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“Just look at me,” he said when he had my attention. “It’s going to be all right,perla.”
Jasper dug the knife into my flesh and popped off another button. This time, he paused to drag the tip of the knife down the opening he’d made.
I screamed as my blood welled up and ran down, and though the doctor in me recognized it was by no means a fatal wound, the fiery sting was a terrible foreshadowing of what was to come.
My breath was coming so hard and so fast, every movement dug the tip of the knife in deeper.
Amadeo’s lips kept moving, but my vision was blurred by tears. I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
Focus on what you need to do, Heidi-girl,my father’s voice whispered inside my head.
What I needed was to stop the tears so I could see. And with a task in mind, I latched onto it, breathing slow, forcing what was happening into a box and closing the lid.
Another breath, and then another.
“Tell him where it is,perla,” Amadeo was saying.
But I didn’tknowwhere; he knew this. So why would he have—
Oh.
I looked at Amadeo for another moment, and now I could see it; I could see his eyes willing me to understand what he was saying. But what he was saying was an extraordinary gamble. At best, it would stall for time, nothing more. I could only trust that he knew what he was doing.
“I’ll tell you what you want to know,” I told the spider-man even as Jasper slipped the knife beneath the next button.
He held up his hand, staying Jasper’s movements, and then he smiled at me, the spider legs of his scar writhing and making me feel like they were crawling up my spine.
“Go on, dear,” he said. There was a light in his eyes like he was salivating, a predator about to sink his teeth into the most delicious prey.
“In the house where you… where you killed my parents, there was a room in the basement,” I lied.
He shook his head. "I searched every room in that house, Heidi. Don’t lie to me.”
He nodded to Jasper, who flicked away the button on my shirt.
“I’m not lying,” I cried.
He raised his eyebrows at me, but he held up his hand, staying Jasper’s movements once again.
“I hope for your sake, you’re not,” he said. There was no smile this time.
I took a deep breath. “In the laundry room in the basement,” I went on, “there’s a false wall behind where the washer was—just like at the Regalton Arms. It looks like the rest of the concrete block wall, but this section is hollow. It’s light. My father showed it to me a few…” The rest of the words got stuck in my throat, and I had to force them out. “…a few weeks before you killed him. He said that if he ever told me to hide, it was the perfect place.”
I blinked, and tears cascaded down my cheeks. “I thought he meant when we played hide-and-seek.”
The spider-man laughed. “He never quite got the chance to tell you to hide that night, did he?”
It was like there was a switch inside me, and with a few words, he’d hit it, slammed his hand right down on it. In the blink of an eye, terror gave way to rage as he stood there laughing over the death of my parents like it was a joke.
If I could have gotten free in that moment, I wouldn’t have run—not away, at least. I would have run straight for him. I’d never been a violent person. The images that flooded my mind, the things I would have done to him had I been able, would have appalled the woman I’d been just a few short weeks ago.
I glanced at Amadeo, wondering if this is what he’d felt. Was this the white-hot feeling that had coursed through his veins when Elio had hurt his sister?
He shook his head. It was a warning.Don’t let it out,the gesture screamed.
But this feeling was too raw and too exposed to leave it alone.
“Why the bloody hell did you kill them?” I shouted, glaring at the spider-man.
