Page 13 of The Knight

The first to kick me while I was there, too.

Still, it strikes me as a sick, horrible kind of joke the universe is playing on me. Of course a snake like me, bitter and full of fire inside, would find herself with no friends and no one to care for her except the woman who birthed me, the one friend who has no idea who I really am, and four terrible boys who have some of the same dark secrets and darker tendencies as me.

I must be broken inside. The only ones who can care about me anymore are just as broken.

Now, as soon as my mother's back is turned, I have a truth to discover: if my brother was broken too, dark and twisted inside, and what it was that he was killed over.

Chapter 6

The partition on Silas's laptop hard drive is, of course, encrypted. At least I think it is—when I get to the portion of the storage system thatlookslike it could be what Lukas was talking about, based on the gigs of memory it's taken hold of, I try to open it up, but all I get is an error message.

If I were smarter, like my brother, I would know what secret it takes to open it up and find out what's inside.

But he was always the clever one, at least when it came to languages, history, and other hard facts. I was the street wise one, despite outward appearances—the one who pulled him back from the riverbank when he almost slipped in, the girl with a fist at her side in second grade when the bullies came for him. Silas was going to make something of himself, and I was always destined to be pulled along in his shadow. Even the shadow of his grave.

Frustrated, I try a dozen different things, but there aren't many guides on the internet on how to hack your own computer. I guess it's probably something out there in some dark forum on the dark web, or maybe just inside a computer science textbook—I wouldn't even know where to look, much less understand the words.

I need help figuring this out.

The only person I can think of who can help me is the last one who will want to.

But desperate times, and desperate girls, call for pulling out my cracked phone and staring at the lit-up screen. Checking to make sure that my mom is snoozing nearby, and Wally is still gone, I unlock the phone and scroll through the waiting alerts.

There are things I'm tagged in on social media that I don't want to look at. No doubt it's all Georgia’s doing after the ball last night where she revealed my elaborate lies. I have a few concerned messages from Sasha and Hector, but none from anyone else—including Chrissy, whose friendship I'm unsure I even want back.

One text message sends a shock through me, followed by a tiny flicker of hope that I can barely admit to feeling.

Holly sent me a text.

It's dated sometime last night, when I was yelling at the boys in the storm, or just after I got kidnapped. After I ran out of the party.

I'm sorry Georgia did that. It was never my intention to hurt you. Even though you hurt me.

A message that stings as much as it comforts.Even though you hurt me.Can I really deny that I did? After I betrayed her, the one nice girl at this school, who lives in the upper echelon but treats all the others like human beings. I repaid her by stealing from her—then worse, last night I kissed her ex-boyfriend.

Her ex-boyfriend who she never would've broken up with if not for my exposé on him that revealed his covered-up DUI.

I really showed Holly what a terrible friend I am.

As I sit with the phone in my hand, reading and re-reading the message, trying to decide if there's anything I can say in return that won't make me look like an asshole, another message came through. Along with many others. My phone is catching up to what it missed out on while it was dead and waterlogged in the trunk of a car, right next to my prone body.

I swipe up on all the other notifications so I can see what Holly wrote.Brenna, are you okay? Sasha called but you didn't pick up. Lukas said he last saw you in the parking lot running away, but no one can find you. If you're safe please let us know!

Surely she knows by now what happened. Great Falls is a small city, and Coleridge is known for its gossip network. If Lukas didn't tell her—and he probably did, if he told her I was missing—then someone else did.

So she doesn't need to hear from me.

But the open invitation to contact her sits on my screen, unmoving yet somehow tempting me. I can't seem to stop myself from probing the wound that is our severed friendship, desperate to cauterize it even if it will never fully heal.

Part of me wants to pour my heart out directly into her message inbox, tell her how sorry I am, how much I regret what I did, how thankful I've become for our friendship. I want to explain to her that I'm broken inside, that my brother held a piece of my heart in his hand and it was buried with him the day that he died. My chest has a cavity full of grave dirt in it.

Burdening Holly with everything would be wrong, though, I realize. Especially if it might make her feel obligated to forgive me even though she's not ready yet. So I decide to stick to a simple response, one that doesn't invite anything more.

I'm safe. Thank you for worrying about me.After a long moment of staring at the text box, the cursor blinking at the end, I add,I'm sorry.

Then I press send and page away, scrolling through all my other messages and calls. I drop a quick line to Jade, who has been updated by Wally but made it clear in her texts that she was impatiently waiting for me to charge my phone and respond to her too.

Taking a deep breath, I do what I've been putting off since I unlocked the phone: I open up an old message window, one filled with texts back and forth about study dates and times, and type a fresh message to Lukas.

---