Look Away

by C. J. Lyons

  Morgan stepped toward her. Zoe raised the gun, aiming half-heartedly at Morgan. “Don’t make me do it, Morgan.”

  “You don’t want to hurt me. You don’t want to hurt anyone.” Damn, where was Nick when she needed him? Morgan had no clue what to say to a suicidal, homicidal, messed up kid like Zoe.

  “But I do. I really do. For a brief moment, I feel like I’m in control of…something. Of my life. Of theirs. I don’t know. But I need that, even if it’s only a moment. I can’t give it up. I’m not as strong as you, Morgan.” She swung one leg over the safety railing, then the other. “It’s all an illusion. That feeling of control. I can’t go back and I can’t move forward. There’s just no place for me here in this world. I’m no one.”

  “No! Zoe, you’re someone. You can be anyone you want. Don’t you see? You have your whole life ahead of you. Where do you want to go? Who do you want to be? I’ll help you, I swear.”

  Zoe braced her back against the metal barrier, the wind whipping her hair as she faced the dark waters churning below. A gust pushed her forward as if even nature wanted her dead.

  The hell with nature, Morgan thought, risking two more steps forward. It was like walking a shuddering, heaving balance beam. Finally she reached the guardrail and clung to it with both hands. Lightning cracked in the distance, a sheet of white light somewhere over the ocean, warning her back. Wind-whipped white caps formed below, ghostly motion in the lights from the bridge high above.

  “Who do I want to be?” Zoe repeated. She shook her head. “I have no idea. I’m not strong like you. I’m just so…so damned tired.”

  Before Morgan could reach her, she edged out even farther, her toes over the open space, her body now at the mercy of the wind. She was still holding the gun but seemed to have forgotten it. A gust nearly toppled her, but she pinwheeled her arms and steadied herself.

  Morgan rushed forward but stopped when Zoe inched away from her, teetering on the very edge.

  “Zoe, no. Please!” She’d never said that word before and meant it, not in her entire life, not before tonight. First with the fisherman and now with Zoe. “Please don’t. Let me help you.”

  Zoe turned halfway to face Morgan, pity in her eyes. Otherwise her expression was calm, at peace. “If they find my body, don’t tell them who I am. Don’t tell them about Curtis, okay? Let him rot in prison. After all, he really did kill me. It just took awhile.”

  She raised her arms, embracing the wind, and flew sideways off the bridge.

  Morgan shouted into the night, the storm shredding her words. She craned her head, searching the greedy black water below, but Zoe had vanished.

  Like she really was no one. Like she never was here. Yet hundreds, maybe thousands of women were safe tonight because of her. Why couldn’t Zoe see that?

  “Why?” Morgan shouted as she stormed down the bridge heading back to where Trish huddled against the car. “Why should you live and someone like her die?”

  She hauled Trish up, barely noticing the larger woman’s weight as fury rushed over her. She shoved Trish against the car, pulled her gun, and placed it against Trish’s skull. “Do you have any idea what that girl went through? What people like you and your filthy band of so-called knights did to her? Tell me! Why shouldn’t I kill you here and now?”

  Trish’s face was pressed against the driver’s door, Morgan’s entire weight pushing the gun muzzle deep into her flesh. Tears seeped from Trish’s eyes but they only fed the rage pulsing through Morgan’s body. For someone like Morgan, anger felt cold, not hot. It enveloped her in ice, numbing her to anyone else’s needs or feelings or humanity.

  That’s how anger used to feel. Not tonight. Tonight, despite the wind and rain lashing at her, she felt a strange burn simmering through her veins. More than anger. Sorrow and pain and fear that she would pull the trigger and terror that she couldn’t…and most of all, guilt. At least she thought it might be guilt. She should have saved Zoe. She should have found a way, found the right words, found a way to pull her down off the bridge, to distract her, make her laugh and want to live…

  She remembered talking to Nick about her father’s victims, about how so many of them just gave up. Like they were already dead inside and no longer cared about what her father did to their bodies. Like they had vanished, their heart beating and lungs breathing, flesh and blood abandoned, left behind.

