And then she hears a voice, and her question is answered.
“Well, that certainly looks cozy.”
Caia’s entire body floods with ice at the click of bootheels accompanying the question, growing louder and louder with each step. She digs her nails into Crew’s back, hard enough to hurt. It’s partly on purpose, and partly reflex—her claws are out, ready to protect her. He hisses, but doesn’t pull away from her. Heknowshe deserves it.
The voice speaks again, all crooning and lilting and perfectly charming. The affectation of it makes her want to vomit. “Got room for one more?”
Slowly, Caia releases her brother, and though every molecule of her body is shouting at her not to turn around,notto look into the eyes of the man standing behind her, she does it anyway. When she finds Easton Beckett’s all-too-familiar shit-eating grin, it takes every ounce of composure she has to not reach out and slap it right off of his face.
Caia levels Crew with a glare that could kill a man dead, and her next words are practically spit. “What thefuckis he doing here?”
Chapter 28
Trey brings Grace kitchen scraps again, but by now she’s lost all sense of time. It could be the third day or the thirtieth that she’s been out here, being drained of life by the sun and this endless task. She eats slowly, carefully chewing each bite of bone-dry chicken breast and savoring it on her tongue. With her hunger tempered and no stomach pains radiating in her gut, Grace feels the exhaustion set in—her eyelids begin to droop, her body begins to rock heavily back and forth. She’s tired beyond reason, barely able to stay upright on the sad excuse for a bedroll they supplied. Eventually, she falls back, out cold by the time she’s horizontal, and—for the first time since arriving at Braxton—tumbles into a deep, dreamless sleep.
A steel-toed boot kicks her awake. It hits her in the elbow, sending a jumping, lightning-quick flash of agony through her arm and then her entire body. Pain sings in her blood as she hisses, eyes shooting open and body whirling around, reaching for a knife that no longer rests beneath her pillow. There is no pillow, and that knife is somewhere in Bellamy’s possession or, more likely, buried deep in a trash bag on its way to a landfill.
“Fuck,” Grace spits, still hovering on the edge of sleep. She rubs at her elbow, cradling it in her palm, but she barely hastime to process how much pain she’s in before another blow lands at the side of her leg, knocking directly into the edge of her kneecap. “Jesus fuckingChrist.” She seethes, then looks up with a withering glare to the offender standing over her. A black, looming silhouette made faceless by the blinding sun.
“It ain’t nighttime,” the figure snarls. “The only reason you should be sleepin’ is if it’s nighttime, or if you’re done with the job. And since the sun is still out, I guess you’re saying you’re done.”
Grace shakes her head, wincing as she tries to sit up, reaching out with her free hand to grab her throbbing knee. “No—I didn’t say that—”
“Shut up.” The figure recedes, walks toward the field, and crouches down with a grunt. “Let’s see just how good of a job you did.”
Grace lifts up onto her knees, ignores the screaming pain that protests the movement, and begins to crawl toward the figure—her uncle, reaching out to pick up a handful of acorn-size rocks. She’s a foot away from him when he stands and turns to face her. “If you’re claiming to bedone, then what the hell are these?” He opens his palm and lets the rocks cascade downward, falling near her spread hands and sending clouds of dust puffing up into her eyes. Grace falls back onto her haunches, shaking her head adamantly.
“I didn’t say I was done, I was just so tired—”
“I don’t want to hear it,” Bellamy barks, then steps onto the rocks on his way to her, abruptly invading her space as he reaches down to grab her left hand, yanking it off her thigh and holding it roughly between both of his. “I told you what would happenif I found rocks. Itold you, Gracie, and you didn’t listen. You just…never…listen.” He singles out her index finger, holding it in his fist while his other hand grips her palm. With a quick snap, one swift motion backward, acracksounds. It takes a moment for her to process what he’s done—it takes a split second of seeing her finger bent back at that terrible, unnatural angle, and then the pain sets in. Heat races through her entire being, and the hell of it overtakes her in the span of a breath. As the pain unloads itself into her system, Grace screams.
He moves on to her middle finger, but this one, he holds at the middle knuckle, fumbling around until he gets a grip he’s satisfied with. “You could’ve been a good girl, Grace,” he tuts, pursing his lips. “But you never couldquitefigure it out. Little slow, I guess. Figures, your momma wasn’t the sharpest, either.” He snaps the knuckle within his fist, and when he releases her finger, it curves harshly to the left at the midpoint. Grace groans, but as the sight sinks in, as that pain comes to join its lesser companion, she screams again. Her throat begins to burn.
“Quit crying,” Bellamy shouts, and, without ceremony, he breaks her pinkie, pulling it almost parallel to the edge of her palm. “Fucking pathetic.”
Only her thumb and ring finger remain unharmed, and her hand takes the shape of a distorted claw, bound by the pain and unable to do anything but curl in on itself. His eyes dance as he grips her thumb, spreading his legs and digging his heels into the dirt below to maintain a good position. He needs the leverage of holding her hand between his thighs. For the pain he’s about to enact on her, he must prepare himself. “This is for running your loud fucking mouth,” he croaks, squeezing her thumbhard, suffocating it. “This is for how ungrateful you are, even after all I’ve done for you. This is for being a disrespectful little bitch.”
A few things happen at once then.
First, Bellamy’s eyes shift away from the large, maniacal circles they’d become during his tirade. They widen with something more surprised, more fearful, transforming rapidly into ovoid orbs of distress. Second, though his grip on her thumb has loosened infinitesimally, she still screams, already mentally in a state where she’s lost that digit, too. The pain has morphed into a singular, devastating being, and she cannot tell the difference between one finger’s lament and another. She screams and it sounds like wailing; it sounds like the scrape of rubber on asphalt; it sounds like a cast-iron kettle sitting atop a bright red burner.
The realization happens slowly—too slowly. He lets go of her thumb, stumbles backward, and stops paying attention to her altogether. Grace slumps forward, but she doesn’t understand right away what’s happened—she thinks, surely, he’s tired himself out. He’ll be back within seconds, vigor renewed and ready to turn the rest of her fingers into mere fragments of bones, swimming within skin.
But he doesn’t come back.
Not for five seconds, then ten, then twenty.
At thirty, Grace begins to understand that the wailing in her ears is no longer hers. It is not the screech of tires. It is not a whistling teakettle.
It’s police sirens.
Chapter 29
There isn’t just one police cruiser driving toward them, bouncing up and down as it rolls over the uneven, untended terrain. There are five.
At first, Grace doesn’t allow herself to believe it’s actually happening. Despite the lights and sirens on full display, despite the quickly closing gap between her and this black-and-blue cavalry, she refuses to let her brain make a fool of her once again. It had tricked her so harshly with the vision of her mother, with the sound of Crew’s voice—creating this facade in the form of a rescue seems on par with its savagery.
Even as the cars come to a stop and doors begin to swing open, she still does not fully accept it. A distant, muffled-sounding voice makes its way to her ears, but it sounds like words being shouted underwater.Put your hands where I can see them,Whitlock, Grace swears she hears—but there’s no way. She mustn’t get her hopes up, mustn’t for one second believe that her uncle is finally going to be brought to justice.
