When Sophia finished with her final daisy, she threw the stem away, although she remained hunkered down in the grass.
“Thank you,” she finally rasped, her voice seeming more broken than ever before. “For saving Jo-Jo. For coming after me.”
“No thanks needed,” I said. “My only regret is that I didn’t finish off Grimes while I was there. Hazel too.”
Sophia didn’t respond. I started to ask her if she wanted to talk about it, but I held my tongue. Despite all those old, wise sayings, talking didn’t always help. Not really.
All it did was drag all of your dark, messy, turbulent emotions out into the light for someone else to see. Besides, raspy voice or not, Sophia had never been much for chatting. So I stood there beside her, still and quiet, letting her know that I was there for her and that I would stay out here with her as long as she wanted me to.
To my surprise, after a few minutes, she began to speak.
“The first time he took me, I was so scared,” Sophia said. “Grimes had been making threats for weeks, trying to get Jo-Jo to let him court me, but we could both tell that there was something wrong with him. They say that animals can sniff out evil. Well, I could sense it in him.
But in the end, it didn’t matter, because he took me and dragged me up to that damn mountain of his anyway.
You can imagine what happened next.”
Torture, beatings, rape. Jo-Jo had told me some of it, like how Grimes had forced Sophia to breathe in elemental Fire, ruining her voice. No doubt, that had happened in the pit when he and Hazel had been torturing her. So I didn’t need her to fill in the gruesome details. It had been horrible, more than any person should ever have to endure, but Sophia had.
“It was ironic, Grimes taking me out to the pit again,”
Sophia continued. “Because that’s the only place that I ever got a moment’s peace from him and Hazel. They would drag me out there and make me dig at the sides, making it larger and larger so they could dump more bodies in on top of the ones that were already there. But I didn’t mind it. Because after they had their fun with me, they would go and do other things. All I had to do was keep digging, and the guards left me alone. All those bodies shifting and rolling and squishing under my feet, they reminded me that I was still alive, and they helped me to keep going, even when all I wanted to do was just give up, lie down, and die. But I’d seen what happened to the other women who begged Grimes for mercy, men too, and I knew that I couldn’t do that.
Not if I wanted to live. I knew that I had to keep my mouth shut, endure it, and stay alive for myself—and for Jo-Jo too.”
I could have told her how sorry I was for everything that she’d suffered back then and again these past few days too, but I kept quiet. Because this was Sophia’s story to tell, and I had the sense that if I stopped her now, she’d never start it again. And I wanted to know all of it.
“I lost track of how long I’d been at Grimes’s camp, and I’d almost given up any hope of ever escaping,” Sophia said, her voice still low. “Until the day one of his men disappeared.”
“When Fletcher came for you,” I whispered.
She nodded, tugged a clover out of the grass, and started plucking the leaves off it. “Grimes didn’t think too much of the guy’s disappearance at first, just that he’d probably gotten drunk off the moonshine and fallen off a cliff or maybe even drowned in the river. But then another guy disappeared the very next day. Then another one the next day. And Grimes and his men started finding the bodies, all of them with their throats cut or stab wounds in their chests and all of them left right out in the open, almost like someone had declared war on them.”
She stopped long enough to grab another clover and start
working on it. “Then I was out at the pit one day, digging, when I saw a man through the trees. He crept close enough to whisper that his name was Fletcher and that Jo-Jo had sent him to rescue me. Warren was there too.
Fletcher told me that he and Warren were going to kill Grimes and get me out of there.”
“But it didn’t work out quite that way,” I said, having an idea where the story was headed.
Sophia shook her head. “Grimes had figured out that Fletcher was really there for me. He, Hazel, Horace, and Henry, their other brothers, set a trap, and Fletcher walked right into it. He managed to kill Henry and wound Hazel, and he even got Grimes to use up all of his Fire magic. Fletcher and Grimes fought, but Hazel shot him, and Fletcher was too weak and wounded to finish Grimes off. At that point, I didn’t care whether Grimes was dead. I just wanted to get off the mountain and go home. So I persuaded Fletcher to leave, and Warren and I managed to drag him down the mountain to where his car was. The three of us made it back to Jo-Jo’s, and she healed him.”
This time, she reached for a blade of grass and began tearing it into thinner and thinner strips. “After that, Grimes kept his distance, but I was always worried that he would come back someday, so Fletcher taught me how to fight, and in return, I helped him get rid of the bodies that he left behind as the Tin Man. I figured that it was more than a fair trade.”
So that’s why Sophia had disposed of all those bodies for Fletcher. Once again, my heart twisted at the wrongness of it, of the thought of her doing something over and over again that had to remind her of Grimes and everything she’d suffered at his hands.
“Fletcher never asked me to do it,” she said, picking up on my thoughts. “He never asked me to get rid of the first body. But Grimes had made me good at digging graves, and it was the only way that I could think of to repay Fletcher.”
“And me?” I whispered. “Why did you keep doing it
for me? Why not at least stop when Fletcher died?”
“Because Fletcher loved you and trained you in his own image. And because I owe him everything. It wasn’t just that he got me away from Grimes. It was all the years of peace that he gave me afterward.”
Another thought occurred to me. “That’s why you started working at the Pork Pit, isn’t it? So Fletcher could keep an eye on you. So he could protect you from Grimes, in case he came after you again.”
Sophia nodded again. “And Fletcher kept his promise, right up to the day he died. He was a good man that way.”
She didn’t say what we were both thinking: that
Fletcher was gone now. That he wasn’t around to protect her from Grimes anymore.
But I was.
I’d made a promise to the old man in his office, and it was the same one that I’d made to Sophia and Jo-Jo too, even if I hadn’t said it out loud to them, even if they didn’t realize it yet.
“Don’t you worry about Harley Grimes,” I said, reaching out and laying a hand on her shoulder much the same way that Owen had done to me when he’d given me back my knives earlier. “I’ll make sure that bastard never hurts you or anyone else ever again. I’m going to finish what Fletcher started and kill him for good this time. That I promise you, Sophia.”
She nodded, but the thick muscles in her shoulder bunched under my hand, and the tension in her face didn’t ease. After a moment, she shuffled forward, keeping low and moving away from me and over to another patch of daisies. I let my hand fall away from her shoulder, but I didn’t follow her.
Instead, I stood there with her in the dark of the night as she picked flower after flower, as though she could strip away all her bad memories as easily as she could separate the delicate petals from the stems.
But she couldn’t, and we both knew it.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The next morning, I went to the Pork Pit and opened up the restaurant right on time, just like usual.
Despite the fact that I was being hunted by a couple of Fire elemental psychopaths, I still had a barbecue joint to run. Besides, Grimes was looking for a woman who said that her name was Gin Blanco, and everyone knew that the Pork Pit was mine. I only wondered how long it would take him to realize that I really was the Spider and come here to confront me.