by Kieran Scott
To my horror, a tear spilled onto my cheek. I wiped it away as fast as I could, but it was too late. The pressure in my chest had welled up into my throat and was cutting off my air supply.
“What?” Kaia breathed.
“All the bruises, Kaia? The ones I told you were from soccer and lacrosse?” I said, my voice cracking. “They’re not. They’re from him! Yeah, Robin threw him out, but he still comes by and usually only when he’s been on a bender. The first time…a few years ago…he came after Trevor and I got in his way. And the time after that and the time after that… Now he comes after me. Every time. Only me.”
“Oliver…oh my God.” She reached for me, but I angled away. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
My jaw clenched. I could see the pity in her eyes. The sorrow. Five minutes ago she might have thought I was keeping secrets, but at least she thought I was strong. Her wingman. Someone who could protect her, who wasn’t a liability, who was worth having on this little adventure of hers. Now she saw me for what I really was: a pathetic little kid whose father abandoned him. A loser who took beatings on a regular basis. I was nothing but an orphan who no one loved.
“You’re one to talk about keeping secrets,” I said bitterly.
Then I turned around and kept right on walking.
chapter 12
KAIA
My heart broke open. There was so much hurt in Oliver’s eyes. And I hadn’t seen it because I’d only been thinking about myself. I’d only considered his existence as it pertained to me. When the hell had I become so freaking self-centered? Suddenly all I wanted was to drive back to Charleston, find this asshole foster father of his, and give him the same treatment I’d given Picklebreath. But he was there, and we were here, and Jack didn’t matter anymore. Oliver had gotten away from him, and he was never going back—not if I had anything to say about it. Our future was all that mattered.
And now he was walking away from me. I’d made my own worst nightmare come true.
“Oliver!” I shouted. “Oliver, wait!”
Right then, my phone beeped and my heart stopped. No one had this number other than Oliver, Henry, and Bess. And whoever was watching the safe house security feed. I fumbled the device from my pocket. There was a new text message from an unknown number and as I read the tiny type, my knees almost buckled.
Kiki, I know you’re looking for me. You have to stop. NOW.
My hand shook as the world tilted on its axis then slowly began to spin in the opposite direction.
“Mom?” I said out loud, my voice reedy.
It was true. It was real. My mother was alive. My mother was alive. This was why the German had a list of our safe houses. He really was looking for her. But she hadn’t been in any of them, so he’d come after me. She was alive. She was actually freaking alive. I texted back quickly, my hands shaking so much that I had to retype the short message five times.
Mom? Where are you???
Almost the second I hit send, the red exclamation point popped up with that evil message: not delivered.
Of course. A blocked number. But she was out there. She was. It had to be her.
I looked up. Oliver was a block and a half away.
“Oliver!” I wailed. “Stop!”
He must have heard the desperation in my voice because he paused. But he never got the chance to turn, because a big, white van screeched to a halt next to him. I’d taken barely half a step when the door slid open and Oliver was yanked inside.
“Oliver!” I screamed.
I threw Sophia onto the road, jumped on, and pushed pavement, but the van peeled out. I took off after it, panic pounding my heart. Who the hell would kidnap Oliver right off the street? And why? These goons were after me, weren’t they? But then, Oliver was with me. So he was fair game.
God, how I wished I had gotten more answers out of that bitch in the meat freezer. How many of Picklebreath’s “others” were out there? Were we ever going to get half a second to breathe?
I raced down the street—a four-lane thoroughfare with a double yellow line and traffic lights. Even with Sophia under me, the van was getting further and further away. I was about to lose him for good, when the lights turned red as far as the eye could see and the van pulled to a stop. Kidnappers who obeyed the traffic laws? It was my lucky day.
I turned on the speed, caught up to the van, and jumped off my board. It rolled ahead and bumped to a stop at a sewer drain next to the curb.
“Oliver!” I tried the door, but it didn’t budge. I pounded on it so hard my fists stung. Oliver shouted, but I couldn’t make out the words.
“Let him go!” I screeched. “He has nothing to do with this!”
The light turned green and they were off again. I groaned, grabbed my board, and followed. As I maneuvered Sophia around an ancient manhole cover I memorized the license plate.
Illinois 851 BCG.
Illinois 851 BCG.
Illinois 851 BCG.
My breath was short, and I honestly felt as if my heart was about to overload. I couldn’t keep up this pace much longer. Up ahead, a police car idled in front of a coffee shop. As I rolled closer I could see two men in blue through the plate glass window, sucking on coffee and laughing.
Would they help me? If I got the cops involved, they’d want my ID. And while I had a fake passport on me, I couldn’t risk it being entered in some database and possibly alerting the authorities of my whereabouts. Even more importantly, if the police got Oliver, they’d send him right back to South Carolina, to Robin, to that hell. I couldn’t let that happen. Anonymity was key. We really were in this together.
I pressed as hard as I could, almost biffing on some roadkill and hopping the larger cracks in the road. At each light, I closed the distance between us, and I nearly got close enough to grab the back fender, but then the van took off and changed lanes, and I lost my advantage. Then the kidnappers hooked a left onto a residential street, and I made it across the main drag seconds before the light turned green. A motorcycle zoomed past me, so close I swore the driver’s leather jacket brushed the back of my backpack.
