Heartbreak Bay (Stillhouse Lake) by Rachel Caine (red white royal blue TXT) 📗

There’s not a sound in the car but road noise. If I can’t help blaming Sam, he also can’t help blaming himself. And this time, he’s going to see the toll this takes directly on my—our—children. I have to suppress the vile impulse to think he deserves that for his past actions.

“Wait, y’all have seen these before?” Vee finally asks.

“People put them up other places we lived,” Connor says, and his tone is calm and uninflected. “They wanted us to leave, and we did.”

It’s the calmness, and the inevitability behind it, that makes my heart ache. I did let the Lost Angels . . . Sam . . . hound us from place to place, for years. I did that for my kids. But I also did it to my kids.

“We’re not leaving,” I tell Connor, and hold his stare in the rearview mirror for a second.

“We just started getting normal,” Lanny says. “I just found friends.” She sounds too shattered to be angry. The rage that sweeps over me is breathtaking and weirdly freeing. It steals my breath and clenches my hands, and I think, Fine. Come at us, you assholes.

Even Vee is quiet now, realizing this is way deeper than she can swim, with currents fast enough to drown the unwary.

That river of silence, fraught with rage and pain and fear, flows continuously, unbroken, until we arrive at Vee’s apartment and let her out. I watch her walk to her door with her absurdly bright gun case and safe and let herself in before Sam puts the SUV back into gear and heads us home. Home. It feels less like that now, more like a fortress bracing for an attack.

I never should have let my guard down.

Sam pulls the SUV into the garage, and we all stay in the vehicle until the door rolls closed. Usually Lanny or Connor is the first to bail, but my kids are quiet and still.

Finally Connor says, “Are we going to talk about it? You knew about the flyers, didn’t you? That’s why you had the panic attack.”

“Not here,” I say. “Inside.”

Sam nods and gets out first. The rest of us follow him, and I see the too-rigid set of his spine, the linebacker angle of his shoulders. Sam’s got a great poker face, but his body language gives him away if you know how to look. I’ve retrieved our guns, and I carry them into the bedroom with the main gun safe to store them away. I put his favorite sidearm in the fingerprint-locked safe on his side, and then mine in its mate on the other. The larger gun safe holds other things as well: a hunting rifle, a shotgun, and two more smaller pistols. Ammunition and cleaning equipment. I seal everything up and go into the kitchen, where Sam is pouring two generously sized glasses of red wine. He slides one over to me, but doesn’t meet my eyes.

“We’re not okay, are we?” He asks it quietly, but I hear the heartbreak in his voice.

I take the glass and turn toward him. The kids are in their rooms, and I keep my volume low as well. “Sam, did you know the Lost Angels were ramping this up again?”

“No.” He says it definitively, and I believe him. “I thought they were letting it go. Last time I checked, we weren’t high on their list of monsters anymore.”

“But not off it.”

“I don’t think we’ll ever be off it.”

“Sam,” I say gently, but with purpose. “It isn’t we. Me and the kids are the ones on the posters.”

That silences him. He squeezes his eyes closed, then says, “I know. I’m sorry.” I hear the guilt. He started this. He knows how much damage it’s already done, and will continue to wreak. But there’s also little he can do about that, and I take a breath to acknowledge it.

He opens his eyes, and we hold that gaze for a long moment before he says, “Gwen, what are you going to do?” I can feel the solid ground between us trembling and eroding, and I hate it with every muscle fiber. Someone did this to us. But not Sam. I know that. I wish I could feel that, but I know it takes time.

So for now, I reach across that uncertain ground and take his hand, step close, whisper, “Stay.” It’s a promise from me, and a question for him.

I feel the relief that floods his body as he hugs me, a long and warm embrace that soothes the screaming parts of me. I hope it does the same for him, but that’s the hell of being human: you never really know. Never.

You never know what the person you love might do. Or could be capable of doing.

Sometimes you don’t even know that about yourself.

We seem better as we get the kids settled for the night; we take our wineglasses out to the porch. It’s not the same as it was back on Stillhouse Lake; the view’s of a cul-de-sac and a neighbor’s front window, not the soothing, cool ripple of the water. But we still have a covered porch, and our two rocking chairs, and we sit together and sip in silence.

I ruin the mood by telling him about my new, worrying stalker. After a fairly significant pause, he tells me about the call from the newspaper.

I nearly spill my wine. “Someone called in my obituary?”

“Probably the same guy, don’t you think? Hell, he might have gotten busy with the flyers too.”

I take in a deep breath. “You took care of that obituary, though. It won’t—”

“Show up online, or in the papers? No. But we should be aware that’s a tactic that’s out there. Stay alert.”

I feel sick at the thought. There’s so much viciousness to all this. And I understand the impulses behind it. It’s so easy at a distance to pass judgment, to feel satisfaction when someone else receives pain you think they deserve.

What this man—if it is