AllFreeNovel
Share Us
KAI
I sat in Landon’s basement and scrolled tiredly through the security cameras posted all around Redwood, searching for a trace of Akio’s family. Akio had said that they went into hiding, and it seemed like he was telling the truth because I hadn’t seen them at all on here.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, jolting me awake.
Landon: Text me the address. I need to get rid of their bodies.
Imani sat at the table, finishing up some homework, and glanced over at me with her phone in her hand. “Where’d Landon go?” she asked. “I’ve been texting him since Maddie left, but he hasn’t answered.”
“Off disposing of his parents’ bodies,” I said, texting him the address of where I had burned the principal and the places where I’d buried his remains where nobody would ever find them. It wasn’t like anyone cared about the people we killed and buried. I’d bet that most people wanted them dead, anyway.
“You say it like it’s nothing,” she said.
“It isn’t,” I said. “They deserved to die. They’d done nothing but abuse Landon for as long as I could fucking remember. I always told him that his mother wasn’t any good, but he loved her almost as much as he loves you.”
While she stayed quiet for a long time, she pressed her lips together and looked at me with those big fucking eyes. “Love,” she whispered.
She fucking loved him, too, and I wanted her to say that to me as well one day, but I didn’t know if it would ever be soon.
A long pause fell over us.
“Have you ever loved someone?” she suddenly asked.
After staring at her for a couple moments, I forced myself to tear my gaze away. “No.”
Lie.
Straight-up fucking lie.
“Never?” she asked, leaning onto the table and staring directly at me. Her stare was smoldering and hot, burning me from the inside out. “Not even …” She swallowed hard and paused for another moment. “Not even now?”
I glanced back at my computers and the security cameras and clenched my jaw. “No.”
Once Imani turned back to her books, I looked up at her. She didn’t even look like she was reading the pages, just staring down at them with hurt in her dark brown eyes. I wanted to tell her the truth, but I couldn’t. Not until Akio’s parents were taken care of.
Still, I was done looking at these fucking cameras for tonight, and I wanted her attention. Landon and João took up so much of her time that I barely got to spend any with her. And, fuck, I didn’t want her to drift away from me. She was the best fucking thing that had happened to Poison.
“You want to learn how to fight some more, for times similar to today, where you can’t bring a gun into places?” I asked, pulling out my keychain and handing her a kubotan. It was a long metal stick that could do some damage if applied to the right pressure points in the body.
Though it would never compare to a gun, it was something.
Imani glanced up from her books and closed them. “Sure.”
So, for the next hour and a half, I showed Imani a handful of useful techniques she could use to protect herself from someone when she might not have a weapon on her. It was bad to rely on a single weapon, especially with Akio’s family being after her.
“What happened to Akio?” Imani asked, glancing at me sometime later.
“Nothing.”
“You said something to him during the game tonight, and then I watched him knock out a police officer, throw him into the back of his vehicle, then literally steal the police car and drive off of Redwood property.”
“He’s doing it for his girl,” I said.
“For Nicole?”
“You know that he likes her?”
“Yeah, he mentioned it a while ago, but I didn’t think he was that serious.” Imani paused and chewed on the inside of her cheek. “Do you think he has … killed anyone yet? He could barely shoot a gun a couple weeks ago, and now, he’s kidnapping the cops?!”
