Page 29 of Glass Rose
“Yes, we do.” My voice sounds hollow in my ears. “There’s something I need.”
The kitchen doorway looks like the entrance to hell. One step. Another. Breathe through your mouth, not your nose. My mother sprawls on the floor, her stomach a mangled mess of tissue and bone.
I crouch down. The white-gold pendant my father gave her on their thirty-fifth anniversary glints in the morning light. It’s a small heart with their initials engraved on the back. She never took it off, not even to shower. My fingers tremble as I reach for the clasp, struggling to unhook it from around her neck.
“Let me,” Gavin says.
My hands are slick with—I don’t want to think about what they’re slick with. I move away, observing as his steady hands work the delicate mechanism. He lifts the necklace free and places it in my palm, closing my fingers around it. The metal warms against my skin, carrying the last traces of my mother’s body heat.
“She wore this every day since I was ten.” I fasten it around my own neck. “Dad saved for years to buy it for her.”
“I have something for you.” Gavin walks to the back door, rummaging through one of the canvas bags I didn’t notice, then pulls something out with unexpected reverence—my grandfather’s hunting knife, the one that always hung above the kitchen sink.
“You grabbed this?” I push myself up, legs unsteady.
“Seemed important.” He tests the edge with his thumb. “Good steel. Old.”
“My grandfather’s. He was a hunter,” I say. “Taught my dad everything he knew. He tried to teach me, but I was always more interested in what made the animals tick than in killing them.”
“You’ll need it.”
“I don’t know how to use it.”
“I’ll teach you.”
“I—”
“You need protection.” He retrieves the leather sheath with a worn belt looping through the back, designed to hang from a hunter’s waist. Then looks at me. “Where do you want it?”
I stare at him blankly.
“Hip is visible,” he continues, “easier to access, but can be annoying while sitting. Ankle limits mobility. Back is hard to reach quickly.”
“I don’t?—”
“Thigh,” he decides for me. “Accessible and moves with you.”
He kneels before me, the knife and sheath in his hands. “May I?”
A nod is all I can manage.
His fingers graze my jeans, securing the knife to my thigh. The touch burns through to my skin, a point of heat in a world gone cold.
“Thank you,” I whisper, not just for the knife but for everything—for coming with me, for holding me together when I shattered, for not leaving me to face this alone.
He looks up. “Too tight?”
“It’s fine.”
His eyes hold mine a beat too long, his touch lingering, before he clears his throat and stands.
“I gathered some supplies while you were showering.” He points to the bags. “Canned food, batteries, first aid stuff. Flashlight. And these.” He holds up a set of car keys. “Garage?”
“My dad’s truck,” I say.
“Options are good. We’ll take both if we can. You drive the truck, I’ll take the van.”
The practicality of it all, planning our escape while standing in my parents’ blood, strikes me as obscene. But what’s the alternative? Curl up and die beside them?
