Page 6 of A Beta Protects

Which is… not what I was expecting

I have a place—a real bed—to sleep in for the first time in days. I still don’t have any clothes or money, or even know where I’m going to go from here, but for tonight, I’m okay.

Dom asked if I needed help with my bags. I mentally snort. If only he’d known all I had were the clothes on my back and a jar of BBQ sauce that I’d tried to eat my first night because I was starving. It didn’t take long to learn that BBQ sauce without ribs or chicken to go with it is not as fun.

I’d sleep in the back of my car, wrapped up in a musty old blanket I dug out of my trunk. I dread to think what I would have done without that blanket.

I consider crawling right into the bed, closing my eyes and luxuriating in not sleeping crumpled up in the back seat of a sedan, but I have to do something about my clothes.

There’s not much to look at in this room. It’s a blank canvas of a room, but it’s safe, it’s warm, and it’s the best thing I’ve had to look forward to for days.

Not ready to fall into bed after all my nervous energy from telling lie after lie downstairs, I wander over to the window, pulling open the drapes to let in some of the moonlight.

A forest lies several feet away. It’s dark, but peaceful, more so because this room faces the back of the house, so there are no lights from any town or city in the distance. It’s the perfect place where Bryce would never think to look for me.

Unless he goes through the side desk in the living room.

Back when I was planning—only mentally at that point, in case Bryce found any list I wrote down—I told myself I would take the postcards with me.

There were all from Dom. I have a stack of them that I bound together with an elastic. I’m not sure why, but even knowing he hated me, I could never make myself throw them out. The last few all had different photographs taken from a place called Wylder, upstate New York.

The postcards always had an address where I could find him, and that he was thinking about Aaron. That’s it. He never asked how I was or said how he was. Just a single line that he was thinking about Aaron, who died on their last deployment.

Bryce had come to me with the mail, suspicious about why Dom was sending his wife a postcard, until I reminded him who Dom was.

“Aaron probably asked him to check on me if anything ever happened to him,” I’d explained to Bryce before he could rip the postcard in half the way he’d been about to.

Our parents had died when I was still in school and Aaron had been about to graduate high school. Aaron would have asked Dom to keep an eye on his little sister if anything ever happened to him. I’m sure of it.

Bryce’s expression had changed, his suspicion melting away. “Oh, the guy who had a problem with you.”

Yes, the guy who had such a big problem with me, he couldn’t bear to spend more than twenty minutes in my presence. I’d spontaneously hugged him before he left town for his first deployment, even though Bryce was watching. It was like hugging a dummy. He had been so tense. I’d regretted it immediately, but Dom had come to Palmerston, our small Missouri town alone, and the thought of him going to fight a war without so much as a hug felt wrong.

I didn’t know much about him, just the little Aaron told me. He aged out of foster care and moved around looking for a job. That’s it. I’d hugged him goodbye, telling him I hoped he stayed safe, and tried not to feel hurt when he ended the hug so quickly.

When Bryce hadn’t torn up the postcard, I’d shoved it in a desk drawer, along with the others that kept coming, year after year.

With nowhere to go after I left Bryce, I’d made a brief stop in Chicago, where I’d pawned my dad’s old watch. It had hurt so badly back when I’d done it and hasn’t stopped hurting since. Then I’d taken my stack of dollar bills, not nearly enough cash to give up one of the last things I had of my parents, met a divorce attorney, and sent a letter.

Mom and Dad would understand what I needed to do and why. They would not have wanted me to stay married to someone like Bryce if there was anything I could do to get out of it. Even if it cost me the only thing I had to remember them by.

Then I came here. To Wylder. To the man who hated me.

Movement below my window captures my attention.

A tall man with long, lean muscles, short dark hair, jeans, and a black T-shirt strides into the forest.

I watch him, frowning.

Where are you going?

Just before he disappears through a gap in the trees, he slows. As if he knows he’s being observed, he twists around.

I’m not doing anything wrong.

Yet the second he turns, I shove the drapes closed and I freeze, my heart racing.

I wasn’t doing anything wrong, so why did I hide?

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