Page 120 of Intrepid

Lifting the heavy duvet to catch the tears in the corner of my eye, I nodded.

“No. Never.” The doubtlessness in her voice hit my heart like a tack-hammer, adding another crack to the many I’d suffered over the weeks.

I didn’t know how many blows the heart could withstand before it crumbled. How many wounds it would bear before it gave out. I didn’t even know how to describe my pain. Anger? Sadness? If what I felt was love, it was a strange duality. The only thing that could simultaneously save and hurt me at the same time.

The bed dipped, but I didn’t bother to turn, knowing she’d sat down beside me, She rested her head on my folded legs. “But I promise you, it gets easier.” For the next ten, or so, minutes, she lay there beside me, neither of us saying a word, until she pushed up from the bed, kissed my cheek, and left.

I shifted my gaze to the easel at the other end of my room, from where Ty’s eyes stared back at me in the sketch I’d drawn of him from my own memory.

Only one thought had lingered inside my head for the last half hour.

I didn’t want it to get easier.

39

Ty

One month later …

Back when I’d watched Pinocchio as a child, I remembered feeling a gut-wrenching sadness for the kids that were never saved from Pleasure Island in the end. Yeah, Pinocchio got out, went on to become a real boy, and all that shit, but the hundreds of other kids who were captured, beaten, and made slaves—what happened to them?

Were they killed? Abused and let go?

Did Pinocchio tell someone, who set them all free?

I’d wanted to believe the latter, but I knew better. Some kids just didn’t make it out okay.

Eli stared back from a chair, set across from where I sat sprawled on a cum-stained blanket of the Motel Six, in Nowheresville Indiana. My home for the last two months. I’d wasted the hours drinking too much liquor, watching too much porn, and had reached the destructive phase, in my efforts to get Sera out of my system. I’d have taken a fucking cocaine detox over the shit my body had gone through in her absence. The stabbing pain in my heart and stomach. The insomnia. The constant ache that never seemed to go away, no matter how much liquor I drank to numb it.

I’d hit rock bottom, and with the murder investigations still going, I couldn’t afford to slip.

The gun lay in my lap, cold steel that’d happily put an end to it all.

I kicked back another swig of liquor, letting the burn and the buzz talk me into it. Scrolling through pictures of Sera only served to solidify my plans, as I let the pain move through me like a bitter poison threatening its equally bitter end. I tossed the phone aside and swapped it for the gun, tucking my head into my bent knees. My body shook with the fury that’d become a permanent layer beneath my skin. Sweat beaded across my flesh, and in a moment of courage, I tilted my head back, propped the gun beneath my chin.

“This is how it ends for us,” I said to Eli, who continued to watch me in silence. “This is what happens to the ones who aren’t saved, right?”

Breath held, I closed my eyes and released the safety.

Something brushed across my skin, and pressure against my hand lowered the gun from my face. I opened my eyes to see Eli standing alongside the bed. Before I could make sense of anything, he wrapped his arms around me.

For a moment, he wasn’t the ghost that haunted me, or the guilt that consumed me.

He was just a kid. A kid who’d died too young at the hands of too much cruelty.

I held onto him, burying my head in the crook of his cold neck. “I’m sorry, Eli. I’m sorry I left you. And that I kept silent for so long. You were just a kid.” In a drunken sob, I clutched him tighter, wishing more than anything that he’d say something back to me. “I’m sorry I tried to forget you.”

We sat like that for a while, until I stopped crying, and the gun fell out of my grasp onto the bed.

When I opened my eyes, I lifted my head from my knees, still hugging them. A chill still lingered in my bones, along with the faint scent of roses.

But Eli was gone.

* * *

Night had a way of welcoming debauchery, like an old friend calling me out to play. Cloaked in obscurity, I watched the girl from the shadows, the way she danced alone, set off from the crowd, a young seal separated from its herd while the sharks circled, waiting. Her long blonde hair, curled at the ends and interrupted with blue streaks, whipped about her head in a tangled mess that made my palms itch.

To my right, across the room, a guy decked out in a button-down two sizes too small and jeans tapered down to his skinny ankles watched her, too. Beer bottle to his lips, he kept his eyes glued to her, no doubt imagining the kind of damage a killer body like that could do. Full breasts that filled her snug top, a narrow waist that widened to small, but curvy, hips hidden in the black leather pants she wore like a tattoo.