Project: Hero

Chapter eighteen

My heart pounds with the realisation and my tongue feels thick. No, I can’t believe that. I’m not a killer. I look at my hands, they’re familiar. The nails are short and cracked, like always.

I don’t see them as my hands anymore. No, these are deadly weapons made of bone and muscle. My mother’s blood drips from my fingers, unseen by everyone else, and stains the sheets. How much blood is on my hands? Who else have I killed?

Beside me Sergio sleeps soundly, he looks peaceful in his sleep. The creases marring his forehead have disappeared. That and the bruises on his face make him look more vulnerable. As if he can sense me looking at him a smile tugs at his lips.

I smile at him. He is cute and handsome and mine?

A flash of my mother’s face behind my eyes and then it changes to Sergio lying broken at the bottom of a large building.

I back away, Sergio grips me tighter in his sleep but I’m able to get away. I can’t hurt him like that. It would destroy us both – if he was able to survive what these hands, these weapons, could do.

As I’m walking to the next bed over, dragging my feet, something hits the toe of my boot. Crouching down to see what it is I’m filled with guilt. My mother’s tablet lies half-forgotten on the floor.

Did she know that her daughter was a killer? Did she know that on that day she was walking to her death?

These are questions that will never be answered. I turn the tablet over and over in my hands. After her death – her murder – her belongings would have been taken and thrown away. Possessions that had no obvious motive behind them like the necklace around my neck would have been left in a warehouse. Other stuff, that could have been important, the director would’ve taken and found out all she could from them.

When Kotey said the locket wasn’t there before he was probably wrong. The locket would’ve been there, just hidden under other belongings. They – Sergio and Kotey – had been locked up so anyone could’ve used the space and done some rummaging and uncovered it. Taking whatever they thought useful with them when they moved off.

That’s why the director wants me to pull the trigger! She thinks that killing my father would even out what I did to my mother. I see her point but I don’t know my mother and I don’t love my father.

Sergio’s hand reaches out to me. He doesn’t care that I’m a killer. How can he when he’s a killer too? It would be like hating yourself.

I settle down next to him, pulling his arms around me tightly as if I can use him to anchor me to the real world. I can feel him smile in his sleep as he burrows into me.

“I love you Blair,” he mutters sleepily.

“I love you too,” I whisper, almost scared of the words.

I’m not sure if he hears me but he does hold me closer. His ribs don’t seem to hurt him, I’m still wary as I nestle my head against his chest.

Since waking up in that dingy cell Sergio has been by my side. The few days he was away – I’m not going to call it by its true name – were agony for me and it felt much longer than a few days. I’m sure my future was never meant to turn out like this, but now that I’m living it I don’t mind.

Sure I would like to have a place of my own in the future, have somewhere I am accepted for who and what I am and have someone who loves me.

I look at Sergio’s sleeping face and smile. He loves me and has built a city of his own. I know it won’t be as big or impressive as the city I grew up in, but still. He’s only a year or so older than me but already he’s done so much for the others like us.