Chapter 2
Keep moving. Stay safe. Stay hidden. They won’t find you.
Every morning, I repeated these words like a prayer, my back pressed to the wall of the random hotels and B&Bs with my hands curled around my mother’s stupid rosary. Religion was such a joke.
No god protected me then, and no god would protect me now.
This trinket was a reminder of how cruel the world could truly be. My blood coated the metal, engraved so deeply into the grooves it would never truly wash away.
I am never safe.
This small town was just another break, a temporary stop, and a place I could breathe just enough to keep running. Old habits died slowly, and lying to yourself became instinct. Hell, survival depended on it.
The café smelled like burnt espresso and sugar. The lights were too bright, and people smiled too wide like nothing bad ever happened here, or if it had, people pretended it hadn’t.
They could pretend to be perfect all they wanted, but I saw the unsteady gaze as I chose a table near the window. They were eyeing me up, the intruder they didn’t recognize, with my back against the wall, my coat folded neatly on my lap.
The door was always in my peripheral vision. Outside, Monticello, Utah, moved at a pace I wasn’t used to, slow and ‘Hallmark-sappy.’ It was complete with couples walking hand in hand, an old man guiding a dog down the sidewalk, and a mother tugging her child across the street. All were laughing.
Alive.
Oblivious.
Safe.
I am never safe.
Despite my reality, there were times I liked to pretend. I always had the safety of observation, and I liked knowing I could leave in a second if needed. I had been in this little hovel of a city for a week now. It was weirdly comforting and was nothing like New York.
Over the years, I had managed to get so far from my ‘home.’ Now it was just in the rearview of the many cars stolen and traded off.
The peppy waitress approached me with a practiced smile.
“What can I get you, sugar?”
Her voice was soft, but with that same hesitation, I seemed to get a lot.
Small towns were notorious for only having one look: White.
And I may appear porcelain, but being a Japanese woman, I got noticed in places like this.
No one was dumb enough to say anything, but there was a constant look in their eyes.
“Coffee,” I said, mimicking the fake smile. “Black.”
“You new in town, darlin’? Haven’t seen you ‘round here,” she said.
“Yes,” I said simply.
It was enough to satisfy her curiosity without revealing anything. She nodded, looking a bit perturbed, but at least she moved on.
I let my eyes wander to the stack of newspapers by the counter, getting up to swipe one, if nothing but to have a reason to remove my gaze from the onlookers of people. Reading a newspaper was something of a habit for me.
I found peace in doing the dumb crosswords at the back and snickering to myself at the comics that weren’t repeats.
Routine was a trap, but sometimes it was all you had. I sat back down and flipped the black-and-white paper, trying to find my sections, when my entire body froze.
It was him.
The photograph of the smiling man made my hands go still. The image was black-and-white, composed to inspire trust, with his perfect blonde hair cropped close, his jaw hardened with stubble, and those deep, shadowed eyes that carried responsibility and fear all at once.
I would never forget those eyes.
I swallowed and read the passage about Father Jedidiah Franklin.
The words hit like a bitch slap to the face.
“Father? As in…”
My chest tightened, and the paper made a warbling noise in my shaking hands.
What.
The.
Fuck.
I took a deep, steadying breath and read more of the passage.
Monticello can’t believe it’s been ten years since it welcomed our amazing Priest. Happy anniversary to Father Jedidiah Franklin on this blessed day! Come give him your gratitude at our beautiful church.
The article continued to praise him, full of overwhelming statements from his people. All gushing about how ‘humble’ and ‘devout’ he was, a calming presence and beloved. People trusted him. Everyone loved him.
All this time, he was…safe.
I pressed my palms together under the table, trying to calm the tremor in my fingers that was radiating up my arms.
The waitress returned, setting down my coffee and watching me as if I might break in pieces.
“He’s really something, isn’t he?” she said, nodding toward the paper. “Everyone loves him. And God forgive me, but he’s not hard to watch every Sunday, that is for sure. Monticello has been so lucky he found us all those years ago.”