  “You can’t make someone want to live,” he’d told her. “The most you can do is share their pain, help them fight to live. But deciding the outcome of that fight? That’s not up to you or anyone else. It has to come from inside them.”

  How she’d despised those women, those Fish, as her father had called them, flopping around with their dead eyes and dead hearts. But Nick made her realize that they’d won. Those women had taken control of their own fate. They’d out smarted her father and regained the upper hand, despite being powerless over their own bodies. They’d decided to die.

  None of them lasted very long after they gave up and their eyes went dead. But all of them died with the same expression of pity and peace that Zoe had had. As if they knew something Morgan didn’t—and never would.

  They certainly knew something her father never understood, despite his trying over and over to torture them back to life. Oh, how he’d howl with frustration, a toddler throwing the game board, scattering all the pieces when he lost.

  Trish didn’t fight back, but she also hadn’t given up. Her eyes were bright with tears and animal panic.

  “Please,” she sobbed. “You don’t need to do this. I’ll tell the cops everything. Give them everyone. You have no idea how big this goes—let me live and we can stop them all.”

  “There are more girls out there?”

  She nodded as best she could with Morgan’s gun against her head. “There are clubs like ours all over the world. And I know most of the leaders. I’ll give them all to the cops if you let me live.”

  Morgan’s finger curled around the trigger guard. Lord, how she wanted to pull the trigger. Rain slashed her face, blurring her vision. She took a breath and straightened her finger.

  “You better. If I hear that you’re weaseling on your deal, I’ll be back.” She put her face down in front of Trish’s. “You don’t want that, Trish. You see, I never had the chance to tell you my real name. I’m Morgan Ames, and Clinton Caine was my father. You’ve heard of Clint, right?”

  Trish didn’t need to answer—the sudden eye-widening panic as she tried to shrink away told Morgan everything.

  “He taught me everything he knew,” Morgan continued, one of her old, feral smiles creasing her face. “You renege on your deal and I’ll show it all to you, firsthand.” She pressed her lips to Trish’s forehead, sealing the deal. “You have my word.”

  Morgan pulled back and eased up on her grip on the pistol. Trish was practically bouncing off the car, so eager was she to cooperate. “Don’t worry. I’ll give them everything. I promise.”

  Morgan didn’t trust herself to speak or even to look at Trish’s weasely face any more. Every time she did, it reminded her of Zoe’s ruined face. She shoved Trish inside the car where Kagan was curled up in his seat, sobbing.

  After ziptying both Trish and Kagan to the steering wheel, Morgan skidded her way down the bridge. She called the police and told them where to find the car and the other evidence.

  The storm raged, shrouding her in thunder and lightning as she stood on the sea wall considering her options. Learning to swim in a pool was nothing compared to crossing the treacherous currents of the sound in the dark. She might be swept out to sea. She might be eaten by alligators. She might just give up and let the water take her like Zoe had.

  Except that wasn’t Morgan. Never was and never would be. She leapt from the sea wall, and the warm water closed over her head.

  When she finally climbed up onto the pavement on the far side, she began walking, wind and rain sending sheets of water swirling around her as if she were the vortex of a tornado.
/>   She had no idea where she was headed. Who cared? It was a nice night for a walk.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Micah lived with his two mothers in a Craftsman-style bungalow in a quiet Pittsburgh neighborhood. The back yard was small, fenced in for privacy, and the entire space was filled with a garden. At the center of the space, surrounded by an assortment colorful and fragrant flowers so that something was always in bloom, stood a wrought-iron gazebo. It had been created by his ma, the one who ran an underwater welding company. She’d shaped the iron into the form of four trees, limbs intertwining, meeting in a canopy overhead. Wisteria vines curled up and over the gazebo, their heavy blooms hanging between openings, an elegant and graceful marriage of cold iron and warm color.

  Two wrought iron benches sat below the floral canopy, a fire pit in the middle. There were fairy lights woven over the framework, but Morgan didn’t turn them on—she didn’t want anyone but Micah to know she was here.

