I have no idea what I'm supposed to do.
My whole body is trembling, my face is soaked with tears, and my hands are clenched so tightly around the little box I know it's cutting into my fingers.
There they are.
My family photo is still laying right on top of the box where I left it when Macie and I went out to look for food that last night. The night she was taken. The night I was stabbed.
My mom, my dad, my little brother, and even me.
Child me, tiny and rounder in the cheeks with my hair combed back into a tight bun at the back of my head. I don't even look like me in this picture. I was so young. So naive to what my life would become. Blissfully unaware with my missing front tooth that soon the people around me who I loved so much were going to die. That we would become this.
This photo was what got me through the cold nights. It was this picture that kept my family fresh in my mind. I'd look at this picture every single day after they were gone. The more their voices and mannerisms started to fade, the more I stared at this picture, unwilling to let their faces fade out of my memory like the rest of them.
But then...
I remember how hard I worked, still injured, to get back to mine and Macie's camp to look for this very box. This box that holds all that was left of my family. I remember the way my heart shattered into a million pieces when I realized it was gone forever. That my most valuable thing was stolen away, taken by someone who would never know the significance of this photo or the love I held for the people in it.
I had assumed it had been scavengers that took my things, but I'd been wrong.
Oh how very very wrong I had been.
It wasn't scavengers.
It's so so so much worse than that.
Strangers didn't steal from me.
It was him.
Demetri.
The man who moments ago I happily had his tongue in my mouth, he was the one who did this all. I thought I had feelings for him. I thought I knew him. I thought he was a person worth trusting and believing in and fighting for when all along...all along he was this.
The fucked up thing is, he doesn't even know.
He doesn't even know that this is my family.
I'm unrecognizable from the little girl in this picture, smiling with scrunched eyes at the camera. He has no clue how he's really wronged me and that just makes it all that much more of an impossible realization to swallow.
It wasn't just any old scavengers. It was them. It was the guards. Not just nameless strangers who may be lurking around here. It was Demetri and his pack of followers who stole my life away from me.
I feel sick to my stomach as an even worse realization slams into me.
Was he the one who stabbed me?
There is no getting past that. No ignoring it now that the thought is in my head. Was it Demetri's curved blade that plunged into my stomach that night? His hate and disgust that wanted nothing more than to let my life leak out of me slowly back into the earth below? Was Demetri the one who took Macie away and gave her to that monster?
It's too much.
It's all too much.
Bile rises in my throat but I choke it back, swallowing hard against the acidic truths.
I look back at the chest where it still sits on the ground of this hut so unassuming, so innocent, so devoid of any signs of what it truly holds.
My things were in there. The things he must have stolen from my camp after he left me for dead. How many others have there been? How many more trinkets and mementoes does he have hidden away in those chests, so close to where he sleeps.
How does he ever live with himself looking at this and knowing what he has inside?
How can he be so evil and how could I have never seen the truth before this moment?
I've kissed him, trusted him, let him touch me, those hands that stole and stole and stole. Those hands that may just be the hands that tried to steal my very life from my body.
It's. Too. Much.
This can't be happening.
It's the only thought I'm able to conjure and hold onto. It's the only thing that makes any sense to me in this state.
My brain powers down and I go into survival mode. I can't be here. I can't be waiting for Demetri in his hut, smiling and happy to pick up back where we left off before.
Fight or flight has kicked in and I know which is winning out.
I've got to escape.
I snatch the photo out of the little tin box, tucking it into the back pocket of my jeans, then quickly replace the box in the chest and toss the quilt back over the top, hiding his secrets once again.
I've never moved faster than I do right now, bursting free from the hut and out into the night air.
It's muggy and wet and as the rain falls, pelting my face I let it mingle with my tears until I no longer can tell where one starts and the others end.
I've been so naïve.
I want to scream but I can't.
All I can do, the only thing there is to do, is go back to Liza. She'll know what to do. She'll know. She has to.
"Holy shit, what happened to you?" She jumps out of her seat, startled, as I push through the flaps of her families much smaller and less full of evil hut.
I run to her.
She catches me in her arms, not recoiling from the fact that I'm soaking wet and now so is she and I'm crying so much my breathing is coming in sharp choking spurts that sounds more like drowning than breathing at all.
"He...he...Demetri-." I try but I can't.
"What?" Rodrick bounds over from off of his cot in the corner. "What did he do? Did you tell him? Tell me you didn't fucking ruin this all-."
"No." I wail and Liza squeezes me around my waist a little tighter. It's suffocating but good at the same time. I feel like she's grounding me, keeping me from just floating away.
"What happened, Kel?" She's brushes her hand over my hair. "What did he do?"
"He kissed me." I spit out with disgust. I want to scrub my body in every place that he's touched, I want to rid myself of any traces of his kindness because they don't matter, the scars do. His callousness is forever engraved into my flesh.
"I'm confused." Liza admits, attempting to pull back but I won't let her. "How is this not a good thing? Our whole plan is working, you're getting under his skin."
I flinch at her use of those words.
Under his skin.
He's the one who has been under my skin. Ripped through it like I was nothing and then hours ago holds me like I'm everything. I've got whiplash from it all.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I'd been falling for him without ever even really considering what he's capable of.
There is no more holding it down.
I lurch away from Liza just in time to vomit all over the huts floor.
I'm even more disgusted with myself.
