Better When He's Brave

by Jay Crownover

  I whimpered a little bit. “He’s going to want to know where I’m at. He won’t just let me drop out of sight.” Titus was going to be pissed that I was leaving the condo in the first place. When he found out why, he was going to call me every kind of idiot for falling into one of Roark’s traps.

  “Well, you better buy yourself some time, then. This little reunion has been a long time coming and your new boyfriend isn’t going to mess with my fun. I have another call to make but I’ll be seeing you soon, Reeve.” It sounded like he blew me a kiss over the line before he ended the call. After hanging up the phone I just sat there staring at it for a long time. I didn’t get my head together until I realized I was crying and big, fat teardrops were hitting the screen. Going to see my parents was a stupid risk to take. I could take a cab to their house, explain what I had done, and Conner could still send Zero after them, but if I didn’t go, they were dead for sure. There was no winning in this scenario, and as usual, at the end of the day I came out the loser. Figuring I didn’t really have a choice, that a homecoming and a come-to-Jesus talk with the people that had raised me was long overdue anyway, I called my mom back and told her I would be home for dinner. I was surprised at how excited she sounded to see me, and the lure of new information, of some kind of closure when it came to her daughter’s death, had her practically giddy. It made my heart hurt.

  I put on some makeup, deciding I needed it like war paint to psych myself up, and then called for a cab. Titus tried to call me, once and then again, but he didn’t leave a message and I knew if I tried to talk to him, tried to explain what I was doing and why I had to do it, he wouldn’t let me go alone. Hell, part of me hoped that it was all an elaborate ploy to get me to leave the fortress castle so Conner could grab me. I had the Glock in my purse and that confrontation was one I was prepared for. Far more than I was prepared for this new one with my parents. I had had a hard enough time telling Titus about the murder-for-hire plot when I turned myself in; I couldn’t imagine trying to find the right words to justify my actions to my parents.

  Conner wasn’t just evil, he was twisted and cruel. He knew that telling my parents that I had arranged for a murder, that I had sold my soul to Novak, would effectively end any feelings they had for their surviving daughter. This wasn’t about hurting me so much as it was forcing me to rip their world apart once again, effectively making me as bad a person as he was. He wanted to remind me how alike we were, which was also a way of reminding me how different Titus and I were. That wounded. It burned and festered inside of me. I didn’t want it to be true but there was no denying that it was.

  I called a cab and decided to turn my phone off. It wouldn’t keep Titus at bay forever, but it would hold him off long enough for me to get the dirty deed done. I figured if the marshals were still following me around looking for Conner, they would fill him in on the fact I was on the move. I sent Titus a text telling him I was going home before killing my phone, hoping it would give him a vague idea of what I was up to. I knew he would have a million questions once he caught up to me, but for now I couldn’t let him or his rightness flavor the discomfort and unease I was tasting as I headed toward the outskirts of the city.

  My parents still lived in the Point. They had a town house behind a strip mall that had long been abandoned and left to rot. The side of the building where they lived was covered in graffiti and all the windows had vertical bars running across them. My parents didn’t have a drug problem, and neither one had ever gambled a day in their lives. They had been two young kids that had fallen hopelessly in love, had a baby way too young, and never managed to get ahead enough in any job to invest in their future. My parents were the working poor, they always had been, and the Point fit them like a comfortable old shoe. My mom worked as a waitress, had since she was a teen, and my dad was a janitor for some big building on the Hill. He tended to jump from job to job, and while there had never been anything extra growing up, there had always been enough.

  As I looked at the faded paint on the front door memories flooded in. All I could see was my sister. All I could feel was the loss and the emptiness that always lingered when it came to Rissa. I had to fight back more tears when I lifted my hand to knock on the door.

  When my mom pulled it open I guess I expected her to look older, still drawn and ravaged with grief. She didn’t. In fact she looked so much like she had before Rissa was murdered it made me fall back a step. The distance between us didn’t last long as she reached out and wrapped me up in a hug. I was so shocked by the contact I didn’t even hug her back. The warm reception stunned me and made the reason I was here after all this time even harder to choke down.

  “You look so pretty. It’s been so long.” She led me through a familiar hallway littered with pictures from my youth. Picture after picture of me and Rissa growing up. The memories knocked me sideways so hard I had to put a hand on the wall to stay upright. My mom gave me a concerned look and took my elbow to guide me the rest of the way into the tiny and cluttered living room, peppering me along the way with questions about where I had been and what I had been up to. My father was lounging in his easy chair watching TV. He looked so normal, just like my mother did, that I practically fell into the couch when the backs of my legs hit it. How had life just gone on for them? How had they battled down the grief and sorrow without doing something about it? I shifted my gaze from one to the other in shock. This was not the family I had left behind. This was a family that had healed and moved on without me.

  I gulped as my mom patted my knee.

  “It was lovely to hear your voice today, Reeve. Your father and I missed you. We wonder how you are doing every single day.” There was so much kindness and love on her face that I wanted to fold over and clutch my stomach because I felt like I had been kicked in the guts.

  My dad grunted his agreement and turned back to the television. I took a deep breath and curled my fingers tightly into my palm.