  As she waited for him to answer her text, she watched the party through the back windows of the house. She was surprised to see that he’d invited Jenna and Andre—she’d thought it would be just kids his age.

  She caught a glimpse of his mothers and smiled as they fawned over him, each in their own way. His egg-mother, as he jokingly called her, looked like him—tall, willowy, with blonde hair so pale that in the light of the setting sun glinting through the windows it looked like white gold. His nest-mother, the welder, was Asian, with a build you’d misjudge as petite until you saw the strength threaded through her well-developed muscles. She didn’t smile as much as her English teacher partner, but when she did it was with her entire body, wrapping the warmth of her love protectively around her family.

  Even without meeting them, Morgan liked them. They were good for Micah—had done good by him. Seeing them, she understood better why he was the way he was: brave and bold, strengthened with a sense of honor rarely seen any more, and most incredibly, honest—so honest, so careless with revealing his true self, never donning a mask, that she’d feared for his life when they first met.

  But now she knew. What she’d misjudged as weakness was actually his greatest strength.

  A pretty girl, Bethany, appeared in the window beside Micah, leaning into him as if whispering intimate soul-bearing secrets. Morgan straightened, almost coming to her feet, but then relaxed when Micah brushed her away, glanced at his phone, and immediately stared out the window, searching the garden draped in the rubies and velvet purples of the fading sun.

  A few moments later, he had abandoned his guests and joined her on the bench. Suddenly the iron didn’t seem cold, not with Micah filling the space, wrapping Morgan in his arms as if she were a precious gift. “You’re here.”

  “Happy birthday,” she answered, not sure if he even heard her, her face buried in his neck, inhaling like someone drowning, desperate for air. Not just air; the scent of him. Nick said smell was the most primal sense, that people didn’t consciously realize it, but even as infants they knew the scent of family long before they could recognize their faces. That was how it felt with Micah. Primal.

  He pulled back, far enough to take a good look at her. She tried to see herself through his eyes—she always did and always failed. Micah was a lot like Nick that way, seeing something in her that she herself was blind to. “How are you? You look great. I can’t believe you made it. I can’t wait to finally introduce you to my moms.”

  “I’m good.” She hesitated. No masks, she reminded herself. But it was so damn hard. “Maybe we could just talk?”

  He eased back in his seat, an arm wrapped around her, pulling her so close that it felt as if they were one. “Sure. What about?”

  Where to start? “I don’t know. How’s school?” On the surface it was a silly, inane question, asking about the summer school he’d been forced to attend if he wanted to graduate next year. But she surprised herself by actually caring about his answer. School was important to him, so it was suddenly important to her.

  “Straight As except for chemistry and trig. But I think I can pull out a B—my mom and Bethany have been helping me.”

  “Bethany. Your old girlfriend?” As if she hadn’t Googled the hell out of Bethany before coming here tonight and now knew everything about the girl, including her bra-size.

  His chuckled rumbled through his chest, and she relaxed. “Are you jealous? That’s hilarious. I knew her in middle school, ages ago. She lives down the street.”

  “That was one of the reasons I left. So we could both be sure. Take some time to know what we want.”

  “Those were your reasons,” he chided her. But he squeezed her tighter, pressing her so close she could feel his heart beat against the side of her face. “I already know what I want. I’ve known since the first day I met you.” He rested his chin against the top of her head, and as always, she couldn’t understand how they fit so exactly right together. “Nothing’s changed. Not for me.”

  Relief swamped her, along with a sudden wave of emotion she was powerless to label as it crashed down on her, her body crumbling into his, tears flowing despite her best efforts. She’d come back too soon, should have worked harder to master her feelings…look at her blubbering like a baby, letting weak emotions rule her. This wasn’t the girl Micah deserved. That girl was strong and in control, powerful, worthy of a guy like him.

  “I’m sorry,” she sobbed, his shirt damp with her tears.

  He tensed. “For what?”

