Chapter 159 Stay By Your Side

Chapter 159 Stay By Your Side

They stayed off every main road.

Zion knew where the cameras were in this city, from years of moving through it and paying attention to what other people walked past without looking at. Traffic cameras at intersections, CCTV above shop entrances, the ones mounted on poles outside banks that had a wider angle than most people assumed. He steered them around all of it, taking the longer routes through residential streets and the gaps between buildings, and Molly followed without asking why because she understood why.

Her face was on a missing persons poster somewhere, while his face was connected to a werewolf investigation. The cameras were not their friends tonight.

They had been walking for hours when Zion slowed down on a road that was more gap than road, the tarmac cracked and overgrown at the edges, the kind of street that existed on the boundary between a town that had been something and the countryside that was slowly reclaiming it.

He stopped in front of a house.

It was a small, single-storey building. A garden that had stopped being a garden some time ago and had grown into whatever it wanted to be instead, the grass was long and the path to the door barely visible. The window on the left side of the front had a crack running through the glass from corner to corner and the paint on the door was coming away in curling strips.

Molly looked at it. Then at him.

"This is yours?" she asked.

"My mother left it to me," He was already moving toward the door, producing a key from somewhere on his person, the key old enough to have a different weight to it than modern ones. "It was hers before."

The lock turned stiffly and the door opened into darkness.

He went in first and Molly followed, he found the light switch and pressed it, nothing happened, so they stood in the dark for a moment while their eyes adjusted and the shape of the interior came through gradually, room by room, as the moonlight coming through the cracked window provided what it could.

There was no furniture. The rooms were left bare down to the floorboards. The kitchen had the ghost of where appliances had stood, the cleaner patches of floor where a fridge and a cooker had once been, and the shelves on the walls had brackets but no shelves.

Zion looked at the empty rooms and cursed under his breath.

"Those filthy thieves," he grumbled, louder, addressing the empty room, annoyance vivid in his tone. "Every single time." He kicked lightly at a piece of broken plaster near the skirting board. "At least they left the walls."

Molly looked around. "How often do you come here?"

"Not often enough, clearly."

Zion moved through the rooms with the familiarity of someone who knew the layout without needing the lights, checking each one, and Molly stood near the door, watching him.

They ended up on the floor of what had been the main room, their backs against the wall below the cracked window, the moonlight coming in above them at an angle that lit the ceiling more than the floor. The berries they had picked from the brambles along the road outside the city sat between them in Molly's cupped hands, dark and small, not enough for a meal but enough to be eating something.

She passed some to him. He took them without counting them, which she noticed, because she had been counting to make sure the split was even and he had simply trusted her to do that.

They ate in silence for a while.

The house had sounds of its own, the settling sounds of an old building that had been empty long enough to develop its own personality, creaks and the occasional shift that made Molly look toward whichever wall it came from before deciding it was nothing.

"Your mum," Molly broke the silence.

Zion looked at her sideways.

She looked at the ceiling. "Is she gone?"

He was quiet for a moment. Not knowing what to answer, and even if he did know what to answer, he wasn't sure if he wanted to talk about it. But he responded anyway.

"She left," he threw a berry in his mouth.

Molly turned her head to look at him.

He was looking at the floor in front of him, his arms pulled around himself, his shoulders tense and drawn in slightly.

"My father," he started, then stopped, then started again. "He had a way of changing people..." He paused. "He hit both her and me. Not all the time, but enough times that she got fed up." His jaw clenched. 

Molly said nothing. She let him talk.

"She left when I was nine," he continued. "Took my sister one night, but she didn't take me." He said the last three words at the same volume as the rest of it, without inflection, like he had said it to himself so many times that the saying of it out loud had lost whatever edge it used to have. "I found out later she thought my father would come after her if she took me.” He let out a sad laugh. “Because he needed his son around. Maybe she was just protecting my sister." He looked at his hands. "I've told myself that enough times that I almost believed it was true. But she left me because she was afraid of being caught."

Molly looked at his profile in the moonlight.

"But she left this house to you," she tried to encourage him.

"Well, she mentioned it in the letter she left behind." He glanced at the empty room. "I think it was guilt. Something she could give me without having to be present when I received it." He shrugged with one shoulder. "I don't know. She's alive somewhere. She just doesn't exist in my life, so in a way that counts as being dead. Doesn’t it?"

Molly looked at the ceiling again.

She thought about her mother, about how she had revealed her secrets to her in the kitchen, how she had effortlessly made the lights go off and on, about how she had betrayed Grace, pretended to help her while hiding what she truly wanted. She thought about Daniel. She thought about her father standing in a forest with a knife and a history and a version of events he had told her and had decided that it somehow entitled him to everything he was doing.

"Mine divorced," Molly shrugged her shoulders and smiled softly. "Dad left Mom for another woman a while back, it was a whole thing. Mum and Daniel were all I had." She stopped. Then, very flat: "Now there's just my dad."

She scoffed, then almost laughed at it, at the absurdity of the equation, the way life could reduce a family down to a single person who was also the person you were least equipped to rely on.

"Some family," she shook her head.

Zion shifted beside her. His hand moved across the floor to find hers and closed around it, she looked down at their hands and felt the warmth of it travel up through her arm.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said, watching her.

She looked at him and she knew he meant it.

He was looking at her with an expression that didn't have any hidden performance, it was not the version of himself he put on in public spaces, just him, sitting on the floor of his mother's empty house in the dark, saying a true thing.

"You can't promise that," She gave a short laugh. Not unkindly. Just honestly.

"I can try."

She looked at their hands. At the damage still visible on his palms from the silver bars, the skin still healing, the evidence of what he had put himself through to get to her.

"I won't abandon you," She pulled her hand from his and put it on his cheek, looking into his eyes. "That's what I can promise. Whatever else happens, I won't do that."

He looked at her for a moment.

"Same," he smiled.

She held out her little finger.

He looked at their hands before lifting his eyes to her face. For a moment, Molly caught a glimpse of something she rarely saw in him. He looked younger somehow, less guarded, as though everything he had told her had stripped away the version of himself he showed everyone else.

He hooked his little finger around hers and held on.

Neither of them spoke. They sat there on the bare floor, their hands joined between them, surrounded by an empty house and the quiet of the night. Molly smiled faintly.

"Remember when I didn't want to go to prom with you, when you asked?"

"Yeah?"

"It wasn't because I didn't like you. It was quite the opposite actually," she laughed a bit.

"Really?" Zion watched this woman in front of him as she looked down at their intertwined pinkies, a faint smile still resting on her lips as she reminisced about their school days. The moonlight spilled through the broken window and settled across her face, catching in her eyes and making her look almost unreal.

He found himself wishing he could keep that smile there forever. There was very little he would not do for her, even if it meant putting himself in harm's way. If keeping her safe meant taking the hit meant for her, Zion knew he would do it without thinking twice. 

"Yes, really. I actually didn't want to go with you at first because I thought it was a prank set up by you and your friends. I had seen you all looking at us and whispering in the cafeteria. I was mad you asked but also ridiculously happy at the same time." She laughed, "I only made sure you saw the mad part."

When he didn't say anything, Molly began to pull her hand away but before she could completely do so, Zion's fingers tightened around hers.

She looked up at him.

He was already looking at her.

For a few seconds, neither moved. Then Molly leaned closer, or perhaps he did, she could not tell anymore. The space between them disappeared slowly until there was nothing left of it, and when their lips met, neither of them seemed to remember who had moved first.

She kissed him first, or he kissed her first, neither of them knew for sure, and it hardly mattered. Once their lips met, it felt perfect.