14. Callum
CALLUM
O ur suite is quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that comes with peace, but one that feels impossibly heavy, pressing against my skin like the walls themselves want to squeeze the breath from me. All I have are my thoughts to fill the silence, endlessly torturing me on a loop.
I miss the walls of our childhood home. The warmth of food cooking, the faint background of the T.V. blasting a football game, and our mother humming to music only she could hear in her head.
My eyes squeeze shut as the memories flood my mind.
Once upon a time we knew the depth of the love a family can have, like Briar has clung to in her retorts.
Every time she throws that in our uncle’s face, the closer she gets to just being another human on the street to me. Her focus has never been on terrorizing the world or turning humans into vampires.
She was just a woman with a dream that night on campus, in the wrong place at the wrong fucking time.
I sit on the edge of my bed, elbows to my knees, and my head bowed into my palms. I’ve rubbed at my face so many times it stings, but it doesn’t scrub away the memory of her screams and the images of her body being broken for entertainment.
Elias moves across the room, starting to pace with the sharp rhythm of his boots on the hardwood. Back and forth he goes.
I lift my head to watch him, knowing the only time he paces is when he’s trying to compartmentalize and file away whatever is bothering him, before it can eat him alive. We haven’t exchanged a word since our spat about me feeding her, so when he opens his mouth, his voice jolts me slightly.
“We just need to get through the year,” he mutters, voice clipped and even, as if saying it out loud is for both his sake and mine.
His hands flex at his sides before he folds his arms tightly across his chest, shoulders hunched with tension as he locks eyes with me.
“We keep doing what we have to, we keep our heads down, and then we get out. It’s already been a month. ”
The words scrape through me like glass. A month. Has it only been that? It feels like a lifetime already, each day carved into me, each night bleeding into the next until time itself feels like another way to torture us.
I blink against the sting in my eyes. Elias’s gaze is sharp with that look that says he’s protecting me the only way he knows how–by telling me to shut down every emotion I’m struggling with.
But the thing is, I can’t. I can’t just file it away to deal with later, or not, like he does. We may be brothers but there are stark differences in our abilities to mask and cope.
“I can’t,” I whisper, admitting it out loud for the first time, shocked by the emotion that floods me with it.
My hands shake as I press them down against my knees in an attempt to stop the tremors.
Elias turns on his heel again, his boots thumping against the floor again as he crosses the length of the suite. His reflection flickers in the glass windows until he turns back toward me.
“You think I like this?” he asks, voice sharper now, but frayed around the edges like he’s coming undone alongside me.
His hand drags down his face, catching at the bridge of his nose before he throws it down at his side again, fist clenching.
“You think I don’t hear it too? I do, Callum.
Every scream, every sound of her body breaking.
But we can’t fix it and we can’t stop him.
We’d only get ourselves killed, and then what? What’s left of our family then?”
He pushes the words out like they’re supposed to hit me with logic, but all I hear is the crack in his tone when he says family.
His pacing resumes, back and forth. “In eleven months we’re out. We’ll have our inheritance. Our freedom. We can walk away from all of this and never look back, and we can pay for a damn good therapist.”
The word inheritance drags like barbed wire through my chest and my lips tighten into a thin line. We’re no better than our uncle profiting directly off of Briar’s captivity, allowing this to happen just to receive our own payoff.
You don’t need to hold the weapon. You’re already guilty, standing there and letting him do it.
Her words have plagued me every single night as I rest my head on my pillow, knowing she’s on a cold, hard floor, fighting with every moment to heal before she’s torn apart all over again.
Elias stops again, pivoting toward me to keep on with his rant, like he can sense that his words aren’t working on me.
“You know what that money means. It’s our way out.
Our chance at a life we actually want. That’s what Mom would’ve wanted for us and we promised her to chase our dreams at her burial. Don’t you dare forget that.”
His voice cracks on the last line, and I see the flicker of the boy who held my hand at our mother’s grave, the boy who shoved his grief down deep because he thought he had to protect me from drowning in mine.
I want to scream back at him that maybe he’s the one forgetting who mom would want us to be.
My hands fist against my knees, nails biting hard into my palms, and the words tear out before I can cage them.
“Mom would never want us to be complicit in this!” I shout, pushing to my feet. “And Dante already told us this isn’t an option, Eli. You just don’t want to believe it because you need that promise dangling in front of you to make yourself sleep better at night.”
Elias stiffens mid-step, jaw snapping tight, but I don’t give him the chance to cut me off. My voice climbs, ragged and raw, weeks of silence and guilt cracking open all at once.
