Chapter 18
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
STORM
There’s a gun in my console, a hunting knife in the passenger seat, and my dad is on the line. Thursday night in Ellicottville just got a lot more exciting than I’m used to.
“She’s there,” Dad says, his voice hushed. That means Mom is home and when Mom is home, she doesn’t want to hear about this kind of work. She’s able to compartmentalize in a way I can’t. Dad never cuts anything off, but unlike me, none of it bothers him.
“I’m on the way.” I keep one hand on the wheel, other on the shifter, my eyes on the dark road.
It’s been not quite twenty-four hours since I spent the night in Sloane’s childhood home.
Her brother, Henry, didn’t bother coming out of his room after she came over, so she didn’t bother introducing me.
We spent the night in the living room, curled up around each other like we did the first night at her house, but otherwise, there was nothing.
She curled her fingers in my hair and we fell asleep to Scream.
The original because she admitted that’s the only one she ever watched and she fell in love.
I told her it’s the best one anyway.
Now she’s back at Ely and I’m back at work.
I dropped pills under rich families’ doorsteps all morning after I took Sloane back to campus, reupped my supply at Motel 13 off the turnpike, texted Cortland to make sure him and Remi didn’t have any last minute surprise plans to come back to our place early, and watched to make sure Sloane didn’t leave her place.
She promised me she was going to be going over color schemes for her future marketing agency and reading books, and maybe one of her friends, Tyli, would come by, but otherwise, she said she’d stay put, but only for tonight.
Her exact words. People love her and she seems to love them so I don’t blame her but I wish I could trap her for more than one night.
I tell myself it’s to keep her safe, and I think that’s true, but there might be more to it, too.
“You know,” Dad says through the speakers in my car, “in another life, you two would make a good couple.”
I know better than to react to surprise at Dad’s words. He’s not suggesting; he’s just doing what he rarely ever does and thinking out loud.
But in my head, I feel that cliff at my back.
See Lydia Flynn’s green eyes holding mine. She would’ve been glad I jumped.
“I thought she was off limits.” I say it anyway to piss him off.
“To kill,” Dad says with no emotion. Then, surprising me, he adds, “Not to fuck.”
“Yeah, well back at the funeral home when we first met, Mom screaming at me in the car, it sure seemed like I wasn’t supposed to fuck her either.
” My mother had never gotten so emotional at anything I’d done, and that was saying a lot.
I was never loud or bratty as a child, but I was destructive.
Anything I could tear apart, I would. The staircase, the bed frame, holes in the wall and not out of anger, just to see what could happen.
But Mom was upset that evening.
Her eyes filled with tears, and my mother isn’t emotional.
I could feel the bitterness inside her when she told me to never speak to Lydia Flynn—or any Flynn—again.
Then we never discussed it.
What I don’t understand is where Lynx fits into all of it, aside from being her uncle and a prominent member of a family I’m not supposed to touch.
Nor do I know if Indie’s death was him making good on his promise that I fucked up.
When I told Dad about Lynx and the windshield, he told me I was lucky to be alive.
“Your mother might change her mind now.” Dad speaks quietly, and he offers no other explanation.
His parents are from Canada, and I hold dual citizenship thanks to them, both French-Canadian, and far more reserved than any American I’ve met in the south.
Mom, born and raised in Alabama, would get mad if I didn’t respond to her right away.
“Why was she so mad then? At the funeral?” I press, wanting answers to questions I’ve had for over five years. “What is it the Flynns have done to us?”
The hotel flashes in my mind.
Dad and Lynx were in the same room, but they didn’t seem like they were even remotely friendly then. What was the point of it all?
“That’s not my secret to tell. All you need to know tonight is if you hurt Lydia, your mother will be the one to pay for it.”
I clench my teeth together, but I tell him the truth after a moment: “I’m not going to kill her.
I’m going to warn her, and I’m going to get answers, since you don’t have any.
” I say it as a dig, because it is. But Dad claims he hasn’t been able to find Lynx, and he has no idea why Lydia would be following me.
“Keep your warnings without violence,” Dad cautions me.
“Why don’t you tell me what it is I’m walking into? What if she knows things I don’t? I’m your son.”
Dad is silent for too many heartbeats. Then he sighs. “Your mom is so much like you, you have no idea.”
I frown in the dark. “What do you mean?”
“Always looking into trouble, falling right into evil.”
My spine crawls as I straighten in my seat. “If you could speak without being cryptic, that would be helpful.”
Dad’s laugh is short and cold. “Don’t end up dead tonight son.”
And as I pull up to The Veil, a place I’ve just discovered Lydia owns as some sort of secret hideout in plain sight to spy on Ellicottville, he ends the call.