I turned onto the street and didn’t see the van anywhere. It must have pulled into a driveway or a garage. I gave myself ten seconds, gasping for breath as I leaned against a wrought iron fence post, then kept moving.
The street was quiet, aside from dance music playing somewhere in the distance, the repetitive thump of the bass keeping time with my pulse. I hopped off Sophia and ducked down the first driveway on foot, thinking it would be better to stay away from the glare of the streetlights. For a second I crouched next to a busted wood fence and strapped Sophia to my backpack, then cut across a backyard with unkempt grass and a stone barbecue pit at its center.
The garages on the street were all detached and sat at the end of long driveways near the back corner of each property. I paused and took out my Beretta. The steel felt cool against my palm, and I prayed no one would give me a reason to use it. But I would if I had to. I would for Oliver.
At the next house, I peeked inside the foggy garage window and saw nothing but piles of boxes.
The dance music was getting louder. The next garage housed a small car covered by a brown tarp. The third was another mess of storage. At the fourth house, I was close enough to the music to hear the laughter and raised voices that went along with it. I had to scale a fence to get to this garage and when I came down on the other side, I nearly slammed my head against a pile of old kegs. The scent of stale beer hung in the air, and there were cigarette butts everywhere. Lovely.
I brushed myself off and righted my backpack. Cars packed the driveway, and the house was entirely lit up. Two girls hung out on the back porch, smoking and sipping from red cups. Over their heads, propped up on the porch roof, were three illuminated letters. BB. And at the very edge of the driveway, hanging over onto the sidewalk, was a big, white van
.
What the hell?
A chorus of cheers went up inside the house. My eyes narrowed as I shoved my short, sweaty hair behind my ears. Suddenly, I wasn’t in such a rush. I pushed the gun into the back waistband of my jeans and made sure my jacket covered it.
Stepping out of the shadows, I cut across the lawn and walked up the steps to the rear porch where the two girls sat. They eyed me as I strode past and opened the back door.
“Ladies,” I said.
One of them scoffed, but neither made a move to stop me. Inside, I found myself in a spacious, brightly lit, mostly white kitchen packed with dozens upon dozens of miniskirt-sporting, overly made-up girls with straightened hair. The dance music was deafening. Everyone was drinking, laughing, shrieking. And in the center of it all was my boyfriend, shirtless, leaning his head back while two buxom babes poured alcohol from two bottles directly down his throat.
“Um, Oliver?” I said.
He brought his chin down too fast and spit brown liquid everywhere. A few drops even landed on my cheek.
“Ew!” the girls chorused.
Oliver wiped the back of his hand across his lips and widened his eyes at me. “They made me do it!”
chapter 13
OLIVER
“We’re really sorry. We didn’t know he had a girlfriend.”
Jessa, the girl with the big boobs and the nasal voice, addressed Kaia, who somehow managed to look threatening, even though the sorority girl had a good six inches on her.
“Our pledge scavenger hunt said ‘Blond Hottie,’ so…”
She shrugged. I watched Kaia, feeling more than a little bit stupid with alcohol dripping down my bare chest. I’d asked around for my shirt and jacket, but no one seemed to know what had happened to them.
“Uh-huh,” Kaia said skeptically. “Do you think you could find his shirt? He looks a little cold, no?”
Jessa scanned me up and down and pressed her tongue into one cheek, smiling in a way that made me feel like I was about to be dragged to her room. Instead, she shrugged again.
“Sure. You guys are welcome to stay and party. There’s plenty of food and beer.”
She swung around, hair rippling, and dove into the crowd. “This is your pledge class president talking, bitches! If you have the hottie’s clothes, you’d better fork them over or I’m gonna dock you points!”
Groans rose up from the crowd. Half a second later, Jessa came back with my shirt, which smelled of strawberries when I pulled it on.
“Have fun!” She twiddled her fingers and was gone.
Kaia snatched my jacket from over the arm of another girl who was sauntering by and tossed it at me.
“I’m really sorry,” I said instantly.
“It’s not your fault you were kidnapped,” Kaia said.
“No. Not for that. I’m sorry about before. For freaking out.” I reached for her hand and she let me hold it. “I should have told you what was going on. I just felt so…stupid. I know that’s lame, but…I didn’t want you to think of me as, like, a victim or something.”
“Oliver, it’s okay.” For the first time since she’d arrived, Kaia’s posture softened. “I’m not mad. I wish I’d known. I would have figured out a way to—”
“What? Protect me?” I laughed bitterly. “No one can protect me. All I have to do is make it through my eighteenth birthday in one piece and then I’m outta there.”
Kaia leaned forward, pressing her forehead into my chest. “I hate the thought of anyone hurting you.”
My heart swelled, and I put my arms around her, backpack and all, resting my chin on top of her head. “I’m okay. And hey… I think we just survived our first fight.”