“And what about her family?” I demand, closing the distance between us until I’m staring into his eyes.
“What do you think they wanted for her? Because I can fucking guarantee it’s not this.
It’s not her ribs snapping and puncturing her lungs.
It’s not her bones breaking over and over again, her skin shredded just for our uncle to watch it stitch itself back together.
” My throat burns, but I don’t stop. “It’s not him finding new ways to destroy her every single day while we stand there and do nothing. ”
The words echo too loud in the suite, bouncing back at us in the silence that follows. My fists shake at my sides, and my breath scrapes through my chest like glass. I don’t realize until I see the way Elias’s eyes flicker with a concern that there are tears streaking down my face, hot and silent.
I don’t bother trying to wipe them away. More would replace them.
“She’s not our family to worry about, Cal,” Elias murmurs. “She’s not Mom. She’s not you. She’s not anyone I swore to protect, and if you keep charging down this path, you’re going to get yourself killed for her, and I’m not burying you too.”
His chest heaves as the words fall from him in a rush, and for a moment the only sound between us is the ragged pull of our breaths.
“Don’t you get it?” My voice comes out pinched from the emotion clogging my throat.
“My soul is rotting here, Eli. Every single day we stand there and do nothing, it eats me alive. I feel it tearing me apart. I can’t watch anymore.
I can’t stand there and pretend it doesn’t matter just because it’s not you or me strapped to that table. ”
I shove at his chest, not to hurt him, but to force him to feel the fury building in me.
“You think this is survival? What we’re doing is no better than standing by and watching our uncle do worse to Briar than what that vampire did to Mom the night she died.
Let that sink in. This isn’t fucking vengeance. ”
My voice cracks, breaking like glass. “I can’t, Eli. I can’t keep watching him do this to her.”
He flinches, my words hitting their mark whether he wants them to or not.
“She’s still the girl who ran from her family to chase her dreams,” I whisper hoarsely, shoulders shaking.
“The same way we wanted to. And if she can fight for that still, even strapped down and bleeding out, then maybe we can too. Maybe we can all break out of this place and finally live our lives far away from this hell.”
Elias stares at me like I’ve shocked him to his core. His mouth opens, shuts, then opens again, words tangling uselessly on his tongue.
“You…” He shakes his head, pacing back a step, then forward again like his body can’t decide which way to run. His hands lift, fall, clench, open. His composure fractures right in front of me. “You can’t…Cal, you can’t talk like that. You don’t just want to escape. You want to take her with us?”
My chest heaves, and the sound of my deep sigh is answer enough, even before I nod in confirmation.
Elias splutters again. “Jesus Christ, I–” He cuts himself off, dragging a hand over his mouth as if he can shove the rest of the words back down. But his eyes are wide and frantic, the last threads of his control slipping.
It’s the most undone I’ve seen him since the night we buried Mom.
Back then, he carried both of us through it by sheer force of will, locking his grief down so tight I thought he’d sealed it off forever.
Seeing him splinter now, because of me, is like watching the one pillar I’ve leaned on all my life start to sway.
“If you break, what the hell am I supposed to hold us together with over the next eleven months?” Elias says hoarsely, almost accusing, his voice fraying at the edges. “I don’t have the fight in me anymore, Callum.”
Still, he’s clinging to the hope that our uncle will just hold the door open for us to leave willingly at the end of the year.
“There’s nothing you can hold me together with in this place, Eli.” I whisper, my voice cracking as I press on. “Every day we stand there, every scream I hear, every fucking bone that snaps…I feel it hollowing me out. You don’t get it. I’m already dying in here.”
Elias flinches like I’ve physically struck him and I press on.
“I’d rather die trying to get out,” I rasp, heat searing down my face with every tear I can’t stop, “than let this place finish the job slowly. At least if I die running, it’s for something. Not as some useless shell rotting under his orders as others suffer.”
The air between us feels stiff as Elias stands there staring at me like he doesn’t recognize the person in front of him anymore.
He lets out a sound that’s half-growl and half-strangled breath as his hands rake through his hair, fingers tugging at the roots until his knuckles whiten. He paces away from me, back and forth before stopping as his chest heaves with shallow breaths.
For a moment he just stands there, fists knotted in his hair. Then, slowly, his hands fall. His arms hang heavily at his sides, as if he’s surrendered to gravity.
When he finally speaks, his voice is barely a whisper. “Okay.”
The soft word barely makes it across the space to me, but it lands heavily in my chest.
“If we die doing this,” Elias says, his gaze locking with mine at last, steady even through the crack in his voice, “we die together. I’m not letting you do this alone.”