  “I missed you guys too. It was just hard to be here. Too many memories.” I was going to have to tell my mom that I nearly suffocated on them and ask her how she hadn’t.

  “Well, the memories are all we have left, so we try and hold on tight to them.”

  Conner knew just what he was doing. This was going to kill me more effectively than a bullet to the brain or a knife slipped between my ribs. He was killing my soul, murdering my spirit, and the bastard knew it. I was going to tarnish the remaining good my parents held on to from Rissa and from me. Those memories would be forever tainted once I told them the length I had gone to, to exact vengeance against Rissa’s killer.

  “We were so excited when that handsome agent knocked on the door and told us there was new information. We just knew Rissa wasn’t into all that horrible stuff they said she was when she died.”

  A cold sweat broke out across my skin and I had to blink slowly and force air in and out of my lungs. “That agent lied to you, Mom. He doesn’t have anything new on Rissa. She died because her boyfriend was a drug dealer and a pimp. She died because she loved a bad man and he hurt her. She died because she made really bad choices for herself and she was just as messed up as he was at the end.”

  My mom gasped and lifted her hands to her mouth. My dad shot a look at me from his reclined position but he didn’t get up. So it began.

  I sighed and told my mother, “The agent came here to see you because he knows secrets about me. Ugly, dark secrets, and he wants me to tell them to you so you can know what kind of person your surviving daughter really is.” I had to take a deep breath because the look of horror that flashed across my mother’s face was almost enough to make me stop talking. “He wants me to tell you what I did when I found out Rissa was dead. He wants me to confess that I went a little crazy, got so lost in the need for revenge and in grief that I made my own bad choices. He’s not even a marshal anymore, I don’t think he ever really was. He had a badge but he just used it for his own ends, not to help anyone else. He’s a bad man and he’s trying to hur
t a lot of people. He forced me to come here and hurt you.”

  My mom got to her feet and started pacing back and forth in front of me. “What are you talking about, Reeve? None of this makes any sense.” She still had hope. I could hear it in her voice. If I hadn’t been planning on killing Conner already, I would be now. I hated having to be the one to take that hope from her.

  “I knew Rissa’s boyfriend was the one that killed her, and I knew he was going to get away with it. Too many people die in the Point for one young girl to matter, even if she was carrying a baby. It was too much. Too much hurt, too much pain, too much injustice. I decided that he needed to learn a lesson the same way he taught it, so I went and talked to Novak.”

  My mother gasped and jerked her gaze away from me. She looked at my dad with wide eyes and he finally climbed to his feet. He lumbered over so that he could put an arm around my mom’s shaking shoulders.

  “I promised him anything. I would have given my soul, my body, every dime I earned from then to eternity to stop feeling all the anger and hurt I was feeling. He told me he would take care of the boyfriend and he did.” I lowered my head so that my hair fell over my face and I felt my nails break the skin on my palms just enough to release a tiny trickle of blood. “Rissa’s boyfriend died because I needed him to. It was the only way I could keep on living.”

  I heard my mother muttering under her breath and then shuffling as she left the room. When I finally looked up it was just me and my father, and he was looking at me like I was a stranger.

  “We raised you better than that. All life has value and you are not the judgment maker. We didn’t turn our back on Rissa when she fell into drugs. We didn’t stop loving her when she turned tricks for that boy. We still valued the good in her. How could you do that, Reeve? How could you make a deal with a monster like Novak? Where is there any kind of good in that?”

  “I felt like I had to. Rissa deserved better than she got.” How could he not want the man that had hurt Rissa so badly to pay? Why was I the only one that thought that way?

  “Did it make you feel better after it was done? Did it bring you peace?”

  All I could do was shake my head in the negative. He sounded disgusted by what I had done. I wasn’t surprised, but it still cut to the bone. “No. Nothing has.”

  “Because there is no cure for grief. All you can do is wait it out, and day after day, little by little, you come to terms with it. But what you did”—now he was the one shaking his head at me—“even time can’t fix that kind of mistake. You will always be tied to a killer, Reeve, and we’ve had so much death and loss in this family. Why did you come here? We were doing fine. Why did you think we had to know that?”

  I swallowed hard to keep his words from hitting me like blows from a fist.

  “I didn’t have a choice. The agent that came to the door is trying to take his own kind of revenge against people he feel has wronged him and I’m one of them. He threatened to hurt you and Mom if I didn’t come clean about what I had done. He might hurt you anyway, so you should really be careful. Revenge can make a person go crazy.” I know that’s what it had done to me and I wasn’t nearly as demented and deranged as Conner was turning out to be.

  “Hurt? That isn’t the right word to describe what you’ve done here today, Reeve. We lost one daughter to her vices and her love for the wrong man. We’re losing another to her own selfishness and impulsiveness. You shouldn’t have come here. If this is what you had to bring home with you, you should’ve stayed far, far away.”

  “I had to.” I really did. This was the reaction I expected, but it still tore me right down the middle.

  “Just like you had to make a deal with a terrible man so you could seek out retribution. ‘Had to’ and ‘want to’ are very different creatures. I think you should go.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I got to my feet and stumbled to the front door.

