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“She was friends with Scarlet … you know how those things go. It’s possible Scarlet dragged her in … maybe she didn’t realize until it was too late.” Carter offers an explanation but it doesn’t do shit to keep me upright as the reality hits me.
“She could have told me. At any point, she could have—”
“She was scared, Declan. We all saw it.”
“Well no shit, she sold us out.” The anger is dull. There’s nothing but fucking heartache that overwhelms me.
“She didn’t call them. She called her mother and that’s it.”
“Her phone is still bugged?”
“Yeah.”
“What did she tell her?”
“That she misses her but she’s scared,” he answers and the back of my throat dries and I have to clear it once again. I fucking hate this. With my hands going numb I run them down my face.
How the hell did this happen?I don’t understand. I loved her. She loved me.
“You there?” my brother questions.
“What else?”
“That she’s going away for a while and that she loves her.”
“Do you have the recording?”
“Yeah. It sounded like she wasn’t coming back, Declan. She tossed the phone and left the car … took a taxi or hitched after that.”
“We know where she is?”
“Yeah … all that cash and she went to a shitty motel down the interstate.”
BRAELYNN
Ican’t stop stop crying. My chest heaves as I try to calm the sobs.
What have I done?
I’ve never been so terrified in my life. My entire being is heavy with guilt. I’ve never felt so reckless and like I can’t go back, I can’t make it better. I thought once that I’d been at the lowest low possible, but I knew nothing.
I betrayed a man I loved. A man who if I ever see again will certainly have me killed.
I don’t even know who I am anymore or how any of this happened. I want to take it all back. Burying my hot face into the pillow does nothing but mute the sobs from creeping through the paper-thin walls of this shitty motel.
The mattress is cheap, the sheets stiff from too much starch and the comforter a holdover from the eighties. There’s enough money in that bag to stay at hotels I’ve never imagined myself in, but I couldn’t bring myself to face more people than needed. There’s no lobby here, just a teller at a window where cash is slipped under the plexiglass divider and a key is given in return.
There’s a chair that looks to be decades old, a laminate desk, a single bed and the kind of old-fashioned bulky TV I haven’tseen in ages and didn’t know existed anymore. From the single window beside the bed, the traffic from the highway blows into the room with a gust of wind. My face is hot and more than once I’ve looked outside, at the five-story distance to the asphalt below.
I’ve thought about leaving the money for my mother. But they’d find it and then her, I’m certain of it. Fresh tears prick hot and unrelenting. I hate them and I hate myself.
I wish I could call her and tell her everything, but I can’t drag her into this. It would only be selfish. The old landline phone stares back at me, willing me to call her, but I won’t.
I could go to the hospital, but he’d find me there. My mother might even find me there and then I wouldn’t be able to protect her. I have to be alone or go back to Declan.
I picture myself begging him, on my knees and pleading with him rather than running.
Half of the time I imagine it, he tells me it’s okay. The other half he looks at me as he did in the basement of The Club, telling me I should be terrified.