No amount of purging will truly take away the guilt I feel. I fell for him. I fell for the one who set the ball rolling on this entire thing. If he'd never taken Macie, none of the things that have happened since would have. I'd have never come here. I'd have never been so stupid as to let that man kiss me.
"Woah, Kel, come on." Liza is worried now, I see it in the set of her brows. Rodrick is too. They're sharing glances at each other like I'm about to ruin their entire lives. Maybe I am?
"It was him, Liza." I finally manage to say. I let the truth out of my brain and let it pass my lips into the world where I can never bring it back. "I found this in his room." I pull out the picture and pass it to her. "That's my family, Liza. That's mine. I left it that last night Macie and I were together. It was in our shelter." I'm trying to make them understand the gravity of what I'm telling them.
Liza and Roderick share some more nervous glances before she speaks again. "So you found your things in his hut?" She reiterates. "Which means-."
"He's the one who stole my stuff and he's the one who stole Macie and he's the one who did this!" I cut her off, lifting my shirt to make them both look at my ugly jagged scars. My marbled flesh a glaring reminder of who these people really are.
Liza's hand flys to her mouth which is popped open into a perfect little circle. She's seen these scars before, but she finally understands.
"Oh my god, Kelani, I had no idea." She promises and that's when I realize I should have wondered if maybe she did. Maybe I'm trusting everyone around me when I should be trusting no one, not even myself it seems. "I swear if I'd known he was actually a part of that, I'd have never suggested you getting close to him, I promise."
Close to him.
I want to vomit all over again but there isn't enough in me to be able to do it again as it is. Instead I fall back into a chair, defeated.
"I've got to get out of here, Liza." I say so low it's nearly a whisper. I don't have volume left in me. I've barely got the energy to even breathe.
"Do you think he knows?" Liza asks and I level my eyes at her, my shoulders tense.
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"He has to, right?" Rodrick agrees with his sister, panic pinching up his already pinched features. "Did you have a mask or anything when he stabbed you?"
"Uh, no." I shake my head. "It was dark though."
"Holy shit, Liza we might be fucked." He says to her, no longer looking at me at all. I'm not important enough anymore. Now I'm a liability. I can see the fear in him. "There is no way he doesn't recognize her."
I want to blow off this idea all together. Want to so badly.
He wouldn't know me from the photo, but would he remember me from that night? All this time I've thought I was playing him, was he really the one playing me?
Have I fallen right into the trap?
"Liza." I sit up straighter, hand on my stomach. "He saw it." I shake my head as the memory comes to me. "While we were gone, he saw the scars, he asked me about them." I want to cry again I'm so fucking stupid. "He pretended to think it was The General who did it...but he..."
"Oh my god." Liza whispers. "Even if somehow he didn't see your face the night he attacked you, there is no way he saw that and didn't put two and two together."
Blinding fury mixes with my pain and humiliation joins the party in the most toxic mingling of emotions I've ever felt.
"This whole time I thought I was tricking him, getting close to him, using him, feeling like shit for lying to him. All along he was the one..."
"He's been in on this whole charade." Rodrick cusses under his breath as he begins pacing the small space. "This whole god dammed time, he's been playing us. We really fucked up, Liza." I can hear the panic is his shaky baritone.
Liza's got her hands buried into her bright hair now, looking just like her brother as she begins to pace the space as well.
"Dad will know what to do." She finally says, bringing a hand down to her mouth, picking at her nails nervously. "God, he's gonna be so mad."
"He should be mad, Liza! Fuck, I'm mad!" He bellows, then lowers his voice, remembering himself. "Don't you get it, Liza? If Demetri knows what she is then he already knows we helped her. He already knows there is a plan here. Why else would we lie and say we found her? He knows damn well that was a lie we told straight to his face."
"He's calculated," I whisper, the adrenaline still pumping through me. "He's got to have a plan here."
"A plan to out us, or kill us, or both." Rodrick throws his head back angrily. "How could you be so stupid?" He levels that anger at me.
I'm up and out of my chair in a second. "Are you kidding?" I balk. "I didn't ask for any of this! I didn't ask you to take me in here or make up this whole story for me to go with or decide that I should buddy up with the fucking leader here!" Liza tries to shush me from the side, I know I'm being loud but I'm getting to the point where I simply just do not give a single fuck who hears me now. "You both sent me out there, had me buddy up with him. I nearly got killed as part of this plan of yours. I've done nothing but try to help you!"
"Rod, you know she's right." Liza pulls me to her side, holding my hand to try to keep it from shaking but it doesn't help. I don't know if it's the fear, the shame, or the anger, or some cocktail of it all, but I'm incapable of calming down. "We got her and ourselves into this mess."
"You did." Rodrick snaps back at her, crossing his arms over his chest and grimacing at his sister. "You got us into this and now I've got to figure out how we get back out with our heads still attached to our bodies."
His overly dramatic speech leaves me cold. I picture them without their heads as I look at them continue to argue with each other over who is really at fault. Who has to tell their father. Which of them is responsible for dealing with me now.
It's all a blur before me.
I hold that picture in my hand up to my face and stare at little me.
Who would have ever in a billion years believed that I'd grow up into this.
That this is my life now?
I don't even know if I'll ever see Macie again at this point.
My whole mission here has been a lie from the very beginning.
Maybe Rodrick is right.
Maybe we really are all fucked.