by Lola Taylor
Her lips pressed together, Erika snatched the money and walked back out the door, never once glancing over her shoulder.
Scott watched her go with loathing. Good riddance.
The auditorium was fairly new, having just been renovated this past spring. Gleaming marble floors, thick red carpets, and state-of-the-art TVs and sound systems made up the inside. Black wallpaper featuring actual sheet music and lyrics from famous artists over the years covered the walls. The music notes had LED lights, alternating slowly through the full spectrum of the rainbow as they walked. “Private Event,” along with tonight’s date, flashed across the screen of a giant monitor that hung above the walkway. Inside the auditorium, from behind closed doors, Scott could hear a popular rock band jamming out to a background of cheers and whistles.
More signs and advertising indicated a charity concert for the children’s hospital. He thought maybe they were going to go in, when they went through one of the staff-only doors and proceeded downstairs. It must have been where the props and other stage gear were kept. Curtains, costumes, sound equipment, and musical instruments sat in organized groups as they walked down hallway after hallway. The carpet here was black, as were the walls, with simple fluorescent lighting above to light the way.
A few people milled by who definitely didn’t look like stage crew. The fancy dresses and tuxedos they wore glittered under the light as they caught sight of Scott and whispered excitedly to one another.
Scott raised a brow, watching them until they’d turned the corner. “Care to explain what’s going on and what I’m doing here?”
“Soon enough.” Ghost smiled at him.
Scott hated that smile—always had. It usually meant shit was about to get real.
They stopped at a room marked with a glittering golden star. A dry-erase board, presumably where one wrote a name, was pinned below the star.
Scott’s jaw ticked. He didn’t like the looks of this at all. Warning bells went off in his head, but what the hell was he going to do about them? Run and be shot?
Alec, Ghost’s driver, opened the door for him. Scott followed him inside—and drew up short in the doorway. “What the hell?”
Jeremy stood there, dressed in his fighting gear. His face paled as he stared at Scott; a loaded second passed between them. He turned on Ghost. “No way, man. You said no friends.”
“And as of right now, he isn’t one. He’s the enemy, the competition. Which you will eliminate, if you want to keep your little girl alive.”
Scott quickly caught on. “Wait a minute. You want me to fight him? Now?”
“Don’t look so surprised.” Ghost leaned against the makeup counter and crossed his arms. “You knew you were coming here to fight. What did you expect?”
“Not to fight the Destroyer,” Scott grit out, heart pumping fast. The temperature in the room seemed to double.
“Are you afraid?” Ghost’s eyes glimmered.
“Hell yeah, I’m afraid,” Scott said. “You’ve seen Jeremy fight. He didn’t earn the nickname of ‘the Destroyer’ for nothing.”
“Seriously, Ghost.” Jeremy stepped forward. “Please. Choose someone else, anyone else.”
“No,” Ghost said firmly. His eyes turned glacial. “You will fight each other to the death, in approximately half an hour.”
“Half…half an hour?” Scott’s brain hurt, it sounded so crazy. “Do you realize I haven’t had dinner yet, I’m exhausted because I’ve been awake nearly forty-eight hours, and I’m not warmed up? That it’s been ages since I last fought?”
“You seemed to hold your own well enough against the police, back at that delightful little inn,” Ghost said.
“That was different. Most of them aren’t trained fighters, not like Jeremy.”
Ghost simply stared back.
“Shit,” Scott spat, pacing. Jeremy would kill him—literally. “What if I refuse?” Scott said.
Ghost barely nodded. Trevor poked the barrel of his gun in the middle of Scott’s back. “Then you’re as good as dead anyway.”
Scott weighed his options. There wasn’t a good way out. He knew there wasn’t. Death faced him on one side of the coin and on the other. He’d been screwed, just like he knew Ghost would do.
“How much money do you have riding on this fight?” Scott said bitterly. “How much are our lives worth?”
“Enough to pay off my debt and then some,” Ghost said evenly.
