Page 10 of Black Hearts

“No.” I narrowed my eyes. “You knew this would happen one day. All the lives you helped ruin, instead of save… you deserve this for what you did to them.”

She began sobbing in earnest again, her shoulders slumping forward as she eyed the gun. Then she gingerly picked it up. With her eyes on me, obviously hoping I’d change my mind at the last second, she held it between her upper lip and the bottom of her nose.

I nodded at her encouragingly. When she pulled the trigger in that spot, it would be quick and painless. The bullet would immediately tear right through to the brain stem, and with that part of her nervous system destroyed, she would be dead in an instant. Dead before she even hit the ground.

“Wait.” She put the gun down.

I crossed my arms. “I’m not fucking letting you go, so stop trying.”

“No, it’s just… I thought of something that might help you find Celeste,” she said.

“What?”

“I remember hearing them talk sometimes. There was a place where the worst of them would take the kids for a week or so before they actually arrived at the mansion. A place where they could keep them away from everyone else while they.…” She hesitated.

“Broke them?”

She nodded. “Yes. And they’d also take others away from the mansion sometimes, to that same place. If they told you they were taking you there, it meant you weren’t coming back. Ever,” she said quietly, looking down at her lap. “It was the kids who refused to fully break, or the ones who tried to escape. Also the ones who refused to work for them once they got too old. I was just thinking… maybe they took Celeste there. It’s basically their killing grounds.”

Roaring rage filled my head, but I let her go on.

“I was good, so of course I never went there. And I wasn’t taken there at the start, either, because I was only ever taken to serve them as a maid. They didn’t need to break me down. All they had to do was wean me off the drugs and promise me a better life.”

I gritted my teeth. She wouldn’t stop talking, talking, talking. Buying more time for herself. “Right. So you’re saying you have no idea where it is?”

“Not exactly. Like I said, sometimes I heard them talking about it. I know it’s a little house on a big property, quite far out. Near a forest. And I remember a guard saying the address once when they didn’t realize I was listening.”

My pulse picked up. “Tell me.”

“14 Blandess Road. Or maybe it was Street or Drive….” She shook her head slowly. “I’m not sure about the road, but it was 14 Blandess something.”

I frowned. “You’re sure about that?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Where is that?”

“I don’t know about the area. I only heard the road’s name and number,” she said quietly, before picking up the gun again. “I suppose I could have found it myself out of interest once I was free to go from the mansion, but I didn’t really want to.”

“Well, good thing we all have maps on our phones these days,” I muttered, pulling out my cell and opening an app. I glanced at Dr. Fitzgibbons to see that she’d raised the gun to the same spot where she had it earlier. “Any last words?” I said, feeling generous after all her cooperation.

She was silent for a long time. Then she raised her eyes to mine. “Part of me did feel bad for what happened to the others, but I just wanted to escape my own fate so badly. So I did what it took. But you can never really escape, can you?”

She let out a heavy sigh. Then she pulled the trigger before I could respond. Her body fell backward onto the sofa, a bloody hole above her mouth surrounded by a burn mark from the gun barrel’s proximity to her face. Her eyes were wide but lifeless.

In just a fraction of a second, she was gone forever.

I didn’t feel bad for her. Not one bit. I picked up the gun, turned around, and walked out of the house, my heart beating rapidly as I looked down at the map app on my phone. There was a Blandess Drive about half an hour out of the city in Snowden, a rural part of South Park Township. Apart from that, there wasn’t a single other Blandess road, street, avenue, or lane in the entire country.

That had to be what Fitzgibbons meant.

Snowden was far enough out that the Circle could easily have a little house on a big chunk of land. It made sense that it was the right place. At least that’s what I told myself as I sped south, following the directions from my phone’s GPS.

When I got to 14 Blandess Drive, I pulled up with a sinking feeling in my stomach. This particular pocket of Snowden didn’t seem very rural at all—it was lined with houses, none of which had big yards, let alone huge tracts of land surrounding them. There wasn’t a forest anywhere near the area, either.

Number fourteen itself was a tiny, rundown shack with white paint peeling off the exterior. It was set on a postage-stamp sized piece of land with overgrown weeds growing through the cracked cement path that led up to the old brown door.

I let myself in—it had obviously been abandoned years ago—and had a look around, the sinking feeling worsening in my guts with each room I found empty. I checked everywhere I could; I even desperately checked for any secret hidden rooms or underground cellars.

Nothing.

Searing anger filled my body again, but this time it was aimed at myself. In my state of sheer desperation, I’d fucked up and made the same mistake I made years ago when I first embarked on my killing career. I’d trusted that Dr. Fitzgibbons was giving me real information, and I let her die before I confirmed it was accurate.

The bitch fucking lied to me.

Obviously, she didn’t feel as guilty as I thought she did, even after I cracked her nerve by telling her the Circle didn’t care about her. She remained loyal to them to the bitter end and gave me a load of made-up bullshit along with a wrong address.

Celeste wasn’t here… and I still had no idea where she was.

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