  “You should be.” My father’s voice was harsh and shaking throughout the entire exchange. I had rendered my mother nearly catatonic but he had enough in him left to tell me, “Don’t come back, Reeve. We were healed, had moved on without you.”

  They had healed because he was right: it was only time and the acceptance of the loss that led to healing, to moving on. I had yet to accept my sister’s death. I was still stuck in the moment, watching dirt cover Rissa’s casket and smoldering like a live ember with fury and rage. I was never going to be whole.

  I pulled the door open and burst onto the crumbling cement stairs that led to the door. I tripped a little over my own feet because I was weak with rejection and disappointment, but hard hands were there to hold me up. He seemed to be there catching me every time I fell these days. I didn’t even look up, just leaned into his chest and started crying. Titus didn’t ask any questions. He just folded me into his strong embrace and took me to his car. The GTO stood like a beacon of freedom, of justice, in this worn place, and once I was inside it, I completely fell apart. The sobs racked my entire body as the motor roared to life and Titus pulled away from my parents’ house. It felt like I was leaving my entire past behind.

  “Don’t turn your phone off again.”

  I hiccuped a little at his stern tone and blinked the water out of my eyes to see where we were going. The city was behind us and we were cruising at lightning speed around the Hill and up into the mountains. I had never been up that high. I was a born and bred city girl, so the closest I got to nature was walking across the grass when I was in WITSEC. The landscape was dark and imposing and also beautiful.

  “I had to. If I spoke to you I knew you would talk me out of going or insist on going with me. Conner told me he would kill them if I didn’t go alone. Besides, you didn’t need to hear me explain what I had done again.” Shouldering my father’s disgust was hard, but seeing it on Titus’s handsome face again would have killed me.

  “Roark might go after them anyway.”

  “He might. But it was more about ripping me apart than it was about them. He figured my dad was going to look at me like he never wanted to see me again, and he was right. I had told him that telling my parents what I had done was the one thing I could never do. Admitting it to them was always one of my biggest fears. Turns out I had a reason to be terrified.” I leaned my forehead on the cool glass of the window and asked, “How did you find me?”

  He snorted and the wheels spun as the gravel turned to dirt, kicking the back end of the powerful car out to the side. “I called the feds. Though I’m feeling slightly annoyed at myself that I couldn’t figure out where ‘home’ was from the instant you sent the text.”

  I hummed a little acknowledgment. “Where are we going?”

  “To the top of the mountain. We used to race down the side for money and pink slips. Bax had a hell of a winning streak when he was sixteen that sort of put everyone off of doing it anymore, but it’s still a nice place to have a quiet minute.”

  “I don’t know that quiet is good for me right now.” I felt cold and numb all over. “But thank you for coming for me.”

  He swore and the car fishtailed again but he didn’t seem that interested in slowing down. His voice was smoky and thick as it washed over me.

  “My mom is a drunk. She had a bottle in her hand the second I was born and hasn’t put it down since. She was never very interested in being a mother, but she was beautiful and had an uncanny ability to attract very dangerous and powerful men.”

  “Like Novak.”

  He nodded in the darkness and I could see how rigid his jaw was as he talked to me. “Novak and my dad, Elias King.”

  I couldn’t stop the shocked gasp that fell from my lips. The life of Elias King was a horror story parents told their children to get them to come home early at night and to keep them on the straight and narrow. His was a name whispered in fear when his awful misdeeds were tossed out as a warning to young girls. Elias King was a serial killer. A rampaging murderer that had raped and murdered more woman than I had fingers and toe
s. Not to mention when they finally arrested him the guy had been sitting on enough black-tar heroin to feed all the junkies in the entire state’s habit for years to come.

  “No.” There was no way on earth that this man, this marvelous, amazing, law-abiding man, came from a horrific miscreant like Elias King. Titus had monsters inside of him but I couldn’t believe he was born of them.

  “Yes. I think my mom knew what he was up to; that’s what started her drinking in the first place. She learned her lesson, though, and when she got knocked up with Bax she knew enough not to saddle him with a killer’s last name. I’ve had a mass murderer following me everywhere I go my entire life.”

  “Oh my God, Titus, I had no idea.”

  “Not many people do. It’s not something I advertise, and King is a common enough last name that people rarely make the connection. My mom was pregnant with me right before he went away. I’ve never even seen him in person. I only know what the rest of the world knows through the news and media. He’s slated for execution but the date keeps getting pushed back.”

  “But still . . .” I trailed off, still trying to work my way through his major revelation.

  “When I was fifteen I had this friend named Jordan. His mom used to bring him by Gus’s shop and we would dick around with cars. He was from the Hill but I didn’t really think anything of it until one day his mom told him not to talk to me, not because of my dad but because of where I was from. Seriously, I came from murderous genes, but because I was poor and from the Point, that was why she didn’t want us to be friends? It was so fucked up, but it made me realize that was what my life was always going to look like. It was bad enough I had a killer’s last name, but I was also from the wrong side of town to ever be of use to anyone.”

  I was breathing heavy and my heart was thundering in my ears. I couldn’t believe he was giving all of this to me. Letting me inside the cage that held his monsters.