Ashes, Ashes

24 - Blown Open

They know. 

Somehow, they know. 

Fear clenched at me, a different kind of fear than what had threatened to overwhelm my body all day. That had been survival -- cold dread and the heart-pumping risk of death, the horror of a body being dismembered or the swing of a deadly axe or waking with bound hands. 

The fear of death is simple, clean and pure. It belongs to your body, and it can sweep you up in its strength. 

(Logan, I'm scared) 

But now there was another fear, more insidious and so much more terrible. 

Guilt. Shame. The fear of being caught out. 

The secret I'd been carrying swelled in me and threatened to spill over. Even though I had buried it deep, even though I'd compartmentalized and rewritten the narrative in my head so many times that I had started to believe the lie -- there it was, simmering up to the surface. The truth wants to be told. That's the nasty thing about secrets; they never want to stay secrets for long. 

"The thing about torture," Liza said, thoughtfully, her head cocked, one finger rested on her chin, "is it doesn't really work. Not for getting information, anyway. People on the rack, or being water-boarded, or whatever else -- oh, they'll talk. They'll say all sorts of things. Whatever they think you want to hear. But the truth? No way." 

She held out her hand to Richard, expectantly. He stared at her, almost incredulous, and didn't move. So she reached out and closed her hand over the barrel of the gun, taking it from his hand even as he blinked at her. 

"Hey!" 

"Thank you, Richard. You've been very helpful." She looked at him, her face an unreadable mask. "But I won't be needing your help any longer." 

The sound of the gunfire was an unexpected explosion, deafeningly loud. I jerked in my chair, my hands straining against their restraints with the urge to cover my ears. Richard dropped to his knees, his eyes wide with shock as he let out a low, miserable moan. He clutched at his chest, and his hands came away bloody. He looked at them, then up at Liza, confusion and hurt and pain twisting over his features. 

Dawn, still barely roused from the Ketamine, made a frightened noise like a scream on mute. 

"Oh please," Liza said, disdainfully. She tucked the gun into the waistband of her jeans, watching as Richard slumped to the ground, curled around his bleeding wound. "As if you thought you would be here to the end. Did you think you were a hero, Richard? You were never anything more than a pack mule. A meat-head to maneuver everyone and drag some bodies in place, and you sucked even at doing that." 

"Liza, please, I'll talk, you don't have to --" the words tore out of me. I was ready to confess. I wanted to confess. So why was it so hard to say what needed to be said? 

"I don't have to what? Kill anyone?" She threw back her head and laughed. "A bit late for that, isn't it Logan?" 

She wiped a smear of blood -- Richard's blood, splashed back in her face from the gunshot -- from her cheek. She took a chair and dragged it close, spinning it around to sit straddling it across from me, arms draped casually over the back, face close to mine and staring intently. 

"What was I just telling you about torture?" She made a 'tut-tut' noise with her tongue, shaking her head. "You don't do it if you're trying to get information. You do it because your mind is already made up, and you want to see them suffer." 

She threw a glance over to Richard, still curled up moaning on the floor. The blood was spreading from a wound in his abdomen. It might take hours for him to die, I realized. Hours of excruciating pain while I sat here, tied up and shivering, surrounded by the bodies of my friends. 

"You killed Laurel Williams, Logan. Is that what  you're going to say? Are you going to play the martyr here and pretend that you're the only one responsible for what happened? Well. It's a little late to take all that blame. But if you're going to admit it, at least you're a little better than the others." 

"You don't understand," I started to protest. 

Richard made a wet, gurgling noise on the floor. 

"Don't I? Oh, I think I do. I think I understand better than anyone." 

She leaned back in the chair, gripping it with both hands. Her knuckles went pale with the strength of her grasp. 

In my peripheral vision, I could barely make out Dawn, straining uselessly against her bindings, whimpering through the cloth gag in her mouth. But I didn't dare look away from Liza. She held my gaze, captivated like a charmed snake. 

"I killed Laurel," I said again, louder, loud enough that I could feel Dawn's confused gaze land on me, could sense her struggle stop from the corner of my eye. "But she asked me to do it. She wanted me to do it." 

Something flashed through Liza's features, and she let out a hiss like an angry cat and jerked forward, sending the chair sprawling. She grabbed my face, her hand at my throat, her fingers digging into my cheeks as she tilted my head back to stare down at me. She gripped my jaw hard, so hard I couldn't talk around her grip. 

"You shut your damn mouth," she snarled, and pulled something from her pocket, some scrap of cloth. She pulled my mouth open and shoved it in roughly, gagging me again. "I don't want to hear it. I thought maybe you'd be different, I thought maybe you'd have something interesting to say for yourself, but you're just like Parker. 'Oh, she wanted it, she asked for it, you wouldn't understand. It's complicated.' Don't even try that bullshit on me." 

Her lip curled in an enraged snarl. She lifted a hand and slapped me, hard, across the mouth, and I could feel my teeth digging into the inside of my cheek, the fabric in my mouth sticking to the bloodied insides of my wounded mouth. 

"I know, Logan. Everyone knows. You don't think we're so fucking stupid we couldn't see through your story? Laurel takes some pills and there you are, just in time to see her die but not soon enough save her, right? Never mind how she got the pills. It was all just a little bit too convenient, wasn't it?" 

Her eyes bugged. She reached into the waist of her pants, and I thought for a minute she was going for the gun, thought she was going to blow a hole in me like she had Richard. But instead, she drew out a knife with a sharp, thin blade. Was that what she'd used on Parker, I wondered? Or had that required some other tool, sturdier, meant for slicing through bone and exposing organs. 

My throat worked, acid rising up in the back of my mouth, and I almost vomited, almost choked myself behind the cloth jammed into my throat, and for a moment it almost seemed like dying that way might not be so bad, compared to whatever Liza had in mind for me.

Compared, maybe, to what I deserved. 

"I've already pieced it all together, Logan, so spare me your you don't understand speech. Laurel was hurting. She was down and broken and hurting, and she felt like she didn't have a friend in the world. Why would she? All the friends who had promised to stand by her side forever had betrayed her. Her childhood best friend was a scummy rapist, and his wife the rape apologist was no better. Her so-called other best friend had all but abandoned her, couldn't even give her the time of day to listen to her problems. Do you know what Abby said to her, the last time Laurel called in crisis? Call a professional because I can't deal with your shit anymore. Can you imagine?" 

Liza's eyes flashed dangerously. 

"But she called a professional all right, didn't she? Someone who knew all about drugs." 

She took the knife and prodded it into my chest, slowly, not fast enough to slice through the flesh but with a methodical slowness that jabbed hard against my ribs, the tip of the blade pin-pricking the skin on the underside of my binder. 

"What did she do, Logan? Did she talk you into it? Are you so fucking weak and stupid that you'd believe someone when she told you that she wanted to die?" 

I made a noise, muffled but desperate. 

Because she was right. I had. I had killed Laurel Williams. 

But it really wasn't like she thought at all.