other women who begged Grimes for mercy, men too, and I knew that I couldn’t do that.
Not if I wanted to live. I knew that I had to keep my mouth shut, endure it, and stay alive for myself—and for Jo-Jo too.”
I could have told her how sorry I was for everything that she’d suffered back then and again these past few days too, but I kept quiet. Because this was Sophia’s story to tell, and I had the sense that if I stopped her now, she’d never start it again. And I wanted to know all of it.
“I lost track of how long I’d been at Grimes’s camp, and I’d almost given up any hope of ever escaping,” Sophia said, her voice still low. “Until the day one of his men disappeared.”
“When Fletcher came for you,” I whispered.
She nodded, tugged a clover out of the grass, and started plucking the leaves off it. “Grimes didn’t think too much of the guy’s disappearance at first, just that he’d probably gotten drunk off the moonshine and fallen off a cliff or maybe even drowned in the river. But then another guy disappeared the very next day. Then another one the next day. And Grimes and his men started finding the bodies, all of them with their throats cut or stab wounds in their chests and all of them left right out in the open, almost like someone had declared war on them.”
She stopped long enough to grab another clover and start
working on it. “Then I was out at the pit one day, digging, when I saw a man through the trees. He crept close enough to whisper that his name was Fletcher and that Jo-Jo had sent him to rescue me. Warren was there too.
Fletcher told me that he and Warren were going to kill Grimes and get me out of there.”
“But it didn’t work out quite that way,” I said, having an idea where the story was headed.
Sophia shook her head. “Grimes had figured out that Fletcher was really there for me. He, Hazel, Horace, and Henry, their other brothers, set a trap, and Fletcher walked right into it. He managed to kill Henry and wound Hazel, and he even got Grimes to use up all of his Fire magic. Fletcher and Grimes fought, but Hazel shot him, and Fletcher was too weak and wounded to finish Grimes off. At that point, I didn’t care whether Grimes was dead. I just wanted to get off the mountain and go home. So I persuaded Fletcher to leave, and Warren and I managed to drag him down the mountain to where his car was. The three of us made it back to Jo-Jo’s, and she healed him.”
This time, she reached for a blade of grass and began tearing it into thinner and thinner strips. “After that, Grimes kept his distance, but I was always worried that he would come back someday, so Fletcher taught me how to fight, and in return, I helped him get rid of the bodies that he left behind as the Tin Man. I figured that it was more than a fair trade.”
So that’s why Sophia had disposed of all those bodies for Fletcher. Once again, my heart twisted at the wrongness of it, of the thought of her doing something over and over again that had to remind her of Grimes and everything she’d suffered at his hands.
“Fletcher never asked me to do it,” she said, picking up on my thoughts. “He never asked me to get rid of the first body. But Grimes had made me good at digging graves, and it was the only way that I could think of to repay Fletcher.”
“And me?” I whispered. “Why did you keep doing it
for me? Why not at least stop when Fletcher died?”
“Because Fletcher loved you and trained you in his own image. And because I owe him everything. It wasn’t just that he got me away from Grimes. It was all the years of peace that he gave me afterward.”
Another thought occurred to me. “That’s why you started working at the Pork Pit, isn’t it? So Fletcher could keep an eye on you. So he could protect you from Grimes, in case he came after you again.”
Sophia nodded again. “And Fletcher kept his promise, right up to the day he died. He was a good man that way.”
She didn’t say what we were both thinking: that
Fletcher was gone now. That he wasn’t around to protect her from Grimes anymore.
But I was.
I’d made a promise to the old man in his office, and it was the same one that I’d made to Sophia and Jo-Jo too, even if I hadn’t said it out loud to them, even if they didn’t realize it yet.
“Don’t you worry about Harley Grimes,” I said, reaching out and laying a hand on her shoulder much the same way that Owen had done to me when he’d given me back my knives earlier. “I’ll make sure that bastard never hurts you or anyone else ever again. I’m going to finish what Fletcher started and kill him for good this time. That I promise you, Sophia.”
She nodded, but the thick muscles in her shoulder bunched under my hand, and the tension in her face didn’t ease. After a moment, she shuffled forward, keeping low and moving away from me and over to another patch of daisies. I let my hand fall away from her shoulder, but I didn’t follow her.
Instead, I stood there with her in the dark of the night as she picked flower after flower, as though she could strip away all her bad memories as easily as she could separate the delicate petals from the stems.
But she couldn’t, and we both knew it.
Chapter Twenty-eight
The next morning, I went to the Pork Pit and opened up the restaurant right on time, just like usual.
Despite the fact that I was being hunted by a couple of Fire elemental psychopaths, I still had a barbecue joint to run. Besides, Grimes was looking for a woman who said that her name was Gin Blanco, and everyone knew that the Pork Pit was mine. I only wondered how long it would take him to realize that I really was the Spider and come here to confront me.
The only thing missing from the restaurant was Sophia. She was still stashed away at cooper’s house, along with Jo-Jo. I’d told the sisters to take it easy and rest up, that nothing was going to happen today. That I had Finn tracking down some leads and was formulating a plan on how best to deal with Grimes.
I didn’t tell them that I’d already worked everything out with Finn, Owen, Phillip, and Bria. I didn’t want Sophia and Jo-Jo involved in my scheme, and I didn’t want them anywhere near me, not when I was waiting for Grimes to make the first move. They’d already faced him twice, which was two times too many. I was going to handle things from here, like I’d promised Fletcher. I didn’t want Sophia and Jo-Jo to set eyes on Grimes ever again—at least, not until after I’d killed him.
I didn’t think that the sisters really believed me, but they’d reluctantly agreed to stay put, especially since neither one of them was a hundred percent. Despite the fact that cooper continued to use his magic on her, Jo-Jo was still weak, and Sophia, well, Sophia had been shot, kidnapped, and tortured. She needed some time to recover from that and from all the grievous wounds that she had on the inside, the ones that no magic could ever fix.
It made me a little melancholy, stepping into the restaurant and not seeing Sophia standing behind the counter, slicing up her homemade sourdough rolls for the day’s sandwiches, or hefting a big pot of Fletcher’s secret barbecue sauce onto a back burner to bubble away. But it was good that she wasn’t there. If she was, all I would do was worry about her, and I couldn’t afford to do that. I couldn’t afford to be distracted for a moment, not when Grimes and Hazel were coming for me.
So I did my usual sweep of the restaurant for bombs, explosive runes, and any other nasty surprises that someone might have planted on the doors, inside the storefront, or even back in the restrooms overnight. When I was satisfied that no one had been inside the restaurant who shouldn’t have been, I flipped the sign on the front door over to
The waitstaff showed up about half an hour later. A few were surprised when I told them that Sophia wouldn’t be in for the rest of the week, but nobody said anything to me about it. They were all too worried about what I might do to them as the Spider to give me any lip about working a little harder because we were a man down.
But the day passed quietly. I cooked, waited on tables, cooked some more, and even managed to read a few chapters of
