The Dark and Hollow Places - Carrie Ryan [112]
“I wasn’t too happy about what they were doing to the woman I love,” Catcher responds evenly.
“I’m not kidding around.” Ox’s voice is menacing, but also exhausted. “You don’t have any idea what it takes to keep so many people alive, do you? Any idea how much it takes to keep order? It takes rules, and to have meaningful rules you have to have consequences for breaking them.”
He leans against the doorframe, wiping a hand over his face. There are dark circles under his eyes. “Regardless of what you might think, I’m not evil, Catcher. But you can’t get away with what you did. And since we can’t punish you directly …” His voice trails off and he sighs. “They wanted to take the women.”
My stomach lurches. A storm of horrible images flashes through my mind and I shove them away, anger building inside me.
“You know you can’t allow that,” Catcher growls. “I won’t allow it.”
Ox throws up his hands in exasperation. “This whole thing’s gone too far. These men want blood.”
I close my eyes, press my hands to my temples. There has to be a way to fix this. To make it stop.
Catcher fires back, “They’re your men, Ox, control them. You’re in charge of them. You shouldn’t have allowed things to get to where they have.”
“Maybe so,” Ox counters. “But that doesn’t change where we are now. Someone has to pay for Conall’s death. They wanted both your women. I convinced them to take only one. You have to hand one of the girls over and I’m not going to stop them. What you did was wrong—”
And before I know what’s happening, Catcher slams his fist into Ox’s face and Ox staggers backward. I race down the hall, throwing myself between them with a hand pressed against each chest to keep them apart.
“Stop it!” I yell.
“What you did was wrong!” Catcher shouts over me. “What I did was justice.”
Ox stares at me a moment, an expression approaching pity in his eyes. He’s different from Conall in that way. Conall loved blood and fear. Ox is just trying to maintain some sort of order on the island—a way to keep his men alive.
“Conall would have found a way to get himself killed one way or another,” I tell Ox. “He went too far.” It’s clear he sees the truth of my words but doesn’t care.
He raises a few fingers to his nose, wiping away blood. “What’s done is done,” he tells Catcher before looking at me, almost apologetically. “I’ve convinced them they can’t have both women. They don’t care which of them you hand over, they just want one. I’ll do my best to keep them from hurting her too badly.”
I stand there dazed, trying to let his words sink in. Catcher’s face pales and his hand clutching the machete trembles. “You allow that and I’ll never supply your men again.”
Ox takes a deep breath and I can hear the weariness in his voice. The same weariness we all feel. “You don’t have an option, Catcher. They patrol the walls and cable car—they know there’s no way to get your friends off the island. And they know that so long as your friends are still here, hurt or not, you have to supply the Recruiters as well.
“I’m sorry about this, I really am. I’d hoped …” He pauses and for a moment he looks lost in thought. Then he shakes his head and turns away. “Look, I can keep them in check for a day, maybe two. Give you a little time to sort it out, decide. But I can’t make any promises, Catcher,” he calls out over his shoulder as he disappears down the hallway.
I just stand there, one hand on Catcher’s chest and the other touching emptiness.
Catcher slams the door and then he punches it again and again until I pull him back, his knuckles raw and bleeding. He doesn’t stop me as I tug him out of our flat toward the stairwell. He lets me lead him to the roof, where my sister and Elias can’t hear us and where I can press snow to his bloody fingers.
He stares at where the ice melts to pink water trailing down his arm. “I don’t know what to do anymore,” he says. “I don’t know how to protect you.”
“It’s not your job to protect me,” I tell him, ignoring the frozen air that envelops us.
He reaches