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When I was three years old, my mother died in a car crash.
When I was seventeen, I watched my friend die in an accident, his blood on my hands.
When I was nineteen, I stood helpless as the man I had once trusted with my life killed the one I had once loved.
Now, here I was, twenty-two, with my only remaining family dead on the floor next to me.
And I couldn't do anything about it.
They found me a few hours later.
The racers' voices were hushed, movements quiet as they moved into the room, one by one. I could hear them because I was silent now—silenced. The quiet seemed almost respectful, and maybe another day I would have had a bitter thought to counter that—respectful murders?—but my mind was shut. I felt empty.
I was empty.
Dawn had turned into day, and I had watched the sun rise through my blindfold. The Lees hadn't even bothered with untying me. I was still in the same position I had been when they had tied me to the chair, and my body was numb to the pain. Moving would have hurt more at that point.
The hands on my wrists were warm, slow, and worried. Even if I couldn't see him, I knew it was Vernon, with the quiet, horrified way he untied me and pulled me up. I fell into his arms as easily as a rag doll, and he held me up as he picked me up from the floor and looked at the pieces of me that remained, but he didn't disturb them. Didn't try to put them back together, but let me stagger forward and be lost for a while.
Thank you, I whispered silently, because my throat felt hoarse from all the screaming and I knew I couldn't get a word out.
I leaned into his warm chest, his rough hands steadying me. There was no hatred in my thoughts, no mistrust, nothing. Just a wide blankness as infinite as the sky, and I didn't even want to escape it.
"Don't look," he muttered, and I pressed my face into his chest. My eyes were dry, but my heart was bleeding from an open wound. In my disorientated state, I didn't even realise that he was shaking—anger, fear, disgust?
I didn't want to look.
I didn't want to see the bloody remains of my father's body. Had they shot him in the chest? Or the head? I hoped it was the latter, all I could wish upon him was a quick death. Despite the hate, there was a morbid gratitude in me for my father's killers—at least they hadn't let him bleed out. At least they hadn't made a daughter listen to her father die.
It was a horrible thought, but it was all I could think about. That, and mercy and nothing, like my thoughts were nothing but an empty scroll waiting for something else to happen—for someone to paint it red with blood. It was waiting for revenge.
