Acting Brave (Fenbrook Academy #3) (50 page)

The memories overtook me and I knew I was going to be sick. He could see it too, and he stepped out of the way. I heard him laughing as I ran to the bathroom and threw up into the toilet.

Chapter 59

Emma

Three and a half years ago

By the time my dad’s friends had finished with me and I lay naked and bloody on the pool table, the bar was empty. I crawled—I couldn’t stand—up the stairs to the apartment, locked myself in my room, and didn’t come out for three days except to throw up.

I’d survived. But what no one tells you is that the aftermath—the surviving—is the hard part.

I’d been expecting...I don’t know what. Something. Some other shoe to drop. I’d thought that they’d kill me, afterwards, or that it would go the other way and they’d regret it and there’d be some sort of justice. But there was nothing. Nothing changed. The men still saw me, still leered at me. That was the worst outcome of all, because it showed that what they’d done simply didn’t matter to them. They thought it was no big deal, which made me feel even more worthless. And I knew it meant it could happen again at any time.

Going to the police didn’t occur to me. I didn’t know which ones were on my dad’s payroll and I knew he’d kill me before I got anywhere near a courtroom. I knew he’d find me if I ran. Chicago was his and I had no money to go farther. I barely had any money at all.

The next two weeks were the most terrifying of my life. I knew that all it would take would be for the men—or ones like them—to get drunk enough, and I’d be pulled back into that back room. The apartment wasn’t safe. My bedroom wasn’t safe. They could easily kick down the door.

I slept with my gun under my pillow, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger, if it came to it. The gun had been useful for scaring strangers but these guys knew me. They knew I wasn’t a killer.

I dreamed about a better life, somewhere far away, and a glamorous career as an actress. I knew it was impossible, but dreaming gave me strength. I spent hours staring at the Fenbrook Academy website, always well out of sight of my dad. Meanwhile, I started to withdraw from my life in Chicago. If it was the only life I could have, I didn’t want to live it at all. I wanted to just stop existing.

I started to think about killing myself.

My dad noticed my withdrawal and wasn’t happy. He already had my brother doing little jobs for him. Sometimes, a dealer would give my dad a package of coke or heroin as a little bonus and my brother would be sent to deal it. That was when he started using. My dad wanted me out there as well. I overheard him joking about me working for the family business. I didn’t get it, at first. I couldn’t deal on a street corner or intimidate someone into handing over their money. I was a woman, for God’s sake. What work could I do?

I’d underestimated him. My mind, even jaded as it was, simply hadn’t gone there.

But before he put me to work, he needed to make sure I’d be loyal. I think he’d seen how close to cracking I was and he was worried I might suddenly blurt it all out to someone—maybe even someone who’d listen. So, when another problem came up, I guess he decided to solve both at once.

I was watching a movie, when it happened. I was halfway through some silly but funny romantic comedy that actually had me smiling, for once. When my dad came in, I paused it.

I never watched the end of that movie. Sometimes, even today, I see it come up on Netflix and I have to skip past it.

“Get downstairs,” he said, staring at me. “We’re going out.”

I knew better than to argue.

Downstairs, the bar was deserted. But the light was on in the back room. Someone had dragged a kitchen chair in there and there was a man in it, facing away from me. His head was hanging back limply.

My brother was there, too, putting his jacket on. He looked almost as scared as I did.

“Go pick him up,” said my dad.

I walked toward the chair, my steps getting smaller and smaller as I approached. I didn’t want to look because I’d seen the blood on my dad’s knuckles and I knew what the guy’s face would look like. But to pick him up, I had to get my arm under his shoulder, while Nick did the same on the other side, and I couldn’t not see his face.

I knew him. I’d seen him in the bar, regular as clockwork every month. I knew he was a cop. From his regular payments, a crooked cop, but there were lots of those. He didn’t seem vicious or cruel and, although he’d looked at me a few times, he didn’t have the hungry look of some of the men. My dad had given him a savage beating. One eye was swollen shut and his mouth was a mess of blood and missing teeth. He seemed to be semi-conscious.

We lifted him up out of the seat, one of us on either side of him, and walked him through to the bar. He winced and shuddered in pain as he walked. The beating clearly hadn’t been confined to his face.

“Put him in the truck,” my dad told us.

I hoped we were taking him home. He’d been beaten for whatever he’d done wrong, and now we’d drop him off at home and he’d recover and know better next time. That’s what I hoped.

But when I got to my dad’s double-cab pickup, the rear seat was covered in black garbage bags, neatly scotch-taped in place. We lifted the man in and he slumped on his side.

“Sit either side of him,” said my dad.

We climbed in, gently hauling the man upright so that he was sitting between us on the bench seat. I exchanged a look with my brother and he looked helplessly back at me. He didn’t know what had happened to me in the back room—or, at least, if he did then he didn’t hear it from me and he never mentioned it. I was far too ashamed to tell even him. So I’m not sure if he realized just how much of a monster his dad was, until that night.

We moved off. My dad drove silently into the night, only the ragged, wet sound of the man’s breathing breaking the silence. We headed out of the city. Out into wasteland and scrub. I started to feel sick. I wasn’t stupid. There was only one reason you took someone out to a place like that in the dead of night.

I looked at the man. He was still only half conscious, but he seemed to be coming round.

“He got ill,” said my dad.

My head snapped up. My dad was looking at me in the rear-view mirror. He’d seen me looking at the man.

“He had an attack,” said my dad. “Of conscience.” And he laughed at his own joke. “Oaks here mistook himself for a good man. He thought that if he stopped taking my money, that’d somehow undo all the shit he’d done.” He shook his head ruefully, as if he wished that was the case. “Doesn’t work like that. But don’t worry, Oaks. We’ll cure you.”