Bastard was ice-cold, worse than Satan himself. He didn’t give a damn about anyone or anything but himself.
The severity of the situation sank deeper in Scott’s gut. Jeremy looked as distraught as he did. Apology shone in his friend’s eyes, but Scott shook his head and smiled back.
They were in this together, had been forced into this horrible situation by a monster with an insatiable greed.
Ghost glanced at his watch and stood. “Jeremy, return to your room, please. Scott needs time to prepare.” He flashed another smile. “Trevor will come get you when it’s time. You’ll find what you need in the closet.”
Jeremy cast one last lingering look at Scott on the way out, and then he was alone.
Scott heaved a shaky breath and caught himself on the countertop as his knees shook.
He was so fucked.
AROUND SEVEN THIRTY P.M., about a half hour before visiting hours were over, Becca pulled up to Rose Hill Hospital. You’d never be able to guess it was a mental health facility from the outside. If anything, it resembled a nursing home. The outside was lined with pretty, well-kept rosebushes. The sidewalk had been freshly swept, and the building was painted in warm, welcoming shades of sand and orange.
The inside was homey. The walls featured the same warm-colored paint, with beautiful landscape photographs hanging in large frames along the walls. The front lobby had an area filled with red-cushioned chairs and a coffee table strewn with magazines.
A nurse sat behind a glass panel at the reception desk. She looked up from the chart she was scribbling on and smiled warmly. “Good to see you again, Becca. Your mother’s been looking forward to seeing you.”
A small trill of excitement went through Becca. She smiled. “I never miss a visit,” she said meekly, suddenly nervous. She loved seeing her mother, but the visits themselves… They could be hard. Unbearable, even.
It wasn’t her mother’s fault. She knew that and had accepted that fact a long time ago in her therapy sessions. No one was to blame but the disease itself.
The nurse asked her to have a seat. After checking in her things, because she wasn’t allowed to bring anything back during visits, Becca went over to the waiting area and sat down in the most inconspicuous seat, right in the corner. Though the waiting area was empty, she adjusted her hat once more, making sure the bill was pulled low and her hair was tucked underneath the cap.
It was embarrassing, and, if she admitted it, even a bit ridiculous she had to hide her identity like this. The fact her mother was still alive was her most closely guarded secret. It was a lie she hadn’t started telling until college.
Grade school had been torture. Kids ridiculed and terrorized her once her mother began displaying symptoms. Their taunts still haunted her nightmares: Crazy. Psycho. Schizo. She’d heard it all. Their hurtful words had battered her fragile self-esteem until her head hung so low, it was a miracle her chin didn’t drag the ground. As if living with her mother didn’t make life hard enough.
How many hot summer days had she gone out wearing long sleeves, all for the purpose of hiding the colorful array of bruises that coated her arms? How many excuses had she come up with to teachers about the cigarette butt burns on her body?
Eventually, the truth had come out. She’d thought things had been bad before, but she quickly learned things could always get worse.
And they did. Once the state learned of what was going on, they swooped in and took Becca and Zach away. It had been hell, living in foster homes, separated from her brother.
To comfort herself, s
he did the only thing she was good at—she studied. Hard.
Math, science: they made sense to her. People didn’t. She didn’t understand their cruelty, or her foster parents’ indifference to her inner turmoil.
Didn’t anyone care about her?
As she became older, family was something she craved more than anything. The intense desire to get her brother back was the fuel that kept her working hard on her grades, which allowed her to earn a full ride to college. Another wonderful thing about college was that she could start over. She’d changed her appearance, donning trendier clothes and sporting a different hair color from the sickly blond she’d grown up with. Contacts gave her a different eye color. Her mother also conveniently “died.”
It was as though she’d been set free. Her mother’s shadow had loomed over her for her entire life, and now she could finally be allowed to explore who she was without judgment.
No one recognized the daughter of the famous “mad artist” who had to be locked up when she nearly burned her house down, convinced it was wicked and needed to be purged of its evils.
