Dead Girl Walking ― Aaron Minyard

51. brother (reprise)

if i was dying on my knees
you would be the one to rescue me
― kodaline

[trigger warnings: referenced past animal cruelty/murder and child abuse; nathan wesninski; lola malcolm; knife violence; strangulation; murder]

♦

THE WESNINSKI FAMILY HOME was a five-bedroom house in the Windsor Hills neighborhood a couple miles northwest of downtown Baltimore.

As far as the community knew, Nathan Wesninski was a former successful day trader who'd given up stocks in favor of investing in businesses around the city. At last count he owned a dozen businesses of varying trades and had deals with a dozen more.

As Elizabeth Wesninski pulled onto the street of her childhood home, she took silent inventory of the mayhem. There were a handful of police cars scattered around the driveway and street; uniformed cops meandering around with notepads and cameras; a crowd of onlookers too nosy for their own good.

Elizabeth parked the car in an empty driveway, shutting the engine off. Her old home was a few blocks away, but there would be no way for her to just drive up without there being problems. On paper, she was dead—the third victim of a car crash that ended in flames, dead at ten years old alongside her twin and mother, leaving behind a despondent father. Riko had taped the obituary to the locker room wall and refused to take it down.

Elizabeth forced the memories out of her head as she pushed the car door open.

She crossed the street and jumped the fence into the first backyard she came across. Growing up, none of their neighbors had had dogs. She could only pray that hadn't changed.

Like a phantom, she crossed through five backyards, stopping to take stock of the situation in the backyard of her old next-door neighbor. The crowd was collected at the end of the Wesninski home's driveway, blind to the backyard. The police were milling around the garage, taking pictures. Whatever distraction her father had crafted, it kept them busy.

It was all part of the game.

With one last glance to make sure no one would see her, Elizabeth hopped the fence out of her old neighbor's backyard and climbed into her own. As she set foot in the backyard, she flashed back to a memory from thirteen years ago.

Nathan had brought home a puppy. Elizabeth and Nathaniel had played with it the entire day, and then their father put a knife in Nathaniel's hand and told him to kill it. He'd cried and refused, which earned him a busted lip and a nasty cut on his collarbone that would scar like so many others.

Then Nathan had pushed the knife into Elizabeth's hand and told her to do the killing, or her brother would go to sleep that night with more than a bruise and a cut.

So she did it, fighting tears the entire time. She still remembered the cut-off whimper, the red on her hands that Nathaniel had helped her scrub away after.

It was how so much of their childhood had gone—one coerced into doing something to protect the other. It had been Nathan's way of pitting them against each other, of trying to make them resent each other so their bond would break.

But he was doomed from the start, because it was Nathaniel who patched Elizabeth up after the deed was done, and it was Elizabeth who held Nathaniel through the nightmares.

It was them versus the world, them versus their father—then and now.

Elizabeth stood under her bedroom window, looking up at the ledge five feet above her. She hoisted herself onto the ledge of the first-floor window below it, cutting the gap in half. She jumped the rest of the distance, hooking her hand onto the ledge above. She managed to get a foothold on the top of the bottom window, the tips of her toes holding her up. She used one hand to shove the window open, the chaos of the crowd out front drowning out the noise on the outside.