Page 12 of Morally Grey

The silence stretches out, and then she takes a deep breath. “Tell me why you did it.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Bullshit.” Her head pulls forward again, and she’s looking right at me. “You could have killed me just now, and you didn’t. You would have been justified, too. That tells me you had a very good reason for killing that bitch, and I want to know what it was.”

“What do you expect from me? The reasons don’t matter. Killing her didn’t fix anything. When people say that murder doesn’t solve problems, they aren’t lying. It solved nothing, and I feel worse for it.” I bite my inner lip. Maybe it won’t hurt to give her a tiny piece of the puzzle. “Remember those NINJA loans?”

“No income, no job, no assets,” we say in unison.

“It ruined my life,” I continue. “And not just my life...” My voice fades out as my heart begins to ache.

“Those loans ruined a lot of people’s lives,” Briar says. “When I was little, the bank tried to foreclose on our home.”

“How’d you guys manage?”

A sly grin slides onto her face, made almost eerie by the flashlight’s glow. “My dad robbed a bank to save the house.”

My jaw falls open, and I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “No fucking way. Did he get caught?”

She shakes her head, sending her red hair around her face. “He was never discovered, but he and my mother died in a car crash a couple of years later, so it didn’t matter anyway. They still lost the house, and I was placed in foster care.” She looks around the basement, then offers me a sad smile. “I got the house back, though.”

The pieces of the puzzle are fitting together now. Her desperation is understandable because it was once my desperation. It’s a desperation too many Americans have become familiar with. We are sold the American dream at a price they know we can’t afford.

I slide the gun across the floor to her. It bumps against her shoe, and she looks at it.

“What are you doing?” she asks, and I can’t answer her. Because I have no fucking clue.

I had the upper hand, and now I’m giving it back to her if for no other reason than I’m not the monster I need to be. She’sright. I’m not some hardened killer who takes a life for the sake of it.

“I really don’t want to go to fucking prison,” I say into the darkness. “If we can find some way to avoid that where you can still keep the house...”

And that’s when it hits me.

I still have access to the cams in Gloria’s house. Maybe the solution to her problem lies there. And if she has a solution, maybe I do too.

“Do you have a computer you’d let me use?” I ask. “I’d like to show you something.”

She motions toward the ceiling. “Yeah, but there’s no power. The Wi-Fi won’t work.”

“Your phone?”

Her hand goes into her pocket, and she pulls it out. “Dead. I kind of forgot to charge it when I was busy kidnapping a murderer. My bad.”

I let out a soft laugh. I can’t help it. She might be out of her fucking gourd, but she’s also likeable as hell.

“Well, I guess we can go upstairs now,” she says. “But if you think I’m letting you go, you’re sadly mistaken. I like you, Grey, but I like...” She hesitates, then says, “I like this house and the memories it holds a little more.” She plucks up the gun and stuffs it into her pants. At least she isn’t holding it on me anymore.

I nod and follow her upstairs, but I get the sneaking suspicion that she’s holding something back. Maybe I’m not the only person with secrets I’m not ready to share.

Chapter Nine

Briar

Inviting him into my bed was probably a terrible idea, but I’m tired and I need to keep an eye on him. I put him back in his metal collar, then climbed beside him in bed. Part of me worried he would tell me to sleep on the couch, but he didn’t. He just turned onto his side and faced away from me.

Not that I’ll sleep. Being tired and being sleepy have two very different meanings in my world, and I’m the former, not the latter.

Lightning fills the room, and the loud crack of thunder follows closely after. Storms don’t frighten me the way they used to scare my mother, but the unexpected sound still makes me jump. And maybe I’m just alittlescared.

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