A loud blast of hysterical laughter ejected from Ronnie’s lips.
“You couldn’t make it up, could you?” Minnie said bitterly, chewing on her lower lip. “Anyway…” a trace of a smile lit up her face, and for a brief moment, she was that wholesome, beautiful sixteen-year-old again. She held up a set of car keys, jangling them temptingly in front of his eyes. “We’ve got a car! And money. We’re going to leave tonight. Road trip!”
Ronnie blinked, “sorry, what?”
The money they’d hurriedly scavenged from Steve’s had dried up quickly, as well as the loot that Minnie had shown up there with in the first place. No matter how much their stolen stacks of cash had seemed in the moment, it felt like their money always had an irritating habit of draining away quicker than they could count. Yet, somehow, Minnie had an uncanny way of always getting more.
At whatever cost.
“All of Jakub’s family will start poking around asking questions. They’ll be sending the police round here. We have got to move.” Minnie supplied impatiently.
“But where’s his mother? Did she leave? Did she give you the car and money?”
Minnie paused and dropped her gaze, running her tongue along the front of her teeth. He processed that familiar expression and felt his abdomen twist. A bizarre mixture of dismay and exhilaration.
“Min…” he began, with a tired sigh.
“She didn’t suspect a thing,” whispered Minnie, ignoring him, an excited grin creeping up onto her face. “She fell right into my hands, gave me all she had… it was so easy…
“And now what, Min?” he shouted the fury that had been simmering beneath the surface of his skin finally boiling over. His cheeks flushed bright red as he smacked his palms onto her upper arms, clenching her entire body tightly in his vice-like grip. “We go on the run, again? What kind of shitty life is this for Zach?” He shook her, anger pulsing through his veins like a torrent of lava. “Huh?”
Minnie laughed in response, a single, glistening tear squeezing from the corner of her right eye and dribbling slowly down her cheek as her body trembled within his rough, unforgiving hold.
“Don’t you see?” she smiled up at him, pupils glassy, as deep and black as an abyss. “Don’t you get it? If we hadn’t have killed Jakub, that sick fuck might’ve done something worse than taking photos… as soon as you started to leave us…” she grimaced, ignoring the shiver that rippled up and down her spine.
“Because we did kill that motherfucker, we got to stay rent-free here, no questions asked, no police breathing down our neck, laying low… we got to be a family…” more tears broke free of her eyes, her cheeks wrinkling as her happy expression only widened. “And now? Because we killed that sicko, his mother walked right in here and gave us everything we needed to leave. And because Jakub wasn’t alive, she trusted me that he was out,” she laughed, “I told her that he was an honourable soldier. She was ever so proud!”
Ronnie shook her small, frail body in his strong hands, savouring the tension of her bones, separated only between them by skin and a thin layer of flesh.
“You sound…” he almost spluttered, his voice breaking, “...evil… you sound like… him.”
His words hovered there above them both, seeming to echo and crash about in the atmosphere like shattering glass, never disintegrating. But they did not hurt Minnie. They did not even hurt him.
“Good,” she hissed, forcing her face as close to his as it would go so that her voice tickled his chin. “Because being good is for mugs, Ronnie. Look where being good got us?”
Ronnie’s face crumpled. He released her from his grip as he fell to his knees and felt the full weight of his pain slam hard into his gut. His body fell into itself, and for the first time, he let the emotional agony and turmoil be felt. He cried. He bawled.
She sank down beside him, her smile only growing in the centre of her face like a beam of sunlight. She gripped onto his shoulders and caressed their blades with the pad of her thumbs, forcing him to look up at her.
“This can’t be right…” he crackled, unable to meet her gaze.
Minnie just laughed and lifted his chin with her hand so that he was forced to look into her eyes.
“But that’s just it, isn’t it?”
He swallowed hard, goose flesh prickling on his arms as he waited for her to continue her dreaded but truthful speech.
“We were never born to be right, Ronnie.”
Chapter Fifty-six
2019
Before that fateful evening two decades ago, there had never been anything eerie or foreboding about the little woodland park, just a short walk around the block from Ross’s family home. On the contrary, as a kid, he’d never had anything but joyful memories of going to Oakwood with his friends, or sometimes even his little sister (who he had secretly enjoyed hanging out with all along). He remembered cycling there in a convoy of bikes, climbing trees, making dens, and leaping over tiny, shallow streams.
Then that awful summer’s night had rolled around, where his parents had been up all night, pacing madly back and forth as they panicked. They’d sent him up to bed, but even if it wasn’t for his mother’s hysterical shrieks of fear resounding up the staircase, he could feel it deep in his bones that something had been very wrong.
When Minnie had been found, it had only been a very brief, very fleeting release from the intense fear that had gripped him like a noose. Because it wasn’t long after that, they’d discovered that deep within the woodland, where the siblings had shared so many wonderful memories, there’d been a monster lurking in its shadows, just waiting to rear its ugly head.
From that day on, particularly when she’d gone missing, all of those snippets of the past had been tarnished. Tinted black. Ruined forever.
Ross tightened his grip on the
