Upon failing to hear a single scuttle of a pair of boots, I push down on the door handle. My mouth falls open like a prepubescent teen seeing his first pair of boobs when the descent of the handle isn’t interrupted by a sturdy lock.
Little Ms. Sunshine with the skitzo eyes is back, bigger and badder than ever.
Since I don’t have access to shoes, my bare feet padding down the isolated corridor is soundless. No one can hear my escape, not even the guard slumped over the monitor now displaying my empty bed.
He looks like he is sleeping. Only a true psychopath knows he isn’t. You can’t miss the putrid scent of a man who pissed his pants in the seconds leading to his death. And just the knowledge that he was scared enough to desecrate himself sees me leaving his gun in his tiny cubicle with him. I won’t need it. Megan said she’d kill anyone who tried to take me away from her—even myself.
When I reach the end of the corridor, I sling my head to the left before slowly veering it to the right. I was too doped out of my head when I arrived here to pay attention to the exit and entry points. I could be about to walk into a packed staffroom for all I know.
With my cockiness too high for a man who spent the past six months feeding the dragon tattoo on his shoulder, I crack my knuckles and rear up for a fight before veering to the left.
I realize the error of my intuition only two steps later. It isn’t the numerous pleas in my head for me to turn around and go the other way forcing me to reconsider. It’s a moose on a hill in the far corner of the hospital grounds that is stealing my attention. They’re not uncommon around these parts, but it’s the fact he’s inside the fence that’s taller than him that has me switching tactics.
Megan heard my father call me Moose, but she also got the whole story on my nickname’s origin when she was curled up on my lap after she killed him.
It really is her.
She isn’t dead.
Although she may be when I learn who occupied her time the past ten months.
White air puffs out of my mouth when I push open a door that’s rarely unlocked before I sprint across the crispy ground. The sleet was heavy today, and the barbs of ice that stab my feet should slow me down, but they don’t. I make it to the hill the moose is on in enough time to watch brilliance being birthed for the second time.
The hem of Megan’s floral dress flicks up around her slim thighs when she adds strength to her swing. Her shovel smacks a guard up the side of his head so quickly, the flirty grin he was hitting Megan with before she blinded him with her kill shot is still on his face when his knees buckle beneath him.
Not wanting our reunion tainted by his raspy breaths as his lungs drown in blood, Megan hits him for the second time. This blow is brutal enough to splatter her face and dress with remnants of his brain.
“Nuh-uh,” I groggily murmur when her hand shoots up to rub off the blob of brain matter stuck to her right cheek. “If you’re responsible for a mess, you’ve also got to clean it.”
Anyone who ever said Megan was stupid needs to eat their words. She’s so smart, she knows the person responsible for tidying up her misdemeanor isn’t her. It’s the man she went on a murderous rampage for. The one who’d still be eating dinner out of a straw and staring at a cardboard box like an endless stream of horror flicks was playing on one of its flaps.
“You made the mess for me, so it’s only fair that I clean it.”
When I cup her jaw, Megan dumps the shovel onto the no-longer breathing guard before she nuzzles her blood-smeared cheek into my palm. The purr of her breaths as she relishes my touch is almost enough for me to skip a manic episode.
‘Almost’ being the imperative part of my reply.
Before the timid voice in my head can talk me out of it, I lower my hand to Megan’s neck, clamp her throat, then pin her to the fence she precut in preparation for our escape. “Where have you been, Megan? Were you with him? Is that why it took you so long to come get me?”
I tighten my grip when Megan answers in the last way I anticipate. The crazy in her eyes is still there, her delusional personality still paramount, but instead of shaking her head in a way that defies logic, she dips her chin instead.
“You were with him?”
She nods again, and I lose my shit.
I scream and shout and bang my fists on any object I can find, then I tear out enough chunks of hair, the chance of leaving DNA behind at my next crime scene is greatly reduced.
Yet, despite the anarchic rage that takes several long minutes to dispel, not a single hair on Megan’s head is ruffled. She remains perfectly untouched, safe, and uninjured because the king’s whole objective is to shelter the queen, and shelter her I will.
Even if it kills me.
bonus epilogue
MEGAN
FOUR YEARS LATER…
As sirens wail across acres of rolling turf, I spin in a circle, seeking Dexter in the crowd. If carnage is prevailing, he is usually close by, if not in the midst of it.
