How Villains Are Made - Kaz Brekker

Chapter Two

"They are dead," said the man.

Maud hated how real it sounded once someone said it out loud.

She might have expected it, of course. After so many years without any contact, the idea had crossed her mind more than once, but hearing someone say it out loud with such certainty had taken a toll on her that she didn't see coming; she felt lightheaded and her heart was racing in her chest, the thudding echoing on her throat as she tried to remind herself how to breathe.

It was like breathing underwater. It hurt, it burned. It felt wrong.

"How can you know that?" she asked, turning to him.

Her voice sounded choked and she was pretty sure there were pathetic tears on her eyes, though she looked away from the man to try and get it together. Her eyes were like a lighthouse in the dark, they told her position in anything; she had been told so several times before and she learned that, sometimes, her silence was louder than anything else.

The scoff came, making her turn to look at the man once more, eyes glaring enough to make his lips twitch and come up in a smirk. He was like a shark smelling blood in the water as he found her weakness in her voice; he prepared, looked at her and attacked.

"I thought you wanted information," he said, voice sounded quite bored. Was she doing something wrong? Was her emotional reaction something awfully disrespectful? "I didn't expect you to want to know my methods as well, Miss van Buskirk."

Though the sentence was light and playful, there wasn't amusement on his voice or in his vacant black eyes. Maud felt as if he was sucking her into his world, taking all the little hope and happiness that she could feel and leaving her with nothing – not sadness, not happiness, not fear; just plain numbness.

Jordie, the young boy that held her sister's hand and kissed her cheeks in clear delight that only the first girlfriend could give a boy. Kaz, her best friend crying in complete despair as she couldn't open her eye coated in blood, forehead open, though she was laughing through the pain and he thought that just meant she was about to die. Good boys. Eaten whole by Ketterdam. Dead. Gone.

Kaz almost pitied her by the paleness and the clear shock she was in. If he was anyone else, he would try to comfort her and maybe even tell her the truth at once, but what he did was watch her take a deep breath and pull herself together in complete silence without blinking for the minute they stood there.

"Let's go," he said, starting to lead her away from there once more.

They were walking, but Maud felt like she was being dragged, though she was walking out of her own will and Brekker wasn't touching her at all.

"Jordie is dead? Kaz is dead?" she asked, just to reassure herself that was the truth.

"Yes," he answered.

"Dirk? Do you know anything about him?" she asked, hands shaking.

She could feel his eyes on her hands as she pulled them together in front of her body, walking in a lady-like position that would make her mother and sister proud, but the truth was that if she was holding her own hand, then it wouldn't look like she was shaking as much as she really was.

Maud wanted to disappear. She wanted to go home, but she knew she couldn't – if she went back, questions would be asked and people would want to know why she had dropped out. She didn't have an explanation and she certainly didn't want to say that she just... couldn't do it anymore. They were all counting on her to become someone, the someone that would put Leij on the maps; she couldn't bear the thought of disappointing all of them.