Page 7 of Brutal Alpha Bully

I never asked her, but I’d always assumed I got the gift from her.

But once she was gone, it was her gift of a home that made Silverville the obvious choice. A homeaid in full and gloriously big compared to what Nora and I were used to. With enough space for a swing set and a garden in the back, and room for us to breathe and grow. Nora had a bedroomanda playroom. I grew flowers. We used homegrown tomatoes to make pasta and pizza sauce, sometimes slicing them and eating them with fresh basil and mozzarella.

Yes, our neighbors held disdain for us. But sometimes weeks could go by where we’d avoid interaction with them and things could feel somewhat normal. Nora and I were always enough for each other.

And now it’s gone. My grandmother is gone, and her home—which I had imbued with my magic, doing everything I could to protect it from the daemon fire—is gone, too. Nothing more than a pile of silken ash.

“Lucian’s leaving.”

When Nora says this, I realize I haven’t answered her other question, but it’s a relief that I have something to do instead. So I just nod, swallow, and get out of the car, leaving the question about leaving Silverville hanging between us.

When I’m out, I lock the car and cast a quick protection spell over it so I’ll know if anyone—or anything—gets too close to her. Nora just stares out the windshield, her hair braided back in two long strands. Without a shower, dry shampoo and braiding were the best I could do to keep it from looking greasy. It—and everything else—still retains the stench of the daemon fire, but aside from dabbing peppermint oil on her wrists, there was nothing I could do to keep the stench at bay.

Moving quickly, using magic to speed up the walk, I cut down twenty minutes to five, arriving at the doorstep of myold home breathless and feeling dried up. I’ve been using more magic since the night of the fire than I’m used to, and I can feel it behind my eyes, in my temples, pressing at the bottom of my throat.

When I climb up the few creaking stairs to the porch, I have to swallow down the memories climbing up my esophagus and threatening to make me cry. The same weathered bench sits on the front, though it looks worse now than it ever has. The pillow nestled in its corner looks like it’s been through the worst—snow and rain and blazing heat without so much as a repositioning.

My mother must have heard me approaching because she pulls aside the curtain over the little arched window on the door before I even have the chance to knock. I hear her gasp, muffled through the wood. Then she says my name, more breath than word.

“Seraphina?”

Wincing, and wishing she would simply call me “Phina” like everyone else, I nod and wait for her to undo the fifteen different locking mechanisms on the inside of the house. When she’s finished, she throws it open and steps forward, her arms going around me.

I’m a small, slight woman, and I know that. Not having much to eat growing up ensured I stayed skinny, scrappy. But that feeling goes out the door when I wrap my arms around my mother and feel her ribs grating against me. I pull back and take in the wan, exhausted expression hanging under her eyes and around her cheeks. Now, her shadows are more purple, more drained than I remember from childhood.

“Mom,” I say, swallowing again through a thickness in my throat, adrenaline already pulsing through my body at the sightof her, at the feeling of being in this house. I love my mother, but the fact that she did nothing to protect me when I was younger means that she feels just as unsafe to me as the others.

“I could feel that you would come,” she whispers, though nobody else is home. She draws me inside and closes the door again, notably not locking it. I silently thank her for that—I don’t want there to be a delay if I need to leave. “And I was just waiting. It’s been so long—where is Nora?”

The last time I came, I made the mistake of bringing Nora inside with me. When she was a baby, I’d struggled with the choice of leaving her behind in the car or bringing her with. Back then, it always felt safer to have her on my hip, no matter where I was going.

But now Nora is old enough, and smart enough, that it makes more sense to leave her in the car. To hope that she knows enough to get out of that situation if she has to.

“She’s not here,” I say, feeling bad for rushing through this, knowing the specific ache I might feel if my daughter only ever came to me in a crisis. If the only time I got to see her was when she had nowhere else to go.

But I also know that I would do anything to protect Nora—and that includes leaving. And yet, for years and years and even now, my mother chooses to stay with my father and brother rather than leave them. Despite my brother’s treatment of me and my father’s indifference to it. Despite knowing it would mean seeing more of Nora and me.

“How is she doing?”

“Just fine. Enjoying the book you gave her.”

My mom lights up at the sound of that, and I wish again that everything could be different. For a wild, hopeful second, Ithink of pitching the idea to her—that she, Nora, and I could take her emergency fund and run off together. Between the money and my magic, surely we could shake them, get away from the family that’s been holding us down, keeping us here.

But just as soon as I think it, I meet her eyes and know that she would never agree. More than the fear of them finding her is the fact that, somehow, my mother still loves my father. My brother.

So instead, I clear my throat, eyes darting to the hallway that leads to her sewing room, where I know for a fact she keeps an emergency fund. Since I was a teenager, she’s been squirreling away money there, a tiny bit from each round of mending she does.

Just in case.

She gave it to me the night I told her I was pregnant with Nora. And she gave me more before Grandma died. Both times, I worked my ass off to pay her back, mailing the money to her in fake birthday cards, greeting cards, magazine renewal envelopes.

“You need money,” she says, saving me from having to ask, and I balloon with relief when she stands at my nod, already moving in the direction of her sewing room.

Quietly, I sit and fidget on the couch, desperately wishing I wasn’t here but grateful we have someone to come to. As I sit, I turn over Nora’s question in my head. Why not leave Silverville?

I come up with no answer. No justification for staying.

As I wait, hearing the gentle shuffle of Mom looking through her things in the back room, I imagine what it will be like. Finding a cheap motel and sleeping with a hand on Noraat all times. Driving out of the mountains—would we go west, to California?

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