Chapter Thirteen #2
The heaviness of his sadness was overwhelming.
Laramie stood and padded over to him, sat behind him and rested the palm of her hand against his back.
Stellan hung his head. “We’d never seen my stepdad’s animal.
We’d always known something was different about him, but we didn’t have any idea what he really was. He was waiting there to kill us.”
“Oh my gosh,” Laramie uttered. “Why?”
Stellan shook his head. “I don’t know. Dame thought mom had asked him, but Mars thinks he did it so he and Mom could move forward and cut ties with her old life.
He thinks Mom was talking about our dad too much because we grew up to look like him, and he snapped.
Sometimes in the wild, cats kill other males’ offspring on instinct.
I don’t know. I just know what happened in that garage.
I will never forget the sound of my brothers’ screaming.
” Stellan slowly pressed his hands to his ears.
“It plays in my mind. I tried to help them. He got me quick. He was huge, and God it hurt so bad. Some of the screaming was mine. I remember telling my brothers to run, but we couldn’t, you know?
There was a big bond there. We couldn’t just leave each other.
I remember when he was done, his Cat just sat in the corner, watching us bleed out.
Mars stopped making noise first. Then Dame.
I was the last one, and I hated it. Hated him.
I remember talking to my brothers, telling them it was going to be okay.
That everything was going to be okay, but their bodies were twitching, and my vision was going.
Everything got dark, and all I could hear was the growling.
I thought my stepdad had come back to finish me. ”
Laramie slid her arms around him and rested her head against his back. Every muscle in his body was tense. He slid his hand over hers, as if to keep her there, hugging him from behind.
“I wish he would’ve just finished it.”
What a heartbreaking admission.
“Why?” she asked on a breath. “You are okay. You are here. Your brothers are still here.”
Stellan had started shaking though, and he rested his cheek against his shoulder. “I woke up broken, and I didn’t feel right in my own skin until two years ago. It’s a lot of damage, Laramie. It would’ve been easier to stay asleep.”
“But then I would’ve never met you,” she said, her voice thick with emotion.
“I’m glad you didn’t die. I’m glad.” A warm tear slid to her cheek and she hugged him tighter.
A tiny whimper escaped her as she imagined what he must’ve seen in that garage—his last memories as a human.
She imagined him comforting his brothers while his humanity was dying.
“Your stepdad is gone?” she asked.
He nodded.
“How?”
“I killed him.”
The admission should’ve chilled her blood. It should’ve made her afraid, but honesty escaped her lips as she whispered, “Good.”
“My brothers don’t know that part. They think it was self-inflicted. They didn’t really give a shit to ask questions. They had checked out the day their Cats had been born.”
“And your mom?”
“She lived for a while. Got cancer and died a couple years ago. She died alone. Sometimes, I put blue flowers on her grave still. It’s habit. It’s not for her. It’s for me.”
“Did she ever find out it was your stepdad who did that to you?” she asked softly.
“Yes. She knew right away. Those first few weeks were a blur. We woke up to something awful inside of us. Hungry. Had to clean up our own carnage in the garage. Had to go through our first Changes with no Maker to tell us what was happening. I called her and told her.”
“What did she do?”
“She stayed with him. She said we weren’t going to ruin another one of her relationships. She blamed us for what he did.”
Chills rippled up her spine. Evil was present in his history.
Evil had been present when he’d been made into a Cat, and then understanding had been withheld by a parent who was supposed to protect him.
“Oh my gosh, Stellan.” After everything, their mother had still chosen him, even though he’d tried to kill her sons.
And still, Stellan had hung a picture of her in his hallway.
Laramie had never known loyalty like this existed. She would also never be able to understand the depths of the damage that had been done to Stellan.
Stellan leaned his shoulder on the door frame and offered his profile to her. “He was a tiger.”
“Tiger,” she whispered. “You’re a tiger?”
A slow nod was her answer.
Chills, chills, chills. His eyes made so much sense now as she recalled pictures of tigers she’d seen over the years.
“What is in your journal?” he asked so low, she almost missed it.
“My journal?” she repeated, confused for a second before she remembered the sketch he’d made of her in the library. “It’s my mom’s.”
Stellan reached behind her, hooking his strong arm around her waist and pulled her down, until her body curled around his, and her head lay comfortably in his lap, right there in the doorway of his RV. He stroked her hair from her face. “Why do you have your mom’s journal?”
She’d already been tearing up, but at the thought of talking about it, she had to squeeze her eyes tightly closed to ward off the ache in her heart. “Is this the trade?” she asked.
“I want to know everything about you. I want you to know everything about me. Good and bad.”
“Good and bad,” she whispered, wondering how the hell she would be able to get through this conversation.
“My mom and dad were so in love,” she told him.
“They were magic. They had this way of lighting up the room and making anyone around them feel love. And then he died when I was younger, and it was me and my mom and our memories of him. And hers were…well…beautiful. I always wanted a love story like theirs.” She swallowed hard.
“And then she died too, and I found the journal, and it details that time in her life when she fell in love with my dad, and I don’t know.
I feel close to them again when I visit the same places they existed together.
As close as I can. Since she passed, I feel like I’m in orbit and I can’t get my legs under me. ”
“She was a good mom?” he asked quietly, stroking her hair.
A tear slid from the outer corner of her eye and down her cheek as she nodded. “She was perfect. I wish you could’ve met her.”
“Maybe it’s best she didn’t meet me.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. I think she would’ve liked you.”
He studied her face and stroked a line down her jaw. “I can tell you are telling the truth. You believe that.”
“I think you would’ve felt her goodness and wanted to protect it.”
His gold eyes darted to her, and a slight smile took the very corners of his lips. “Sometimes I think you can see me.”
“Scary for you?” she guessed.
“Terrifying.”
“I go to the places my parents visited, and I talk to them, and I sketch it, and tape it to the back of her journal entry. I moved here to do this. They went to college here, and met here, and being where they were makes me feel anchored. It makes me feel happy.”
He was nodding slowly, eyes on her hair as he stroked it, thoughtful expression on his handsome face. “Sometime can I go with you?”
Laramie couldn’t help her emotional smile. Thickly, she whispered, “Sure.”
“Yeah?”
“Next up is Memory Grove.”
“I know that park.”
“There’s a tree there that my dad carved he and my mom’s initials into. I want to find it and sketch it.”
“I can help,” he told her.
And she believed him. Nothing she had said had been strange to him, but now that she knew about his difficult dynamic with the ghost of his mother, it made sense.
Any connection she kept with her mother, he would understand.
He had done the same in his own ways with blue flowers on the grave of a mother he had never been able to let go.
“I’ll go with you to put blue flowers on the grave if you want,” she said softly. She would never respect his mother though. It wouldn’t be an act for the mother. It would be for Stellan.
He’d been watching his fingers trace her hair but lowered his gaze to her. “Saying it out loud might have put the urge to rest.” There was a growl to his voice. “It would be more fun to pay a tribute to the woman who raised you.”
Oh, her heart. It was so full, it ached in an unexplainable way. It was full of his understanding of why she was really here and hurt by what had happened to him. He had deserved so much better growing up.
He was such a tough, hard-outer-shell man, but his care was enormous. It was so much more than she had ever guessed, or that anyone would ever understand. He’d said it himself. He’d never talked about this stuff to anyone, not even his brothers.
They had touched each other’s bodies. Their chemistry couldn’t be denied, but this…lying here with her head in his lap as he stroked her hair, exposing their hearts to each other…
If Laramie were to start a journal of her love story, like her mother had done before her…on the first page, she would sketch this moment right here.