He found them. Ha…More like ran away and ended up here.
Like me.
I pressed my palms together harder, my nails biting into my skin. The pain felt good…grounding.
“Yes,” I said, a bit robotically. “I’m sure Father Franklin is amazing.”
She smiled again, unaware of my sarcasm and pleased to have shared her stupid, sinful crush. The still oblivious idiot walked on when she realized I didn’t have anything else to offer.
I didn’t know his name. I thought he was a savior back then. The irony that he ran off to be a fucking priest wasn’t lost on me. I was just a stupid teenager, we both were…
The alley reeked of piss and old beer. I couldn’t tell if it was my own urine rolling down my leg from my fear or if it had been there before.
The neon bled down the grungy brick walls from the club sign above me, and I tried to focus on the flickering instead of my reality.
My husband had me by the wrist, his fingers crushing both my hand and my throat.
All I felt was pain.
The anger and embarrassment bled with my thighs twenty minutes ago. Or maybe it was only a few minutes. It felt like hours. Jayce had torn my skirt off my body, and I was exposed to the air.
“Don’t make a scene, be a good girl and give it to me, Wife,” he snarled in my ear, thumping me back and forth against the rough texture of the brick.
What did it matter if I screamed? No one cared. They walked faster, afraid of the man in front of them. He was the leader of The Crimson Carrion, and no one was going to save me.
This was my life.
The minute he decided he wanted me, I was nothing more than a hole to fuck. Happily ever after for me would be…death.
I felt like I was going to black out. The intensity of the pain was making me dizzy, and I felt so weak that Jayce held me up at this point.
“Aw, such a good Wife. This is all yours, Baby. Suck it. You broke on my cock so well. You deserve a taste of all that blood and come.”
I didn’t land on my knees. I landed on my ass, falling back so hard without his hold that I smashed my head against the concrete. With my head spinning, he gripped me by the hair and yanked me to his dick that dripped in my blood.
“Hey! What the fuck do you think you’re doing to that woman?”
I could barely see straight. The assault and my head cracking the pavement had my vision blurring in and out. I didn’t feel myself fall, didn’t feel the smack into the ground again.
I watched the two men fight like Mortiferals through my hazy vision. The dirty-blond-haired guy was in a black hoodie, his face hidden as his fists flew. He was fighting Jayce with a fevered anger.
For me?
They were breathing raggedly, fists and blood flying as I lay on the ground in my own shallow puddle of blood.
“Don’t fucking touch her!”
“That’s my fucking property! Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“She’s a human being! Who the fuck calls someone their property?”
Property. Jayce never had love for me. Our marriage was as transactional as a grocery haul. My father killed my mother when she tried to keep me from our bloodline.
I was nothing more than the Yakuza leader’s daughter.
My father didn’t even blink when he bound and gagged me, sending me away to America to marry the asshole that was Jayce Kayuzi.
I had lived in New York with my husband for some time, but I barely spoke the language. English was hard to learn, but right now I understood that this man was protecting me. He was trying to save me.
“Tasukete,” I whispered. “Help me.”
The man looked at me with stormy eyes and shoved my husband harder into the wall.
“You wanna play, boy? Let’s fucking play.”
The blade…the sounds…I could barely hold on. My vision was so blurry that I couldn’t see my own hands in front of me. I tried to stay awake, tried to tell myself I was alive. The sounds were wet and final, echoing in my bones.
My husband fell beside me, my clothes soaking up a river of blood pooling beneath us. There was surprise in his eyes, with rage as he coughed and held his side.
I couldn’t react.
I was fading.
The man standing above me was shaking, looking at his hands covered in blood. The blade dropped from his hands, and he stared at me on the ground.
“I didn’t mean to…I was just trying to—”
Sirens wailed in the distance, cutting off what he was going to say to me. They were distant but approaching quickly.
