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“Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.”
She left him, because he was a pretender and she was the sun, and the wound in the sky rained on his face and asked if he was done, done, done. He closed his eyes and lay in the hole he’d dug without his arms and legs. His heart was a cold gray dead thing, and all the lines were crossed, his chainmail burning, because he’d asked Rory to stay when he had no right to and knew she should run far away from here, and all of his hoodwinking lies.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Rory had laughed at Zeke playing the fool as she was marched back to her cabin, but he didn’t sing “The Pretender.” He sang “Run.” What did he know that she didn’t? Run. It wasn’t a lyric. It was an instruction.
There was also no freaking way she was running without him. Right now, she wasn’t even walking anywhere because Daniel the brute had made himself comfortable on the porch with a shotgun across his knees and there was no other way out.
“Why is he there?” Shavonne reasonably wanted to know.
“I made Orrin angry?”
“On purpose.”
She almost laughed because Shavonne’s question sounded more like a statement.
“Not good. Not good at all. That’s a lifetime membership of the black mark’s club. Why do I think you’re not worried about that?”
She had far bigger problems. Run. She took Daniel down the first time because he didn’t expect it. He was armed, and he knew she had skills. She could wait him out, he had to sleep at some point, but she’d rather eat her own arm because running wasn’t something you did at your leisure.
She stood with Shavonne peering out the shutters at the brute’s back. Shavonne didn’t need this in her life. “You should go to the nursery. He doesn’t have a beef with you.”
“Uh-uh. No way. That guy is an asshole and this is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me that wasn’t about my two babies since I got here.”
“I need to get to my brother. You don’t need to be tangled up in this.”
“Oh, I need to be. That is my porch and you are my cabinmate.”
“You’ve known me a month and for most of that time you didn’t speak to me.”
“It wasn’t personal. I’ll distract him, and you run for it.”
“Who are you, Veronica Mars? How are you going to distract him?”
Shavonne frowned. “How hard can it be? He’s a man.”
Rory turned away from the shutters. “Please, you should go. I’m trouble.”
“Here’s what we’ll do.” Shavonne put her hand up in front of Rory’s face to stop her interrupting. “I’ve got my special new mom rations. I have the ingredients for butter cookies. You go shower, make it look like you’re going to bed, also you stink of goat and not the decent soap kind. I’ll make that man wish for a cookie so hard he can’t think for salivating and when I take a plate out to him, you got your chance.”
“Who do you think I am?”
“I think you’re going to need to be Jessica Jones and do so some freaky, punchy, mind-control shit.”
It wasn’t a terrible plan. The cookies would be a distraction. She had to do something while they were being made and if doofus out there thought she was going to bed for the night, all the better. “What did you do on the outside?”
“I was a high school teacher. I know how devious thinks.”
“Do you miss it?” There was a whole lot of deprogramming coming for the Continuers.
“I miss what being a teacher should be about. I don’t miss what it had become. We had four active shooter lockdown incidents at my school. I couldn’t take hiding in classrooms wondering if I’d get out alive, if my kids would, anymore. I had an inheritance, used it to co
me here, have a safer life.”
Not everyone was going to be happy about Abundance being broken up. She had to find their money, so they could have it back and get another chance.
“You bake. I’ll shower.”
