Page 165 of A Bond with the Dark

They had seen the whole thing.

“So,” Dom asks, arising from his box, “what happened?”

“You killed my mom?”

43

BROKEN

SAYAH

What?” Dom exclaims, every pane of his expression sharp and pinched, concentrating on the meaning of my words.

“My mom said that you killed her, my aunt, and my grandma.”

“Woah woah, wait a minute,” he says, rising from the box he was sitting on and stepping toward me. “What are you talking about?”

I’m still kneeling on the ground, the feelings of grief and sorrow violently mixing together with anger and rage. The undeniable facts are colliding so violently within me that I feel nauseous. “She said our familial line is of the fire to make the phoenixes, but there hasn’t been one in over four hundred years because the warlocks have been stepping in and stopping them.”

“Oh,” Bash says, his eyes darting between us, “well, see then. It wasn’t my brother.”

“She said that Dom was the one who killed my aunt. My grandma. My mom.” I’m seething. I can’t see straight, and those sharp splinters of disgust and agony are gouging into me, making it hard to breathe down here.

As he glances back at his brother, Bash’s eyebrows draw up to his hairline.

“Babe, wait,” Dom utters, the concern in his forehead drawn so tight his face looks like it may crack, “that can’t be true. How did your parents die?”

“Fire,” I whisper to the candle in front of me. “They were killed in a house fire.”

When my eyes track back to his, his expression rearranges from confusion to anguish. Something surfaces in his mind, for his eyes blow wide with sudden shock. “No. No, no, no, no, no,” he stutters, yanking his phone from his pocket and turning so fast, throwing the door open, letting angry light in.

“Where the fuck are you going?” I yell as I rise in a breathless rush, ungracefully chasing after him.

His legs are moving so fast that I struggle to keep up. Bounding up the stairs in two steps, which takes me three or four, he’s a blur of colors when I reach the first floor. Stumbling after him as he slams the sliding doors open, the sounds of his phone making a call echo through the house.

“Hello?” comes Adaline’s voice as I finally reach him, catching my breath.

“Mom!” he nearly screams, his face flushed with fury, his eyes wild under folded eyebrows. “You remember a few months ago when you had me come to Colorado to set that house on fire you said was part of a grim infestation?”

“Yes,” she says, her voice a collection of calm and curiosity, “what about it?”

“Did you know it was Sayah’s mom and stepdad in that house?”

Silence unspools from the line, and his knuckles whiten as he grips the phone tighter.

“Mom?” he screams after a few more seconds of quiet. “Did. You. Know?”

“I didn’t know it was her mom. No.”

My chest compresses with a surge of emotions I can’t decipher. Eerily similar to the grief I felt when I got that late-night phone call telling me my parents were dead. Along with that agony returning, as I look at Dom and he at me, something exists at this moment that feels too heavy for me to carry. The weight of this revelation is tangling together, morphing into a monstrosity I can’t cage. I watch him in horror as he realizes that he is the reason I suffer. He is the reason for my rage. He is the reason my best friend was taken from me. He is the reason that my son lost his grandparents.

I knew something didn’t sit right when I got that phone call.

“But you knew it wasn’t a grim…?” his voice trails off, as if the words grow too complex or too big to fit into syllables.

A few seconds of stilted silence feels like an eternity.

“Fuck! Mom? What the fuck?”

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