Read Online The Sovereign Era (Book 2): Pilgrimage by Matthew Wayne Selznick - Free Book Online Page B

shit out of him. Make him know it wasn’t over. Make him know he wasn’t dealing with a teenaged girl. That he had…he had me watching him.”
    The frustrated anger built in me, moving fine-grained sandpaper over the surface of my brain and down the nerve endings in my skin. I imagined Eric Finn’s face—a face I had never seen, a face that was a vague amalgam of fear and cowardice—in tears in front of me while he cowered on the ground. “Make him sorry.” I blinked and looked at Jason. “That’s what I’d do.”
    Jason nodded. “Sounds like a good start.”
    “Sounds nothing at all like letting it go ,” Mel said. “Fuck’s sake, Nathan. Lina’d kill you. Shit, your mother would kill you. And the cops. And what about the legal shit?”
    Jason gave Mel a look. “Screw that.” He looked at me. “M.Y.O.J., right, dude? Make that part of the deal.”
    “What deal?”
    “When you face him. Make that part of the deal: that if he talks about it to anyone—anyone—you’ll, I don’t know, fuck him up.”
    Mel threw his arms into the air. “Blackmail? Seriously, what is wrong with you two?” He stepped in front of me and stopped my pacing. “Nate. This is a bad idea. You know it.”
    Of the two of them, Mel had been my friend the longest, ever since he first moved into the neighborhood in the summer of sixth grade and struck up a conversation at the bus stop. He had always been the steady one, the comparatively calm one. I think he recognized that his role was to provide a foil to Jason’s flailing bravado, and he embraced that. He was sure playing it to the hilt right now.
    “Mel,” I said, “I can do something about this. I can make a difference. I can make that fucker feel something about what he did to Lina.
    “Maybe,” this thought had not occurred to me until just then, “even keep him from trying to rape someone else.”
    “Yep,” Jason chimed.
    “I can do something, Mel. For once.”
    Mel frowned. His lips twisted. “For once?”
    His body language broadcast “gotcha,” like he’d made some big psychological victory, like I’d see reason and let it go, let the world keep spinning, let Eric Finn keep going through life as a guy who thought he could get away with nearly raping my girlfriend.
    Fuck that.
    “Yes, Mel. For once.” I felt my upper lip tremble. For a lot of people, I know that’s a signal they’re about to cry. On me, it means I want to bare my teeth. It means I want to leap.
    I forced myself to look away from my best friend. My eyes found Jason.
    “Can’t let it stand, man,” he said.
    I took a breath and exhaled explosively. Right then, for a moment, that’s when I felt like crying. I didn’t.
    “Yeah.” I looked at Mel. I wanted to see understanding in his face. “I don’t think I can.”
    All I got was disappointment.
    “Guess you’ll tell me all about it when it’s over.”
    He turned away and made a fuss over picking another record to play.

Marc Teslowski – Three
    Marc stowed his carry-on bag and sat down in his window seat. The curving wall of the airliner cabin was cool where he leaned against it, raising gooseflesh on his bare arm. The sensation made Marc’s lips split in a steely grin.
    He was going to Missoula.
    When he got there, he’d pound on the doors of the Donner Institute for Sovereign Studies until they let him in and let him see his son.
    Nobody liked it. Baldwin threatened to no longer represent Marc and Jeri, which was an empty threat, since far as Marc could see, the lawyer had so far done for them exactly jack shit.
    Jeri was as close to pissed off as he’d seen in years. He would have thought she would have gone along with whatever Marc wanted, especially if that meant even a tiny chance it might get Byron to come home. Faced with the possibility, it was almost like she didn’t want Byron to be back under Marc’s roof.
    Maybe she didn’t. She’d never approved of Marc’s parenting philosophy; he knew that. Tough. He was