Page 12 of Blood Ties

Riley

T ime slips past without me noticing. There is nothing but darkness, the faint creak of the floorboards above my head, and my shallow breathing. But gradually, the trembling in my body eases and the numbness fades.

What comes next is much worse.

Awareness starts in my body: the pain in my cut-up bare feet, the ache in my back from being tackled to the ground by Kai, the dried blood coating my arms and torso, the dirt under my cracked fingernails.

I am bruised and scraped and battered. But I almost relish the physical pain, because it is a distraction from the weight of my grief.

I feel it like a gaping hole in my stomach, a loss that makes me hunch over in my chains and shudder and gasp for air. Felix, Caleb, May. They’re all gone. Gone forever. I fist my hands in my lap and let out a low cry that echoes off of the cement walls.

“I’m sorry,” I choke out, shutting my eyes and rocking back and forth. I’m sorry that I couldn’t save you. I’m sorry that I ran. I’m sorry that I’m alive and you’re not.

My friends are dead.

I replay the night, over and over, agonizing over my mistakes. If I had turned back quicker, could I have escaped with Felix? If I had acted sooner in the kitchen, could I have prevented Caleb from being killed? If I had been with May, could I have saved her?

If I hadn’t been in Knox’s room this morning— if I hadn’t spent last night in his bed— would I have died with them?

That would be better than this.

But even as I torture myself with my thoughts, I know it’s pointless. There is no way to change the past. My reality is this: May died.

Her limp body falling to the floor —

Caleb died.

Bone snapping under the blunt force of the gun —

Felix died.

He died to slow them down so I could run he died to save me and I failed him —

And I am here. Alive. Chained up in the basement of a house full of monsters.

The exhaustion must overtake me, because all of a sudden I’m jerking awake to the creak of the door opening. For a moment there’s light at the top of the stairs, and a tall figure silhouetted against it. Then the door shuts, and footsteps descend toward me.

I press myself back against the wall, heart pounding in my ears, biting back a whimper.

A moment ago I thought there was nothing worse than living in this hell, but the breath shuddering in my lungs and the wild drumbeat of my heart tell me that’s not true.

I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die —

A light clicks on, illuminating the dark figure in the room with me.

Kai. His face is bruised and shadowed by exhaustion.

Probably from helping murder my friends.

My eyes dart from his face to his hands, searching for a weapon, but instead he holds a bottle of water and a sandwich wrapped in a napkin.

I swallow hard. I’m suddenly aware of how parched my mouth is, how empty my stomach. But terror keeps me hunched against the wall, my shoulders braced and my head lowered. I remember Knox’s words — oh, you want to keep her — and revulsion swirls in my stomach and claws up the back of my throat.

Kai drops to a crouch in front of me. He sets the wrapped sandwich down and uncaps the water. He holds it out to me, but I flinch away.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says.

I bark out a high, hysterical sound that is not quite a laugh. “You handcuffed me in your basement,” I say, voice so raw and hoarse I don’t recognize myself.

He lowers his eyes to the floor. “It was that, or...”

“Or what?” I whisper. “Or slaughter me like my friends?”

“I didn’t kill anyone.”

I choke out another unhinged sound — half laugh, half sob.

“No, you just watched it happen,” I say.

“You didn’t do a goddamn thing to stop it.

Even last night, when Knox brought us all here—” My lower lip wobbles, but I clamp down on it with my teeth, willing myself not to cry in front of him.

“You knew what was going to happen, didn’t you?

You knew and you said nothing.” And I kissed him.

I invited him to come to L.A. with us. What a goddamn idiot I was.

“How many people have you watched die here?”

There’s shame written all over Kai’s face, but it only makes me angrier. He let this happen.

“I told you to run,” he says.

“Do you think that makes it better? Do you think you’re any less of a monster than they are?

” He flinches, and I relish the ability to get under his skin.

To cause him a fraction of the pain that he’s caused me.

“You should have killed me with my friends,” I whisper, and turn away from him, shutting my eyes.

After another couple of moments, he stands and walk back up the stairs. I curl against the wall, refusing to even look at the food and water he left for me.

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