The man kept looking at me, a war raging in his eyes, before he got to his knees beside me, lifting my head and placing his hoodie underneath it.
“I’m sorry. You’re safe now, okay. You’re safe.”
But I wasn’t.
I never would be again.
It was not the cops who found me that night.
It was my husband’s men. Seeing Jayce dead on the ground beside me, and the knife beside me that was used to kill him, they blamed me for his death.
I spent the next eight years being tortured every day until finally I was able to sell a part of my soul to become free.
Every night I lay in the dark basement, shaking, in pain, and alone from the gang’s cruelty. This fucking man had left me to endure the consequences of his fear.
His sin. Not mine.
I survived all these years because I had to. I ran the first chance I got, because I wasn’t giving up. Because I was nothing if I didn’t run. They would find me, and I would be dead. All the years of surviving would have been for nothing.
The café’s door jingled, and it brought my focus back to the present. There were Hallmark-card smiles and the waitresses bustling around. I held onto the smells of burnt coffee and sugar to keep myself centered in the present and away from the past.
It felt like it was slipping every time I saw that damn smile on his face from the paper, and no matter how hard I pressed my thumbs into my palms, the pain couldn’t completely ground me.
I folded the paper slowly, aligning the edges.
Control mattered.
Control was all I had.
Monticello was no longer a random stop on a map of my marathon life of sprinting from one spot to another. It had become an inevitability.
The distance from New York had once felt like freedom. Now it felt like fate. I hadn’t come west to find him, but here he was.
Safe and sound.
Fucking Holy and untouchable.
I thought about the last ten years.
Rooms without windows, questions that weren’t questions, men who spoke softly while they hurt me over and over, all the lessons I’d learned about disappearing inside myself in those moments, how to obey when a hand closed on my wrist, and how to breathe as shallow as possible and wait for the punishments to pass.
All the while, he had been thriving. Not hunted like a Mortiferal to put down. Not marked for death for existing.
Nope.
He was safe, reading sermons, hiding in a collar that hid the scars I knew were beneath.
I pressed my thumb nails harder until I felt the blood seep through, remembering the wet sounds his sneakers made when he ran from me.
It was the gauntlet snapping shut from his actions.
I counted the steps that night. Each slap of his shoes on the wet pavement echoed in my nightmares. He left me in a pool of blood.
I never knew his name, and age had changed us both, but I would never forget his eyes—the storm inside the coward. The paper may have been black and white, but I knew those eyes were a colorless gray, like a void. I knew because I’d fallen into them that night. Thinking they would be my salvation.
I looked at the photograph again, the people’s words echoing in my head on a loop.
Holy, Safe, Beloved, Kind, Blessing.
Untouchable.
I watched my coffee mug reflect a soft smile touching my lips. It wasn’t happiness. It was recognition.
The recognition of a debt that was still unpaid, which I came to collect. Monticello had been here all along, waiting for me to arrive and claim my prize.
It was fate.
It was the place where my obsession, my hatred, my pain, and my damning plan would find its beginning.
And its end.
I’d never be safe, but now neither would he.
I wanted to watch him…watch him and slowly make him remember little by little. I would patiently wait for the moment he would notice me, dragging every blood-stained moment between us. I would make him taste the fear and pain he forced onto me.
He played the savior, but he was the fucking demon who threw me in hell.
No.
I sat back, observing the sunlight sliding across the floor in little waves. The town moved on outside the window, the men and women shuffled about, unaware their priest wasn’t just a demon. He was the fucking devil.
Deep inside me, a quiet promise grew from my darkened heart. He had run once from me, but I would not let him run again.
I would make him remember me.
The holy priest would break every vow for me, get on his knees and worship me, not his god.
He would love me with everything in him, then I would disgrace him to his congregation.
They would know the fraud he was, and only after he was miserable, alone, as caged and hated as I have been all these years.
Only then would I finally end it.
He would die on his own knife when I sank it into his broken heart.