Page 111 of Holy Sinner

Chapter Fifty-One

KIT

“You fucking bitch. You’re not going to get away with this!”

“Tie her legs tighter. I don’t want her getting loose.”

Rafe nods at me and tightens the ropes around my mother’s legs. We found a bag of weights, ropes, and a heavy chain in the storage building. Grant and Rafe didn’t waste any time using them to tie my mother up. The storm is just a drizzle now. Rain falls gently around us as we stand on the dock with my mother laying on her back and screaming at me. Alana’s a few feet away and pacing back and forth.

I look back at her. “You don’t have to be here for this,” I tell her. For a second it looks like she’s going to leave but then she shakes her head.

“I’m staying with you.”

We lock eyes and I see the understanding she gives me. It’s there plain as day in her gaze and part of me is relieved that I don’t have to hide this from her. She doesn’t know what Grant and Rafe are. I’ll never tell her what their true nature is but she will know about this. Tonight is going to be carried by the both of us. There’s comfort in knowing that she’s going to be with me for this, at least. I take a deep breath and look back at my mother.

“You think all of your problems are going to go away? Is that it? That once I’m dead all your problems are going to be solved?”

I cross my arms and peer down at her. “I’m not that naive anymore. I know you dying won’t fix everything but it’s a start.”

“You killed that boy and now you’re going to kill me!”

“Mark deserved to die and so do you.” Grant hauls her up by her arm and wraps the chain around her twice. “You both hurt me and the world will be better without you, just like it was without Mark.”

“That’s a lie!”

I shake my head and watch Grant connect the chain and hand it off to Rafe, who loops it around the rope. “When Mark went missing, no one looked for him. His family did but then that’s when the girls that he hurt started talking. I wasn’t the only one. I was just the only one that got away. Do you think his family wanted the secret of who their son really was to come out? They could let him go missing and no one would say a word about the girls he raped, the ones he hit. The ones he hurt so badly they never were the same. It was easier to let him stay gone than have that come back on them because they knew.”

Two weeks after Mark was buried in the ground his mom and dad found me after school.

“We know he had plans to see you that night.”

Fear had zipped up my spine. All afternoon the school had been buzzing about Mark. A girl had been interviewed on the news saying if something bad had happened to him she wouldn’t have been surprised.

“He did things where someone might want to hurt him.”

That had created a firestorm. I’d kept my mouth shut and like always, everyone had looked right past me. No one knew that I’d had plans to see Mark that night or that I’d thought I’d been going to prom with him. If anything, the police were looking at the girl that had given the interview. But the girls at school had started to talk. I was the last to know that Mark wasn’t the nice guy I thought he was.

Even his parents knew.

“We won’t say anything if you don’t.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“If you say so…”

I hadn’t pressed but I’d never heard anything from them either. They moved a year later to Hawaii and that was that. The world had gone on spinning and no one missed Mark all that much outside of a tribute held at the first football game of senior year.

The world was better without Mark hurting girls and the world would be better without my mother’s particular brand of evil.

“No one is going to miss you when you’re gone. You’re evil.”

“And I made you. What do you think that makes you? You’re no better than me.”

You’re no better than me.

Those words had always had the power to break me down. Reduce me to nothing but a weak and scared little girl but they don’t do anything this time.

“I am, though. We both know it. That’s why you’ve always hated me.” I take a step closer to her. Rafe adds another weight to my mother’s ankles. “I’ve always been better than you. Even if I wasn't, at least people would miss me if I went missing. That’s not going to happen with you.”

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