Page 34 of Snake

Knox twists his hands together.

“I always knew he was a self-serving piece of shit, but it was only when my mom started dosing herself with anti-depressants that the truth came out.”

The last time I saw him this despondent was when he and Mason sat me down and finally told me why he’d miss school. That was a month or two after Amy went missing, if I remember it right. Back then, things started crashing down like dominoes.

Nim hits the joint again, and it’s nothing like her first hesitant puff, because she almost coughs up a lung this time. Knox waits for her to finish, taking the joint and tugging on it before unraveling the rest of his story. “It stopped being fun for him to beat her. I guess she was too out of it to fight back. So he turned to his kids.”

He drags on the joint again, the only sound in that moment the crackle of weed and a small pop of an igniting seed.

“We’d take turns going to school back then. Couldn’t dare let anyone see the bruises he left, because he told us exactly what he’d do if anyone ever found out about our time in the shed.” Knox glances up at me through his lashes, darkness in his eyes. “The times I tried to stop him taking my sisters out there, he dislocated my shoulder, tied me up, and then took them anyway.” He shrugs, looking back to Nim with glazed eyes. “They told me he only ever beat them. I told myself I believed them.”

Nim has her hands folded over her mouth. “I’m so sorry,” she whispers, but Knox waves away her sympathy before crushing out the roach under his heel.

“Our family coped. But there were others who didn’t. Miners who died of black lung because his company wouldn’t provide adequate safety gear. The ones that died in explosions, or were trapped under fallen rock. They didn’t cope. And their families barely got by after they lost their breadwinners.” Knox lets out a long breath and slowly comes to take a seat beside Nim.

Mason tracks him with expressionless eyes, still silent. I guess it’s not his story to tell either, unless he wants to mention the time Lorenzo broke his collarbone when Mason tried to stand up for Knox.

The silence is too heavy, suffocating as fuck, and I can’t end it soon enough. “He was going to sign in new legislation,” I tell Nim.

When her sad, hazel eyes latch onto me, I can feel her pity. I don’t like it one bit, but thankfully she doesn’t direct it at me. I don’t know what I’d have done if she ever looked at me like that.

“If it went through, and there was a high probability it would, then miners wouldn’t be able to claim life insurance payouts through the mine for things like accidental death or black lung. And life insurance through the mine is all most families can afford. Private insurance companies cost too much, and some won’t even cover miners because of how dangerous their job is.”

“We had to stop him,” Mason says. “There was no other way.”

More silence. Nim stares at Mason and me, then locks eyes on Knox. “You have questions,” he says darkly.

“Why didn’t you...I mean, couldn’t you have gone to the police?”

We all laugh, but the sound is dry and mirthless. It’s Knox that speaks. “We tried that, once, even though my mother begged me not to do it. She said there was too much at stake.” Knox shrugged. “We did it anyway. That’s when we discovered how corrupt the police in this town were. We could have taken them photographic evidence of the abuse, proof of the hundred different ways he was making a profit off others’ misery...and they’d have squashed it.”

“Like they did with my report,” Nim says.

“Want to lose? Play by the rules.” Knox shakes his head. “We took matters into our own hands. That all happened before my mother began taking all those drugs. Then she stopped caring about anything. Me, my sisters...everything.”

A candle splutters on one side of the room, drawing my attention away from Nim and the bed. I stare at that candle as it splutters and jumps, trying to stay alive in its puddle of suffocating wax. Was that what it felt like to my dad? His lungs slowly hardening, no longer able to draw life-giving oxygen from the air he breathed.

“It sounds like he deserved it,” Nim says slowly. “But that doesn’t mean you had any right to take his life. That’s something a court has to decide.”

Mason snorts. “Don’t you get it, baby girl? Lorenzo would never have seen the inside of a jail cell.”

“But you could!” Her yell catches me so off guard, I almost lose my balance when my head swings around so I can stare at her. “You could go to jail for what you’ve done. Why would all three of you risk it?”

Knox looks at me, then Mason, then back at Nim. There’s a hard light in his eyes, but I know it’s not regret. “They wouldn’t let me do it alone.”

Fuck, I remember that argument. He said he’d only told us he was going to do it, because he wanted to make sure he’d thought everything through before going ahead. But the minute we knew who he wanted to kill, and the full extent of the why behind it, we couldn’t let him do it alone.

Loyalty.

I’ve never experienced it as truly, as purely as I have with these two men. My friends. The first I’ve ever really had. The last I’ll ever need.

I lick dry lips. “That’s not all,” I say.

Knox looks over at me, eyes narrowed. He gives his head the tiniest shake. No.

I bite the inside of my lip, seconds away from telling Nim about the list, anyway. Isn’t that what Knox said to do?

Once Nim saw what we were doing, how we were cleansing Cinderhart, she’ll have no choice but to join us. And while I think it’s risky, someone like her coming to our side, I’m glad we made this decision. Four can do more than three. And someone as soft and diminutive as her? No one can expect her to be part of a plot to take out the cancerous members of our society.

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