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Except now the man who’d become my father.
Ben bent down, and before I could act, he sliced his knife over Howard’s head.
There was a pocket of air, of silence, before the ramifications of what he did was comprehended.
As he stood back up, he straightened with Howard’s ear in his hand. Fresh blood poured over his knife, dripping down to Howard’s face as more blood burst from the side of his head.
Vicky was screaming, still muffled.
I—a scream was caught in my throat. I couldn’t scream. I didn’t know why that was. I didn’t know how I knew, but I just knew that I could not scream. Ben was watching, waiting. He was judging me, waiting for something.
I wasn’t sure.
His eyes were latched on me, and he was eerily still, an evil smile starting to tug at the ends of his mouth.
I didn’t scream, barely. Sweat formed on my forehead from the effort not to let out how I really felt. Howard was moaning at his feet, rolling over. The blood spewed as he did.
“I thought that would be an incentive, but you surprise me, Sister. I can do an eye next time? Or maybe below his knee?”
I shuddered. “What do you want, Ben?”
His face suddenly darkened, and he stepped over Howard, lunging two steps to me before stopping. Standing at his fullest height, he thundered, “You will not call me that name. Ben is dead. I’m your brother. I’ll be referred to as your brother.”
He was close enough I could reach out to him. I could grab him, fight him, and as if he read my mind, he retreated back on the other side of Howard, making himself so he was dramatically smaller. His head and shoulders both hunched down. “It’s been so long, Sister. We have so much to catch up on.”
I didn’t know what questions to ask him, which ones would set him off.
“What happened to you, Be—Brother?”
His eyes jerked to mine, but he relaxed as I used the appropriate term. “You’ll need to be more specific, Sister.”
My mouth pressed tight. He was boxing me in. He didn’t want to talk about Mom. “After…what happened with you and…”
Another warning lit from him.
“Where’ve you been this whole time?”
He shifted to the side, his mouth pursed before he rolled one shoulder back, tightly. “Some people raised me, the ones who found me. They kept me for themselves, said I’d grow to be a backwoodsie like them. They taught me to shoot. To kill. To hunt. They beat the shit out of me every Saturday night. It was their entertainment. They taught me other things too. How to live off the land. How to be a ghost. There were things they couldn't teach me, where I would need to leave to learn those skills. They didn’t want that, but they didn’t realize who I was. They thought they were turning a stray dog into a killing machine. They didn’t know they took in a cub that would grow into a wolf. That was their mistake." He raked his gaze over my face. “I killed them. I did it the way he used to.”
He. The Midwest Butcher.
We’d come full circle, back to the start.
I didn’t care about Cameron Fowler. He’d already destroyed my life once.
I wanted to talk about Mom.
I wanted to ask, so badly.
Is she alive? Please, Ben.
Maybe it was time, or maybe he felt my silent pleading because Ben all the sudden dropped the murderous gusto. He wouldn’t look at me. He was more than half turned away from me, turned away from the entire room. If he lifted his head, he would’ve been looking directly at the stairs.
Layers left him, lifting off him, and vanishing away until he was someone else.
My lips parted. A sense of longing filled me. Ben… Now I saw him.
There was my brother.
