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“You can’t really kill somebody with these,” Knox says. “But you can make them wish they were dead. If it’s somebody who really needs to suffer, sometimes I dip the hooks in hot sauce or lemon juice first. Just to really make it burn.”
“How do you decide?” I ask him. “If you want someone to die quickly or if you want to draw it out and just fuck with them?”
Knox shrugs. “Depends on Gage sometimes. What he wants done with the person. If we just want information, then I just hurt them until they’ll tell me anything I want to know, and probably some stuff I don’t too. Their credit card numbers, their social security shit.Anything,just to make the pain stop. If they’re fucked either way, then sometimes I draw it out anyway, really make them realize what they did before I kill them. That part’s usually just for me.”
“What would you do if you wanted or needed to kill them quick?” I ask him.
“There are a lot of places on a person where they’ll bleed out quick,” he says. He puts his hands on me, touching the places where I remember the major arteries and shit are located. “If it needs to be quick and neat, then you can always snap the neck or suffocate someone. Things that don’t leave a mark.”
“When you killed your uncle, was it slow or quick?”
“It was quick.” Knox grimaces. “Probably better than the fucker deserved, but I got what I needed anyway.”
I tip my head to the side, studying him. Tattoos crawl over nearly every inch of his exposed skin except for his face, and his shoulders are as broad as a linebacker’s. He’s got a little scruff on his jaw, and it makes him look wild and dangerous.
“What was it that you needed?” I ask.
“I saw the fear in his eyes.” Knox purses his lips, his expression taking on a faraway quality as if he’s reliving something from his past. “I saw that he knew he was about to die, and I know he knew why. And then I killed him, and he died with that fear burning in his veins.”
My jaw clenches, and I ball up my hand into a fist at my side. “That’s what I want for Julian,” I admit, my voice harsh with the force of my emotions. “I want to pick his life apart piece by piece and make sure he realizes exactly what he’s lost before I kill him.”
Knox doesn’t say anything, just looks at me, but I know he’s listening, and I know he understands.
So I keep talking, letting everything that’s been building up spill out of me.
“Hannah’s dead, and I feel so... guilty. She died protecting me. She jumped in front of that bullet, that had my name on it, and now she’s dead. I was supposed to protect her, and I didn’t.”
Knox’s face gets more serious, and he puts the tools in his hand down, setting them aside.
“You can’t hold that guilt inside you,” he says. “Everything you’ve done for the past five years has been to avenge Hannah, and then you tried to get her out when you found out she was alive. She knew that. You did your best for her, and no one could ask for more.”
I swallow hard and look down at the concrete floor. It’s dark in places, probably from old blood stains that were hastily cleaned up. I fix my eyes on one patch of concrete and try to focus on that and not the darkness that wants to creep in around me.
As if Knox can see it taking hold again, he suddenly picks me up and puts me on the counter. I don’t fight it, letting him move me where he wants to.
“Hey,” he says, tipping my chin up with two of his rough fingers so I’m looking at him. “Tell me some good memories about Hannah. Whatever you can think of off the top of your head.”
I blink at him for a second, surprised by the request.
Knox isn’t usually the one for the heart to hearts and touchy feely stuff, but I guess it shows how much he cares that he wants to help chase some of this darkness away. We can’t kill anybody right now, so maybe this is the next best thing for the moment.
I open my mouth, and I don’t even have to think hard about something to talk about. It just comes out automatically.
“Hannah loved climbing trees,” I tell him. “She was freakishly good at it too. Like some kind of spider monkey or something. There was this huge tree in the park by our house, and Hannah would just shimmy up it like it was nothing. And I’d stand there at the bottom, just terrified. I was scared of heights, and even more scared of falling. But it was like Hannah didn’t even notice how high up she was. It never bothered her.”
Even just talking about it, I can picture standing at the base of that tree, watching Hannah move faster than anyone should have been able to in a tree, going from limb to limb, higher and higher.
“One day we were at the park, and I was standing there at the bottom like usual, and Hannah told me she wanted me to see the view. I said no immediately because I couldn’t even imagine trying to get that high. But she wouldn’t let me chicken out. She helped me climb this massive tree, and we went up so high it was like we could touch the clouds. We could see so much of Detroit from up there, and it looked a lot less shitty than it did from the ground. It looked beautiful.”
I get lost in that memory for a moment, thinking about the feeling of the bark, rough under my hands, and the way my heart hammered in my chest, going a mile a minute while we climbed. Hannah’s voice, just a little breathless from the climb, telling me I could do it, telling me it was all going to be worth it. She’d reach out and take my hand when I faltered, putting it on the next branch up and showing me how to make my way higher. There was wind in my face, and we could see for what felt like miles.
It takes me a bit to shake myself out of the memory, and then I glance back up at Knox. “Why did you want to know?”
He grins. “Because you have to hold on to those good memories just as hard as the bad ones. They exist too. Right alongside the bad. They’re yours as much as all the awful, shitty ones are.”
I raise an eyebrow at him, surprised by the depth and insightfulness of the statement.
“Wow. That’s very Zen of you,” I tease. “You’re like a psychotic, murderous Winnie the Pooh.”
