“Reed, what are you doing?”
“Protecting you,” I mutter. “Byron’s probably been watching. You’re so lucky Prescott has a thing for you, or you’d be in a fucking shipping container on a boat to Dubai by midnight.”
“Fuck you,” she spits, bucking against her restraints.
Okay, she’s notlucky, but I’m not wrong. Byron is going to be livid; there’s no way he’ll want to keep Quinn around. She’s too much of a pain in his ass. Corbin Kemp was a douchebag, but he’s been a Walker guard for years. He knew our protocol, and he was reliable. Replacing him won’t be easy, and it’ll put even more stress on the rest of our staff. Quinn will be happy about all that, but she won’t get to enjoy it if Byron gets his way.
“This is going to be trouble, Quinn. I don’t know what to do. You got any ideas?”
“Let me out and let’s run,” she says. “We’ll come back for the other girls with the feds.”
I shake my head. “We won’t get far. First off, your implant will go off less than a mile from here. Second, Prescott can make a phone call and half the cops in the state will be looking for us. I’ll try to think of something. I have to go see Byron, now.”
“Reed, wait!” she screams as I leave the dungeon.
There has to be a way to spin this — blame it on Corbin. He’s not allowed to touch Quinn — he knew this. I tried to subdue him without killing him, and if he had been at his job, he’d still be alive. Additionally, and maybe most importantly, Prescott wouldn’t have wanted Corbin interfering with Quinn’s training. By the congressman’s directive, only Byron and I have say over how Quinn is treated, and Byron never questions Prescott. If Corbin wasn’t bullshitting, and Byron really did tell him he could have a turn with Quinn, Byron needed to run that by me first.
I’ve barely left the dungeon on my way to Byron’s office when he intercepts me in the hall. His face is so red, his expression so apoplectic, I wonder if Quinn was right and we should have run.
“How the fuck does this keep happening?” he asks me.
“You saw?”
“Yes, I fucking saw. You let your guard down for some ass and a man wound up dead. What the fuck were you thinking?”
At the end of the hall I see Edwin peer at us, then quickly vanish.
Great.He should be watching the workshop, though I can’t blame him for being curious. Does he know what happened, or just that Byron is incensed for some reason?
“Corbin had no business being there,” I argue. “And she acted so fast, there was nothing I could do.”
Byron steps up, getting in my face. He may be my boss, but he needs me, especially with Corbin gone. I don’t shrink back.
“If you hadn’t left a fucking knife around-”
“Wouldn’t have been a problem if he hadn’t intruded,” I argue.
“You sure? Maybe she was waiting for a chance to get you, how she did with Jefferson.”
Grabbing Byron by the lapels of his jacket, I pull him until our noses nearly touch. “I had her under control,” I growl.
“That’s what Jefferson thought. And probably Lance, too,” says Byron. “Maybe you forgot, she killed your best friend? She’s a violent fucking cunt, Reed! She’d be three-for-three if not for us. Just because she’s got the hots for you doesn’t mean she won’t cut your throat given the chance, and you need to start treating her that way,”
Shit.
Could he be right? When Quinn told me what happened the night Lance attacked her, I believed her story — but that was before she attacked Mr. R., Jefferson and Corbin. Knowing what she’s capable of now, is it possible she lied to me? Maybe not completely, but what if she downplayed her culpability? I’m sure he attacked her — I don’t doubt that — but what if she really did push him out the window on purpose? She might leave that part out.
No, that’s bullshit. Byron doesn’t know her the way I do, I tell myself, though I can’t dismiss my doubts completely. I’m sure enough about Quinn for now — I’ll figure out the rest later. Even if Byron’s wrong about her, I have to play along.
“Fine,” I say, as another possibility occurs to me: what if Quinn is changing? I can believe she didn’t kill Lance, and that she defended herself against Jefferson — but there’s no question she chose to kill Corbin. She didn’t do it in defense of me or herself: she saw he was going down and could have stayed put. She made a conscious decision to end the man’s life. Was it because she thought it would help us escape, or because she felt he deserved it? And if Corbin deserved to die, then don’t I too? “I’ll take care of everything.”
Byron nods, pointing back to the dungeon. “Start with Corbin.”
“What about him?”
He looks at me like I’m a dunce. “The body, dipshit. Get it out of here. Dump it in the lake.”
I hadn’t even thought about what we’d do with a corpse — it’s never come up. But we can’t just dispose of it, can we?