I’m instantly backthere, back on the day when I saw my childhood home burning to the ground, except this time it isn’t my home that’s been burnt. It’s mymother, and as the nausea momentarily stops churning in my gut I have a sudden, visceral need to know what thefuckhappened.
I mumble the question aloud, through lips that feel numb, and Dean lifts me up, helping me towards an empty seat in the row of chairs by the window.
“She’s not going to tell us anything,” Jaxon says disgustedly. “Since we’re notfamily.”
“I’ll call my father.” Cayde fishes his phone out of his pocket. “He’ll know something, I’m sure. He knows everything that happens in this town.”
Because he runs it,ownsit,are the underlying words, but at least Cayde has the tact not to say it right now. Not to turn this awful, horrifying night into part of the dick-measuring contest the men of this town have been doing for centuries.
I don’t hear anything Cayde says. He steps away, still probably within earshot, but I’m too overwhelmed to try to listen in. Instead, I let Dean pull me against his chest, gently wiping at my mouth with a napkin as I lay my head against his shoulder. My eyes are burning, but I can’t seem to cry, probably because I know that if I start I’ll never stop.
“Here.” Jaxon kneels in front of me with a small paper cup of water. “Drink this. You need it.”
I shake my head, but he pushes the cup forward insistently. “You need it,” he repeats. “At least rinse your mouth out.” He hands me another empty paper cup. “I know it’s hard, but you’ll feel better.”
It’s the gentle insistence in his tone, the worry, that makes me give in. These three boys, who at one point were my captors, my tormentors, savage and cruel and merciless in the way they broke me and used me, are now my support. My friends. My lovers, even—boyfriendsseems like too casual a word for what we’ve shared. Too ordinary.
There’s nothing ordinary about our relationship. And definitely nothing casual about it.Casualwas never a word that could have been used for anything that’s happened among the four of us. And now—
I nearly choke on the water as I take the first sip after I rinse my mouth out. It takes everything in me to sit there with Dean’s arm around me, sipping water while Cayde makes a phone call, knowing that my mother is in a burn ward somewhere in the hospital, possibly dying. All I want to know is what happened, how things could possibly have spiraled out of control so quickly.
Cayde comes back to stand in front of us, and he suddenly has the same expression on his face that Dean did earlier, one that makes him look years older. He looks tired and grim, and my chest contracts, my stomach twisting until I think I might be sick again. I’m glad I already finished the water Jaxon handed me.
“What happened?” I ask in a small whisper, knowing that I don’t want to know and have to know, all at the same time.
“There was a fire,” Cayde says tiredly, his face so full of pain and worry for me that I feel that sick fear all over again, like I did the afternoon that my mother told me that she didn’t know how to keep us safe.
I tried, mom, I think helplessly as I look up into Cayde’s face.I really tried. I swear.I tried to keep us both safe.
Clearly I’d failed, on both counts. I’d almost died, and my mother—
“A fire?” I whisper the words, thinking of that other fire, the one that consumed my childhood home. I have a sudden awful vision of the Sons dragging my mother out into the middle of downtown Main Street and setting her ablaze, like some witch in the 1600s, but that can’t possibly be what happened. And Cayde confirms it, just a few moments later.
“The house on Blackmoor Estate, where she lived, was attacked,” Cayde says quietly. “They—” he breaks off suddenly. “Do you really want to hear this, Athena? Are you sure?”
I feel my stomach twist, but I nod anyway. “I have to know,” I whisper, and I mean it. I do have to. If I don’t, then I’ll wonder all my life what really happened.
“They barricaded the house and set it on fire with her inside,” Cayde says, clearly forcing himself to meet my eyes. “My father wasn’t home, and no one else was able to get to her in time. By the time the culprits left and anyone could be called, it was too late. Your mother was already severely burned, and the house was beyond saving. She—” he breaks off again, but I know what he’s not saying.
She’slikely beyond saving, too.
“I’m so sorry, Athena,” he murmurs. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I don’t know—we’ll find out who did this.”
“It must have been the Sons,” I whisper, my hands balling into fists in my lap. “Who else would want my mother dead? They’ve wanted me and my mother both dead ever since my father—” I break off then, my throat clogged with tears. “It sounds like they’re going to get at least half of their wish.”
“You don’t know—”
I don’t hear the rest of what Cayde says. Deep down, I do know. And even if she could survive, as much as it hurts to think it, I don’t even know if that’s the best thing. I try to imagine a life after this, after she’s been burned so terribly that I can’t even see her. I can’t let myself picture my beautiful mother like that, disfigured, living in pain for the rest of her life.
I wish I’d done so much differently, on my last visit. I wish I’d asked her all the questions first, so that our last memories of the visit could have been lunch out and antique shops and bad horror movies and ice cream, not her telling me things she’d hoped she’d never have to revisit, reliving my father’s infidelity, his daughter that wasn’t hers, the tangled web that his one mistake had woven for my whole family.
But that’s just it,I think bitterly.His mistakes have been causing all of this from the very beginning.I’d loved my father so much, and it hurts to think it. But all of this is because of my father. Natalie, my childhood home, my servitude to the heirs, my kidnapping, my mother dying alone in a hospital bed, it’s all because of mistakes he’s made.
I don’t want to hate him for it, and even now, I feel like hate is too strong a word. But I feel mired in misery, drowning in it, in resentment and grief and regret, and I pull away from Dean, because in this moment it feels wrong that he’s the one comforting me.
“I want to see her,” I whisper helplessly, knowing that won’t change anything. Knowing that my last conversation with my mother will always be the one about my half-sister, about lies and cheating and abandoned daughters and faithless men. Knowing that I won’t ever see her again.
“Here comes a doctor,” Cayde says, stepping back. I hear the footsteps on the squeaky-clean tile, and I look up, hoping for one brief second that I’ll see something on their face that will tell me the gut feeling churning in my stomach is wrong.