Chapter Four

CHAPTER FOUR

Crow

Idrove too fast up the mountain, my truck fishtailing more than once. My pulse throbbed. My head spun. My heart was in a war with my chest, doing it’s damnedest to break through.

I’d wanted to break Billy’s hand.

I’d wanted to kill him.

I still did.

I followed the familiar road, past the other houses, climbing higher, until it turned to gravel. I wouldn’t feel like I could breathe until I was behind the metal fence in the distance. I’d put it in when I was eighteen. It was one of the first things I’d done after inheriting my mom’s money.

It didn’t stretch around the whole property—I’d had to make it as safe as possible for the animals while also trying to keep people away. If anyone wanted to get to my house, they would have to get there on foot by going around the fence, and that was the most important thing to me. To see them coming and have the advantage.

I pressed in the gate code and watched it slide open, thumbs drumming on my steering wheel, a small way to let out all the pent-up energy and anger inside me.

It didn’t work.

My vehicle skidded to a stop in front of my log house, the sun still high in the sky above it. I threw the truck door open, then slammed it closed, wanting something to hit, to break, to let this anger bleed from me even if I got hurt in the process. It was the only way I knew, something that had been taught to me by the father I hated, but whose voice was still inside my head.

Pain was punishment, yes, but it was also a way to Clarity. To open your mind and break down walls and set yourself free. And the easiest way not to go down there, into town, and hurt them, was to hurt myself.

I took long strides toward the closest tree and began to punch. Pain burst through my knuckles and up through my wrists as my fists pounded the thick bark. In seconds I was bleeding, and a minute later the swelling started. My breathing came out hard and fast, the urge to keep going threatening to win, but I forced myself to pull back. I slid to the ground, back against the tree I’d just used to fight through all the emotions pelting me. Chosen had been wrong about so many things, but he’d been right in that most people down there would never understand me. They were filled with entitlement and hate for anything different from them.

My chest ached as I struggled to slow my breathing, the throbbing pain in my hands centering me in a way. I couldn’t afford to let myself break them, or I would have kept going.

No one in Tranquility wanted me around, and I didn’t give a fuck about that. I didn’t want them around either, but Billy, Chuck, and Hank were the only three who didn’t just ignore me. They wanted to make a lesson out of me, wanted to wield their control over me, and I would kill all three of them before I let them do that. No one would control me ever again.

I went into the house, dripping blood from my hands with each step. I took a bottle of alcohol from my stash, poured it over my left hand, then my right. That was the extent I would go to to clean them. I still felt like an earthquake had met up with a hurricane inside my chest, and it took everything in me not to wreck my own things, not to throw and hit and rip up everything in sight. My feelings were always so big, so overwhelming that I struggled not to lose myself to it, not to let them overtake me because what was the damn point in fighting so hard? The townspeople would never just let me be. Why not become the thing they accused me of being? Or hell, maybe I already was.

I slid down the wall, closing my eyes and counting backward from ten, trying not to give in to those instincts I fought against so hard, the ones Chosen used to tell me I had to grow and open myself up to because I was weak and weak men couldn’t be leaders. The Lord had Chosen him because he was strong, and I had to be too. I’d never wanted to be a leader, though, and he’d wanted a son he could mold into a replica of himself. What I’d wanted was his happiness, so I forced myself to be on board with the rest of it. I’d become his soldier in Enlightenment, which wasn’t being Enlightened at all. We had been pawns for him to feel powerful and in control.

Time got away from me. That happened sometimes. I’d be sitting there, and the next thing I knew, I’d disappeared inside my head without any idea of how much time had passed.

The alarm warning me someone or something was at the gate pulled me out of it. It could be an animal. They set it off sometimes, but the way the storm picked up inside me, the eye of the hurricane having passed, told me it was something else.

Maybe it was Billy, Chuck, and Hank. They’d never come up the mountain before, never braved my wrath where they didn’t have people around who would always see me as wrong and them as right, but I wanted it to be them. Wanted to be able to deal with them on my turf, to stalk them in these woods I knew so well, because that was how I felt every time I went to town. Stalked.

I pulled up the app on my phone and frowned at the battered car that looked nothing like the jacked-up truck Billy drove. My confusion grew when after a moment, it was the pretty man who got out, the one who wore his sadness like a second skin.

He ran a hand through his short, dark hair. It stuck up slightly in the front and sorta went to one side. The man had delicate bone structure but sharp cheekbones and an angular face. He walked over to the gate, fumbled with the latch, then seemed to realize he couldn’t open it. He looked around at the trees, the ground, the forest, as if trying to figure out another way.

I zoomed in closer. Saw him lick his pretty, plump lips, then rub the back of his neck in a move that said he didn’t know what to do. I’d never seen a mouth like his, bow-shaped and like it had been painted to be perfect. He was smaller than me, only a few inches shorter but much thinner and with less muscle. His cheeks had been pink in the store earlier, highlighting the freckles that danced across the bridge of his nose and along his cheekbones. His hand trembled, and I felt something inside me stir. I wanted him. Wanted to fuck him and possess him, which made me hate him—and hate myself even more.

He paced for a moment, then took a deep breath, went back to his car, and grabbed a backpack and a duffel bag.

Warning bells made my ears ring, my muscles tense, the threat of him in my home, on my grounds, making me edgy. In the beginning, people would try to come up my mountain, try to take photos or break in, wanting what was mine. They couldn’t have it, though. No one could. This was all I had.

I went straight for my gun cabinet, pressed in the code, then pulled out my favorite rifle. I hadn’t been able to protect my mother, but I damn sure would protect what was mine now.