Page 88 of Break for Me

“God,” she whimpered. “I don’t know what she would say to calm your crazy ass back down.”

I went to move around her but she sidestepped with me, while the driver in the other car fumbled it into reverse.

“J.”

She stepped right against the barrel and grabbed my wrist with both hands.

“You’ll never get to her if you end up arrested for road rage murdering someone right here in the street,” she pleaded. “Get back in the car. Please.”

When she tried to push the gun down that time, I let her and she released a wildly shaky breath.

“Alright,” she said. “So, Memphis was the anchor that kept your psychosis under wraps. And now I don’t have access to her. Great.”

Memphis had never been able to prevent me from blacking out before it happened though.

I went back to Seph and unlocked the doors so Trista could get in on her own side. She hissed in pain while she lowered herself into the seat. Scurrying across the console and having to run to catch me couldn’t have felt pleasant for a stab wound to the quad, but she never said anything about it. She laid her head back against the seat and exhaled hard before the only thing left of us on the road was a cloud of smoke from the back tires.

* * *

We were sitting in the driveway at the house for which Memphis had given me the address in record time. There weren’t any other vehicles in the driveway, but there were two overhead garage doors attached to the house. Just because the house was dark and I couldn’t see any movement didn’t mean our organization hadn’t set up camp inside her house to wait for us.

“I don’t understand why we’re here,” Trista whispered, like she was afraid to actually speak. She probably was. Neither of us had said a word prior to this moment. “Why aren’t we just following that tracking device that she said she’d take with her?”

“I don’t know anything about Memphis,” I said, and nearly fucking choked on the truth in those words this time. “I don’t know if she has a family. I don’t know if there are other people in there who might have been hurt or who might need help. They won’t hurt Memphis until they’ve at least told me what they’re demanding. We’ve got time.”

“I thought you guys didn’t have identities? How could she have a family?”

“Executioners and Judges have different rules. Come on.”

She had so many more questions, but I watched her come to terms with the fact that I was not in a mood to answer even a single one of them. She followed me all the way around the house while I looked in windows and checked every door that we came across. I couldn’t decide if the front door being left unlocked was an oversight on someone else’s part, if it was a dare to stroll right in to find whoever might have been in there, or if it was meant to be a trap. If this had been just me in any other situation, I would’ve barged right in like a madman. But Memphis’ chance at surviving was very strongly linked to my own ability to remain alive now. Trista followed me through every room in that house, clinching the back of my jacket in her hands with every step. I didn’t hear her so much as breathe until I went back to the front entryway and flipped one of the lights on. Memphis had a security camera aimed directly at the front door from the inside. I imagined someone somewhere was watching every move that we made in here, but I really didn’t care. Maybe it would even prompt someone to call me and lay out whatever set of demands they had about this situation.

“J?” Trista asked from the living room just around the corner from where I was. She was holding a picture frame by the time I made it to her.

“Which one do you think she is?” She asked, handing the frame over to me. I couldn’t do anything about the laugh that burst out of me at the sight. It was a group of women in what looked like a massive bookstore. There were people everywhere around them, carrying stacks of books between booths. Three of the women in the middle of the photo just looked like people; like they would’ve blended right into the background of this photo. The girl on the far left though; the one sticking her tongue out and holding her right hand up in the devil horns rock salute, she stood out. The skeleton hand that was tattooed across the back of her hand to draw attention to her gesture solidified my guess. Memphis had the blackest hair I’d ever seen and was small enough to fit in my pocket. She looked like she belonged at a Disturbed concert rather than some book fair.

“She’s the little rocker girl, isn’t she?” Trista asked. I shoved the photo right back at Trista when I realized my thumb was moving back and forth across Memphis’ face.

“Yeah. That’s my guess, too.”

“How old is she, J?” She asked. “She looks like she would’ve been younger than me when this was taken.”

“I don’t know.”

“She’s cute,” Trista added quietly.

Cute.

Because she really wasn’t fucking old enough to be beautiful.

Fuck.

I spent the next hour searching through every piece of the house. There wasn’t anything to suggest that Memphis had family who lived here with her. She had an entire room that looked like it was really supposed to be a bedroom but it had been turned into a library. The whole first set of shelves seemed odd and out of place, like she’d kept every college text book she ever had. From literary classics to books I never had a chance at understanding about computer science.

“She’s a smut reader,” Trista laughed from further in the room. She was scanning shelves of books where every cover seemed to consist of a mostly naked man. I laughed myself then. Those felt more fitting.

“I think I love her,” Trista said while she ran her fingers across the spines of more books further down the shelves.

I couldn’t even force myself to set foot in Memphis’ office when we happened across it. We shouldn’t have been there looking just for the sake of looking at her belongings anyway. It was probably creepy and definitely a massive invasion of her privacy, but it was the closest look I’d ever had at the girl who I’d spent the last five years on the phone with every single day.

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