Page 40 of Prodigal Son

Her dreams wouldn’t follow her to Cain’s room. For some reason, she always felt safe there, safer knowing he was home again.

Rushing through the garden gate, she crept onto the dark porch and climbed through the unlocked kitchen window. Gracie had moved a table below the window after the night Cybil accidentally fell and woke the whole house up.

Once inside, she shut the window and took off her shoes. Tiptoeing down the hall, she went to his room and quietly opened the door. The hinges creaked and she paused, surprised a fire was lit in the hearth. Brow furrowed, she looked at the empty bed. No Cain.

Her jaw clenched in anger, and her eyes burned with tears of disappointment. Where was he? Why wasn’t he here like he promised he would be?

She couldn’t accept that he left the farm again, especially without a goodbye, so she crawled onto the bed and waited. But the longer she sat alone with her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, the more it became clear he wasn’t coming back.

His betrayal sliced deep, over and over again until she could hardly feel the ache anymore. She didn’t know why she drew so much comfort from his nearness, she only knew that in his presence she felt safe. How foolish, when his abandonment hurt most of all.

CHAPTER 15

Destiny’s shoulders propelled off the bed as her body flung upward with a startled gasp. Air filled her lungs as if she were breaking through the icy surface of a lake she’d been drowning under for days. The sudden shock of waking so abruptly left her shaken. Heart punching hard, her chest vibrated with inexplicable panic.

Home. She was home.

Disoriented, she searched her bedroom for anything that might have startled her awake. Brain still foggy, she wasn’t sure if she’d had a nightmare or some outside source woke her so brusquely.

Was there a bang? Perhaps thunder? Was someone breaking in? Her panic didn’t immediately subside when her brain recognized she was safe and everything looked normal.

Blowing out a breath, she reached for her phone but came up short. Where was it? She glanced at the floor, thinking it might have fallen off the nightstand, saw nothing but a dirty sock and a few novels she’d been trudging through.

A golden haze backlit the blinds, but she wasn’t sure if it was dawn or dusk. Grabbing the remote, she flicked on the television. 7:15 am—still morning.

“Wow.” She fell back into the pillows, her heart finally slowing and her equilibrium returning. She hadn’t slept that deeply in years.

Pushing her unruly curls away from her face, she stilled. Wait…

She looked around her bedroom again, sensing something was off. Memories teased the fringe of her mind like a thought when one suddenly forgets what they wanted to say. She was supposed to do something or be somewhere. She couldn’t remember. Something about Vito.

“Shit. I need my phone.” She stumbled out of bed and froze. “What in the mother of Rosemary Rogers am I wearing?”

She looked like she either escaped from a psych ward or a Victorian novel. Gathering up the cloth nightgown, she frowned, thinking over her last insomniac shopping episode. No, she definitely wouldn’t have ordered a nightgown like this no matter how sleep deprived her shopping habits tended to be. So where did it come from?

She rushed toward the door to find a phone, but stalled out again at the full-length mirror. “Holy Medusa.” Her hair was in a full-blown, bride-of-Frankenstein frizz.

She shook off the distraction. “Phone.”

Darting into the hall, she froze again at the sound of a toilet flushing, something that shouldn’t happen when one lived alone and wasn’t using the bathroom. Her back hit the wall, and she searched for a weapon. The nearest object was a metal water bottle so she lifted it like a club—“Oh, Jesus!”—Water spilled down her front. “Great,” she hissed, swiping a hand down the billowy front of the hideous nightdress.

The bathroom door opened and she sucked in a breath, drawing back her water bottle club, ready to attack. A large shadow fell on the adjacent wall and Destiny swung.

“What the fuck, D?” Her brother stumbled into the door frame, a hand holding his head where the water bottle hit.

“Vito? What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you. Christ, I’m seeing Tweetie birds. What the fuck did you hit me for?”

“I thought you were a burglar. Why are you in your underwear in my house?”

He wobbled to an upright position and growled at her, wrenching the metal water bottle out of her hand and flinging it down the hall. “Where the hell have you been?”

“I was…” She couldn’t remember what she did last night or who she’d been with. Had she gone out? Stayed in? Ordered bad Chinese food and passed out? There had to be alcohol involved for this level of amnesia.

Startled by the blank spots occupying her mind, she looked up at her brother. He must have recognized the confusion in her eyes, because his scowl abruptly shifted to concern. “Are you okay?”

“I think so.” Disoriented and oddly relieved by her brother’s presence, she wanted to throw her arms around him but hesitated on account of the underwear. “Can you please put some clothes on.”

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