Fake Me To Church

Chapter 23.2 - What Ever Happened to Baby Lane?

- STEVEN -

My heart pulsed, hands shaking.

"Isn't it just a masterpiece?" Lane's voice drawled as the screen ahead froze upon the image of Glenn Clather's split skull, blood seeping like a painted river onto a carpeted canvas. "Have you ever seen anything so beautiful in your life?"

I gulped hard, felt tears threatening to spill at the bases of my eyes. I'm going to die, I thought, quivering as Lane walked up the steps to the stage and sashayed behind the podium.

She turned to me. "Well, you're awfully quiet. What's the matter, not enough naked girls with boobs bouncing in your face?"

I was still shaking, but I locked my teeth together. I forced the ends of my lips downward and narrowed my eyes, trying my best to look undaunted—or angry? Fearsome, outraged, something...I didn't know for sure, but I knew I couldn't look weak. I couldn't let her see any ounce of fear, not while I sat bound and unable to move.

But the moment I made eye contact with her, she began to laugh.

"Seriously?" she burst into chuckles. "Steven, just drop the macho act. It's over! Don't you get that?" She picked up a knife from atop the podium and jolted forward with it, faking like she'd hurled it right at my face.

I winced, turned my head away and shut my eyes.

She laughed again.

I swallowed hard.

"Do you even know why you're here?" she taunted.

A single tear fell from my eyes held painfully shut. "Because my dad is a...a rapist, a murderer...a monster."

More laughter. "Your dad? Really?" I heard her put the knife down. "You seriously think this is about your dad?" She paused. "If you wanna know the truth, I actually admire you, Steven. Your old man might be the biggest dickwad known to man, but you—you never really bought all his bullcrap. You always hated playing games and playing church. There was more; you always knew there was more."

I opened one eye and watched as Lane began pacing back and forth.

"Cam saw the same thing." She paused as she returned to center stage, reached for the podium's edge, ran her fingers along the stiffening strands of hair sprouting from my brother's disembodied head. "That's why he left. That's why he found me. And you and me, we're not that different, Steven. To tell you the truth, I almost spared you." She drew a silent breath. "Almost." She gripped her knife from on top of the podium again, this time stabbing it angrily into the wood beneath. "But then I remembered something—you tried to rape my little sister. You tried to destroy her...the same way your dad tried to destroy me."

Lane ripped the knife from the wood, then walked to the bath tub on the stage's end. For the first time, I noticed what looked to be a hand sticking over the edge of the tub, a hand whose ring finger was encircled by a medium-golden band.

Dad?

"And yet somehow, I thought maybe—just freaking maybe—you'd changed. But when I saw you and Grace in that hallway, when I saw what you wrote on Ahmed's locker—and when I saw how you tried to intimidate Irina with your father's name..." Lane growled, then exhaled. "That's when I knew it. I knew you were just like him."

I felt my hands shaking again. "So what, then? You just banged Cam until he brought you home to meet my parents? Nice strategy, you psycho piece of sh—"

"Well, it worked, didn't it?" she cut me off. "For Cam, it was love at first sight. And for me, it was all the power I needed to rip apart your family's delicate little strings."