Gun Shy(66)

Ray has disappeared — he’s just gone —and Damon is standing beside the table, a gun in one hand, complete with a silencer screwed onto the barrel. No wonder the noise wasn’t louder. But could Leo have heard it from his place? I doubt it. Damon looms over me, the knife suddenly in his hand, brandishing it above my face.

I scream. I’m covered in wet stuff — in what’s left of Ray — and now Damon is going to stab me to death?

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he hisses, taking the knife and freeing my wrists. They’re still bound together, but no longer attached to the length of rope that runs under the table and secures my ankles. The rope tears loose under the blade and I instinctively curl my arms back down and around myself, the pain in my shoulders indescribable. It’s as if someone has cut off my arms with a rusty butter knife and then stapled them back on.

Damon circles around to the end of the table and frees my ankles as well; I draw my knees to my chest, slipping on the blood and beer coating the table, and then I’m falling, landing hard on my side on something wet.

I’m on the floor, my arms wrapped around my knees, and I’m resting on warm, bare flesh. I turn my head to the side and scream into my gag, feeling my eyes practically bug out of my head at the sight of Ray’s half-missing skull. There is blood everywhere. I’m laying in it, it’s splattered against the side of my face, all over my arms, I’m laying in Ray’s blood and brains.

I’m laying in what’s left of Ray.

Damon scoops his arms under my shoulders and gets me to a sitting position. “You gonna be quiet?” he asks.

I nod feverishly, and he sticks his fingers into my mouth, scooping out the cloth jammed in my mouth. As soon as my mouth is free, I lean over and throw up. My hair is loose and I’m pretty sure I get vomit in it, but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything.

On hands and heels, I crawl away from Ray, backward, never letting him out of my sight lest he should spring back to life and murder me. I feel hands behind me, yanking me up on shaking knees, and the soft knick sound of Damon cutting my wrists free.

My back is against his chest, and I sag into him as he holds me off the floor. My head lolls back against his shoulder, and I can’t find it in me to try and run, even though he’s probably going to shoot me now, even though he’s a murderer. I must be in shock, I think to myself. I’m frozen, and not just from the bitter cold. I can’t get my limbs to work. Can’t get my brain to kick into gear and tell me what to do next. Can’t stop looking at Ray, at the top of his skull, the way it just smashed apart like a pi?ata full of watermelon slices.

“I have one question,” Damon murmurs, his mouth so close to my ear I can feel the graze of his teeth on my earlobe. “Was he telling the truth about Leo?”

My silence is enough of an answer for him.

“Oh, Cassie,” Damon says sadly. “I try so hard to make you happy. And you are such a disappointment to me.”

His gentle hands turn hard. One stays on my arm, his fingers like a vise. The other hand threads into my messy hair, fists a bunch of bloody strands, and rips me to my feet.

“Wh-what are you doing!?” I shriek, trying to get his hand away from my scalp. It feels like he’s going to pull my skin off right down to the bone, peel off my mask and leave me just a faceless skull.

My entire body starts to shake violently. Because I thought this was over. I thought I was safe. But I’m not safe, am I? I’ve traded one monster for another. There’s a reason they pretended to be brothers. Somebody took Damon all those years ago, put him in their car and drove away, and something so bad happened that Damon never went home. Never went to the police and told them he’d survived. Survived what? What happened to that ten-year-old boy to turn him into this? What was so bad that he’d rather have a gravesite for himself instead of admitting that he lived?

He drags me to the upstairs bathroom by my hair. It hurts more than you’d think, being dragged by your hair. I’m still covered in pieces of Ray, blood and skull and sticky from having taken a face full of Pabst more than once. A bright red line paints my forced ascent up the stairs, onto stark white tiles, and into the small shower stall where Damon shoves me. I land awkwardly, pain shooting through my knees and up my body. It can always get worse, I remind myself, as freezing cold water erupts from the showered and douses me. So cold. So, so cold. It’s winter — a few degrees cooler and the pipes would freeze over in our house.

I try to scream, but barely a whisper comes out. I’m so cold. So stunned. So weak. I can barely make a sound. I gasp as Damon reaches in and shoves my head under the steady stream of ice cold water, panting as I watch Ray’s blood wash off me and circle around the drain.

“Look at me,” Damon snaps.

I look at him.

Everything is pale in here; white tiles, white ceiling, white towels. Even the whites of Damon’s eyes. But it’s the irises that fix me to the shower floor, the same way a pin might fix a dead butterfly inside a glass case. So blue. Blue used to be my favorite color. That was before. Now, I hate the color. Now I want to forsake the sky, the ocean, because they remind me of Damon King. Daniel Collins, I correct myself. His real name is Daniel Collins.

“I should take you outside and hose you down in the snow like a fucking animal,” Damon breathes. “That’s all you are. A fucking animal.”