Over and Run With - A Gallagher Girls Story

Chapter Thirteen

"I've already spoken with my brother." It was the first voice I had heard in hours. It was the first sound I had heard in hours. There hadn't been one single creak of a floorboard, no wisp of wind. There was nothing to be heard of from the other side of a wall or through a cracked door. Say whatever you'd like about the Gathering, but they knew how to disarm their enemies, and sound had always been my favorite weapon. "And if your stories don't align, then I may just take a trip down to the lake and throw one of your friends in it, how does that sound?"

Lily whipped the bag off of my face, and the light of a nearby flame stung at my vision. It took me a moment to find her in the darkness, her silhouette lost in a great and towering loft, but her entrance was unceremonious. Her presence, simple. She didn't have the appearance of a terror cell mastermind. Instead, she really just looked like an inconvenienced older sister. "What are you doing here, Goode?" she says. "What's your grand plan?"

As far as being taken prisoner went, I had been in worse straits. Still, that didn't keep my wrists from burning. Didn't keep my back from aching. It didn't keep my voice from being hoarse when I said, "No plan. Just questions." I looked up at what little I could see of her. "I'm told you're the woman to talk to about that."

Golds and oranges landed in waves against her chin, her cheeks, her jaw. "You were told wrong," she said. "I don't have the time to listen to some made up tale of rebellion that's meant to distract me from whatever it is you're actually doing."

"Well then it's a good thing that none of this is made up, isn't it?" I snapped, and I was already trying to undo the zipties around my wrist, but they were too well done. Lily was a Gallagher Girl. She knew my training just as well as she knew her own. "I'm not here to put up an attack."

Lily took one step closer. Then another. "And why not?" she said. "I take yours, you take mine. That's how this game works, isn't it? You must have felt some kind of way, watching your safe house burn down like that. Might give a girl some ideas about revenge."

It's a strange sort of balancing act, trying to negotiate with someone who, by many definitions, has taken your world away from you. This was the woman who had taken my mother away from me. Later, she had taken Matt. She had taken my safety, and my security, and my sanity. Lily Collins deserved my hate, and I knew that in the deepest parts of my soul.

But I couldn't actually hate her. Not yet. Not entirely. Certainly I was able to hate her, and I was willing to hate her, but that wasn't a path I could afford to take. Not right now. For the moment, I didn't view her as a person, but rather as a goal. A hill to be climbed, a mountain to be conquered. "If I wanted revenge," I said, "don't you think I would have brought more backup?"

I couldn't tell exactly how Lily saw me, just then, but I felt her stripping me of my personhood just as I was of her. As she stepped closer, closer, and finally squatted down to my seat on the concrete ground, I wondered if she had ever seen me as a person at all. I wondered if she had ever seen anyone as a person. "Well that's just it, isn't it, Goode?" She reached out to me, pulled a strand of sweat-soaked hair from my face. "How do I know you didn't? How do I know the rest of your family isn't hiding out in a bush somewhere—?"

"A bush?" I couldn't help myself. "You think Cameron and Zachary Goode are in a bush? You think Joe Solomon is in a bush?"

Her hand clasped over my mouth. It was a quick, impulsive action that was closer to a slap than anything else. For the first time since we had arrived at the warehouse, I began to feel truly, wildly scared. Not uneasy. Not uncertain. But rather, frightened in a way that the best spies never ignore and the worst spies never survive.