gets out a garbage bag. I keep my back to him, trying my hardest to ignore him as I dig scoop after scoop. Even after my arms burn, I keep digging because I just want this night to end. I’m not strong enough to remove my nightmare, so I only have one choice and that’s to appease my nightmare.
After a while, Father comes over and grabs the shovel from me and digs some himself. Even though my arms appreciate the break, I don’t know what to do with it. I feel like I need to be doing something to keep from feeling this way, so the moment Father hesitates, I grab the shovel again and start digging.
“That’s enough,” he says when I’m at the point where my arms ache and my hands burn. I quickly climb out of the hole and see him drop her into it. I drop the shovel and rush away before leaning against a tree, needing it to support me. I feel sick as I sink to my knees.
“Dammit, Killian, stop being so fucking weak,” he snaps. “Get over here.”
I shake my head.
“Killian, now.”
I push myself to my feet and slowly walk over to him, glad when I see that she’s at least covered with dirt and I can’t see her body lying in there. Father thrusts the shovel at me, and I take it, not sure how much more of this I can handle. I’m not like my father. I can’t deal with blood or wounds or dying animals.
But I bury the body because I’m afraid of what will happen if I don’t. When did I become so afraid of my father? Was it just years and years of his shit? I never imagined it would lead to me helping him hide a body.
When I toss the final shovelful on top, Father turns to me and tightly grabs my wrist. “Killian, you might think that you could show someone this grave and get me tossed in jail, but when they dig her body up, they’ll find something of yours in there.”
I stare at him as I try to figure out if I’m hearing him right. “W-What are you talking about?”
“And if you think you can hide it, I have videos of you digging that grave and burying that body. You’re tied to this death even more than I am.”
I take a step back but the hand around my wrist tightens until it feels like he’s going to crush my bones. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“She was just a whore, Killian. It isn’t worth going to prison for a whore, now is it?”
Anywhere sounds better than here. “No.”
“That’s what I thought. Now let’s go.”
So I go.
Twelve
“Sometimes you get this weird constipated look on your face like you’re contemplating the existence of the world or something,” Shepherd says as we walk toward the front doors of a hotel.
I shift my “constipated look” onto him and narrow my eyes. “Sometimes you’re an asshole who has no filter.”
He laughs as he pats my back. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Oh, are you talking about the way you hugged my legs as you snoozed all the way here as the old man talked about his seven cats? I know everything about those cats. I wonder if that’s how you’ll be when you’re older. Alone with nothing but cats to hear your cries.”
“Better than being alone with nothing to hear my cries like you,” I say.
“Vicious,” he says as he walks through the front door of the hotel and up to the man at the counter. “Do you have a pet-friendly room available?”
“For a fee,” he says.
Once he’s finished paying, we head upstairs to the room on the fourth floor. He pulls open the door to a bedroom with two beds and a large window looking out on the small city.
After Shepherd has assessed the room, he turns to me. “We need to go to the store. Let’s leave the dog and hope he doesn’t destroy anything. You don’t have anything on you that could be tracked, right?”
I eye him because he has to know how stupid that question was. “You… think I shoved a phone up my asshole or something?”
He gives me a look. “You just kind of give me that vibe.”
“A phone up the ass vibe?”
He nods. “No credit cards or anything. Nothing, right?”