Chapter 30
Jenna
Impossible.
I slam the brakes of my car, as I pass the tree farm, a figure of a man standing near the main office.
Calvin and Turner are the house.
Which means this shadow of a figure might be my brother.
I whip into the farm entrance, shocked to the see the gate open. But I don’t stop. I keep driving, and the man standing on the deck of the main office grows more and more familiar as I pull up.
I reach into my console and pull out my taser, just in case, as I come to a stop in the gravel lot. The man still doesn’t move. Not as I inch the car door open, and not as I close it.
“Cade?” I croak his name out, and the man freezes.
And then takes off at a sprint.
Fuck, are you serious?
I take off after him, and the air snaps my lungs open.
I pull up the hood on my jacket, and rush after him.
The ground is a carpet of pine needles, soft, but the frost underneath is slick and treacherous.
My boots crunch, but I keep the steps quick and light.
I’m sweating and freezing at the same time.
“Cade, wait!” I scream the words after him, but he keeps darting ahead.
He’s a dozen rows of trees in front of me, but I keep pushing, desperation humming through my body.
Every time I think I’ve lost him, there’s another blur of motion, another brush of branches.
I move faster, push harder. My pulse is a metronome in my ears.
The taste of blood creeps up the back of my throat, and I think about what it’s going to mean if I catch up.
If I actually see him. If we could just talk.
The tree farm isn’t really a farm; it’s a horror show in daylight. I cut through an alley of mature spruces, low enough that I have to duck, and nearly run into a roll of barbed wire. I see him once more now, twenty yards ahead. Man-sized, hunched, and wrong in the way he’s moving.
He makes for a hard rush to an office building, slamming the door behind him. I stay low, make it to the edge of the lot, and wait.
I risk a breath, then another. I check the Taser, ready in my palm. Then I move. I creep up the porch, and place my hand on the doorknob, my heart pounding in the side of my head.
Why did he not stop? What’s wrong with him?
I push the door inward, and freeze.
Cade is there, leaning against the wall with the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” His voice is raspy, and I hate how much I recognize this version of my brother.
It’s how he acted when he came clean about what his father did to him.
“Cade…” I take a step toward him and close the door behind me. “It’s me.”
He screams louder, all teeth and spit, and comes at me, picking up something from the floor on the way.
I dodge sideways, barely. The tire iron takes out the doorframe with a thud and a cloud of splinters.
He’s faster than I remember, but the speed is jittery, uncoordinated.
He swings again, and this time I catch his wrist and twist, the move automatic from years of dealing with kids twice my size.
The weapon clatters to the floor, but he pushes us to the ground. He’s on top of me, hands at my throat, knees digging into my stomach.
“Cade!” I spit the word, fear splitting through my chest as my vision blurs. “Cade, it’s me!” He doesn’t stop, not until my nails rake his cheek, not until the blood runs and his eyes focus, just a little.
“Cade,” I whisper, a tear slipping down my cheek. “It’s Jen.”
The fight goes out of him all at once. He goes slack, shoulders trembling. The hands leave my neck, and he drops onto the floor, knees drawn to his chest like a child.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” His words are mumbled, and it’s barely coherent, but I’m trying to understand what the hell just happened.
I take a deep breath, my hand flying to my neck. It aches. Painfully. My eyes jump to my brother.
He’s crying. Not in the ugly, blubbering way, but in an equally disturbing way—shivering, breath hitching, teeth chattering. I sit up, my own chest burning where he pressed down. I rub the spot, my instincts screaming that my brother is not who he used to be.
But he is. This is my brother.
I scoot closer, slow, the way you approach a wounded dog. I brush the blonde hair out of his eyes. He flinches but doesn’t pull away.
“Hey,” I say, voice soft, “You’re okay. You’re safe. I’m here.”
He shakes his head, peering up at me with red eyes. “You shouldn’t be here,” he says, but it’s barely more than a whimper. “They’re after me. Everyone is after me. They’ve always been after me.”
“I know,” I whisper as I wrap an arm around his shoulder. I hold him, arms tight, rocking him like I did when we were small, and the only monsters were the ones our father created.