If anything, her mother was the one who needed to be cleansed. The things she’d done…
Becca shook her head. Traveling back in time wasn’t something she liked to make a habit of. Not just because her therapist didn’t recommend it, but because of her own volition.
She frowned.
At least she could remember her childhood.
Lately, her memory had started to “deteriorate,” for lack of a better word. Not only waking up in places she didn’t remember going to sleep in, or finding items that didn’t belong to her, but weird, inexplicable lapses in time. Maybe she couldn’t remember what she did from three o’clock to five o’clock one day, or where she was or who she was with one evening. It was starting to scare her.
And the headaches…they had never been this painful. Her doctor said, “Our bodies adapt to medication over time, and the dosage has to be tweaked, or, sometimes, we have to switch to a different prescription entirely.”
She swallowed hard. A familiar lump formed in her throat.
The lapse in time was the one factor that had kept her from seeking out the doctor.
Because Mom experienced the exact same thing before she was clinically diagnosed.
Footsteps startled her, and a door opened by the reception desk. A middle-aged brunette dressed in burgundy scrubs smiled. “Becca?”
Becca blinked, cleared her head, and stood. “Yes.”
“Sorry for the wait. Follow me, please.”
Becca fell into step just behind her as they navigated the pristine white halls of the hospital. Her heart thrummed wildly with a nervous jitter.
You could be here, someday. Trapped in these white walls, with no one to come visit you.
The thought of never seeing Amy or Zach again was unbearable.
No. No, I don’t want to be alone. I can’t. She’d been alone for so much of her life. She was tired of it.
The nurse stopped before the visiting area and frowned. “Are you all right, miss? You’re pale.”
“Yes, I’m fine.” Becca’s voice was breathy. A chill crept up her arms as she stared through the long, rectangular viewing window embedded in the door.
There sat her mother, staring despondently at the table. Her once-luminous skin looked dull and gray, and her golden hair had more white than she remembered. The curls were so unruly, it looked like a frizzy, tangled mess. Someone had tried to help her fix it; it was pulled halfway up in a pretty clip.
A nurse stood by the wall, watching her mom intently.
It was far too easy to picture herself there, with all hope gone from her eyes. The thought chilled her to the bone.
The nurse looked Becca over again; worry still danced in her eyes. “You ready?”
“Yes,” she rasped, clearing her throat. “Yes,” she repeated, stronger this time.
The nurse hesitated and pressed her lips together. She didn’t say anything as she opened the door and motioned for Becca to enter.
Becca took a few hesitant steps into the room. Her mother never looked up as she slowly sat down. Every muscle in her body tensed. “Hello, Mother,” she said quietly, feeling like a child. Her voice hitched up in pitch as she watched her mother with anxious eyes.
Her mother didn’t look up, not at first. When her eyes did finally drag themselves up from the table to her daughter’s face, Becca’s breath caught. Her mother blinked slowly, her eyes squinting slightly. “Becca,” her mother whispered after a beat.
Becca’s eyes watered. “Mommy.”
For a moment, the cloudiness in her mother’s gaze faded, and her mother, her real mother, shone through. With tears brimming in her eyes, she smiled and reached over, grasping her daughter’s hand.
Becca clung to that grip. The little girl inside her remembered the good times and yearned for them again. Her mother was not always dark and cruel. At one time, when Becca was barely old enough to walk, she had been every little girl’s dream mother. She took her out for playtime at the playground, read stories to her before bed, and treated her to ice cream. Those were happy times.
Then the darkness descended.
The hospital bracelet around her mother’s wrist glinted in the fluorescent lighting. At last, she let go of her hand and sat back, staring at Becca with a happy smile. “How’s your brother doing?”
“He’s fine,” Becca rasped, unable to tell her the truth. That she was so royally fucking up as a guardian. Her mother had enough problems. Her already unstable psyche might not be able to handle it.
“And you?”
Becca nodded. “Well. Thank you,” she said quietly.
