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“I don’t understand.”
“I am a hunter, little mouse. I track down men who have hurt others. Who have hurt children and women.” His hands stroked down my flanks as if to soothe me. What is said next fills me with trepidation. “Jude, I kill them for money.”
“Oh Lorand.” My hand covered my mouth, shocked by his confession, and he pulls it away kissing each fingertip.
“Please Jude just hear me out.” I’m shaking my head no. I’m scared, worried and numb. “I’ve done a lot of bad things. Things that make me unworthy of you.” Lorand is pleading with me and all I can do is sit there absorbing his confession.
“You murder them for money?” Cold is the only sensation I feel and he rubs my skin like it will change what he’s just told me.
“Yes. I’m given a contract and I’m paid to do really bad things to people who have no right to share the air you breathe.” His hands drop from me and I stand unsteady. I reach out for the wall falsely hoping to stabilize the fissures in my heart that steal my ability to anything but stand there frozen.
“Be honest with me.” Could I tell if he was lying to me?
“You mean the details?”
“No. Please not that, the other. I need to hear why, something that rights the wrong. Something that explains why you do what you do.”
“Nothing makes it right. I made choices and they haunt me every day.”
“I will hear you out before I pass any judgements…but I can’t promise I won’t be hurt or disappointed….” I didn’t know what to be or what I expected him to say next.
His breath makes a hitched sound, a puff of air forced from his lungs. “You don’t remember, but Lacy used to babysit you as a kid.” Her face comes back to me, it’s something I remember because she was so kind, so good and loving.
“Oh, but I do remember. She was always so happy and she sang songs all the time. The voice of an angel, she was…wonderful.” My reminiscing is interrupted by Lorand’s icy and detached voice. Clearly we are remembering two very different pasts.
“And they killed her. Sold her more precisely into sexual slavery. She was taken and everyone was told she ran away. They spinned a story that she followed her dreams to Nashville except she never got there. Didn’t even bring her guitar.”
“Who said that?” I needed to know.
He ignored me and kept going. Reaching out to touch him, he shook and when my hand cupped his cheek, it was his tears that I felt hot and wet on my skin. “None of that was true, of course, but it was the lies they fabricated which made the case an easy one to close as a runaway. It destroyed my mother.”
“That’s awful, Lorand, but you said you found them? The men who did this. Did you make them pay, did you k-kill them?” I was scared, but not for the rational reasons I should be.
“All but one.”
Fourteen
LORAND
“Tell me who they are.” Jude took my hands and opens the palms smoothing them out. I hadn’t realized I’d been clutching my hands together so tightly until now.
“Robert Beringer, Beau Lassons, and Kendrick Halstad.” Each name burned as I voiced them.
“They were the Academy’s Administrator’s before they elected a chancellor to take over the school.” Gasping because that original chancellor could have been her mother had she not left for the east coast. Taking my hand back from hers, I pressed against the crease in her forehead smoothing the skin.
“Smile. I don’t like to see you frowning.” I tell her.
“The things you do…”
“They are bad people.” Frowning, I begged her to understand.
“Don’t justify it.” It’s amazing how blind eyes can still pass judgement and I’m trapped under her glare left wanting.
“I’m not. But it is what I do.”
“I don’t believe you’re that person.” She has no idea the kind of person I am. I destroyed a science lab to rid the world of that scum and instead nearly killed her.
“This is the truth. I didn’t speak to you because I was afraid you’d figure out it was me.” She gives me nothing so I continue my story instead. “Those men are all dead now. Two by my hand in the explosion and Halstad by cancer.”
