Status

fast, almost as if the blood was seeping through her pores. I felt outside of myself; my rage had taken ahold of me again.

I grabbed two fistfuls of her hair and bashed the back of her head against the concrete over and over. She latched onto my shirt, staining it with her bloody fingers, but her grip was weak.

“Momma, he’s here!”

I turned and saw my daughter looking up the stairs. Then I heard the footsteps above. Ladykiller!

The thought of him sent me into a panic. I hopped off of Deja and went to my daughter, trying desperately to release the ties. I bit into them but it did nothing but make my teeth ache. Still, I kept biting, and I thought I was making progress when Kylie screamed and I felt Deja’s arms wrap around my neck in a suffocating hold. I fell back, fighting to get her arms off of me. Her legs wrapped around my waist and locked me against her. I was helpless.

“I’ve been waiting for this,” Deja said through gritted teeth. She sounded like a monster. “I’ve had it hard my whole life. Because of you!”

Her hold tightened, crushing my wind pipe. I could hear my daughter calling to me but I couldn’t see her. I was subjected to only staring at the ceiling, and it was getting very blurry.

“I wanted to be like you,” she hissed. “You were always so pretty. All the boys from school still comment on your pictures; they like everything you post. But nobody notices me.”

I caught a breath when I pulled on her arms but she tightened up again and I was seeing red. She squeezed harder.

“It’s all gonna change when you’re gone,” she said in a craze. “They’ll notice me. I won’t be in your shadow anymore.”

“Let her go, Deja. Now!”

I didn’t understand it but Gideon was prying Deja’s arms from around my neck. How did he find me?

He separated us as we got to our feet. Deja tried to attack me again but Gideon pushed her back.

“Kill her, Gideon!” Deja yelled. “What are you waiting for?”

I saw Gideon was holding a black handgun. Kill me? Was she crazy? Gideon was my homie.

“She’s the one who kidnapped Kylie,” I told him. “Her and Ladykiller did it together. And he might be on his way back.” I pulled out my cell phone. “I’m calling the police.”

“Give me the phone,” Gideon said.

I handed it to him. When he put it on the floor and crushed it under his heel, I was speechless. Deja started laughing, her teeth bloody red, and it all became clear. I hadn’t made a mistake with the addresses at all. This was Gideon’s house. He and Deja were in cahoots.

“Tie her up with her daughter,” Gideon said to Deja.

“No, shoot her,” Deja cried. “She knows what’s going on.”

“Just tie her up first, Deja. Shit.”

Deja pushed me toward the gas pipe and shoved me to the floor next to my daughter. She cable-tied my wrists around the pipe. Extra tight.

“We need to talk right now, Gideon,” said Deja. “We can’t keep both of ‘em here for long.”

Gideon looked at me and sighed. “It’s wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said to me.

Then the two of them walked up the stairs and closed the door.

CHAPTER 19

I immediately tried yanking on the ties. The pipe didn’t budge one bit.

“She use swizzers,” Kylie pronounced. “When I had to go to the bafroom, she cut t’em with swizzers.”

We didn’t have scissors so I started looking around me to see if I could find anything sharp within a leg’s reach. I didn’t see anything but lint balls and used fabric softener sheets. There were boxes on the other side of the basement but there was no way I could get over there.

“I know it’s something in those boxes…” I said to myself.

“I can get loose,” Kylie said. I watched as she tried to pull her little hands out of her ties. Her thumb was bending in unnaturally and I started to tell her to stop until I saw her hand slip free. I gasped, and a second later her other hand was loose too.

“Look and see if you can find some scissors,” I said.

My heart was beating fast as she scampered over and searched one of the boxes. I heard Gideon and Deja upstairs arguing and I knew it was only a matter of time before they came back down.

“We should have killed Kylie the first day we took her!” Deja yelled.

“And what would we have done with the body?” Gideon hurled back.

“Bury it!”

“Bury it where?”

“Anywhere! In the backyard.”

“Are you crazy? How about we bury her in yo backyard!”

I asked Kylie did she find anything and she looked at me and shook her head no. I whispered for her to look for anything sharp, not just scissors. Then she ran over with a device that I was sure was going to save our lives—a cell phone.

I held the power button and said a silent prayer. It was an old cell, not a smartphone, that Gideon probably stuck in a box down here. The screen lit up and so did my eyes. Even when the display flashed “no service,” I still had hope. I knew 911 could still be dialed out without minutes or a service plan. But when I pressed the “9,” the screen went black. I tried to turn it back on but the battery was dead.

I told Kylie to go look for another one.

“We gotta take ‘em outta state,” I heard Gideon say, “like we planned to do in the first place.”

“No, we have to get rid of them now!” Deja shouted.

“I told you why we can’t do that. We can’t kill them here. That’ll be too much evidence in my basement. You’re supposed to kill them where you bury them. Niggas in the joint told me this shit.”

“That plan sounded good before Tyesha got here. It would’ve been easy to move Kylie alive because she’s a little girl. Trying to take Tyesha too will get us caught. She busted my fuckin’ head up. Something can go wrong on the trip there. She’s a sneaky bitch, Gideon!”

“Don’t call her out her name.”

“Are you fucking serious?!”

In a sharp whisper, I told my daughter to hurry. She dug in a box that tipped over and spilled contents to the floor. My heart raced, waiting for one of them to come bolting down. But they kept yelling at each other. Kylie picked something up and ran over to me. It was a box cutter.

Hurriedly, I stuck the dull blade between my wrist and the zip tie. I sawed back and forth until it popped off and did the same with the other one. I went and rummaged through the boxes, looking for another phone. Instead, I found a laptop computer. It didn’t look new at all—the Dell symbol was missing, and so was the “H” and the “E” on the keyboard. But it had a wireless symbol so I tried to power it on.

It worked!

Deja’s voice boomed through the floor above us. “You know she has to die too now, right? Tell me you know that, Gideon!”

“So you get to be with Rodrick… and who will I have now?”

“That’s not my problem! We teamed up to get rid of their daughter. Everything was fine until your girl showed up. Now she has to die. What do you think, that she’s still gonna wanna be with you?!”

This had to be the slowest computer I’d ever seen. It was still booting up. No wonder he trashed it.

“Go down there and handle your business, Gideon. Or give me the gun. I’ll do it… Give me the gun, Gideon!”