Girl, 11 by Amy Clarke (grave mercy TXT) 📗

aim it at his chest, but then cried out and dropped her arm. Her shoulder spasmed with pain from her fall inside Douglas’s basement. She could switch the weapon to her left hand, but there was no way she could trust her aim with it—not with Natalie only inches away from him.

Terror grew white hot inside her. She couldn’t see Natalie’s face, but the little girl’s body was tense and trembling, and she had vomited into the snow.

The poison. She was dying.

The thought almost kicked the back out of Elle’s knees, but she forced herself to stay standing as Douglas finally turned to face her. He was transformed from the man she saw last week: granite face ruddy with effort, blue eyes free of lenses and glowing from the bright sunlight glaring off the snow. His balding head was covered by a black wool stocking cap. He was unsurprised, unmoved—panting from the lashes he had laid against Natalie’s skin. His brown leather belt lay in the snow next to his feet, coiled like a dead snake. He must not have been able to find a switch under such heavy snowfall. On his right cheek, drying blood shone sticky and thick around a fresh wound, suggesting he’d been grazed by a sharp object. She wondered if it had come from Natalie and felt a wild combination of pride and terror at the thought of the little girl fighting back against him.

“Ah, Eleanor.”

The sound of her old name on his lips made her tremble. He used to say it so often—sometimes like a curse, sometimes like a prayer. He called her by name every time he gave her an instruction, every time he punished her, every time she pleased him. He made her dread it as much as he made her long for it, all in just a few short days. She would never understand how.

She was desperate to look at Ayaan or Sam, to figure out whether they had a plan, but she didn’t dare break eye contact with Douglas now that he was looking at her, his gun still snug against Natalie’s head.

“Elle, I’m sorry,” Natalie wailed. “I tried to get away.” Elle resisted the urge to run to her. Natalie would only live if Elle was in control, if she did not make another mistake. She had made enough of them where TCK was concerned, enough for a lifetime.

“It’s okay, sweetheart.” Her voice was shrill in the cold, country air. She swallowed, trying to steady herself. “It’s going to be okay.”

“You’d be proud, Eleanor. She tried to kill me, just a few hours ago. Almost succeeded too,” Douglas said. “Uh-uh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” He looked next to her at Sam, who was trying to inch closer.

Elle put her arm out, stopping him. “Do not mess with him.”

Ayaan spoke from a few feet behind them. “Douglas Stevens, you are under arrest for the kidnapping and murder of Amanda Jordan, as well as the kidnapping and aggravated assault of Natalie Hunter.” She used the same voice she always did, clear and precise. “Drop your weapon and come with us peacefully. We will not harm you.”

While Douglas was looking at Ayaan, Sam broke into a run. Before Elle could even blink, Douglas lifted the gun away from Natalie, pointed it at Sam, and shot.

“No!” Elle screamed, lunging forward, but Douglas had already returned the end of his pistol to Natalie’s head. She shrieked at the hot metal burning her flesh, her body contorting, and then she slumped over the tractor. Elle prayed she had gone unconscious. There was nothing she could do unless he dropped that gun. Elle chanced a look to her left. Sam was sprawled in the snow, some of the drifts soft enough to close around his body. He didn’t make a sound.

When Elle looked back at Ayaan, the commander was standing resolute, pursing her lips with eyes wide and dry. They had missed the opportunity Sam had tried to give them—that brief second where Douglas’s gun was not directed at Natalie. It had passed so suddenly, shattering like an icicle on pavement.

Elle faced Douglas again. She was a few feet closer to him now, close enough to see the hardness in his eyes. He was angry because this was not going to plan. Nothing, so far, had gone according to his plan. She could use that.

“You stopped for all these years.” She shook her head as if in disbelief. “What made you lose the urge to kill? Did you finally meet a woman who you actually loved?”

Douglas laughed. “You think that’s what this is about? That I was some isolated, involuntary celibate who could have been cured with a regular woman in my bed? Oh, Eleanor, I expected better of you by now. I have no trouble with women. They believe everything I tell them, including my dead wife. You remember her, don’t you? I told her you and Jessica were my nieces when she came home early one day and caught you scrubbing the floor.”

The way he said “Jessica” brought a memory slicing through her consciousness like a hot knife. He said it the exact same way as he had twenty-one years ago. She sorted through the haze, trying to recall a woman catching her cleaning. She didn’t remember ever seeing her. She’d been so hungry and scared that, afterward, it felt like each memory of the place was a card in a deck, and someone had thrown it into the air and scattered them all.

Then she remembered the bodies in the burnt cabin. “I know you killed her.”

“My wife killed herself. I just cremated her in an unconventional way.”

“She was shot.”

“She knew what the consequences were for betraying me. In that way, she caused her own death.” He smiled. “Conveniently, her lover made an excellent body double.”

Elle blinked, thinking of the two charred bodies, buried without names. She pictured Luisa, dumped in a lonely grave behind an abandoned house, her mother