Page 6 of The Ties That Bind

3

By a name

I know not how to tell thee who I am:

My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,

Because it is an enemy to thee;

Had I it written, I would tear the word.

ROMEO & JULIET

I hadn’t seenor heard from Arabella in years, not since she tore out my heart and left me a broken man. A year almost to the day after that first kiss, she collapsed in my arms, tears streaming down her face, and told me she was pregnant. Her father was sending her away to have our baby before giving it up for adoption. She’d refused to tell him who the father was and he’d refused to let her live in his house until “that thing” was out of her. I’d asked her not to go, begged her to marry me right then and there. I promised we could leave it all behind—run away together and lead normal lives away from the bullshit we’d grown up surrounded by—but she’d told me that was madness.

Years later, I thought maybe she’d made the right decision, but at the time I couldn’t see past my fury—at the world, at her father, at my father … but most of all at her.

The day before she was set to leave, I managed to smuggle a note to her through a deliveryman who owed me a favor. In it, I told her that if she went through with her father’s plan, I never wanted to see or speak to her again. That if she took away my child, she was as good as dead to me. She never responded. Four months later, I heard through the grapevine that she’d returned.

I hadn’t wanted to care, but I couldn’t help myself. Even though she’d destroyed me, I was still in love with her. Knowing she had my baby growing in her belly, I was maybe even more in love with her than before. And even though I’d told her I never wanted to speak to her again, I waited for her to get in touch with me. And then I waited some more. When I thought I would go insane with waiting, I drove out to the middle of fucking Wisconsin to call her from a payphone. I’d gotten word that she still had the cell phone I’d bought her the year before. That seemed like a huge oversight on her father’s part, but since it benefited me, I couldn’t complain about his ineptitude.

The first time I called, the phone rang, and rang, and rang some more. For two hours, I kept calling, hoping for a different outcome. Finally, when I’d told myself it was the last time I’d dial those ten digits, Arabella picked up.

I hadn’t the first clue what to expect from our conversation, but I hadn’t been prepared for her to tell me she’d had a miscarriage and our baby girl was dead.

“I’m sorry Xander,” she’d said, “but we never should have been together. This is our punishment.”

I didn’t believe that, of course. Our daughter would have been the exact opposite of a punishment—she would have been a fucking benediction. Creating her was the best thing I’d ever done. But, like her mother, she too had been taken from me by that bastard Royce Wilson and now he had to pay.

My whole life I hadn’t really cared about our feud with the Wilsons any more than I did the other squabbles the St. Johns engaged in. As far as I was concerned, they were all just thorns in our side, to be dealt with as necessary. But that afternoon, I vowed to get my revenge, to take from him as he’d taken from me.

And then one day one of his nephew’s heads arrived in a box on his doorstep, a stamp marking the contents as urgent. No one had stepped forward to claim the kill, but he had to suspect it was a St. John special delivery. A year later, another Wilson’s eyeballs made their way to his office. That time, I’d signed the note myself.

And thus our petty squabbles became an all-out war. I had no idea if Royce Wilson knew why I’d made it my mission in life to destroy his family—no idea if he knew the baby Arabella had been carrying was mine—but after awhile I didn’t care anymore. If he did, no one had uttered a word about it in my presence. My own father had absolutely no clue why I was so hell bent on destroying the Wilsons, he just loved that I was.

And yet, for everything that had gone down between us, the family patriarchs seemed to have an unspoken rule that their children were sacrosanct. That was, until yesterday when Jayce ordered me to kill Royce’s daughter, the only woman I’d ever loved.

And even though she was the same woman who’d made me want to die a thousand times over, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t snuff her out the way our daughter’s life had been snuffed out all those years before.

I had a choice to make: Jayce or Arabella?

Both of them my enemy, and yet both of them so ingrained in my soul that if I lost either one, a part of me would die right along with them. So what would it be? My twin or my lover? My darkness or my light?

* * *

A handfulof days later I sat in a cheap motel off the highway in the middle of nowhere Ohio, in a one stoplight town set up to cater to truck drivers and hookers, the phone I hadn’t used in almost eight years cradled in my right hand, a new burner phone I’d bought yesterday sitting on the bed to my left. On the nightstand next to me was a half empty bottle of whisky and a bucket of melting ice. I was drunk, but not so drunk that I could ignore the dull ache that had taken up residence in my gut and refused to leave no matter how many anti-acids I chomped down. (The whisky probably wasn’t helping matters, I conceded, but I needed it more than I needed my stomach lining, so there you go.)

I was pretty sure I knew what had to be done, but until I acted one way or the other, I could always change my mind. Until I sent the text I never in a million years thought I’d be on the verge of sending, things could always go the other way.

And yet, they wouldn’t.

The second I’d pulled that dusty old lock box out from under my floorboards and rifled through the contents inside, I’d as good as chosen my path. Dictated my future.

Signed Jayce’s death warrant.

Taking a deep swallow of the shimmering amber liquid, I mustered my resolve and, with only the briefest bit of hesitation, typed in my security code, bringing the ancient device to life.

Back when Arabella and I had first started dating, I’d bought a phone for each of us, linked to an account that could never be traced back to me. In case it ever fell into the wrong hands, I’d populated it with the names and phone numbers of random women I’d found in the phone book, hoping her father would never know that “Juliet” was his daughter’s secret lover … the son of his biggest rival.

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