Page 47

She looks away, embarrassed.

“Bianca?”

“Yes!” she whispers a yell. “Damn!”

Telling her not to have sex with her boyfriend is useless. He’s all she really has.

“Take care of Matty,” I tell her, spinning around.

“I will.”

I open the back door, taking a step out, but suddenly, someone is there. I rear back. Hugo’s eyebrows shoot up, surprised, but then a smile curls his lips like his job just got a lot easier.

Shit!

I shove him in the chest, he topples backward, and I run, leading him away from the house.

Yanking up my hood, I tuck my phone inside my clothes and dig in my heels, powering as fast as I can.

Climbing over the chain-link fence, I jump down into the next backyard, and instead of turning right toward the street, I race left, toward the dirt road, behind the houses.

“I’m not going to hurt you!” Hugo yells. “Why do you run from me?”

Bullshit.

I halt in the alleyway, looking left and then right. Axel stands in front of his red Mustang, and I spin around, rushing the other way.

I shouldn’t have come. I could’ve called. What good am I, if I can’t help them?

I take a right, down a small pathway between houses, and leap over the fence, scrambling into the wooded area that borders Weston.

Footfalls pound behind me, and I look back, seeing Hugo on my tail. I whimper, unable to stop the noise from bubbling up my throat.

He lands on my back, taking me down into the tall grass, and I jerk my elbow back into him. He falls off, and I scurry to my feet, but he grabs me and comes up, wrapping his arms around me.

“Shhh…” He sounds like he’s handling a child. “No one is going to hurt you.”

Tears spring to my eyes, and my legs nearly give out. He squeezes me, the wound on my arm aching.

“Killing you doesn’t make him money,” he says. “Thank God, right?”

I growl, thrashing in his hold. “Hugo, no.”

“Shhh.”

He brushes my ear with his mouth, and I shake, my gaze slowly rising upward. I see Orion in my head, pinpointing in the sky where the top left corner star of the constellation might appear when it becomes visible every winter.

Betelgeuse. One of the brightest stars in the constellation. I picture it looking back at me. Do you see me?

“Just let her go, man,” Nicholas shouts.

He never had the stomach for this.

But Hugo just tsks. “We all serve our purpose.” And then in my ear, “This is the only way. You know that.”

Then he grips my jaw, twists my face around, and covers my mouth with his. I cry out.

“Hugo!” Nicholas growls.

See me.

I bite down, tasting his blood, and he screams. So do I. I drop like dead weight, feeling his hold loosen, and I run. As fast as I can. Past the tree line and into the darkness of the woods. I run and run, slipping into a pool of mud, but before I can get out, they’re nearly on me. I dip down, my body nearly covered in the sludge, and I go still, trying to make like a stone.

“Bianca is growing up nice and pretty,” Hugo yells.

I shake.

“I’ll get my money back on your ass or hers.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, my stomach roiling.

“I don’t want to do that,” he says, looking around the trees and into the distance, past me. “But he will if he has to.”

Hugo is a piece of shit, but I don’t fear him, not like Reeves. Hugo would coerce me, but he’d never force me. And he knows Bianca is all Matty has right now.

He doesn’t want that.

“The clock is ticking,” he calls out. “Come to your senses.”

A moment later, footsteps retreat, and they leave.

I crawl out of the little pool, mud spilling from my clothes as the rain kicks up again. I tip my head back, but I don’t look. I just let the water wash away the dirt.

If you don’t grow, you die.

I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be this anymore.

I stay there a while, making sure they’re gone as I try to let the despair and worry work their way through me—out of me—so I can get my head clear. So, I can figure out what I need to do.

After a while, I walk slowly, staying on side streets and between houses, checking my phone and seeing it’s dead. Probably from the water.

I walk and walk forever, down a dark country road that slowly starts to brighten with streetlights as the sun sets, and I don’t know where I’m going, just away.

At least it seems he doesn’t know about the camera at Green Street.

Thoughts race through my head—solutions that won’t work and people who can help me but won’t. Is this what my mother thought once upon a time? Where the pressure got too hard and the options too little, and she just decided that was it? All she’d ever be.