked in the circle drive, with the vague plan of getting in it and driving away fast enough to outrun the memories. Maybe my legs were smarter than my brain, because they threw in the towel before I got the door open—saving me from getting behind the wheel and immediately causing an accident.
My knees buckled, and I turned as I fell in slow motion, ending up slumped against the driver’s side front tire.
My heart felt like it was trying to pound its way out of the cage of my ribs. I couldn’t catch my breath properly. Jez couldnotbe here, in this house, more than a year after I’d last seen her.
“She’s the one who tried to kill Knox,” Gage had said.
Jez can’t be a killer, my mind tried to tell me, despite the fact that my last memory of her involved struggling out from under the dead weight of my stepfather’s corpse as she backed away, her eyes huge in her bone-white face.
Jez alreadywasa killer.
She’d killed to protect me from a monster. The monster who’d followed me out of my youth, tracking me down in a new city, in my new, painstakingly built life. And then she’d run away, leaving me alone to deal with the aftermath.
I still remembered the way my hands had shaken as I unlocked my phone, scrolling down to a number that had only been added a few weeks previously.
“Yeah?”Heath’s gruff voice had picked up on the other end.
“H-hi,” I’d told him in a shaky voice. “It’s, um... it’s Tony Scalise. Sorry—I know I’m nobody to you. But I’ve been helping your pack out with some stuff lately, and... I need help. I really,reallyneed your help.”
By all rights, he should have hung up on me without a word. Instead, there was a long pause.
“What kind of help?” he’d asked, and it had been all I could do not to spill out the whole story over the phone like an idiot.
I’d bitten down hard on the torrent of words.
“Trash disposal,” I’d managed, past a clenched jaw. “It’s too big for me to move myself.”
The memory rose up, as fresh and visceral as the day it happened.
