Letting her go meant losing again. Letting her go meant admitting that Quest had won, that Mehar had won, that the life I wanted was never coming back and the woman who had it didn’t even know she’d stolen it from me.
My brother was on the phone with blood on his face and fear in his voice, and he had never once in thirty-six years asked me for anything except this.
And I couldn’t give it to him.
“I’m sorry, Khi.”
“Janelle. Don’t do this.”
“I love you. Tell Zeph I love him too.”
“Janelle!”
I hung up. He called back immediately. I let it ring. He called again. I let that one ring too. If my brother wanted to find me bad enough, he could track my phone. He had the resources. He had the connections. And if things went sideways tonight, I wanted him to be able to.
I pulled back onto the road heading east. Toward the warehouse. Toward Mehar and Thad and whatever was waiting for me when I got there.
The gas light was still on. I kept driving.
8
Mehar
My arms were dead. I couldn’t feel anything from the shoulders up except a dull, pulsing ache that had settled into my joints and made a permanent home there. I didn’t know how long I’d been hanging. Hours. Maybe more. The fluorescent light was still buzzing. The warehouse was still dark. And I was still here, which meant I was still alive, which meant I hadn’t quit yet.
I shifted my weight to the left and swung. Slight, controlled, testing. I’d been doing this since I woke up. Small movements that Thad couldn’t see from his angle, micro-adjustments that looked like a woman struggling to get comfortable but were actually a woman working a problem. Because I’d felt it about thirty minutes ago. A give. Barely anything. A creak in the beam above me that was different from the other creaks, softer, with a splintering sound underneath it that told me the wood up there was old and tired and didn’t sign up for this either.
I swung again. Harder this time. The chain rattled and the beam groaned and I felt it shift a quarter inch. Maybe less. But it moved. Something up there was giving and I was going to help it along until it gave all the way.
Thad had fallen asleep. His chin was on his chest and his breathing was shallow and ragged and he’d finally stopped running his mouth about twenty minutes ago when his body decided that being awake took more energy than he had left. Good. I didn’t need an audience for this.
I pulled my knees up toward my chest, let my full body weight hang, and swung hard. The beam cracked. Loud, sharp, a sound like a bone snapping, and then I was falling. The chain came with me, the beam gave way in a shower of dust and rotted wood, and I hit the concrete on my side so hard the air left my lungs and my vision whited out for a second.
I lay there gasping. Everything hurt. My shoulders felt like they’d been pulled from the sockets and put back wrong. My wrists were raw and bleeding and still bound, the metal cuffs connected by the heavy chain that was now pooled on the concrete around me like a dead snake. But I was on the ground. My feet were flat on the floor. And that changed everything.
Thad’s head snapped up at the crash. His eyes went wide when he saw me on the floor instead of hanging from the ceiling, and I watched the color drain from his face in real time.
“No. No no no. Mehar, listen to me?—”
I was already up. My legs were shaking but they held. I gripped the chain between my bound hands and wrapped it once around my right fist. It was heavy. Industrial. Cargo chain, meant for securing equipment and towing machinery. It was going to do just fine.
“Please.” He was trying to wheel himself backward, but his arms were too weak and the chair barely moved. “Please, I didn’t do anything. She brought me here. I didn’t have a choice. Mehar, I got kids. I got two kids. Please don’t do this.”
I stood in front of him and looked at this man who had killed my sister. Who had crawled into my life pretending to be something worth loving and used me while Kacey was athome pregnant. Who had destroyed my family before I ever destroyed his body. He was sitting in a wheelchair with tears running down his hollow cheeks and snot on his lip invoking his children the same way men always invoke their children when the consequences finally arrive.
I thought about Zahara. My big sister. The one who braided my hair when our mothers were too tired or too beaten to do it. The one who left our father’s house first and made it possible for the rest of us to imagine leaving. She was dead because of this man. And I’d kept him alive in a cage for months because I wasn’t ready to let him go, because holding him gave me something I could control when everything else was spinning. But I didn’t need that anymore. The cage was gone. The control was gone. All that was left was the math, and the math had been settled since the day Zahara stopped breathing.
“My sister didn’t get to beg,” I said.
The first swing caught him across the temple and knocked him sideways out of the wheelchair. He hit the concrete and the chair toppled over on top of him and he was screaming now, high and thin and broken, and I swung again. The chain connected with his ribs and I heard something crack. I swung again. His arm. Again. His shoulder. He curled into himself on the floor, trying to cover his head with hands that couldn’t grip anything, and I kept swinging because every impact pulled something out of me that had been lodged there for years and the only way to get it out was through the chain and into his body.
By the fifth swing he’d stopped screaming. By the seventh he’d stopped moving. I stood over him breathing hard with the chain hanging from my bound hands and blood on the concrete and blood on my clothes and blood on my face and I felt nothing. No satisfaction. No guilt. No relief. Just the quiet that comesafter you finish something you should have finished a long time ago.
I dropped the chain. My hands were trembling. My whole body was trembling. But my head was clear and my legs were working and I needed to move because Janelle was coming back.
The warehouse had one door. I pressed myself flat against the wall beside it, on the hinge side where the door would swing open and block me from view. I picked the chain back up because it was the only weapon I had and it had already proven effective tonight. Then I waited. My breathing was loud in my own ears so I slowed it down the way I’d learned. Shallow and steady. My heart was slamming but my hands were still. I’d done this before. Hidden and waited and struck first. It was my oldest skill.
I don’t know how long I stood there. Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Long enough for the adrenaline to start fading and the pain in my shoulders to start screaming again and the smell of the warehouse to settle back into my nose, motor oil and mildew and now something else underneath it. Something iron and wet. Thad’s blood pooling on the concrete, mixing with the dust.