Kaia looked up at me and smiled. “Yeah, I guess we did.” She rose to her toes to kiss me but then pulled away. “Oliver, I have something to tell you.”
I raised my eyebrows at her expectantly.
“My mom. She is alive.”
Kaia showed me her phone, and I read the text. “How do you—”
“My mother is the only person who has ever called me Kiki. It’s her at the other end of that video feed. She saw my number, and she texted me.”
“Oh my God,” I whispered.
“I know. I don’t have a clue where she is or where she’s been, but she’s out there.”
“Wow.” I was happy for her, but at the same time a crater opened in my chest. Kaia’s mom was alive. She still had a family. She had people to go home to. People who loved her. And I felt envious. And scared.
Because if Kaia went home to her mother, then where did that leave me? Kaia was all I had. She was my family, and for the last year, I had been hers. But if her real family came back into the picture…
“You guys want?”
A girl with black hair down to her butt held out two paper plates, each with a juicy-looking burger and chips on it. I raised an eyebrow at Kaia.
“Did you not hear what I just said?” she asked.
“Yeah! Yes, I heard you, I swear.” I took the two plates and thanked the girl, who walked away to deliver food elsewhere. “But I also know that we’ve been on the run for two days, and somehow found ourselves at an actual party where people are having actual fun, and I am starving.”
Kaia cast a thoughtful look at the plates. Neither one of us had eaten since our barbecue feast, and that had been at least seven hours and two states ago.
“Wherever your mom is, she’s not going to be any more or less findable in the next half hour,” I said, slinging my free arm around her shoulders and balancing the plates in my other hand. “I say we stay here for a bit with these lovely Beta Beta Gammas”—a few girls cheered nearby, simply because I’d said their letters—“and relax. For a little while. Come on, Kaia. We’re on a road trip. Let’s do something, I don’t know…fun?”
Kaia tilted her head, considering. “Why do I feel like if we were at a frat house you wouldn’t be quite so psyched to stay?”
“Because I am a male person with eyes?” I suggested.
She cracked a smile, then took one of the plates and walked into the living room at the front of the house. All the furniture had been shoved against the walls to make space for a dance floor, so she continued through to the wide front porch. There were a few girls dancing out there, and some guys too, but the porch swing was free. Kaia grabbed it, and I sat next to her.
“We’ll stay,” she said. “But only if you keep those eyes on me.”
I grinned and kissed the corner of her mouth. “Not a problem.”
Kaia quickly slipped her gun out of her waistband and stashed it back in her backpack. I tensed and glanced around, but no one had noticed.
“Good?” I asked as she sat forward again.
She swung her legs under the seat like a little girl.
“Good,” she said.
I lifted my burger, but before I took a bite, I held it out to her. I was feeling traitorous over my jealousy and insecurity and wanted to do something about it.
“To finding your mom,” I said.
She touched her burger to mine and smiled. “To finding my mom.”
chapter 14
KAIA
I leaned my head on Oliver’s shoulder as we looked out across the Chicago skyline. The Beta Beta Gammas had a rooftop deck with some pretty sick views. On any other night I would have been totally wrapped up in Oliver, enjoying this stolen moment, the two of us free and alone.
But everything was different now. My mother was alive. And all I could do was hope that Oliver hadn’t noticed how very elsewhere my mind was. Because the initial elation of knowing she was alive had settled, and slowly, the feeling had been replaced by something else—something that felt a lot less pleasant.
Anger. Betrayal. Confusion.
So maybe three somethings.
Where the hell w
as she? Why had she left me? How could she go a whole year without contacting me? What was she doing watching security feed of the safe house? Did she know what had happened to my dad?
Whatever the answers to these questions, one thing was abundantly clear. My mother, one of the two people I trusted more than anyone else in the world, had abandoned me. She’d left me behind. Left me for dead. And now she didn’t want to be found?
Well screw that. Because now, more than ever, I needed answers. And she was the only person who could give them to me.
I would be back in that Honda right now, gunning it toward who-the-hell-knew-where and coming up with a plan later if it wasn’t for how hopeful Oliver had looked when he’d asked me to stay. After his confession on the street earlier, I would have done anything to see him smile. And if that meant hanging out with the girls of Beta Beta Gamma for an hour or two, so be it.
But I can’t say I wasn’t happy when he brought me up to the roof to be alone.
“How can there be so many people out there that they fill up a city like that?” Oliver mused, kissing the top of my head.
“And every other city on the planet,” I replied.
“Can I ask you something?”
A simple question that caused a thump of foreboding in my chest. “Sure.”
“Before, when you were asking me who I was…?”
I blushed.
“Who did you think I was, exactly?”
Heat crawled up from under my collar and along my jaw line. “I don’t really know. FBI, maybe? Homeland Security?”
I wasn’t about to tell him that it had crossed my mind that he was a villain. Or a manny.
Oliver guffawed. “No way.”
“You do look very sophisticated in my father’s clothes,” I told him, tweaking his collar.
“I’m flattered, I guess.” Oliver shook his head incredulously and slid his arm around me. When he started to laugh, I felt it in my ribs. “Seriously? Me. A government agent.”
