Page 31 of Bound in Ashes

He wanted this place to be safe.

I knew that to be true, but I also couldn’t help but think about what else it meant.

Like the fact that he was preparing for the time when he would be gone.

My chest tightened, and I tried to swallow the breath-stealing clamp. Turned so that Jack wouldn’t look back and see me, forcing me to explain something I wasn’t even ready to name.

“You trying to grow a tree under you?” Uncle Levi said after he deposited the barbed wire.

“I’m sorry. I’m just standing still, old man,” I said with a smile on my face.

“I know. No time for that right now, though.”

I smiled, remembering my first day at the farm. “You remember when I got here?”

“Like I’d ever forget?” he said, letting out a low chuckle. “I knew you city kids were strangers to hard work, but you took it to the next level.”

“I did not,” I said, looking faux offended.

Uncle Levi smiled.

“I know. You always were a hard worker, but stubborn as the devil himself,” he said.

“Yeah, but I met my match in you,” I said, remembering my first week here.

Uncle Levi, or “that old bastard,” as I called him back then, had engaged me in a war.

He always said everyone had to earn their keep, and the way I would earn mine was doing chores on the farm.

The other kids in detention eventually caved, but not me.

No. I did nothing. Nothing at all, and waited for the consequences.

Then one night he told me to pack my bags. Stared dead in my eye and told me some people couldn’t be saved. I’d never forgotten the heat of that shame. And my desperation to prove him wrong.

Cajoling hadn’t worked.

Begging hadn’t worked.

And Uncle Levi hadn’t even tried being stern.

But ego? My Achilles heel, then and now, too.

And by the time the social workers from juvie came to assess me, I was his number one farmhand.

A lot of those skills were still there, though rusty.

“That’s not a bad-looking knot,” he said, looking down at my hands.

I wore canvas work gloves and held needle-nose pliers that I used to twist the barbed wire.

“Yeah, it is pretty good, isn’t it?” I said.

“Where’s Thorne?” Uncle Levi said.

“Why do you think I would know that?” I asked.

Uncle Levi shook his head. “So now you’re gonna insult me?”