Saving Grace

55

I awoke to the sound of nail-filing, the soft scratch as Somerton sat on a chair beside my brother and I, running his nails along a filing board. He paused, narrowed his eyes, blew on his fingers.

"About time you woke up," he said, never looking up from his hands. "I was sure I'd killed you."

I looked down, tried to move.

"What have you done to me?" I groaned, tugging against the ropes that bound my wrists and ankles. I looked up at Scott, bound also, passed out in chair beside me. "What have you done to him?"

"Nothing that won't heal," he said, glancing at me sideways. He sighed, set the filing board beside the Glock on the wooden desk. "Although, that is soon to change, Mr Downing, for I see you and your brother, but not what we agreed to trade."

"I'm here to trade myself."

"Well, I don't want you."

"And why do you want her? She's just a girl."

"She has wronged me in ways you cannot even fathom."

His eyes – black, beady, violent – shone in the orange light, piercing me in his depraved stare. They turned darker still as a twisted grin spread over his face.

"But that's no matter," he said. "True suffering comes from loss, and your death will ruin her in ways I never could."

He rose from his seat, pulled a switchblade from his pocket. I sucked in a breath, pushed back in the chair.

"I read your letters!"

He paused. My jaw clenched.

"In the attic," I went on. "Albert, I take it."

Albert paused, lifted his chin, cracked a smile.

"After all this time, the clever boy finally connects the dots."

"It was the only explanation that made sense," I said. "I met Nicholas, the janitor at the bar while Grace met Albert, the charming psychopath at the security store. What do they call it? Split personality?"

"Dissociative Identity Disorder," he said. A small smile grew on his twisted face. "I like to think of it as body-sharing."

I gulped, blinked.

"Nick was the one who sent the gifts," I went on. "He made the late phone calls, stalked Grace's social media, followed her on the street. You saw that if he kept going, you'd both be caught and get done for harassment – or worse. So you made a deal – Nick backs off and keeps quiet, and you grease the wheels with Grace, eventually asking her out for him."

"Nicholas is a child," Albert said. "He doesn't understand that following these girls and sending gifts and calling them at all hours isn't an appropriate method of courting. He doesn't understand restraining orders and prison and incarceration. I have to protect him from those sorts of things. I have to protect myself." He paused. "I met with Grace because I hoped that when Nicholas finally mustered the courage to ask her out, she would agree and he could stop all this nonsense before it got us into trouble. Instead, she shot him down like a dog." Albert launched forward, violent eyes locked on mine. "And do you know what that did to him?! That rejection!"

I pushed back against the seat, the blade a mere inch from my right eye. Albert's hard mouth softened, hand shook for a split second.

"He went and he did it again." His voice cracked, teeth sinking into his bottom lip. "Now, I not only have to clean up the mess of that stupid baboon, but also the mess of this new beast, this thing that keeps clawing at our insides, trying to break free and cause all sorts of chaos."

I narrowed my eyes.

"No," I said. "No, he didn't..."

"A new alter," he said. "One more dangerous and vicious that both I and Nicholas put together. You don't understand – you could never understand..." Albert's eyes faltered, swelled. "It will be the death of us all."

The same fear I had seen in my brother – crippling, paralysing, all-consuming – now festered in the eyes of Albert. I watched it spread, blacken, coil in his bones. Then he met my eyes and I saw not only his fear, but his wrath.

"She did this to us," he said. "And she will pay for it."

He lifted the knife, and I knew it was over.

© A.G. Travers 2018