Close Range Christmas by Nicole Helm (ebook reader for laptop TXT) 📗

But she made all those walls he’d built crumble, and he felt more like he’d been at twenty and stupid than he was now. He knew what could go wrong when you reached for everything. He’d had the scars to prove it.

She smiled at him and he didn’t know how he’d survive any of this, even if they caught Anth and everything went back to normal.

“You should be asleep.”

She sighed. “I’ve tried. Brain’s too jumbly tonight. I hate that nothing has happened. I keep thinking if I could just work out some missing piece, we’d be able to set a trap for the next note. But if it never comes...”

“It’ll come,” Dev replied. This wasn’t over. That’s what Anth’s first note had said. Which meant nothing ended until it was over.

“I know. That’s why I can’t stop thinking.”

“Yeah, I think we’re all having that problem.” He couldn’t seem to get himself to move inside the room. Instead he just leaned against the door frame.

“We share a mother. Anth and I. There should be some...bond of connection. Like you have with your brothers.”

“We grew up together. It isn’t blood that bonded us. It was everything we survived. I don’t have any bond with Anth and we share a father. I’ve actually met him, even if it was only once.”

Sarah looked down at her belly, smoothed her hands over the bump. “It’s weird...isn’t it? There’s a connection here, and he’s coming at us when I’m nine months pregnant?”

“There’s no way he could know that, Sarah. Our own family didn’t.”

“I know. I just... It’s the thinking. He’s making us wait on purpose because he has to know we’re sitting here driving ourselves crazy trying to understand him. And we can’t, can we? We don’t know him. I grew up knowing I was adopted, but loved. So loved. I didn’t remember anything about my parents, and I’m not saying I never thought about them, but I was given a life I could never resent. I really doubt he had that.”

“Yeah. But he wasn’t with the Sons, so it was possible.”

Sarah shook her head, her blond hair falling out of its messy braid. Her hair on his pillowcase made his heart ache all over again, but she kept talking about Anth and danger, and for the first time in his life he didn’t want to focus on the bad.

“He wouldn’t have hooked up with Ace, wouldn’t have scared my mother enough to leave me with Duke and Eva, if he had some good life somewhere.”

“Maybe.”

She fixed him with a look—one of those looks that meant she had some...plan or something. A battle light, he would call it. He was too weary to figure out an excuse to walk away—get away from Sarah’s constant battles.

Or, you kind of like them.

“What was it like to grow up in the Sons?” she asked, clasping her hands over her stomach.

That was not the battle he’d expected, and in hindsight he probably should just walk away. But the answer wasn’t as traumatizing as she was probably expecting.

“I don’t know.” At her sharp look, he shook his head. “It sounds flippant, but it isn’t. I don’t... It feels like it all happened to someone else. I don’t try to remember and the more I don’t, the more foggy it gets.”

“Did you feel alone?”

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “No. I always had Jamison, and... I think we remember our mother a little better than the younger ones. I think she loved us, but...”

“But what?”

“Her whole life was survival. Her own. We were...pawns of that survival. Which sounds harsher than I mean it. It’s hard to blame her...doing what she could to stay alive.”

“Couldn’t she have escaped back to Grandma Pauline like you all did?”

Dev shrugged. These days he couldn’t seem to feel anything for his mother except a sort of pity. What little he remembered of her was of a woman beaten down by...everything. “Maybe. I don’t think she knew how. Whatever...whatever attracted her to Ace kept her a victim of his mind games. Or maybe she didn’t want to leave. I was a kid. I don’t know. I know she feared for her life, but hell, maybe she liked that.”

Sarah grimaced, but Dev couldn’t deny the possibility. There were too many awful things he’d seen and endured to think some people didn’t enjoy or crave that kind of thing.

“After your mother died, what happened?”

“I don’t know. We kept...living. Jamison took care of us. Kept us together. Taught us how to survive and planned our escapes. He stepped into her role, I guess. And did a better job of it.”

“Anth didn’t have either. Not a loving family. Not even the Sons.”

“We don’t know what he had.”

“No. We don’t. But what if he had nothing?”

Dev had the uncomfortable memory of what his father had done to them all at seven—except Cody, who they’d managed to get out before Ace’s...ritual.

“There’s no record of Anth Wyatt,” Dev said carefully. “It’s possible... Well, what if Ace kept him isolated from everyone? He expected us to be able to survive in the wild at the age of seven. Why not Anth too?”

“What do you mean survive in the wild?”

He cursed himself for forgetting himself. Forgetting that there were things he didn’t want to get into. Didn’t want to rehash. Like all of it?

But it was Sarah, nine months pregnant with his child, who was waiting for an answer. Who was trying to understand, and he didn’t have it in him to change the subject. Not when she was in his bed, her hands on her stomach where his own child’s heart beat.

“Ace had a ritual. When we turned seven, he’d leave us in the Badlands by ourselves. We had to survive on our own with no supplies for as many days as years we were old every year on our birthdays.”

“At seven?” Sarah demanded, wrapping her arms protectively over the child inside of her.

That child would never know the kind