The Runaways

Chapter 10

I turned away from the door, away from the reminder of a murder I probably caused. If I hadn’t said anything, Rusty would’ve walked out of this place alive without Liam at his heels. If I’d handled things differently, he might’ve made it back to the family he probably had waiting for him.

The weight of his death hung heavier in the air than the suffocating silence between Caleb and I. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to react to something I’d only ever seen in news stories.

Caleb hadn’t said a word since his conversation with the stranger. He sat on his heels, balancing his weight on the balls of his feet like he was waiting for something. For what—I didn’t know. I didn’t want to.

A sliver of sunlight refracted through a tear skimming the surface of his face. He cried quietly to himself, like an unspoken grief too weighty to voice had settled on his shoulders.

I inched towards him, allowing blind pity and ignorance to get the best of me, and stopped paying attention to the slow changes in his expression.

I promised myself from the moment he’d forced me on the bus that I’d never let him scare me, that I wouldn’t let him have an inch of control when it came to keeping my cool.

But when he turned to me, eyes wild and raging in the middle of an otherwise beautiful summer afternoon, he terrified me— and no self-made promise made a difference in that fear.

My breaths broke against my vocal chords and spattered out of my mouth in raspy fragments. I backed away from him, hoping to retreat from his unrelenting gaze, but the second I moved he lunged at me and grabbed my wrist so tightly I thought he’d break it from the pressure.

His eyes burned cobalt with a kind of broken rage I’d seen in Liam, the kind of white-hot anger I didn’t think he was capable of. Frantic, I tore away from his grasp and pushed against his chest as hard as I could, trying to keep him at an arms length. He charged forward, breaking my grip and backed me into the bunks lining the walls behind us.

My calves struck the bottom beam of a lower bunk, and my knees buckled beneath me. Caleb latched on to my shoulders, locked his elbows, and tried to stiff-arm me down onto his bed.  I reached up and tore at his face with my nails, leaving three raw and bleeding scratches along the length of his cheek.

He stumbled backwards and covered his face with his hands. I took his confusion as an opportunity to escape and sprinted towards the door, my heart beating bruises into my chest.

I heard him dragging the legs of what sounded like a chair across the floor behind me, but before I could turn back, he hurled it straight into my legs and sent me reeling.

The impact rattled through my teeth. The splintered floorboards ripped right through the skin of my knees, leaving gashes as big as quarters just below the caps.

I was feet away from freedom, and I’d scrape all the skin off my legs if it meant making it outside. I needed this chance, and with Cillian and Marcus nowhere in sight, I couldn’t afford to lose it.

As I tried getting to my feet, Caleb bore his knees right into the center of my spine and slammed me down onto the floor a second time. I rolled onto my back underneath him, dazed and desperate to stop him from pushing all of his weight down on top of me.

He slapped both my hands aside and slid his fingers around my neck; choking off what little breath I had left. I buried my nails into the skin of his wrists, scrambling to relieve the pressure he pressed down on my airways.

I pleaded him to stop and searched his eyes for any sign of the boy he’d been at the station, but he wouldn’t look at me.

        “That’s enough, Caleb!”