Page 108 of Leather & Lark
“I checked records foreverywhere. There’s no one who’s feasibly within the range of your description.”
I let out a string of swears as Rose shoots me a worried look. She starts searching through a pile of syringes and vials arranged on a tray on a side table. Conor is rattling off different iterations of Abe’s name and everything that he’s searched as Rose opens a Bible that lies near the table’s edge. Her eyes go wide as she whips it off the surface and thrusts it toward me, pointing frantically at the name.
“We found something. It’s AbeMead,” I say to Conor. The realization hits me right in the chest. “Ohshit. Mead. HarveyMead is that bloke Rowan and Sloane killed in Texas. He must be related.”
Conor’s fingers tap furiously over the keyboard. There’s a brief pause that feels like an eternity. “It’s his brother,” Conor finally says. “I’m coming up with an address for Oregon. I’ll need to get to Leander’s and search from the office for anything more than the basics.”
“His history isn’t going to tell me where he’s taken Lark,” I bite out.
“No,” Rose says as she points to the closed front door behind us. There’s a map taped to the wood. “But maybethatwill.”
We step closer.
Portsmouth, the title says.
I rip the map from the wood and throw the door open. Then I run down the hallway, feeling like I’m being burned alive, one cell at a time.
SCORCHED
Lark
I wake to darkness.
No sliver of light. No sound. Nothing to orient my brain as to where I am or how I got here.
Only a familiar smell, a vague recognition my brain can’t pull from the haze of whatever drug still swirls in my veins.
I slide my arm across a cold metal floor and tap my wrist to check the time. But my watch is gone.
“Fuck,” I whisper. The word is too thick on my tongue. I roll onto my back and blink at the dark, willing any filament of light to appear, but nothing comes. All I see is a blackness.
Every heartbeat pushes me to a cliff edge of panic.
My breath quickens. Bile roils in my stomach. I pat my pockets down for my phone. Nothing.
Memories surface through the haze of drugs. A man in my apartment. My dog snarling. Blood on my throbbing head. I touch my hair and there’s a crust of it clumped in the strands. I remembera pinprick of pain in the side of my neck. My trembling fingers drift down to the mark.
I press my eyes closed. I will myself not to cry. The drug still lingering in my veins is both a blessing and a curse, dulling the memories of another darkness. Even still, I see the red numbers of the clock through the slats in the door as I huddled with my sister in the closet. Those glowing lines are so clear in my mind despite the many years that have passed.
Five thirty-nine.“How much longer?” I’d whispered to my sister. It had been hours since we’d heard any sounds from the house, but we refused to disobey our mother. We saw the desperate fear in her eyes when she closed us in and demanded we keep our promise to stay hidden.
Ava held me close. Kept me warm. “Figure it out, Lark,” she said.
Figure it out, Lark.
My fingers land on a small circle of metal embedded into the floor. I push myself up to sit and trace it, looking for a latch. But there isn’t one. There’s just a smaller, raised metal circle with eight screws near its perimeter beneath me. The surface of the circle feels slicker than the surrounding floor. I try every inch of the circle, hoping for a solution, some kind of button or clue. Nothing. Just the roar of my heart and the tremor in my hands as I fight to keep my fear at bay.
I crawl forward with one hand reaching into the darkness and hit a wall. The metal is the same as that beneath me, but there are small slats in rows, precise openings in the wall just wide enough to stick my finger in. I can’t feel anything inside. After trying afew of the holes, I trace the length of the wall and reach the next one, then the next. Halfway through my progress to map the metal in the dark, my fingers land on glass.
A window.
I press my face close to it and try to look out, but there’s nothing on the other side. Just darkness.
My fist is weak when I ball my hand tight to pound on the narrow strip of glass. “Let me out.” My voice is gravelly, barely more than a rasp. I try again, putting as much strength as I can into my fist as I bang on the window. “Somebody let me out—”
Something is pulled away from the window and I take a startled step back. Suddenly, bright light flicks on behind the glass. In the window, there’s a man looking back at me with a lethal smile.
Abe Midus.
