The Lies That Bind

30: Check

Calla Parker had plans.

She gazed across the street, to the little white house in desperate need of a paint job, fiddling absently with the bracelet at her wrist as she thought of love and loose ends.

Love, of all things. She swallowed an incredulous snort. Love was a problem, a thorn in her side that had lodged itself into her skin, down through the muscle and bone and into her marrow, dragging her forward and onward to its inevitable, brutal end. For love, there would be hell to pay.

But those pesky loose ends...well.

There would still be hell to pay for those, too. Only this time, she'd be the one collecting.

Calla crossed the street and approached the little white house. She'd been there once or twice before, for a pregame and another, far later night, poorly spent on the disgusting couch the boys who lived there kept shoved in the corner, because Olivia had insisted they drop by and drop by had turned into sleep over, and sleep over meant Calla on that filthy couch while Olivia lounged in her boyfriend's bed, the king of his very own castle.

Calla's eyes flickered to the upstairs window.

She had a knack for dethroning kings.

Three knocks on the front door—damn Cooper and his damn compulsions, the number three was starting to stick with her in the worst fucking way—and soon enough Calla found herself face to face with none other than Kevin Richards, whose already wary expression transformed into something very like fear when he spotted her there on his front porch.

"Kevin," she greeted cooly.

Kevin had apparently lost the ability of speech, because he just stood there and stared at her like a gap-mouthed fish, too stupid to understand the danger it was in.

Calla's more violent impulses had been curbed somewhat over the years, thanks to the relatively consistent schedule of savagery she'd been tasked to carry out by a dark god of her own making. Killing Kurt and the others had kept the beast sated.

Until the photo on her fridge and the warning written in red.

Now it was a snarling, irrational tangle of claws and teeth, its maw yawning wide as it tore her apart from the inside, demanding what it was owed.

LETMEOUTLETMEOUTLETMEOUT.

Poor Kevin.

Or maybe not. Poor Kevin had made his bed. Now he could settle down and lie in it. "We need to talk," she said when it became clear Kevin had absolutely zero intentions of ever moving again.

He swallowed. A sign of life, if not intelligence. "Um..." 

That was the only word he could muster. Um.

"Why'd you do it?" she asked, hoping to speed things along.

His eyes immediately filled with tears. Fantastic, she thought, disgusted. "I'm so..." He gasped, clinging to the broken doorframe. "I'm so sorry."

They always are, right before I turn them into nothing at all. 

"Why?" she demanded again. His tears meant so very little to her. But she had a part to play here, and play she would. So she let a crack of doubt slip through her facade, into her eyes, softening them a bit, and even in the set of her shoulders, which drooped as though the fight had left her all at once. 

Kevin sniffled rather unattractively, swiping at his panicked tears as they attempted to slip down his splotchy cheeks. "I had to. I fucked up."

"Kevin, what are you talking about?"