Page 40 of Under Fyre

Their memories burn me. My wife. My daughter. They scald like water from a fucking kettle. Lizzy’s angelic face, wiped clean. I can only imagine what had been on there.

Red didn’t clean my wife. He left her for me, dirty and used. A taunt. The police report confirmed what I intuitively knew as soon as I stepped onto the scene.

He’d brutalized them. Tortured them. There’d been enough time. I was having a drink with a friend. Not even a close friend, but a fucking work pal.

I lived in regret, in despair, for months. My parents came to see me. I think they arranged the funeral. I don’t know, because I was drunk every waking hour until I landed in the hospital with alcohol poisoning.

My parents almost forced me to go to rehab, but I managed to convince them I was fine.

All I wanted was another bottle. Two, maybe three. I was working up the courage to down a handful of pills with it.

At least, I think I was.

But when I was released from the hospital, brandy in one hand and a pack of Vicodin in the other, and I stepped over the threshold of that room Red had painted—like his motherfucking namesake—red…

It was all gone.

Like it had never even fucking happened.

No blood. No stained carpets. No damaged furniture.

That had been Lizzy’s room. He’d found some kind of sick thrill in dragging her mother in there, raping her in Lizzy’s bed.

But now the room was empty.

Floors stripped down to the wood.

Fresh wallpaper.

I called my parents. Mother answered. I called her a fucking cunt and told her I was going to kill her with my bare hands. That I was leaving right then, getting in a cab, and coming to fucking murder her.

She hung up the phone on me.

Every day I wish I hadn’t done that. That I’d been able to control myself and not take out my rage on her. She’d done what she’d thought best—ridding me of the memory of their tragic deaths.

But that’s not how I saw it.

She’d taken something precious from me.

She’d stolen the object of my fixation. I was rudderless. Tossed about like a dinghy on the open ocean.

Only a year later did I realize she’d saved me as surely as Arrow had.

She hadn’t taken away my obsession. She’d replaced it.

Instead of self-destruction, I chose self-care. I built myself back up to someone capable of change.

And I did change.

I became a hunter.

And Red became my prey.

* * *

The signal isspotty out here, but I can get a very slow internet connection if I’m in the car about a mile down the road from the cabin. It’s freezing—I don’t want to waste gas on heat when I’m only going to be out here for a few minutes.

This’ll be the second time I’m leaving Charlotte alone in the cabin. It doesn’t bother me—she’s no longer a flight risk.

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