Page 57 of Antihero
That makes me angrier. I want her to be afraid, to fear and fight like we did. “Noneof it could’ve happened without you!”
"I know. I'm sorry."
“I don’t care!” I shout. Whether she’s crying or if it’s just the rain coalescing on her cheeks, I can’t tell and don’t care. “It’s too late to be sorry.”
Charlotte nods weakly, then falls to her knees, heedless of the rubble that cuts at her pants. She’s waiting. I grit my teeth and pull it out of my waistband—the cord. It hadn’t felt right when I packed it; it doesn’t feel right now. But I’ll use it. This last time. Now, Charlotte looks up. “You’re not safe, Paige.”
I frown at that. “What do you mean?”
“You need to leave this island. Just go, don’t come back. Don’t trust anyone you know here.”
Does she know about Tristan? Who he really is? Perhaps she thinks he’s going to come for me. “I’m not leaving.”
She shakes her head, like she knows it's hopeless. “They’ll get you. You’ll never be free of them as long as you stay.”
“Who?” I demand. “I’ve killed them all! Who’s left?”
“I don’t know!” she shouts back. Wind throws her hair across her face. “There’s more than you think. I don’t know who they are. If I knew, I’d tell you. But they kept things from me, too.”
My jaw tightens. “You’re lying. Like you lied to us back then.”
“It won’t end with me. I wish it would.”
“Then how will it end?”
***
Needler
Paige wasn’t at work. Nor was she at her house. She’s doing more than avoiding me now. She’s hiding from me. But she knows this island better than I do, having lived here her whole life. I search for her. I wait for her at her door, and I go to the grave I know she visits up on a northern hill. There are flowers there, recently left. So, I go back to her house. I haven’t gone inside, not yet. Perhaps I’m afraid of what I’ll find. Perhaps I know it’ll be a goodbye.
This lingering is how Charlotte slips through my grasp, too. I’ve been watching her, waiting for Paige to come, to either lure or attack her. I realised too late that trying to track bothwomen was stupid. But I’m not thinking straight. And nowbothhave managed to elude me. As the sun starts towards a horizon darkened by storm clouds, I get desperate.
Paige hasn’t bothered to fix her door since I broke it down last time. I brace myself as I walk right into her home.
Empty. The kind of emptiness that speaks of abandonment. The kind that mirrors itself in my chest as I look upon the space.
The first thing my eyes catch on is the mask. There on her coffee table. Silver, full-faced, angry. I nearly stumble to see it; it reeks so strongly of a past I’ve tried desperately to step away from. Tried, and failed. Beside it, is a long, wickedly sharp tine— a needle as long as my forearm, as silver and shiny as the mask next to it.
I want to tell herno. That I choose her, not this. I want to pick up the mask and break it in half.Damn her.
She thinks I need this. But she’s wrong.
She thinks she’s sparing me the tragedy of her. I don’t want to be spared.
Further back on the table, I see the small box. Within the span of a breath, it’s in my hands with the lid flipped back. My laugh is nearly a sob as I see what’s inside.
Heart-shaped chocolates.
Dropping them back on the table, I know she’s either gone or about to be. I take a step back, needing to think more clearly. The mask stares back at me.
I turn away, dragging my eyes from the lidless face, the future in being Needler and nothing else, and step into the cramped bathroom, hoping that things are missing—a toothbrush, or a comb. More that would indicate she went prepared, that she planned to live.
But everything is untouched, everything still in its place. Except for one thing. Thrown in the sink is an opened pill bottle. Small white pills have spilled from it, with three stillinside the rim. The ones that sit against the porcelain of the sink have begun to leech colour towards the plug, pale blue rivulets staining the white.
It’s that blue colour that draws me to pick up the bottle, peering at the three remaining pills. I draw it to my nose and sniff the bottle.
The milliseconds that I freeze seem to stretch out far too long, with too much in them to process. There’s no time to understand.
