Charmed (Death Escorts #2)(53)
Author: Cambria Hebert

I was aware of Frankie’s fingers moving lightly over my chest, giving me courage to talk.

“My father wasn’t much of a man. He left us when I was ten years old. Sarah was only five. A baby. My mother did what she could for us. She worked herself until she had circles beneath her eyes and holes in the bottom of her shoes. Still, she always smiled at us, always told us how much we meant to her. It would have been easy, I think, to blame us, to be angry and make us the target for that anger. But she never once let us see her cry. I heard her sometimes, at night, when I was supposed to be in bed.”

Instead of saying she was sorry for what obviously had been something hard, she still said nothing. Instead, she kissed me just beneath my jaw and then pressed her face in the crook of my neck.

“I got my first job when I was twelve. I was bigger than most boys that age, so I lied and took on as many jobs as I could. It helped some and gave my mother more time with Sarah. When I was fifteen, I quit school to work fulltime. I brought home enough for us to live, but I wanted more for them. Mother was always there for us, and Sarah… Sarah was…” I swallowed past the lump that had formed in my throat. Thinking about my sister was something I tried to never do.

“She was important, huh?” Frankie said, sensing the emotion that welled up inside me.

“Yeah, she was,” I replied. My sister meant everything to me. “So I started boxing. I got beat up a lot the first couple years. It seemed I always had some sort of injury—a black eye, a busted rib. But I didn’t give up. I kept fighting. I liked it. I think I got all the anger my mother never seemed to carry. After a couple years, I started winning. You got a lot more money for winning than you did for losing. The night I died, I was fighting for the championship title. A title that could have made me over ten thousand dollars. I was naive to think someone wouldn’t kill to keep their title.”

“You took the job, you became an Escort for your family, didn’t you?”

“Without me, without my income, they would have ended up in poverty or my mother would have married herself off to someone that didn’t deserve her. So, yeah, I took the job. I killed and I sent almost all the money I made to my mother and my sister anonymously.”

“Thank you for telling me. I probably would have done the exact same thing in your shoes.”

She thought that was all there was to my story. That the killing machine I was today was solely based on the fact my family needed to survive. It definitely was what made me an Escort… but the emotionless killer… that took something else entirely to create.

“Is your sister a Death Escort too?”

“No,” I denied. The thought of my sister, of someone so pure as her doing what I do made me sick.

“Well, that day at the café when you said you saw her… wouldn’t she be…?” Her words trailed away.

“Dead. Sarah is dead.”

“But you said you saw her…”

“The Reaper has her body. I have no idea how he got it or why, but he does and he was using it to throw me off, to mess with my head.”

“You said before he doesn’t want you to complete this job.”

“He wants me gone. For good. If I don’t do this job, he’s going to use it as an excuse to Recall me.”

Her arms tightened around me, and her face buried against my neck. “I’ve been trying to mess it up for you too.”

“You didn’t know any better,” I soothed, rubbing my hand over her back.

“I don’t want you to get Recalled.”

“That’s not going to happen. I have a plan.”

“What kind of plan?”

I shook my head. “The less you know the better. I don’t want you involved in this.”

“Charming?”

“Hmmm?”

“If your sister’s body looks as young as it does, then…”

I swallowed against the memory of that day. Of the day I killed my sister. “She died a couple years after I became an Escort. She was barely eighteen.”

I felt the breath she sucked in, but I was so lost in the memory of that day that I didn’t hear if she said anything.

“After I died, the boys started coming around. And I say boys because none of the guys that showed interest in my sister were man enough to have her. It drove me crazy, seeing her with guys that didn’t deserve her, that couldn’t give her the life I wanted her to have. But once I was gone…”

“She was trying to find someone to fill the hole you left behind.”

Yeah. Maybe. “She and my mother cried for weeks after I died,” I recalled softly.

“We don’t have to talk about this if it’s too hard.”

“No. I want you to know.” I blew out a breath and finished the story. “Sarah got serious with this guy. When he wasn’t around her, he gambled, he drank… he cheated. I couldn’t just knock on the front door and warn her away. I mean, she didn’t even know me. One night he showed up at the house after he’d been at the bar. Sarah told him she didn’t like his drinking. He hit her.”

I clenched my fist at the memory. I could still hear the slap against her skin. I could hear her cry.

“I killed him.”

“You were protecting your sister.”

“Yes, I was. But killing him is no different from killing anyone else. Except he wasn’t a Target. One of the Reaper’s rules is to never kill anyone but a Target. I walked around for days, terrified he would find out, that he would Recall me. But he never did. He never said a word. And so I went on killing and sending the money to my family.”

“And then Sarah died.”

“She didn’t just die. She killed herself.”

Frankie sucked in a breath. “But why?”

“Because I killed her boyfriend. I heard my mother talking to one of her friend’s right after the funeral. Seems that losing me and then losing the only other man she ever loved sent her over the edge.” Why she loved that jerk was beyond me. I thought she had better taste than that. Maybe I didn’t know her as well as I thought. I was silent for a few minutes. “Because of me, my sister killed herself.”

Frankie pushed up against my chest to stare down into my eyes. “You are not responsible for what your sister did.”

There was no point in arguing what I knew to be true. “After that, I stopped caring. I figured out a way to shut down my feelings and just focus on my job. On death.”