Here's the next chapter. I hope you like the story so far, I'd really like to know what you think about it. Don't hesitate to leave a review !


A killer.

That's what Quinn had become, at least in the eyes of the others.

To Rachel, she was still the strong, independent woman she had always been, the little girl who had to go through a thousand horrors and who had survived. The woman from which one had stolen a part of her and who had avenged herself, who had taken the law into her own hands.

The woman who has spent fifteen years of her life looking for the murderers of her parents and her sister, and who had finally found them.

She was also the woman she loved. Nothing she could do could ever change it.


She found Quinn in the living room of the first floor, sitting on the ground, looking away. The clothes that Rachel gave her covered the scars streaking her back, even though she could figure them out because of the wet stains darkening the fabric in some areas.

Quinn turned her head toward her and offered her a tired smile. The small dark-haired girl smiled back at her as best as she could, despite all the emotions she was feeling, from sadness to dread by way of total incomprehension.

She sat down beside her, facing the bay window. It probably was past noon — the sun was already high, hidden by the mountainous mist, unable to warming up the freezing atmosphere surrounding them.

Rachel briefly asked herself if Quinn had regrets, if she was feeling guilty over what she did.

Then Rachel wondered if she had regrets. If she thought that what Quinn had done was wrong or deserved to be punished.

Would she ever dare think to denounce her?

She shook her head to stop her thoughts from going this way. She knew that Quinn hadn't had the choice. Neither had she; if she had to choose between protecting Quinn or protecting her views on morality or on the good, she wouldn't hesitate a single second.

Quinn must have felt her internal struggle because she leaned toward her and asked her if she was alright.

As if nothing could go wrong in a house full of corpses and blood. As if Quinn hadn't just coldly slaughtered the four members of the same family, as if nothing had just occurred here.

"It's going to be OK," Rachel answered. "It'll be better when we'll get out of here, but... I think it's going to be OK."

Quinn swallowed. "I'm sorry to have put you through all this. All those... This is my fault. I should have minded my own business, and let you out of this."

The brunette nodded. Everything would have been simpler if she hadn't met Quinn, if the latter hadn't dragged her into this.

But Quinn hadn't pushed her into doing anything — she had chosen to help her, of her own free will, to support her, and she would never regret her decision.

"I don't blame you," Rachel said after a long silence interrupted by their breathing.

"I know," the blonde replied. "But I am still sorry."

She squeezed Rachel's wrist between her bloody fingers, before kissing her temple, her clammy, dirty hair.

She would probably never tell her, but she couldn't have done a thing without Rachel by her side. If she hadn't come to her rescue, Quinn would have undoubtedly never come back. She wouldn't have had the strength.


After having eaten something — as much as their stomachs could — the issue of the corpses couldn't be left ignored any longer.

They had to leave, quickly, before somebody would notice the sudden disappearance of a whole family, before somebody would pay a visit to them and discover what had happened.

Rachel looked at the dead body collapsed on the dining table with a desperate look. There would be so much blood to wipe away, and they had so little time.

She didn't even know how to get rid of a body — was it only possible? To wipe every single mark of a formerly living being, without anybody finding out what had really happened?

She looked for Quinn; she would probably know what to do.

The young woman had taken shelter in Rachel's car. When the latter came to find her, she got out reluctantly and, wanting to leave as soon as possible this damned place, walked briskly to the house.

The two women first took care of gathering the bodies, before they even thought of what was coming next. They immediately set to work, not wishing to linger in this place.

Quinn and Rachel agreed on leaving the corpses in the bathroom of the first floor, and they first began by taking down the two teenagers' bodies which were still upstairs. Rachel stopped herself from retching when she had to lift the legs sticky with the blood of the young boy. Her hands were slipping, and she had to stop twice before she could take the stairs. Quinn gave her a sorry, but confident look and they went back upstairs to take care of the other body.

