Page 6 of Dreadful

I shove my hands into the holes, but as soon as I try to climb, pain shoots up my leg and into my head. It’s so overwhelming I double over and throw up on the sidewalk.

“Please! Boy! Help me!”

Horror slices through me. I thought the noises in that room would be the worst thing I’d ever hear. But nothing compares to my friend begging me to save her life and not being able to do a damn thing about it.

“Boy, plea—”

Her final whimper cuts off.

Blood thunders in my ears, and I can barely hear my aunt shrieking at the dogs to heel. But I already know it’s too late.

The animals whine to finish the job. The gardener gags. MyziaAntonella muffles her scream so none of the fancy, rich people on Beacon Hill find out what’s going on.

It’s the girl’s silence that rings loudest in my pounding head. My hands shake as I touch the brick between us. I’d give anything to hear her silly song, but only the gardener’s whisper drifts through the holes in the wall.

“Mrs. Vincelli, is she…is she dead?”

After a moment, Antonella snaps with anger that I’ve never heard from her before.

“Sì.”

Yes.

My heart breaks.

No.

I shake my head. It can’t be true. A heavy breath shudders from my throat. There’s no way the girl risked herlifehelping me escape.

I didn’t even know her name.

“Leave us,” Antonella orders.

“But Mrs. Vincelli—”

“Now!”

She’s talking to the gardener, but I jolt at the rage in her voice. My ankle rolls, and my vision blurs. It takes all my strength to shuffle backward, away from the girl. As much as I hate to leave, there’s nothing I can do here to help. And if I stay, all this will have been for nothing.

I’m in a daze as I hobble nearly two miles back home. My leg is on fire, but my chest is numb. I don’t even realize I’m home until my mom is blubbering uncontrollably in front of me, crying about how worried sick she was.

My father is “displeased,” but otherwise shows no emotion. The boy that’s taken over my body is screaming at the top of his lungs, demanding to go back for the girl. My father refuses, and when I try to leave on my own, he and I come to blows. It’s a quick fight, one he wins easily with a slap to the side of my head that sends me to my knees, hurting my ankle more than I can bear.

Pain takes over, and I watch everything happen to the boy after that.

Mom forces two of her nightly pills down his throat and rushes him to bed. She fusses over his bloody, ripped-up leg ruining her brand-new sheets, but insists he can’t go to the hospital until all of this has blown over. The cops—but more importantly, my father’s men—can’t find out Claudio beat him in this game. The boy’s broken body will have to wait to be healed “for the good of the Family.”

The boy and I couldn’t care less about the “Family” and its politics, but my mother’s pills make everything foggy.

Claudio calls. My parents’ voices carry through our thin walls. They say everything I never wanted to hear.

The girl is dead. Claudio wants a truce. Whatever his motives were, it doesn’t matter now because my dad agrees to let it all go. Let bygones be bygones. Everything is smoothed over between our families with one phone call while my chest feels like I’ve been slashed up into jagged pieces from the inside out.

As I lay in bed, anger fights with the haze over my thoughts, and the longer I fight the medicine, the more my hatred burns under my skin.

It can’t happen now, and I don’t know when, but as soon as I’m strong and powerful enough, Iwillget revenge for the girl.Everyonewill pay.

That promise hugs me like a blanket while I shiver from my wounds. I hum her song to help me go to sleep. When I finally do, her cries fill my nightmares.