AllFreeNovel
Share Us
A reality about so many damn things.
She sucks in a sharp little breath and stops fighting for a second, long enough for me to open the back door and step out into the cooling evening air.
I stalk toward the woods, careful to take the well-worn path this time instead of barreling through the thickest parts. I’ve used this trail too many times to count over the years, often with similar weight thrown over my shoulder.
But with a much different purpose.
Normally, I fight those memories, try to keep them dead and buried, but tonight, I open the floodgates, allowing all the blood and violence and anguish to invade my brain to help me get in the mindset for what I need to do tonight.
Terrify Beauty.
A strange dichotomy—to want to protect the very thing I’m about to scare intentionally. But I can’t have her look at me like she did yesterday ever again—like I might be something, someone more than The Beast. It’s far too dangerous, and it’s far from true.
I don’t bother trying to be quiet as I march through the woods. Twigs and leaves crunch and break underneath my boots, alerting anything living on the mountain of our location. But with the don’t-fuck-with-me vibes rolling off me right now, nothing would dare approach.
We finally reach the clearing, allowing more of the fading light to hit us.
I feel her lift her head. “Where are we?”
“None of your concern.”
I stalk through the bright-yellow buttercups, past where I do my log splitting and my workshop, toward the far side, where the second trail winds down the back side of the mountain and toward the gorge.
“Where are we going?”
“You ask too many questions, Beauty.”
She blows out an annoyed sound, twisting to try to see better, but my strong grip on her keeps her tipped over. “It’s what I do. I’m a librarian, for Christ’s sake. I’m all about exploring knowledge and learning, and all you are doing is giving me bullshit.”
I fight the laugh that tries to bubble up my throat.
This isn’t the time nor place for any kind of levity, even if her feistiness always manages to annoy me as much as it delights a part of me that I didn’t know could exist anymore.
Her frustration grows the longer I don’t react to her statement. She releases little irritated huffs and tries to see where we are as I maneuver down the zigzagging path until I finally reach the spot where I intended to bring her.
I flip her up onto her feet, setting her down, and she wobbles slightly, blinking rapidly as she digs her hands into my biceps, steading herself primarily on her good foot.
No doubt her head is spinning after being tipped upside down for so long, but I break free of her grip as soon as I’m confident she can stand on her own.
She twists her head, examining everything around us in the fading light. “Where are we?”
I grab her arm again and march her to the edge of the cliff, then point out across it to the vast wilderness that makes up the backside of Barker Mountain.
The wild side.
“What do you see?”
Her eyes narrow, and she peers down to the darkness of the bottom of the trench, then out across the endless trees. “I don’t know. More forest?”
“Do you want to know what’s at the bottom of that gorge?”
A shudder rolls through her, and true fear flashes in her gaze as she peeks up at me out of the corner of her eye—either unable or unwilling to look at me fully.
I lean in, so she can feel my words, not just hear them. “My family’s enemies. And no one would dare come looking for them, even if they could find them down there. Nature takes care of almost everything, but to really ensure our dirty deeds stay buried, I collect the bones and put them ten feet under out there.” I spread my hand wide across the vista to make my point, and she tenses again. “No one sets foot on this property, Beauty, and we have hundreds and hundreds of miles of land they’d have to search, if they wanted to try.”
No one ever would.
My body starts to tremble, thinking about how many are buried out there.