He drove us into a forest, a pathetic little thing that somehow still stood between vacant industrial lots. When he stopped, he jumped out and went to get something from the back. When he came back, he jerked his head at my brother and me to tell us to get out, too.

I’d frozen, though, staring at his hands. He was holding his shotgun and a pair of shovels.

I tried to open the door, but it took me three attempts to close my shaking fingers around the door-pull. Nick and I hauled the man out of the truck and hoisted him back onto our shoulders so that we could walk him along. When we set off, our dad leading the way, my brother and I were so sacred that our steps were as stumbling and weak as Oaks’s.

The forest was dying. I don’t know what quirk of city planning had allowed the land to stay protected when industry had sprung up all around it, but it hadn’t worked. The soil had long since soaked up the chemicals from the surrounding factories and the trees had hungrily sucked up the tainted water. It was summer, but few of them had leaves and their trunks were a misshapen, ugly mess. In the light of my dad’s torch, they looked more like twisted metal than living things.

My dad led us to a clearing and indicated that we should set the man down. We did, lowering him gently onto his knees.

My dad threw my brother and me a shovel each. “Start digging,” he said. Then he crouched down to stare into the Oaks’s face. He had to grip his shoulder, or the man would have toppled over onto his face, he was so weak. He kept gazing into the Oaks’s eyes, but he spoke to me. “See, Emma,” he said, “when a man like Oaks forgets who he is...well, that just makes problems for everybody. Soon, people forget who we are. They forget this family. Can’t allow that.”

The ground was soft, the soil crumbling and dry, any tiny roots that would have held it together long since killed off by the chemicals. It was easy digging and that was bad, because it went fast. The spades made that unmistakable metal
shh
as they slid into the ground, and then there was the soft patter of earth as we flung it over our shoulders. There’s no sound in the world as frightening as someone digging a grave.

Maybe you wonder why I did it. Why I didn’t run at my dad with the shovel and cave his skull in, or why I didn’t take my gun at home and shoot him in his bed. It’s the same reason why you can’t cut your own leg off, even if you’re pinned under a girder in a burning building and you’re going to die.

But that didn’t stop me loathing myself. It built inside me with every push of the spade into the ground, a deep black hatred of what I’d become. The sort of hatred that makes you want to become someone else.

When the hole was about four feet deep, my dad told us to stop. Then he lifted the man up and set him down again on his knees, facing the hole. He pumped the slide on the shotgun and I saw the man’s shoulders tense. That’s when I knew he was aware of all this. He knew exactly what was going to happen to him, even if he was long past being able to stop it.

My dad raised the shotgun.

I felt as if my whole body, beneath my skin, had turned into a solid lump of ice so cold it burned. “No,” I croaked.

My dad wrapped his finger around the trigger.

My cheeks were wet. I hadn’t even realized I was crying. “
No!”
I said again.

My dad pressed the muzzle of the shotgun against the man’s head.

“You don’t have to kill him,” I begged. “You already hurt him. He
knows.
He won’t do it again!”

“Other people will,” my dad told me. “If they think we’re weak. They’ll think they can just walk away from us.” He shook his head, staring right at me. “No one walks away from this family.”

There was an explosion like the end of the world. I screamed and screwed my eyes tight shut. There was a dull thump as the body fell into the grave.

I turned to the side and threw up.

“You ever get any stupid ideas of going to the cops,” said my dad, “and you remember this. I’ll do this to you. I’ll do this to anyone you love. And if you try to run, there’s nowhere you can go where I won’t find you.” He tossed me a shovel. “Cover him up.”

***

When we got home, my dad ripped all the garbage bags off the back seat of his truck. He sent Nick off upstairs and then caught me by the arm before I could follow.

“You’re mine, now,” he told me. “And you’re going to start making yourself useful.”

His hand squeezed harder on my arm, his fingertips like iron.

“Tomorrow, you go buy yourself a dress. You’re going to start coming with me, when we meet to set up the big loans.”

No. God, no, he can’t mean—

I honestly thought I must be wrong but he leered at me as he confirmed it. “See, the muscle I have around, like Thomas? That’s the stick. That’s what they get if they don’t pay. But you? You can be the carrot. You can be what they’ll get if they do.”

I did something stupid—I shook my head. It wasn’t a conscious move; it was instinctual horror at what he was saying.

He pushed me, hard enough to send me staggering into the wall. I had to put my hands behind me to stop me, which left me vulnerable. So, when he slammed his fist into my belly, there was nothing I could do.

I folded almost in half. He brought his knee up under my chin and I tasted blood. The pain followed a second later.

“Don’t ever say no to me!”
he screamed—that sudden, vicious anger, and my insides turned to water because I knew this was going to be a bad one. Something—his fist, I guess-caught me on the side of the head and I went down, instinctively wrapping myself into a tight little ball as he started kicking me.

***

Afterwards, I could barely stand without the pain sending me back to my knees. I dragged myself upstairs and took a shower, my movements tentative and slow. I scrubbed until the dirt had come out from under my fingernails and I could no longer smell cordite and blood. But there was a deeper stain on my soul that wouldn’t come out.

I huddled on my bed, unable to sleep. My dad thought he’d trapped me. He knew that, now I’d witnessed that, I’d never dare go to the cops. But in a way, he’d freed me. The horror of what he’d done and the thought of what would happen to me next—maybe as soon as that night—made me think about taking risks I’d never have dared take before.

What if I
did
run? He’d said he could find me anywhere, but what if there was no
me
to find? What if Emma disappeared?

What if I became someone else?