“There must have been a reason,” I say, and the words are salt on an open wound. “Tell me there was a reason, Cade. What happened in Lubbock…”
He cuts me off, voice flat, dead, as he pulls away. “I killed them because I wanted to, Jen. There’s something broken.” He taps the side of his head as he leans in toward me. “He broke me.”
I jerk, not just at the words, but at the way he says them. Like they’re a fact, like he’s reporting the weather.
“I killed them,” he says again, looking at me with the eyes of a man who’s already left his body behind. “Because they made me angry. Because I could. Because I wanted to. Because it felt good. Because he was fucking her too hard.”
There’s no freaking life in his eyes, and my heart stutters, as I search for the brother that pulled me from the fire. That went off to serve his country.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he repeats himself.
I want to slap him. I want to hold him tighter. Instead, I just sit there, heartbeat gone to nothing, the cold leeching up my legs as I realize all my lies, all my money spent, was for this. For my brother to tell me he killed them because he wanted to.
“You were my hero,” I murmur, holding his gaze. “You killed Monty, but he deserved it.”
“I killed that prick boyfriend of yours, too,” Cade factually. “Just a quick cut in the vent line. No big deal. He was a dick.”
My heart squeezes. “It was an accident. You’re blaming yourself—”
“No,” he laughs, tipping his head back. “You are in denial, Jen.” His voice grows sharp. “That’s your whole fucking problem. You think that I’m this little brother that saw the hell we went through and wanted to make it all okay for you. But you know what? That’s not true.”
I shake my head. “You’re a good kid. You just went through—”
“Why? Because Daddy touched me?” He erupts in manic laughter. “He never did that to you, did he?” He angles his body toward me, and my skin jumps. “You were untouchable. Mom would’ve protected his little girl.”
“That’s not true, she wanted to protect you—”
“Fuck you,” he screams at me, rising to his feet and reaching for the tire iron.
“You were a part of the problem, Jen. You. If you wouldn’t have run off to college, maybe you could’ve saved me.
He never touched me until you left. If you wouldn’t have gotten involved with that dick, I wouldn’t have had to fuck up his boat.
If you’d have just loved me, I wouldn’t be like this.
” He raises his arm, and I realize this it.
This guy is my brother.
“I’m sorry,” the words slip out. Cade just shakes his head, but I keep pushing. “I’m sorry that I left you. I’m sorry that I wasn’t there. I’m sorry I didn’t have the courage to do it myself. You were brave.”
He glares down at me, and then flings the tire iron across the room, shattering a window. “I can’t get the demons out of my head, Jen. I tried. I tried to run them out. I tried to do all the psycho-bullshit with Bradford. And you know what happened? They got louder. I’m a monster.”
“No,” I plead. “You’re not. You can get better.”
He curls his lip in disgust. “You need to get better, Jen. You. Let me be. Go live your goddamn life. Stop trying to give yourself purpose by making me better.”
I bat the tears away. “Wait, please.”
He shakes his head, not meeting my eyes. “It’s better this way. You’re not like me. You don’t understand. You won’t.” He opens the back door, cold wind slapping the hair into his face. I want to chase him, but I feel frozen.
Really fucking frozen.
He’s halfway gone when he turns, just for a second. “I love you,” he says, pausing. And in that brief moment, is when I see my little brother, but then it fades, his eyes black. “Go home, take care of Mom, and stop chasing me. Or I’ll fucking gut you and leave you to rot in this goddamn tree farm.”
I jump as he slams the door behind him. I sit there in the dead silence of the office, every muscle screaming at me to run after him, but I can’t. I’m stuck in place, lungs burning, tears freezing on my cheeks.
And honestly, I believe him.
I pull my knees to my chest, and the version of my brother I don’t want to believe settles in my chest. Maybe he is a monster. Maybe I didn’t love him enough to save him. I break into a sob, years of fucking trauma exploding from the deepest darkest corners of my mind.
It’s only when I hear the creak of the front steps that I lift my head.
The doorway fills with a shape too big for the frame, too solid for the dreamlike logic of the past ten minutes.
Calvin Bradford.
He stands there, eyes taking in everything—the shattered window, the mess in the office, and me on the floor, gasping for air.
But there’s not an ounce of understanding, his voice cutting like ice through my entire body.
“Found what you were looking for?”