He gave me a smile that I knew would send chills through any other person. “You think they’ll get away with this? You think I believe you—of all people—would let them? You grieve, and while you grieve, we’ll prepare for what’s coming.” He slid a hand over my head, cupping the back of my neck. “I know you as if you were my own blood, and I know your heart is too big to not let this pain out. It’s why you had to get out of the business. It’s why you could find a way to live a normal life for so long. It’s why you loved that boy more than your own life when everything you’ve been through pointed to you being unable to love.”
I should have known he would understand me better than I knew myself. He got up and went to the cracked cupboard across the room. “I brought you clothes yesterday when I came to check on you.”
He pulled out a pair of light gray sweatpants and an oversized hoodie. He helped me dress, as comfortable with me as if he had been my father, his hands gentle on my wounded body.
I wished he had been my father. Maybe I wouldn’t be here now if that had been the case.
No, I would have been an abnormal like him then, and hiding from the world. Running for my life, or working for the tyrants of the world to make a living, tyrants like my father.
A hiss slipped out of me as I lifted my right leg. I could barely get it a few inches off the floor. Zee bent without a question and maneuvered my foot into the leg hole. “Haven’t had to help you dress for a good twenty-five years. When you took a tumble off the obstacle course, and broke both your arms. Remember that?”
I kept my silence, but appreciated that he was trying to distract me. I stood as he slid a pair of my oldest runners on my feet, then waited as he laced them up. “Haven’t done this for about the same length of time either.” He patted my calf when he was done, then stood, head and shoulders above me.
I slid an arm around his back and leaned into his body, letting him help me stand as I let myself acclimate to the pain. “Let’s go.”
Zee walked at a pace I could keep up with, but even so, by the time we reached the front doors of the hospital, my breath came in hard gulps with the exertion and sweat rolled down my face. Broken ribs . . . they would take time to heal. So would the pelvic bone issue and the wrist. But none of that mattered. Zee understood that I had to take time to heal, and in that time, I would make my plans.
He got me into his truck and strapped me in. I let him do it for me, because the feeling of sitting in a vehicle so like Justin’s old Ford froze my body . . . I couldn’t stop the flashback from happening.
Flashbacks were not new to me and I gritted my teeth as this one washed over my senses.
I could see the inside of the old Ford, could feel it rumble under me. The sensation of being in the truck as it careened down the hill, and then when the first tire had blown, to be followed so closely by the second and third. I made myself focus on that part, the stark details of the accident that had been set up, and ignored the rest of what had happened. I would not think about Justin and Bear.
I put a hand over my eyes as Zee started the truck up, my spine tingling with a rush of adrenaline that had nowhere to go.
“You going to be sick?” Zee didn’t put the truck in first gear.
“No. Just get me home.” I wanted my bed. I wanted a place I was familiar with, away from the hospital. I should have known things wouldn’t be that easy.
I should have known that Zee . . . that he was trying to help in his own way.
We were ten minutes into the drive when he cleared his throat. “The doc sent home some good sedative painkillers to help you sleep. Percocet by the looks of it.”
I didn’t look at him, just kept my hand over my eyes, trying to keep my mind blank, nothing. “Anything else?”
He cleared his throat again. “I got the initial police report. There was no tampering on the brake lines. Nothing. And there were no tire blowouts. I know you want someone to blame, and I know your past is the easiest place to do that.”
What was left of my emotions froze over in slow sections so that my body felt like it was being pushed through ice, piece by piece. My silence only seemed to encourage him, when all I wanted was for him to stop talking. Because he was wrong. I hadn’t told him about the gunshot. Or the man at the truck, or what I suspected was the same man at the hospital.
“Bea—”
“No.” I threw the word at him. “That is not my name.”
“That has been your name all these years. You going back to Nix now?” The weight of his eyes flickered from me to the road and back again.
I nodded. “Yes. I never stopped being Nix. No point in hiding it now.”
He let out a slow breath. “Look, I get it. I do. When your mom died, I wanted to blame them all, every last fucker I’d ever dealt with. I wanted them to be the reason she was gone. They weren’t. She was sick and no healer would touch her because of your father, and so she died. Just like this was an accident. The reality is your family and your past has forgotten about you. The way you wanted, the way we planned.”
My stomach rolled, his words acid drops in my belly. “In the hospital, you said . . . they wouldn’t get away with it. You said—”
“I said what I said to get you moving.” His tone was hard. “I said what I said to get you up and out of that bed, Nix. I know this pain. I know it well. It will consume you if you let it, it will drive you crazy if you let yourself sink into a belief that this was no accident.”
I put my hands over my eyes and leaned forward so that my forehead was on my knees. My back and hips protested the movement but I barely noticed. “It wasn’t an accident. I know it wasn’t. What about the report on Justin?” Why was he even arguing? He knew my family, and he knew their reach and the lengths they went to protect their money and power.
I was a loose cannon they’d never tracked down, a weapon they’d lost somewhere in the wild that had taken a large sum of blood money right out from under their noses. I’d avoided all the hunters they’d sent after me, both normals and abnormals, and there was no reason to think that Zee wasn’t right.
If he was right, then I could grieve. Except he wasn’t, which meant I couldn’t let it out, not yet, and maybe not for a long time.
Zee’s fingers drummed a terrible staccato on the steering wheel with one hand and a matching beat on the stick shift with the other. “Justin died with a broken neck.”
“That’s it? No gunshot wound to the head?” I sat up, my eyes narrowing.
“Nothing in the reports,” he said, his words as careful as if he were treading glass shards. “The official autopsy report won’t be out for a few weeks at least.”
“They can be faked. You know that.”
He shook his head. “What happened was a terrible, shitty accident that never should have happened, but it did. You’ve picked up after you lost everything once before, you can do it again.” He slowed for what was one of the only intersections in town, took a left, and we were heading out toward the place I’d called home for ten years. Ten years of peace.
Ten years of no blood or death, or magic or monster slaying that wasn’t putting food on the table. Flashes of my past tried to reach for me, to remind me of what I’d walked away from, of what I’d tried to protect my small family from.