Rachel vainly tried not to look at this hole, right in the middle of the fifteen-year-old girl's torso, this hole that let pieces of bones and ragged muscles show through. The blood was dripping down on the parquet and the carpets, and Rachel then thought that it would be impossible to clean all this blood, no matter how much time they had.

While they were moving her to the bathroom, the phone rang.

Quinn and Rachel looked at each other with an alarmed look, having forgotten the very existence of this item.

Puzzled and on her guard, the taller of the two women laid the corpse down and came closer to the source of the noise, a common ringtone which rang six times before dying in a complete silence.

Quinn watched the handset and noticed that there was no answering machine linked to it. She waited again for one minute or two, then she unplugged the device connecting them to the outside world. She also picked up the phone, leaving it swaying at the end of the wire.

She came back to help Rachel. The man's body was by far heavier and more difficult to support, despite the liters of blood he had lost during those last few hours. They finally dragged him on the floor, leaving umpteenth red, indelible, menacing marks on the parquet.

When the woman's turn came, Rachel looked away.

She couldn't bear to see again this disfigured, inhuman face.

Her hand was still holding the knife which had been used to stab Quinn's back.

With rage, Rachel took it out from her with a kick once she was thrown away with the three other corpses. She also kicked her in what was left of her shinbones, then her skull, watching a shapeless, grayish mass coming out of it and spreading around her.

To her eyes, it was all she deserved.


"Will we leave them like this?"

Rachel's voice sounded strange in the car.

They had taken the time to clean up as best as they could, wiping away the blood and the dirt from their hands and their skin, and while they were at it, they also changed into a fresh set of clothes.

Since then, they hadn't come out of the car. It was like a shelter to them, a resting place away from the agitation taking place only a few meters away from them. From here, they could see the trees and the mountains, and even beyond; perhaps they would go to that beyond, once they would be finished here. They would still have to talk about their next destination, the place which would welcome them.

Running away. Rachel would have never thought that one day, she would have to run away. Weird enough, the idea didn't bother her.

She felt Quinn sigh and shrug her shoulders.

"I don't know, Rachel. Probably. What do you want to do? We won't be able to erase every one of our tracks, obviously."

Of course not, they wouldn't be able to. The house was huge, they would need days, even weeks. But Rachel couldn't bear staying more than a few hours in this shack. She had seen enough, felt enough. The corpses had already begun their process of decomposition, and the smell made her want to vomit. And this blood which stuck to the shoes as soon as they crossed the doorstep...

They wouldn't be able to do it, it was certain.

Rachel tried shyly another approach of the problem.

"And if we... if we only take care of the bodies?"

"What do you mean?"

Quinn furrowed her brows. The small brunette swallowed.

"I mean... We're not going to leave them inside, without doing anything else, are we? We're going to put them elsewhere, right?"

"Where do you want to put them, Rachel?" Quinn asked, perplexed. "No matter where we hide them, the police will come to find them. And anyway, given the mess we've made inside, there's no use in wanting to erase our tracks anymore."

"I'm not talking about wiping our tracks. I'm talking about burying the corpses."

Rachel feared that Quinn had broken her neck when she quickly turned her head toward her. She looked at her for a long time, visibly trying to control herself.

"It's out of the question."

"But... they are still human beings," Rachel softly claimed.

"I said that it is out of the question."

"But why, Quinn ? They still deserve..."

"They deserve nothing at all!" she yelled. The light silence that followed was chilling. "Nothing! Not even a grave or a tombstone! They killed my parents, Rachel, they killed Frannie, and they abducted me! They beat me up and they treated me like a slave, like the scum of the earth! I lived through countless horrors in this cellar, without seeing the light of the sun for six months. I still have nightmares about it today, as for the last fifteen years. They have deprived me of having a normal childhood, they killed the only family I ever had, and you'd want us to... to bury them?"

"I am sorry."

Rachel had spoken so low that Quinn thought she had hallucinated. But she knew she wasn't dreaming when she saw tears shining on her friend's cheeks, her shifty eyes looking down and not wanting to meet her gaze, her hands gripping each other and her nails digging into her flesh.

