Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
GAGE
T he buzzing of my phone pulls my attention away from the movie we’re all currently watching in Xander’s apartment.
I shift, trying not to jostle Sera, who’s leaning against my chest, and grab it out of my back pocket.
Ice instantly flows through my veins, freezing my joints in place, as I take in the message waiting for me.
Mom
Come home. Now.
That’s it. Nothing else. Just three words that simultaneously send dread spiraling through me and panic licking up my spine.
“Everything okay?” Sera pushes herself up to study my face, and I work to smooth over my features, to make them as impenetrable as they once were before she came crashing into my life.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I lie, hating myself for it.
I don’t want to lie to my mate…but I also don’t want to involve her in the screwed-up mess that is my family. Once she knows the truth about me, about what I did…
Terror squeezes my heart in an iron vise.
“Gage?” A frown touches her pink lips as she continues to stare at me, easily seeing through my bullshit.
Foster, who’s sitting on the opposite side of Sera on the couch, quirks a red brow at me. Confusion and wariness swim in his eyes. I subtly shake my head, indicating for him to drop it. I don’t need my friends with me. Not for this.
It’s my battle to face.
Xander must’ve paused the movie because I now find myself the sole focus of everyone in the room. Devyn and Xander both appear concerned, Tristan looks wary, and Kian appears confused. V—who quite literally forced his way into the apartment a few hours earlier—just looks…murderous. Then again, he always looks murderous. He has resting murderous face.
“My job called,” I fib through gritted teeth, gently shifting Sera so she’s now leaning against Foster. I rise to my feet and grab my jacket off of the back of the couch. “I need to go.”
Sera watches me with pursed lips but doesn’t argue or call me back. Either she sees the tension thrumming through my shoulders or she knows me well enough to step back and drop it.
I can’t help but love her more.
I slip out the door as Xander reluctantly restarts the movie—some action thriller that Tristan used to watch obsessively when he was younger—and move towards my beat-up car. However, before I can take more than a few steps, a rough hand slaps down on my shoulder and pulls me to an abrupt stop.
I turn, my heart somewhere in the general vicinity of my throat even as a scowl slips over my face.
V.
His eyes are narrowed on me as if he’s seeing through my skin and picking apart the blackened pieces of my soul, studying them from every angle and gauging if I’m good enough for his precious kitten . His grip on me tightens almost imperceptibly as he releases a low, guttural growl.
“I don’t like liars, Greg,” he hisses.
“It’s Gage,” I respond instinctively, my voice gruff, the weight of what I’m about to do settling on my shoulders like a one-hundred-pound cloak.
“Liars make me angry, Garret,” he continues, using his free hand to draw out one of his blades and caressing my cheek with it. “Very, very angry. Especially when one of those liars lies to my kitten.”
The fear I should be feeling when face-to-face with this psychopath dissipates in a tidal wave of anger. I shove away his blade with a growl rumbling up the back of my throat.
“Fuck off, Vagina. You don’t know the first thing about me or my life.”
His lips twitch at my use of Sera’s nickname for him, but I’m not sure if it’s the beginnings of a scowl or a smile. It’s hard to tell with him.
“Does poor little Gagey have mommy and daddy issues?” he taunts, not releasing my shoulder. His eyes flare with a spark of madness that lifts my hackles, my body tensing for a fight. “If you’re planning on hurting my kitten, on betraying her?—”
“Fuck no!” I snap, angry that he would even suggest such a thing. I push his other hand off my shoulder and take a few steps backwards so I’m out of range of the maniac. “Just leave me the fuck alone and mind your own damn business.”
It’s dangerous to give your back to a predator, especially one as unhinged as V, but I’ll need to trust that his obsession with Sera outweighs his need to kill me for my insolence.
I don’t have time to deal with V with everything else going on.
With a grunt, I slide myself into the car, but I don’t immediately pull away. Instead, I stare at my fingers, bleached white and gripping the steering wheel hard enough to crack it.
I almost forgot what day it is today. Honestly, I would’ve forgotten…if my mother hadn’t texted me.
Somehow, someway, Serafina was able to dissipate the shadows that surrounded me for far too long, bathing them in light. But now, I’m facing the cold, hard truth of my reality, glaringly more obvious in the illumination of day. It’s time for me to pay for my sins, as I have every day since the incident. It’s time for me to repent and plead to every god in the universe to forgive me.
My mother claims I’m a monster, and one day a year…I actually believe her.
Mom is waiting for me outside of the trailer, her emaciated body looking thinner than ever before, the stench of alcohol wafting off of her in palpable waves. I can smell it even before she enters the car, her hair greasy, her eyes glazed, and her clothing ripped, showing more skin than I ever wanted to see on my mother.
“Drive,” she tells me curtly, not even bothering to give me directions.
I know exactly where she wants me to go, the same place I’ve gone every year since I was a kid.
How could I have forgotten what day it is? With everything going on with Tristan, Kian, and Sera, I allowed myself to believe… Well, it’s stupid. A monster is never allowed to truly forget the sins he committed.
