Girls with Sharp Sticks (Girls with Sharp Sticks, #1)(99)

She was exactly where she was supposed to be.

I turn to Dr. Groger as he is using the patch kit on himself to stop the bleeding from his shoulders.

“Now the others,” I say to him. “Bring back the others.”

“Sorry, Philomena,” he says. “There are no others. Valentine’s chip has been destroyed, and the rest of the girls have been incinerated,” he replies easily. “I told you they rot. Once the brain is removed, we dispose of them. Valentine will have to be incinerated soon.”

His words are a punch to the gut. “Why kill them at all?” I ask. “Why be so cruel? You could have just let them live their lives.”

He takes a few paces toward me, and behind him, Annalise gets down from the table, trying to steady herself.

“Lives?” the doctor repeats. “What lives? You’re a machine. You’re . . . a bunch of organs connected to electricity. You have no lives that we don’t give you. You’re artificial girls. What could be more useless?”

He watches me with hatred in his eyes—hating that we’re the ones controlling his behavior, the way he controlled ours for so long. To him, the worst thing in the world would be to live at our mercy. He’s afraid we’ll subjugate him to just that.

“You’re frightened of us,” I say, realizing it. All of these men—their cruelty, their restrictions—all they had was control over us. Without that, they had nothing. We were their greatest possession. Us, free of them now, terrifies him. But now . . . we terrify them.

“Tell them, Doctor,” Leandra says, studying the letter opener still in her hand. “Tell them what you do with the girls you’re afraid of. What you do to them.”

Annalise stares at the doctor, her mismatched eyes narrowed. Marcella watches from across the room with Brynn, as Sydney comes to stand next to me. Jackson waits near the door, his lips parted but saying nothing.

Leandra smiles, and nudges the doctor in the shoulder with the sharp end of her blade. “Tell them,” she whispers.

The doctor, furious, bares his teeth at her. “I decommission defiant girls like you,” he growls at her. “And over the years, I’ve ended better than you, Leandra. Smarter. Prettier.”

“Ouch, stop, you’re hurting my feelings,” she says in a monotone. She begins pacing, walking around the doctor in circles, staring down at his bald head when she passes behind him.

“This was for nothing,” he says to her. “They won’t get far.”

“Farther than you,” she shoots back. But the doctor smiles ruefully.

“You’ll see,” he says.

“How many?” I ask, interrupting their discussion. “How many girls have you destroyed?” Dr. Groger looks at me. “Too many to count,” he says bitterly. “And believe me, I’ve asked Petrov for your fucking head?!” He screams it, making me flinch at the venom in his words. The hatred. “But your investors must have paid extra, Philomena,” he continues, spit running down his chin. “And it’s too bad,” he says. “I would have ruined you and then burned you up. I would have enjoyed—”

In a swift movement, Leandra grabs the metal box of patch kits from the desk and slams it into the side of Dr. Groger’s head with a thick thud, knocking him to the floor.

My eyes widen, but I don’t move right away, listening to the gurgle coming from his body—a rattle in his lungs—until the room goes silent. Leandra holds the bloody metal box in her right hand, testing its weight. The letter opener is still clutched in her left. When she notices me, she shrugs and sets the box aside.

“Trust me when I tell you I had no choice,” she says calmly. “We all would have been dead by morning.”

It occurs to me that Leandra knew she was going to kill the doctor from the second she walked in tonight. From the second she exposed her true feelings. Her true thoughts. She couldn’t leave him with that secret—with our secret.

Leandra comes to stand over Dr. Groger, her shoes on either side of his head. “Huh,” she says. “Seems you were right, Sydney. Turns out he can’t live without his brain either.”

Sydney turns away, disgusted. But I stare at his body, his words haunting me. Knowing how close I was to his unimaginable abuse. Inflicted pain. And then there’s the realization that he’d probably done it before. How many times?

“How many times?” I repeat out loud. The doctor’s face is turned so that I can see him. See his vacant eyes. The steady flow of blood pouring from a dent in the side of his head.

“How many times?” I ask. “How many girls?”

But Dr. Groger isn’t going to answer.

I shake my head, the vision of him hurting us playing in my mind. Him smiling as he does it. Handing us a lollipop when it was over.

And he would have kept doing it. Girl after girl. Because the men here considered us soulless, and by devaluing our existence, it allowed them to act out their sickest fantasies.

Every moment that the doctor was alive was a threat to my survival. An incomplete justice to the girls he’s hurt. I’m not sorry that he’s dead. I’m not sorry.

But I don’t want to become a murderer.

I crouch down, palm on the floor to steady myself as heavy sobs overtake me. The weight of what has been done to us destroys me, just as he intended.