Becca’s mother seemed pleased. “Tell me, child, what adventures have you been up to lately?”
This was Becca’s favorite part of the visit. Like an excited little girl, she rattled off recent happenings, highlighting only the good. The wider her mother smiled, the more exuberant she got.
The conversation quieted a little. “Seeing anyone?” Becca’s mother asked.
Becca felt her cheeks heat, and she pulled at her cap. “No.”
“Just haven’t found anyone interesting?”
Becca pressed her lips together.
Maybe. I don’t know. I’m still confused about how I feel.
She never expected to be in love with a woman. She wasn’t even sure when those feelings had developed. They’d lurked quietly for a few years now, growing stronger and deeper with every moment she spent with Amy.
But would Amy ever feel the same way? Doubtful.
The realization she was in love with someone she could never have broke her heart a little more every time she thought it.
She shook her head; her shoulders slumped from sadness. “No, Mommy.”
Her mother stared at the table. Her hands shook as she picked at her nails. The tremble lasted only a few seconds, but Becca’s eyes snapped to them as if neon lights had gone off on her mother’s fingers.
Her heart sped up. No. No, she’d been careful with her words, about not diving further into the topic of relationships, just as the nurse had requested a few visits ago. What triggered the change? What had she done wrong?
Her mother’s head snapped up; her eyes darted back and forth frantically. Becca gasped as her mother seized her hand, her eyes pleading. “Where am I? What is this place? Did something happen to me?”
Becca’s heart squeezed at the rising fear in her mother’s voice. “You’re in a mental hospital, Mommy,” she said calmly. “You checked yourself in years ago.”
“I—what? I would never have abandoned my children that way!”
“You didn’t. The state took us away.”
Her mother locked eyes with her, going still. There was no tremble this time, only a slow blink.
A sardonic smirk came over her mother’s lips as she sat back, eyes glinting darkly. “You little slut. You think you can lie to me to my face? You’re the one who put me here. How else
would I get so crazy? You brats drove me nuts.”
Becca steeled her heart. She’s not herself. You know she doesn’t mean it.
Her mother patted her jeans. There were no pockets on them, as required by hospital regulations. “Where the hell did I put my damned cigarettes?”
Becca squeezed her lips together.
Her mother stilled, glaring at her. “The hell you looking at?”
Becca’s heart slammed against her chest. Don’t switch, don’t switch, don’t switch—
The hand flew out across her face before she could draw breath. Her cheek sang from the burn.
The nurse ran forward, shouting something into a walkie-talkie. She seized Becca’s mother before she could deliver another blow.
“You little whore!” her mother screamed. “You good-for-nothing brat! You took my cigarettes, didn’t you? Didn’t you?!”
“No, Mommy,” Becca stammered.
The door flew open as two more nurses ran into the room. Two now grappled with her mother, who’d begun to kick and scream and claw like a wild animal. Rage filled her eyes and voice, making it raw.
“I never wanted you!” she screamed. “You ruined my career! I never…wanted…”
She went limp in their arms, and her gaze clouded over. The third nurse removed a needle from her mother’s arm.
A gentle hand landed on Becca’s shoulder. It was the brunette who’d led her back here. She smiled in sympathy. “Time to go, sweetheart.”
Becca followed her out, not really seeing or hearing anything around her. She’d gone numb inside.
I never wanted you!
She hadn’t realized she’d been crying until the nurse went behind the reception counter, plucked a few tissues, and retrieved Becca’s belongings.
“Thank you,” Becca whispered, happily accepting them and dabbing at her face. The nurse handed her things to her. “I’m so sorry. I—I tried to be careful, watch what I said so it wouldn’t trigger—”
“You have nothing to be sorry for. Sometimes, we think we have the triggers narrowed down. But when we think we have them figured out, they change. It varies from patient to patient.” She grasped Becca’s shoulder and smiled encouragingly. “Don’t give up hope. We’ll get there.”
