My Marionette Lover novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Brad Cuts a Rope

I showed them my wrist in the Annex that evening.

The black thread lay across the floorboards, limp, because we were out of her range.

Arlen knelt and held my forearm in both his hands.

He didn't touch the thread.

"She put a string on you," he said.

"On my wrist, over the gauze."

"Cut it."

"If I cut with the shears, I lose more of mine."

"Then I'll cut it with a kitchen knife."

"It's not that kind of thread, Arlen."

He let go of my arm and walked to the far wall.

His back was rigid, and I knew what he was doing, because I had watched him do it at the Sigma house.

He was holding a heavy door shut.

"I won't let her hold you," he said. "I'll walk off the roof first."

"That's not a plan."

"No," he said. "It's a promise."

Someone hammered on the Annex door with the flat of a hand.

Birdie opened it, and Brad walked in with his hood down and his face the color of paper.

He was holding a long cream envelope in two fingers.

"A man in a gray coat gave me this outside my dorm," he said. "He called me Mr. Amesbury."

"Who calls you that?" said Birdie.

"Nobody. My father when he's angry."

He put the envelope on the workbench.

Birdie read it first, because Birdie reads everything.

"Redfern Holdings," she said slowly. "Junior analyst. A hundred and forty thousand a year, starting in June."

"And?" I asked.

"And his sister's tuition at the state school, all four years, paid direct."

Brad's little sister was a first-year with a lacrosse scholarship that would not last past a torn knee.

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