Gone - Anna Brooks Page 0,75
be that.
Okay, okay.
Calm.
I keep my head straight and memorize where she’s taking me. And as far as I can tell, she’s driving toward the city, not out of it. Buildings are a blur, and I can’t tell if it’s from how fast she’s driving or from the unwanted and unshed tears clouding my view.
When she pulls down an alley and into a garage, I realize she’s taking me to her house. Okay. This is good. I’ve been in her house before. The layout is familiar enough, so I know how I can escape.
“Don’t move.”
I don’t have anywhere else to go, dumbass.
“Scream and I’ll end this before it starts.”
The part of me that wants to ask her what this is, is outsmarted by the logical part of my brain telling me to just shut up until I know her game. She presses the barrel to the back of my head and shoves me toward her house. My ankle throbs, but I push on. Why are none of her neighbors outside right now to see this? When she opens the back door, I take note that it’s not even locked.
Gio would be so mad at me right now for allowing her to get me to another location, but I can’t fight her with this stupid cast on like I normally could. She nudges me down to the basement, where I almost hurl at the smell of… mold and rotten food.
There’s a light dangling from the middle of the ceiling. The floor is all concrete but covered in a huge plastic sheet. The dumb bitch has weapons all over the place, too. Tools and canned food, even a pen on the dryer… one with fake ticks in the barrel. Of course. Okay, focus. All I need to do is get her distracted for a second, and I can get out of here. As long as she leaves my hands untied.
“Sit.” She pushes me toward the center of the floor, and I have no choice but to fall back. I purposely make myself go farther than she pushed me because I saw a chunk of rock falling off the wall. “Hands behind your back.”
Perfect, I scoot forward and hide the rock under my butt and then hold my hands the way Gio taught me so I can have room to work the rope free. Once I’m secure, or once she thinks I’m secure, she sits on the second to last step and rests her wrist on her knee, blood trailing down her arm, aiming the gun my way. Brody must have shot her dominant arm.
Four. She got four shots off, I think. The first one that didn’t hit Brody, then she said she hit him with three. But that doesn’t mean shit when I have no clue how many bullets are left in the fucking gun. I figure it’s wise to wait for her to talk, so I sit still and watch her with nervous anticipation.
“He was supposed to be mine, you know?”
“What? Who?”
“Damien.”
Shit. That’s what this is about. Damn, shit, damn, shit.
“I saw him first, then you stole him.”
You can’t steal something that belongs to you. “I didn’t know you wanted him.”
She looks at me with a fixed stare and slowly tilts her head like something I’ve seen in horror movies. And when she screams, I don’t expect it, so my entire body jolts. “He’s mine! He’s been mine. It’s time now. I just need to get you out of the way, you need to disappear. I don’t want him to come home to your dead body at his house because I don’t want any memory of you left in it. So I’m doing this here since you didn’t fucking die yet.” That bitch…
As she begins to raise her arm, I try to distract her with the first and only thing that I can think of. I lie. “You don’t want him.”
“You’re right, I don’t want him. I already have him.”
“No, you don’t.” I swallow and shake my head. “He’s not what you think he is. He’s awful, Jesse.”
Her brows draw together in anger. “Don’t say bad things about him! He’s perfect. I know he is. You said so yourself!”
The gun goes off when she waves it in the air and some plaster falls down on my head. I’m trying to work the rope, but she actually did a really good job with the knots.
“He’s not. I lied to you because I was afraid. I was so scared. You know what it’s like.