The silence in the car is tense and uncomfortable. I feel a weight on my shoulders that’s always accompanied by someone’s eyes on me. They cut at my skin like daggers, a physical sensation that twists my stomach and covers me in a layer of frost.
But still, my mother doesn’t speak, her gaze continuing to crawl over my skin like an invasion of skittering insects.
I tighten my grip on the steering wheel.
All too soon, we pull into a familiar, modest building with brick walls, a huge awning, and a small parking lot. I steer us into one of the empty slots but don’t immediately make a move to get out.
Mom doesn’t either.
And then she speaks, the disdain in her voice dripping like acid eroding rock. “Where were you today?”
I don’t respond, knowing that anything I say will only make things worse, will only exacerbate her ire.
“You know what day it is,” she continues in her curt, no-nonsense voice that has insidious fear slithering through my mind and grasping my heart.
I’m three times her size, but when she speaks to me like that, I feel like a little boy all over again, one who desperately wants his mother to love him.
“Or are you so much of a monster that you forgot?”
Again, I don’t answer, and that only seems to heighten her anger.
I brace myself, readying for the hit a second before she delivers it to my shoulder. She’s so frail and weak that it feels more like a light tap than her attempt to punch me.
“You fucking selfish boy.” She opens her car door jerkily and steps out.
I press my lips together and follow her, still not saying anything, still avoiding eye contact.
“This is why we come here. So you can see what you did.” She wobbles slightly due to her intoxicated state, but I don’t lift a hand to help her.
The last time I did, she slapped me so hard across the face I received an actual bruise from the rings adorning her skeletal fingers.
I follow a few steps behind her, keeping my head lowered, my dark hair obscuring my eyes from view. I don’t want to see the accusatory stares I know are following me down the hallway. Mother has made it clear time and time again to the staff the reason for our visits.
And the reason why my father is here in the first place.
The nurse in bright-blue scrubs looks up from his computer at the front desk when we arrive. He takes one look at my mother, frowns, and then jerks his head towards the hallway.
My mother is a frequent visitor, even if I’m only forced to come here once a year.
“Right this way,” he says, not bothering to check us in or even ask who we’re coming to see.
As we move down the hallway, the white tiles so meticulously polished I can see my grim reflection staring back at me, I peer at all of the open doors.
Supernaturals of every species lie on cots.
Some are connected to machines. Others are surrounded by healers. And others still are staring blankly at a wall, their expressions devoid of any feeling or emotion.
These are all fae who have been…broken. That’s the only word I can think to use. This assisted living facility has been around for over ten years and serves to help fae who can’t be healed through magical or traditional means.
Like my father.
Whenever anyone asks me what happened to him, I tell them he left. Hell, I even say that to myself , as if I can somehow will it into existence by believing it hard enough. But reality is a double-edged sword just waiting to stab you in the gut when you least expect it.
His room is the last door on the left, and Mother doesn’t hesitate to walk inside, her abnormally tall high heels clanking against the tiled floor. She stops when she’s beside his bedside, staring down at a face that is so similar to mine, it’s like looking in a funhouse mirror.
This… This is what I’m going to look like when I’m older. At one point, that thought filled me with icy dread before I reminded myself that I don’t have to act like my father just because I look like him.
His olive complexion is a striking contrast to his dark hair, though the messy strands are currently streaked with gray. He used to be large—his body bulging with muscle—but time has withered him away, turning him into a husk of a man.
His dark eyes stare vacantly at the ceiling, not even blinking when my mother brushes her hand across his cheek.
“Gage,” she snipes. “Come say hello to your father.”
I swallow around the razor blade lodged in my throat and venture a single step closer. I hate staring into the face of the man I despise more than life itself.
The man I broke.
Destroyed.
Sure, his body may still work, but his mind… His mind is shattered, thanks to me.
Thanks to the nightmare I pulled him into, where he has no chance of escaping.
It’s why others fear me, why I’m terrified to tell Serafina the truth about what I am. Sometimes, I believe the supernatural world is like a balance, and every weight that’s added begins to tip the scale. It’s why my powers cancel each other out—I can heal, but I can also destroy.
I’m a baku, an Unseelie fae who can heal anyone with my magic.
But who can also trap anyone—human and fae alike—in a nightmare of my own making.
Once someone’s trapped in the confines of their own mind, there’s no escaping. They’re stuck in that prison until their bodies eventually fail or their hearts stop from the terror crashing through them.
It’s what I did to my father, after all.
So I stand there, staring down at the man who worked his entire life to destroy me but ended up being destroyed himself, and I wonder if my mother’s right. If I’m truly the monster she always accuses me of being.
Maybe I am. Maybe I’m not. All I know is that I don’t regret my actions for even a moment, and I’ll do it again if it means protecting the people I love. I’ll embrace all of the darkness inside of me, all of the wispy shadows that coil around my heart like slithering snakes, and I won’t hesitate.
Not again.
Not ever.