Lawless (King #3)(29)

“Fuck you! Fuck you! I hate you! You can’t f*cking do this to me! You can’t! I won’t f*cking let you!” she raged. I didn’t know what to do, but I did know if she kept up her thrashing against the wall she was going to f*cking hurt herself. I knelt down on the mattress and picked her up into my arms, crushing her to my chest, but she didn’t stop. She slammed her closed fists against the sides of my face, my chest, anything she could make contact with again and again. She clawed her nails into my skin, raking them across my shoulder blades.

“Stop!” I growled, holding her arms down at her side. “Wake the f*ck up!”

“Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck this!” she screamed, still wailing away on me, her little fists feeling more like a vibration against my chest than a beating.

“Ti, it’s me, wake the f*ck up!” I said even louder. “Goddamnit, girl you’re going to f*cking hurt yourself. Wake the f*cking f*ck up!”

She stilled, but I continued to hold onto her. It took several minutes but I felt the moment the fight left her body as she sagged against me. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t said a word in so long I’d thought she might have fallen asleep until she spoke against my skin, her breath brushing over my nipple. “I killed my mom.”

“I know,” I said, unsure of what else I was supposed to say. “Come with me,” I said and for once she actually listened, sliding off the bed and following me outside into the night. I walked over to the bonfire, the very place where Eli and his men laughed as they tortured me. I was going to take her down to the dock but decided against it, because if she pissed me off again I didn’t know if I’d be able to resist carrying out my earlier threat and tossing her ass into the bay. For at least a little while the shitty flashbacks that followed me around like a possessed puppy dog nipping at the heels of my memory would have to take a backseat to the girl with the pink hair.

“Sit,” I ordered, pointing to a white plastic lawn chair. Thia sat and watched me as I lit the end of a small piece of straw. When it glowed brightly I gently set it on the inside edge of the fire pit and set two small cut logs on top of it.

“Why the fire?” she asked.

“The fire is for a little light and…” Thia smacked her arm, and when she pulled her hand away she revealed the crushed up body of a big mosquito.

“And a little keeping the blood suckers away.” She wiped the bug off her arm as the smoke started to billow into the sky from the pit. “That should take care of it.”

I sat on the edge of the brick bonfire, facing Thia in her chair. She pulled her legs up into the chair and under her little white tank top, stretching the material over her knees, killing any chance I had of staring at her tits.

I packed the little one-hitter and grabbed my lighter. “Watch,” I said, as I set the weed aglow, keeping my thumb over the hole on the side until it was time to inhale all the smoke I’d just created. I exhaled and held the lighter and bowl out to her. “It’s not blow, but it will take the edge off.”

Thia turned the lighter over in her hand and examined the bowl like it was an artifact from a museum, running her fingers over the smooth blue glass. She attempted to light it but dropped the lighter when the only thing she managed to light was her fingertips. “Here,” I said, picking up the lighter from the grass I held the flame over the bowl as she did what I’d showed her, taking her thumb off the hole and taking a shallow drag, releasing the smoke on a cough.

“I didn’t kill my dad though,” she said when her coughing subsided. “My mom did. I came home and she was sitting there in my brother’s old room. She had my dad’s pistol on her lap,” she said, continuing her confession.

As much as I thought Thia could have been working for Chop it never occurred to me that she maliciously killed her parents, but I stilled at the mention of a brother, wondering if she was about to tell me there was a third body out there somewhere, but she filled in the blanks before I could draw my own conclusions. “My brother died when we were kids. We weren’t that far apart in age. We were playing on the porch. There was always spiders out there. Groves give off a lot of moisture and spiders love a good wet heat and a little nook or crevice to hide in. The porch had all that. We saw a spider climb into my dad’s work boot by the door, I was going to stomp on it, but my brother wanted to check it out. He reached into my father’s boot…” She trailed off. “They took him to the hospital but it was too late. Brown widow. Not always fatal in adults, but in kids…”

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said, not wanting to send her back into a state of shock that her story might trigger. “I know what it’s like to not want to relive the horrible shit over and over again.”

Thia continued anyway. Looking up at the smoke from the fire as she spoke. “My mom started to slip away. Growing more distant every day. Most days went by and she didn’t even talk to me. Business started to go to shit. They were always fighting. Then one night I came home and,” she sniffled, “there was no more fighting.

“My dad was already dead. I made a run for it, but I tripped. She wanted to send us all to the same place. Said we were all going to be together. I convinced her that we should go at the same time. I switched guns with her, giving her one I knew always coughed on the first pull. She was so determined. There was no arguing, no getting out. I could have shot her in the arm, in the leg, but I couldn’t be guaranteed she’d drop the gun, or that she’d stop firing. The look of determination in her eyes told me that shot or not she’d keep on coming. I couldn’t let that happen. I thought about my dad. About him always telling me to be his strong girl. So I did what I had to do to be his strong girl, and I aimed at her chest and I fired.