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“Carmine’s dead.” The words fall out of Billie like milk spilling out of an overturned carton. She couldn’t hold it in. “I was on the stairs, knocked out. When I woke up, she was there. Like… Like heleft her therefor me to see.”
Kate watches her for a moment, fresh tears in her eyes. Her voice is a whisper, “You think he was taunting you?”
“I don’t know. It just… It felt wrong, leaving her on the landing like that, right next to me, knowing I’ll find her when I come to. And, what, he leaves me there alive?”
Kate shakes her head. “Maybe he took off after the screaming. I got away. But they didn’t.”
“Grace did. Heard the cops talk. She’s in the hospital.”
“Grace must’ve run right by you on the stairs. And Carmine, I guess, tried to run after her—”
“Or Blood Hood moved her,” Billie mumbles.
They can only look at each other, hands lingering together. The confusion, the suspicion—it’s all there to be found in opposing wet glass-eyes and coffee-brown ones.
Out the corner of her eye, Billie sees him, but she doesn’t look: A cop in a brown uniform, the kind that makes Billie’s nose scrunch with good old fashioned trailer park hatred, comes up to Kate. His hand reaches for her elbow, his grip gentle but firm enough to intrude on their moment.
Pale and dark fingers glide apart as Kate is steered away.
A chill of ice-cold fear rattles Billie’s spine. Her voice shakes as she calls out, “Where are you taking her?”
If Kate ran all five streets to the Square, to the station, she’s been here for a while now. They have no reason to want more time with her.
Kate forces a grim smile, like she’s trying to reassure her or something, but all it does is make the pit in her gut feel emptier than ever. “Trevor’s here to pick me up. Take me to the hospital. I need stitches,” she adds and lifts her bandaged arm.
Billie nods, her mouth parted, and she surely looks something like a stupid goldfish. “Call me,” she mouths.
Kate nods, the corners of her forced reassuring smile tucked into her cheeks.
Their gazes don’t break until Kate’s taken around the corner to the front office. And Billie’s alone again in the sea of desks.
As she stands there, her mind churns through what Kate told her. In the shower, Kate heard something, but she didn’t say what. And she went to the bedroom, where Blood Hood was attacking Grace and Carmine. They scattered and ran. Billie would’ve been unconscious on the stairs by then. Kate made it here. Grace was picked up on some street.
Billie was the last of the three to be picked up by the cops. So they plopped her down the end of the desk pit, with the Deputy, and those fucking pigs not once mentioned a word that Kate survived. That she was alive in the same fucking building as her.
Her hands fist at her sides, her face twisted into a scowl. All that fear mixes with the fresh wave of anger that flows through her icy veins, and she just wants to scream. Scream down this whole useless station full of useless cops.
“Billie.” Deputy Wade stands behind her, like a ghost appearing from thin air.
She jolts with the scare.
Cursing under her breath, she turns on him, her face red. “Can you not sneak up on people after they’ve been attacked, maybe? Or is it too hard for you to use that peanut brain, yeah?”
He only looks her over once, a look of disdain she’s certain he practiced on years of arresting her mom, then he gestures to the exit Kate just took. “Mr. Preston is here for you.”
Billie’s face is still so twisted that the scar on her mouth digs deep into her freckled skin.Which one? Elliot or his dad?
Instead, she asks, “You couldn’t get ahold of my mom?”
“Oh.” Deputy Wade smiles something cold and awful. “In fact, we were able to track her down. Right down to a jail some counties over. Arrested in a bar fight, charged with possession.”
He looks all too happy to tell her that.
Billie’s face shifts into a sneer. She leans in towards him and, in a hiss of venom, whispers some hard truths home, “We both know you only hate me ‘cause you had a crush on my mom all through school, and she turned you down. Then she fucked your brother.”
With that, Billie smirks at his fallen smile.
She turns on her heels and storms out of the pit.
