Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake #5) - Rachel Caine Page 0,124
him ever again. “That wasn’t justice. That was cruelty. Do you even know the difference?”
No answer. I leave the body of a child-killer, a murderer—in the end, just a desperate, sad, frightened woman—and turn the doorknob. Maybe I’ll die when I walk out. Maybe I won’t.
I can’t really bring myself to care.
He’s laid bare horrors to me: The horror of a mother killing her children for personal gain. The horror of her own death. The horror of how relentlessly hollow and easy it is to say she deserved it. Maybe someone else can make that decision. I can’t.
There’s a hallway beyond. No traps. Nothing waiting.
Above me, an intercom engages, and I look up at the black metal screen. “We played a game in the car,” he says. “After she killed her children. It’s called Would You Rather, do you know it?”
“No.”
“It starts out small. Would you rather have a nickel or a dime? Would you rather have a salad or an ice cream? But every question has to get bigger. So I asked, at the end, would you rather get shot in the head and die, or lose all your arms and legs and stay alive? And this is what she chose, Gwen. I didn’t choose it. She did.”
I swallow a sick, horrible surge of bile. “It was a game.”
“Not really. There’s a pattern. Bad people will choose greed and personal gratification. If you do it right, when you ask them, Would you rather push a button and kill someone else, or say no and lose a million dollars, guess what they choose? People are things they sacrifice to their needs. I wasn’t surprised at how Sheryl chose. She was only surprised I was serious.”
It’s the logic of a child. The decision tree of a machine. I feel ill, hot, disconnected. I have to brace myself against the wall. The smell of blood and rot suddenly overwhelms me, and I nearly fall. I can’t do this. I can’t.
“There are more rooms if you want to see the choices they made,” he says. “Every one of them was a murderer, not just once but many times over. I thought you were one of them. But it’s all right, Gina. You surprised me. No one else ever has. It took real courage to do that. Or real sadism. I’m not really sure which you showed me.”
“I’m going to find you,” I tell him. “And you should be afraid of that.”
He says, “I haven’t been afraid since that day.”
I don’t ask which one. I know. At seventeen years old—the same age as my daughter, my God—he stopped being a person and started inhabiting a body on the day his sister died. This has been a long time coming.
“Maybe you will be,” I say. “Before this is done.”
“I hope so,” he says. He sounds wistful. “I really do.”
“Where’s Kez?” He doesn’t answer. I turn in a circle in the hallway, and I shout it with all the rage boiling inside me. “Where’s Kez?”
He doesn’t answer.
I will have to look.
24
KEZIA
When the trap triggers, I’m a step behind Gwen, and it doesn’t help. I go down like a sack of sand, stunned by the strobes and the sound, and while I’m completely bashed into shock, I feel someone zip-tying my hands and ankles. A gag goes over my mouth. I try to get myself together, to struggle. I can’t. I curl into a whimpering ball, eyes squeezed shut and still burning from the lights that are beating into me, the sound so heavy it’s crushing me. I think of my child, begging him, her, the delicate life that’s just a fragile collection of cells right now, to fight. To live.
I don’t know how long that goes on. I only know that it’s an overwhelming relief when I feel my body moving away from the assault of noise and lights, and then it’s suddenly, intensely gone. Like someone flipped a switch.
Because someone did.
I’m terrified for my child. I don’t know if the baby’s okay. You have to believe, I tell myself. And you have to survive.
I can’t see, but I feel the changes. From smooth concrete to sudden warmth. Sun on my skin, humidity close. Fresh sea air, and the reek of the cannery subsides. Where’s Gwen? I try to blink away the glare, but all I can see are confusing, fragmented ghosts. My ears are ringing, and I can’t tell if I’m actually hearing anything or just imagining it.