At this instant, Quinn was ashamed of herself. She sighed heavily, conscious that Rachel's legitimate question didn't deserve such a sharp, hot-headed answer. She bit her lip, hating herself from looking like those monsters. She had had no scruple killing them, one by one, and yet she wanted more than anything not to look like them.

The seconds passed by slowly in the car, while the little dark-haired girl was trying as much as she could to stop her tears from flowing and that Quinn was fighting the sobs threatening to escape from her throat.

"I'm sorry, Rachel."

The words were accompanied by a hand that looked for the brunette's one, squeezing her softly.

Quinn said it again, then she began to weep silently.


The night fell quickly. The two girls still hadn't left their car.

They hadn't talked about the bodies anymore, and they probably wouldn't mention them again more than a handful of times. It wasn't the most important thing at this instant.

Exhausted, the two women had laid down on the backseat, where they finished shedding their tears on their shoulders. Then Quinn had cuddled up against Rachel, as they did since they were kids and they shared the same room in the orphanage.

Rachel had always succeeded in calming her down, after she woke up with a start because of another nightmare or because she just couldn't sleep.

The brunette was stroking her hair wordlessly (Quinn hadn't made a single noise since this afternoon), letting the blonde breathe the air between her neck and her shoulder, recovering from her emotions.

She had almost forgotten that barely more than a few hours before, she had committed four murders.

Nobody seemed to be aware of that case; no police car, no patrol, no neighbor had come here, to this lost house. It was relieving the pressure only for a moment, allowing her to breathe a little better and to think about what they must do the following day.

Rachel held Quinn a bit tighter.

"You know..." Rachel whispered softly, keeping on sliding her fingers through her thin hair stuck by blood and sweat, "I'm sorry for earlier. I shouldn't have said that to you."

She felt Quinn lightly shake her head against her body, then she pulled apart to be able to look her in the eye.

"I'm not mad at you," she simply said. Before adding, still looking at her : "I love you."

Rachel felt her heart missing a beat.

Then, the young blonde took back her place against her chest, breathing slowly in the silence engulfing her little by little.

Rachel let her fall asleep against her, and she also began to drift toward sleep with her. A light smile adorned her lips. She knew that Quinn loved her, but she had never told her, not before tonight.

In the darkness that was falling around them, she closed her eyes, but not before having kissed Quinn on her forehead and wished her goodnight.


They had been awake only for one hour when Quinn decided they'd better get going now before the sun would be fully up, so they would not be noticed by anyone.

Firstly, Quinn, as a precaution, decided to conceal the car she had rented a few days earlier by releasing the handbrake and pushing the car from the top of a rocky road winding until the bottom of the valley. She hoped nobody would find it too soon — anyway, they could never make the connection with her. She had taken precautions and signed the rental contract under a false name and a false address.

Then she got behind the steering wheel of Rachel's car, waited for the latter to be well settled to start the engine toward elsewhere, away from here.

Behind them, the house was slowly beginning to burst into flame.

Before Quinn was throwing the other car in a ravine, Rachel had retrieved the gas from it in a jerrycan and drenched the inside of the stone building with it. When she had entirely emptied the can, she stroke a match and threw it on the doorstep. The first floor of the house instantly caught fire, the flames burning without making any distinction between the painting masterpieces, the pictures, and the souvenirs, and the corpses rotting in the bathroom.

It had been the only solution to wipe their tracks at best.

A smell of burnt flesh tickled her nostrils, and she turned around quickly. Her hands reeked of gas, but she welcomed the scent with relief.

She could follow the spectacle in the rear-view mirror, but she preferred to tear her gaze off it and look in front of her, where Quinn was driving them.

She didn't mind, as long as Quinn was with her. It was her only concern.


Is it alright for you to feel this way?
Put your head in my lap, the world will go away
We can go there, we can go anywhere
We can go there.

— Alright, Kinnie Starr.