“Where is she?” he raged and smashed his fist into Ivan’s mouth. Another brutal hit shattered his front teeth. The broken bits sliced Emory’s knuckles. Ivan choked on the blood filling his mouth as he squirmed out from underneath.
Emory grabbed his gun and sprung to his feet. When Ivan dove into him, they collided through the door and into the hall. The spindly lunatic had no right to his strength, and each of Emory’s punches seemed to register no pain, only grunts. They wove around one another, slower and panting as they swung their weight into each other.
Ivan hurled himself at Emory again but crashed into the wall as Emory darted out of the way.End it.He trained his gun on Ivan. Panting on the floor, Ivan stared up at Emory but made no move to defend himself, so his hands fell to his sides.
“You can’t do it, can you?” Ivan spit out a mouthful of blood at Emory’s feet. “If you kill me, something dies in you too, the part of yourself you cherish the most; the hatred that’s become your purpose.”
Emory squatted in front of Ivan and, like a serpent’s strike, violently seized him by the throat. He pressed his gun to the middle of Ivan’s forehead.
“Where is she?”
Are you ready for this?
Emory swallowed hard. He’d spent so many years hunting the wrong answer to the question. Delighting in the hesitation, Ivan laughed as shouts sounded from a room farther down the hall.
“Amelia’s getting away!” Richard Dauer yelled. “Someone come get her!”
Emory hopped to his feet and blindly started down the hall but stopped halfway. He lifted his gun and spun around. Ivan limped along the wall. Another glob of blood filled his mouth, and he flashed a crimson smile.
“Me or her?” Ivan rasped and edged farther away. Behind him, the open area had cleared out, all but a few dead bodies sprawled on the floor. “You can’t have both.”
Their eyes met with common knowledge passing between them andthe only thing they’d ever agree on—it ended when one of them was dead.
Emory didn’t move in either direction. Time slowed as Ivan shuffled backward. Gun lifted, Emory followed, unable to look away or change course. If only a handful of moments in life truly defined one’s fate, this was surely one.
“You hate me more than you’ll ever love her,” Ivan said as he stood at the far edge of moonlight streaming across the floor. Shadows gathered at his back. With another backwards step, he beckoned Emory to join him, drawing him once again into the darkness.
Emory could follow him there and into the depths of depravity. Perhaps it was where he belonged. He strode toward the edge of madness, closer to his brother who looked in raptures as the gap closed between them.
End it.
Stopping short of the shadows, Emory pulled the trigger. The recoil ripped through him, sending a shockwave of pain through his shoulder. He ran for the room down the hall and looked back the moment before he careened inside.
Blacker than black again, Ivan’s silhouette hobbled around the corner, not dead but evidently injured. Like a phantasm, vaporous in the way he evanesced back into the abyss, Ivan was gone.
FORTY-THREE
AMELIA
Amelia raced down the rusty staircase. She nearly lost her footing as she jumped from the second-to-last step and hit the ground with shaky knees. Her ankle tweaked with a shock of pain, but she righted herself and remembered her mettle. She couldn’t quit now, not when she’d come this far.
She rounded the building’s corner and sprinted its length with a chain-link fence to her right. Her legs burned, pumping hard as she hurled toward freedom before stumbling to an abrupt stop. At the end of the building, the fence blocked her path.
Amelia steadied herself with another sip of air and hoped like hell it was just a trick of the moonlight. As she got closer, though, the fence remained, a culmination of her fears woven together with a curl of barbed wire on top.
There was nowhere to go but backwards where pain and death awaited her.I can’t turn back.For the past month, she hadn’t chosen how she’d lived, but she could choose how she died. It wasn’t there and not like that.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay,” she muttered in fast succession and a surge of adrenaline.
She’d have to climb. The barbed wire could do its worst, but torn to shreds would be a blessing compared to what Ivan had in store. Amelia sucked in a hard breath and approached the fence.
Gravel crackled behind her, and dread pooled in Amelia’s gut, her stomach roiling. Someone had followed her. She wouldn’t get out without a fight. She sidelined the urge to vomit and gripped the pipe.
This is it.
All she had to do was hold on and swing hard. She’d done it once. She could do it again. With her heart slamming in her chest, Amelia turned around. She lifted her eyes from the ground in a hesitant sweep to Ivan, who’d found her, no doubt.
She didn’t register who she saw instead. He’d come for her. He didn’t have to. He could’ve read her note, called it a loss, and let her go. The pipe hit the ground, and a knot ached in her throat as Amelia groped the fence beside her.