  “I should have stayed away. I’m not the girl you knew before.” She tried to pull away, but he held her tight. “I’m not sure I can ever be that girl again. Look at me—I’m a mess.”

  “Not to me. I think you’re wonderful.”

  She shook her head, her face rubbing against his chest. “No. I’m not. I’m weak and pathetic. This isn’t me.” She planted both palms against his chest and pushed back far enough to look up at him. “This isn’t what I wanted. I came here to tell you—”

  “Tell me what?” His tone was guarded, as if he were already bracing himself against a painful blow. Which only made her want to cry even more. He paused long enough to swallow twice, the scar on his neck quivering with the motion. “Morgan, are you trying to tell me I’m not who you want, not anymore?”

  She blinked, his words drying her tears. How could he think that? Stupid emotions muddled everything. “No. I know what I want.”

  Another pause, this one longer, as he looked away. The lights and sounds from the party inside ghosted through the twilight.

  Finally he turned back to face her, his face bowed, the shadows hiding his features. “Not to sound like your typical insecure guy, but would you mind sharing? Just to make sure we’re on the same page.”

  She couldn’t help herself. The laugh burbled up from nowhere, from everywhere. At first he looked shocked, but she took advantage of the element of surprise and caught his face between her palms and pulled him into a kiss. A long kiss. Longer than it took for the moon and stars to shift overhead. At least that’s how it felt.

  He caught his breath, his exhalation tickling the hairs on her neck. “Okay, then. Definitely on the same page. Guess the next step is meeting the parents. I mean, we’re done with the hiding and sneaking around in shadows, right?”

  They were? She was much more comfortable in shadows than facing the full light of day. But his family was a vital part of Micah, one she could no longer deny.

  “How much do they know?” She tried to hide her trepidation, but knew she’d failed when he wrapped his fingers through hers and raised her hand to his lips. He kissed it tenderly. What was this weird fluttery feeling, like she’d swallowed a hummingbird and it was fighting to get free? Was this what Norms felt? It wasn’t fear—fear left her cold, focused, just like anger.

  Nerves? She’d have to ask Nick. Even her heart rate had quickened—she could slice a man’s throat without that happening. Her palms slicked with sweat; they’d be useless if she needed to hold a weapon. What quirk of
evolution had created this irritating, distracting sensation? And how did Norms survive it?

  “They know only what they needed to know before now.” He’d promised to keep her secrets—a promise that had caused him pain, she knew. Her secrets were the only secrets Micah had when it came to his moms. “That you’re an emancipated minor who works for Jenna and Andre, that your dad was Clinton Caine, that you were hurt stopping him, saving lives. That you saved my life—more than once.”

  “And that you saved mine,” she reminded him. “Do they know about what I’ve done? The bad stuff?” She’d told Micah the truth about her upbringing—in the hopes of scaring him off, protecting him from her world. It had failed miserably.

  “No. I wasn’t sure how much was okay—” Poor Micah. Deception, lies, secrets—they were all foreign to him. He nodded, as if settling an argument with himself. “I guess we take it one step at a time.”

  “What if they don’t like me?” She squeezed his hand tight enough to feel his knuckles grind. His moms would hate her, she was sure. Despise her for the danger their son had experienced because of her, for contaminating Micah with her blood-stained life.

  He knew better than to try to comfort her with useless reassurances. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it—if it comes to it—together.” He stood, pulling her up with him. “Ready?”

  No. Definitely not. Morgan squared her shoulders, feeling as if she was facing the biggest challenge of her life—being open and honest with people she cared about. She might not know Micah’s mothers, but they loved him; which meant, like it or not, they were now inside Morgan’s circle of protection. She inhaled, the scent of wisteria and night-blooming jasmine reminding her of the precious gift that was family, that invisible, unbreakable bond that she’d envied in Nick and Lucy, Jenna and Andre.

  And now she was about to wrap herself in those bonds, chain herself willingly. Oh, how her father would laugh. The thought made her smile, filling her with courage. She might be her father’s daughter, but she was nothing like her father.