Jaclyn sounded tired. Resigned. Orion had never heard her like this before. Sitting on the sofa, binging junk food, watching TV like she was some normal twenty-something woman. Like this world had turned inside out and Orion was the only one left that had a brain craving blood.
She didn’t know how to reply to that. She could yell some more, maybe try to get through to her. But what was that doing? Was that really helping her friend? By urging her to hold on to that need for vengeance, as if that vengeance was some magic pill that would make all the pain and nightmares go away. It was just shackling another kind of ankle cuff to her. She knew that. But, like the sickos who bought her, used her, sold her had acted on their own innate yearning, unable to deny its wicked calling, she too felt that yearning . . . a yearning for the blood of her abusers, the blood of all abusers.
“Do you ever wonder about the stories we tell ourselves?” Orion asked after a long silence. Long enough for Jaclyn to turn the show back on and take a long swig from her bottle. “About how we cast ourselves all these years in The Cell? Not even to the police, to whatever family is still left, but to each other, and ourselves? Do you wonder if we have been lying to ourselves about what role we played?”
Jaclyn paused the show again. This time she sat up and focused on Orion. She eyed her with that hard stare of hers that would never soften. “No, I don’t give a fuck about whether my story is a lie. Or if yours is. All that matters is that we’re alive to tell them. All that matters is we can watch what we want, eat what we want, and say what we want.”
She narrowed her eyes even further, looking at Orion in the same way Orion was looking at her, searching her face, looking beyond. “Fuck, you’re not still hung up on this whole revenge in the form of murder thing are you? You can’t be fucking serious.”
Orion’s blood warmed. “How can you not want revenge?” she demanded. “After what they did to us?”
“I want revenge,” Jaclyn said quietly, more quiet than Orion had ever heard her. “Don’t you think that if I had a dragon, I’d burn this whole fucking city down just to find them?” She didn’t wait for Orion to answer. “Of course I would. But I don’t have a dragon. A kingdom. I don’t have a fucking army to take them down. It’s just me. And I know I can survive a lot, but I won’t survive some campaign for revenge or justice or whatever the fuck you think you’re doing, which can only end with my ass right behind bars again along with you. Because we’re never going to get it. No matter what we do, it will never be enough to even the scales. What they did can’t be repaired or revenged away, Orion. And when you’re sitting in a cell again one day for thinking it can, you’re gonna remember these words.”
She hated that Jaclyn was surrendering. She hated that the angry, rebellious girl in The Cell wasn’t the same out here. Mostly she hated that she was making sense. “So, you’re just going to give up? Sit here for the rest of your life and eat junk, watch TV?”
Jaclyn shrugged. “Maybe. But I think I’ve earned that choice, Orion, don’t you? As much as I love you, I’m not letting you drag me into whatever twisted web you think you’re capable of weaving.”
Eleven
Things had changed since Maddox’s visit.
Since his news.
Orion had always been planning on revenge. She’d been planning for blood. But in a way that might only ever be a plan. Never to be executed.
She liked to think that she would’ve gone forward no matter what, but something told her that she would have lost her nerve. She’d become too domesticated in this new world where torture and monsters were hidden. She, like everyone else, might fall into the habit of thinking monsters only existed in stories.
So, in that respect, Thing One did her a favor by killing himself. By proving to her that even in prison, he had more rights than she did. More control.
Bob Collins was still walking around a hospital in a white coat saving lives like he hadn’t ruined hers. And being celebrated for it.
She was going to do it.
What she’d been planning.
But before she got her hands dirty, stained with blood that would never wash off, she had a promise to keep.
Dark whispers taunted her with the truth that Mary Lou was dead and no one else had witnessed the promise made. Orion could break it and no one would know the difference. But Mary Lou had done more for her in The Cell than Orion’s parents had done her entire life before it. Nurtured and cared for her in a way that ultimately saved her life. She owed her this much.