He Made Me Bark, I Grabbed His Gun

Chapter 3

In the ambulance, Santino’s right hand was held in place with a splint. With his other hand, he clutched my sleeve.

“Vivi, what the hell—”

“Big brother, wait until they set the bone.”

“No.” He tugged hard, eyes fixed on me. “What you did back there was terrifyingly clean. How do you know how to do all that?”

I stared up at the emergency lights on the ceiling, the red glow flashing on and off.

“Do you remember when I was seven? When I was taken from the back garden of the estate?”

He nodded, his throat shifting.

“After that, I spent twenty years in a place. A black-market ‘sanatorium.’”

“Sanatorium?” His voice tightened.

“It wasn’t healing anyone. They bought people, brought them in, gave them a number. Then came the tests. The training. No names. No birthdays. Just that number.”

The paramedic paused and glanced at me.

I ignored him and kept going.

“I was A-17. They trained us not to make a sound. How to make people talk. How to make someone shut up.”

I stopped for a second.

“And how to make sure someone never speaks again.”

Santino’s hand started shaking.

“That place is gone now. I got out three years ago and burned it to the ground. People, files, everything.”

“The day I walked out, sixteen others walked out with me. They’re out there now. They answer to me. They work for me.”

“But they’re not my family. They’re the people who crawled out of that cage with me. None of them are normal anymore.”

“Neither am I.”

“You don’t know anything. Papa doesn’t. Mama doesn’t. You don’t.”

“All you know is that I disappeared when I was seven and came back twenty years later. You all thought I was fragile. Timid. One bad shock away from falling apart.”

“Mama stands outside my door every night because she’s afraid I’ll have nightmares. You and the others locked the armory three times over because you were afraid I’d see a gun.”

I turned to look at him.

“I’m not afraid of guns. I know them too well. In my hand, a gun feels more natural than a knife and fork.”

“I barely remember anything from before I was seven. But the weight of a gun, the recoil, the pull of the trigger—I could recognize all of it with my eyes closed.”

“They wiped my life before seven clean. Then they filled the empty shell with this.”

Santino’s tears fell onto the white stretcher sheet, blooming into small dark spots.

“Vivi, I thought you’d spent those twenty years being bullied out there. Suffering.”

“No. I just became someone else.”

“That little girl you used to hold in your arms—the one who wanted two extra spoonfuls of honey in her cocoa—she died in that place a long time ago.”

He opened his mouth, but in the end, he said nothing. He only gripped my sleeve tighter, as if the second he let go, I would disappear for another twenty years.

“Oh, right.” He suddenly turned his head. “Marco is on his way. Dante is flying in from Boston tonight.”

“On the phone, neither of them asked a single question. They just kept saying the same thing.”

“Protect you.”

I looked away before he could see my face.

The ambulance stopped. The emergency bay doors opened, and the stretcher was pushed out. I followed close behind.

Then my phone buzzed in my pocket.

I took it out.

A text message.

Unknown number.

[It’s been twenty years, my little lab rat. Do you still remember what Area A smelled like? —Your old friend.]

I stared at the screen.

My fingers slowly tightened around the phone until the case creaked.

I shoved it back into my pocket, drew a deep breath, and followed them inside.

I thought I had burned that place clean.

But now I knew—

Someone had made it out alive.

And he had been watching me.

Watching me come home.

Watching me gain something to lose.