Page 16 of The Sinner and the Gunslinger
“Come, child.”
Someone grabbed her arm, but she snarled. She pushed all the burning emotion and fear from her gut and unleashed it on anyone nearby.
And she stood.
She waited.
She made a mental list of all the hospitals she’d call.
Then she crossed her heart and hoped to die.
He promised.
Ten
Leila
Islam my laptop lid shut. The old wooden table rattles, causing the brass lamp to wobble. From various points of the archives, glares are sent my way. Mercy and Tawny sit at a table monitoring news networks for signs of Asmodeus. Raven is with a book, probably doing the same thing I was doing... reading the same words repeatedly. I close my eyes and shake my head. We’ve been researching for days but have come up with nothing. This bookish stuff is not my forte. Plus, all I can think about is a certain brooding gunslinger walking around the abbey with an ex-demon fawning over him.
I keep replaying the days before the fire at the group home, trying to work out what I did or said to make him feel that faking his death was the only way out, but I keep coming up with more reasons to break my heart. I was in my final year of middle school, and he was about to graduate high school. He didn’t do well with his grades, but neither did I—despite my trying. We were dreamers and preferred sports. Me, with a side of baking.
A few nights before the fire, he returned home late. Usually, he would stop by my room after school. But this one time, he never showed up and never turned up for dinner. Concerned about his lateness, I’d stolen dinner rolls and shoved them in my hoodie pocket before heading to the room he shared with other boys.
His door had been open, and I overheard an angry argument inside. Zeke sat calmly on his bed, his head resting against the wall, a butterfly knife flipping deftly in his hand. His attention was glued to the ginger-haired teen on another bed opposite him. Puck was about to age out of the system. He looked and sounded like a grizzly man.
From the day I arrived at the home, Puck had made it his personal business to make my life hell. I don’t know what I did to earn that attitude, but as much as I despised him, I wouldn’t have wished for the injuries he sported that day. For a moment, I fall back into the past, recalling the events as though they’d just happened.
* * *
Puck’s eyes and lips were puffy, bloody, and swollen. Hate was unmistakable in his ice-blue eyes as he glared at Zeke and said, “You’re going to fucking pay for this, Cohen.”
“Good luck with that,” Zeke drawled, unworried. “I won’t pull my punches next time.”
It was then I noticed Zeke’s knuckles were bloody. But the rest of him seemed unscathed.
“Why do you even care?” Puck sneered. “Unless you’re actually a pedo, and she’s your little pleasure doll.” He changed his tone to mocking. “Oooh, does Cohen want to make out with his little china doll? Maybe I should turn you in to the cops.”
Zeke gave a cruel laugh. “Pedo. That’s rich coming from you. Lei Ling is the only girl you haven’t tried to shove your cock into, and you know it.”
Ew. I scrunched up my nose. Why were boys so gross?
But then I registered my name was spoken and gasped. They were talking about me. I snuck closer to the door to see better. Even under the swollen face, Puck’s dark intentions were clear. He didn’t deny what Zeke accused him of. He was smiling.
“One of these days, Cohen, you won’t be around to protect her.”
“She can protect herself.”
“She still sleeps with her fluffy toy. She ain’t gonna do shit.”
“You’re sick.”
“Maybe. But I’m right. She’s growing up to be a juicy piece of ass, and you know what that means. Girls like that love it. They want it. They beg for it.”
“You don’t scare me.”
He gestured to his face. “So this was for what, then?”
Zeke caught the knife. He pointed the blade at Puck. “That was your final warning.”
