The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions #1)(38)

I keep my voice even. “Was it.”

“He disappeared before he died.”

How does she know? I want to ask, but I don’t want to give anything away. “Why do you think that?”

“Are you saying it’s not true?” she asks. “That he didn’t disappear and then commit suicide—which happens to be how our friends are dying? How Sam died, at his funeral?”

A finger of ice trails my spine.

“What do you think Mara has to do with it?” I ask, but I’m feeling uneasier by the second, and my mind rebels against Stella’s words, pressing on me to leave. “Look, whatever happened between you and Mara, you’re clearly not over it, but I couldn’t care less, so if that’s all there is, I’ll just be going—”

“Whatever happened between me and Mara?” She laughs without humour. “God, you really don’t know her at all.”

“Oh, but you do. Because you were so close?”

“Because I was there. When she murdered Dr. Kells—”

“And what’s his name, right? Sorry, if you’re trying to shock me, you’re going to have to try harder.”

“Do you know what Mara did to him?”

“Killed him,” I say plainly. “Freed you, as I understand it.”

Another icy smile. “Yeah. She killed him. But not before cutting out his eye. While he was still alive.”

Got me there. I try not to show it, not to betray that her words cut me off midbreath.

“And she didn’t just murder Dr. Kells. She butchered her.”

“All of you were prisoners, test subjects. Mara got you out of there.”

“She did, but not before locking herself in a room with Kells and cutting her into a thousand pieces.”

“A bit dramatic—”

“With a scalpel. That she still has.”

That’s . . . indisputably disturbing.

She throws me a knowing look. “Oh, she left that part out?”

“Are you actually saying that you think Mara’s responsible for people she doesn’t even know committing suicide?”

Stella says nothing.

“What’ve you told Leo about her? Your friends?”

She lets out a puff of laughter. “That’s what you’re worried about? What I’ve told them about her?”

I’m feeling ill, light-headed, and not remotely about to admit that Stella is right about anything, any of this. Mara had no reason to want strangers dead—she wanted to find out about Sam as much, if not more, than I did. I stop playing defence, start playing offence.

“If Mara hadn’t killed Kells, and Wayne, you’d probably still be there, or dead. And,” I add, as Stella opens her mouth to speak, “despite all this, you still escaped with her and Jamie. And stayed with them for quite a while.

“I did stay. Until I couldn’t anymore.”

I already know I don’t want to hear why. “You were fucked with, abused, tortured. Whatever any of you did or didn’t after, you’re not responsible for it.”

She turns on me then, the force of her almost knocks me back. “We’re responsible for everything we do. We always have a choice.”

My words, once.

“And Mara chose wrong. Every time. There was this trucker—”

“Stop.”

“A trucker picked us up. I had to go to the bathroom, so we stopped and got out and Mara came into the bathroom and I left and she came out covered—soaked—in blood and he was dead.”

And? “That’s not all of it, is it though?”

She pauses. Then, “What?”

“Come on. You don’t expect me to believe she just killed someone for using the bathroom.”

I hear, see, the blood rush to her cheeks. “He tried to—he was waiting for me.”

There it is. “In the women’s bathroom. At the rest stop.”

Silence expands like a bubble around her.

“He raped you?” I ask.

A small shake of Stella’s head, and I know. I wasn’t there to witness it, but I know.

Mara’s been through—hell. It’s the only way to describe it, how this all started.

The boy, if he can be called that, barely human as he was, started out as her boyfriend before he became her tormentor. A night out with him and her friends had ended up with her trapped in an abandoned insane asylum, after he tried to force her, nearly raped her himself—that’s how her ability first manifested. That’s how the woman who raised him, a doctor bought and paid for by my father, forced it out of her. Mara thought she’d killed him and her friends that night, but he made it clear to her—and only her—that he was still alive, tormenting her with his existence, and no one believed her but me. I was there for that bit. Every second he lived tortured her. He took her freedom and crushed it, and then Kells did the same. Mara was violated, in every way, by people she was supposed to trust—her boyfriend. Her doctor. And she was committed for it—not even her family believed her, the people she trusted more than anyone in the world.

Her parents don’t know. They thought they were helping, genuinely, and her mother would fall on her sword if she knew the truth. Mara knows that. She knows it’s not their fault. And yet.