Page 24 of Like a Hurricane

Torin leaves the moment he can, reluctantly agreeing to bring me supplies in the morning.

After I settle Arryn into the bed in the only bedroom in the cabin, I cover her with a couple of blankets to get her warm again after the trek through the unforgiving winter chill, and go about getting a fire started to warm the place.

It was as bad as I thought it was going to be, dust everywhere, empty cupboards, cobwebs in the corners. But this was going to be home for the foreseeable future, and I needed to make it as such.

The last time I was in Ravenpeak Bay, I’d ignored this sense of calmness being out in the middle of nowhere brings. I’d ignored the pull to this cabin, a place I’d built for me for the quiet and the beauty of this small island, but now as I start to make the place more livable, the fat full moon penetrating through the holes in the trees, illuminating the fresh snow, I realize this is home.

Not the sterile apartment back on the mainland, nor the many other houses and apartments I have scattered across the US. This cabin, this one bedroom, log building surrounded by nothing but trees and rocks and snow, on this tiny island constantly battered by the elements and tormented by the rough sea, ishome.

The island was like Arryn.

Wild. Beautiful. Unpredictable.

She reminded me of the storms and the skies, the unforgiving seas and wind. She was exactly as I call her. A storm. Ahurricane.

So very fucking hard to ignore and harder not to be struck by the utter power and beauty of it.

She didn’t even have to open her mouth for me to know she was a woman to worship.

Chapter Eleven

There’s light streaming through a window where the curtains have been left open. I’m laying close to it, buried under a pile of blankets. I am fucking hot. Sweat slickens my skin and I hastily start to kick at them to try and get cool.

It takes me a moment to realize this is not the hospital. There are no beeping machines, instead the only noise I can hear is the caw of a raven – or maybe it was a crow, I didn’t know the difference, and gone were the sterile walls and smell that was simply hospital, acidic, potent, and not at all comforting. But wherever I am now, smells delightful, like fresh wood burning on a fire, leather and pine. My arm twinges as I move to sit up, the stitches pulling like a bitch and the pain is a dull, throbbing ache that I choose to ignore as adrenaline spikes and my heart picks up speed.

So much had happened. My dad…oh god, my dad!Tears threaten as I recall the look of shock that crossed his face a moment before his body went limp. They’d shot him! Killed him. Right in front of me. It was like mom all over again, the blood, the screams, the panic… It was happening again.

I suck in a lungful of air and try to calm my breathing, just like the therapists told me to do when I went to them years ago.

I play through the memory, trying to detach myself from it so I can see it clearer without having my emotions jade what I can remember. It was a routine dinner, I didn’t want to go home so I went with my dad, I was never supposed to be there. It was a normal fucking evening…until it wasn’t.

I’d recognized them the moment they’d stormed the private dining room we had occupied for the evening. Kenneth and Malakai Ware were a growing thorn in my father’s side. But they were just competition, they weren’t supposed to be killers.

Or so I thought.

They hadn’t hesitated when it came to shooting my father and the man he was having dinner with. It was Kenneth that pulled the trigger on the both of them, but it was Malakai who tried to pin me down so his dad could finish me off too.

There was so much blood. All over the floor, all over me. And while I could detach myself somewhat, it didn’t stop the older memories from layering on top of the new ones.

I choke on my own sob, hand coming around my throat as if it could stop the lump forming, threatening to choke me as flashbacks of the night my mother died play through my mind. The memories of the night when she was murdered.

It was so dark, my father and I had gone out with my sister for the evening, my mother wasn’t feeling well so she stayed home. We lived in a safe neighborhood, nothing bad had ever happened there. We got back late, and I was the first one through the door, I was so used to walking in late and not wanting to disturb anyone, I left the lights off. I could navigate that house with my eyes closed so I didn’t need it and that night was no different. I kicked my shoes off at the door and stepped through to what was the living room, but then my foot hit a thick wet patch on the wood flooring, and I slipped. I cried out as my head thumped off the floor but then I noticed how wet it was, it was soaking through my clothes, it was on my skin and hands and face.

“Dad!” I’d called, wincing with the throb in my head, “Dad, I think there’s a leak!”

I heard both my dad and my sister rush in, I was still trying to get up off the floor, trying not to slip again and then the lights were turned on and I had to shield my eyes against the burn.

My sister screamed. It was the kind of sound that you remember years later, in the dead of night when everything else is silent. It’s the kind of sound that rattles your bones and sinks into the very soul of you, marking you from inside. When I finally looked at them, my sister was sobbing, clutching her mouth as if it could contain the cries she was unleashing, but my dad was staring at me. My eyes dropped to my hands and then I saw it.

The blood.

I was covered in blood. I was wearing white that night, but it was stained red, my skin was smeared with it, it was under my nails.

I swung around and found her immediately.

My mother.

I didn’t know a person could bleed so much. I guess I never really thought about it. But I’d come in and slipped on her blood, landed only a foot away from her still and lifeless corpse.

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