“Hello?” A boyish voice fills the receiver.
“Preston?” I whisper.
“Yeah.” He pauses. “Delilah?”
“Yes! Did Marcel tell you?” That’s a dumb question. Of course he did, or else why would Preston have guessed me out of all other people in the world who could call him?
“He told me. I’m glad to know you’re all right. Until I talked to him, I assumed Rossi’s crew got you, too. Where the hell have you been until now?”
How much should I tell him? I’m not prepared for this. I wasn’t sure if I would ever talk to anybody from my old life again.
“Delilah? Are you still there?”
“I’m still here. It’s been… complicated.”
“How? What’s going on?”
Screw it. What do I have to lose? Okay, maybe that isn’t the best thing to ask myself, considering everything else that’s happened, but the idea’s the same. “I was locked up for a while. Let’s start there.”
“Locked up? Where?”
“I don’t know, and that’s the truth. I’d assume not too far from Corium since it took a helicopter ride to get here.” My throat tightens. “It was the same place where they took Matteo. Where they killed him.”
A hiss fills the line. “Motherfucker.”
“Then, one night, this guy came and took me away. He brought me to Corium. It hasn’t been awful compared to where I was before. But I’m still not free, and even worse, I don’t know what I did to deserve this.” Now that I’ve started, it seems that I can’t stop.
“Have you run into Rossi?”
“Sure. And of course, I had to pretend he didn’t hold me captive in a frozen hellhole for God only knows how long.”
“Face it. Even if you told people, they probably wouldn’t care. He could kill someone right in front of the headmaster, and he’d let him walk away.”
He’s right. The way everyone treats me, the disgust and hate, they might act like he was some big hero for almost killing me.
“I swear, it makes me sick when I see them walking around together, all while I know what he did to so many people. My brother and the whole family. Nash.”
“Quinton didn’t kill Nash.”
“He didn’t? I assumed.”
“No. It was that bitch, Aspen.”
I have to hold myself up against the wall. Aspen? How could a little thing like her overpower Nash? He got rough with me once or twice, and I couldn’t overpower him. “That can’t be true. She doesn’t look like she could kill a cockroach.”
“She stabbed the shit out of him. I thought you knew that.” He pauses, and suddenly, my head feels like the inside of a fish bowl. Preston continues, “You mean nobody’s talking about it at Corium?”
My gaze drags down my body. I think I’m going to be sick. I’m wearing her clothes. That little bitch killed Nash, and I have to wear her clothes around school. I wonder if she laughs at me in secret? I wouldn’t doubt it. “She spared my life,” I whisper over the bile rising in my throat.
“Yeah, well, don’t go getting any ideas about her being a decent human. She’d put a knife in your back the second it was turned.”
Yes, now that he mentions it, I get that feeling from her, too. She’ll smile to my face, but I’ll bet she’s cold and just as brutal as her husband when nobody else is around. She has to be, or else why would she want to be married to somebody like him?
When I don’t say anything, he sighs. “Are you okay? Actually, don’t answer that question. I’m sure it can’t be easy being there, especially after everything that happened.”
“I’ll be fine. You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Good. Because I’m going to need your help.”
“With what? What can I do?”
“You can help us take care of her.”
I’m sure my heartbeat can be heard throughout the room. “Take care of her. You don’t mean…”
“Yes, I do. She needs to die. She murdered Nash in cold blood. She shouldn’t even be breathing now, but it’s not exactly easy getting to somebody in that place. Especially somebody who’s married to that motherfucker, Q.”
My stomach tightens, and a pain twists deep in my gut.
“So you want me to do it?” I ask in a squeaky voice that doesn’t even sound like mine. I’ve never been asked to kill anyone. I’ve never even considered it. I’m not that type of person. At least, I don’t think so. “I don’t even know how I could.”
“Just leave that part up to me. Now that I know you’re there, we can come up with a plan that won’t look too obvious.”
I hate her. She killed Nash. The only person who cared about me, who ever gave a shit. She took him away from me.
And I agree, she deserves to die. If there was any justice, she’d already be dead. Preston is right about that. But me?