“I want you to tell me what happened to your family. I want the whole story. Why were they killed?”
She pulls her hands away from me, and I look back at her, finding her face holding a not-so-stoic mask, since she can no longer maintain a convincing one around me.
“You’re drunk.”
“Yeah. Not drunk enough.”
“You know, when people get as drunk as you are, they pick fights with judgmental decorative statues, write love letters on a pizza box, or summon demons on a napkin. But you—you go straight to morbid.”
“No!” I’m not letting her deflect. “Fuckin’ tell me!Now!”
She goes silent, her eyes begging me not to ask this of her.
I inch closer, lips hovering over hers, uttering a single command.
“Kiss me!”
She leans in, giving me a gentle kiss, full of love, full of fire, and so much more that’s left unsaid. When she pulls away, her palms stay on my cheeks, running her thumbs there like wiping tears that aren’t on my face, but on hers.
“My father used to work for a good man for over fifteen years.”
Her chest rises as she draws in a shaky breath before she proceeds.
“Not good in the conventional way. He had a criminal front, but he was good to us. We were family to him. His daughter was...” There’s a beat of hesitation. “is my best friend. When her father died of a heart attack, her stepmother fired everyone loyal to her dead husband, including my father. My best friend was not yet in a position of power to have kept us there, so my dad had to find someone else to work for.”
She takes a gulp of air, and then another, like telling the truth makes it harder to breathe. Biting her lower lip, she pauses, staring straight into my eyes, asking once more for a way out. But I won’t give it to her this time, and she knows it.
“One day, he came home with multiple stab wounds on his arms and a bullet inside his thigh. A failed one-off for ‘a special kind of monster,’ was my father’s explanation, but...”
Her head tilts in a subtle shake, like she’s unconvinced by her own words.
“I swear those cuts looked a lot like he’d been tortured. Dad said his convoy got ambushed after a handoff. Everyone but him was killed, and the money from the deal was taken.”
For a brief second, her focus shifts away from me, and both her brows and the corners of her lips tighten.
“If he had shown up after that failure, he would’ve been killed. If not, it would look like he took the money. My father knew he was a dead man walking. For that amount of money, all of us were as good as gone.”
She bites her lip to stop it from trembling.
“Go on!” I urge her, and another tear falls down her cheek, which I catch with my thumb and wipe away.
“If he hadn’t taken the FBI deal for witness protection, we would’ve been dead a long time ago. So we ran, we disappeared. We tried so hard to fit in, the misfits that we were. An ex-soldier with temper issues. A poker hustler who kept hustling the housewives. A pyro who had to suppress those destructive instincts. And me—thepsycho that I am. We did fit in a way... until we didn’t. Until, as I told you already, we were found.”
Summer pauses, silently asking me if this is enough. A slight shake of my head tells her it isn’t. Her gaze falls for a brief moment before finding me once more, while a hand of mine goes over hers, reassuring her that I have her. She can fall, and I’ll catch her.
“That night, when we were packing, waiting for a call from the FBI agent to relocate us, that’s when they came. Five men. When they burst into our house, we tried to fight them. They shot my brother’s leg. At gunpoint, they made me and Milo kneel next to each other before calling their boss. Killing us was not enough for that man. He wanted to see us suffer. He watched as two of his goons... raped my mom right before our eyes. My father was screaming. Milo was shouting at them to stop, and I... I just... I kept crying... helpless.”
Her eyes shut, but tears keep slipping down her cheeks.
“When they were done with her, they... put a bullet into her chest first and then—” A sob chokes her words, and her eyes lose focus, like she’s watching it happen somewhere else.
“One to the head.” Her voice comes out detached, hollow.
“That’s the last time my father made any sound. For the next hour or so, those men kept peeling skin from his body, poking holes and cutting parts of him, while that monster, on the other side of the line, watched, directed, and laughed.” Her eyes press shut for a heartbeat before she looks at me again. “That sound haunts my nightmares. They took...”
Summer pauses mid-sentence, like she misplaced the recollection somewhere and refuses to look for it. More tears roll down her cheeks when her lips part, ready to speak.
“They took one eye and one ear, so my father would still see and hear us while we watched our hero being dismembered piece by piece, until he... he barely looked human. They used the adrenaline boost frommyEpiPens to keep dad from passing out. When theywere finally ordered to...” She swallows hard, “put him down, he looked at my brother and me one last time, with guilt like... I’ve never seen before.”
