Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 60198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 301(@200wpm)___ 241(@250wpm)___ 201(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 60198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 301(@200wpm)___ 241(@250wpm)___ 201(@300wpm)
“Our father should have left the pack to you,” I say.
“He doesn’t get on with my mate, remember?”
“Right,” I say. Gray’s mate is… well, a singular creature in a lot of ways.
Gray and I walk out of the jail together. I’d say it feels like a triumph, but not really. I didn’t like being caged. Didn’t like having to fight all my instincts. It was good that the boys were with me. Gave me something to protect. Connor was scared, but brave. Kept my mind off the walls that felt like they were closing in.
“If you wanted to buy a forest, all you had to do was ask. Callie and I would have been more than happy to help,” Gray says.
“They don’t want money.”
“Everybody wants money.”
“The guy wants a lot of money,” I correct myself. “They don’t want to be bought out now. They want to use the land for perpetuity. They want to claw every cent of profit from it from now until forever, and nobody can be bought out when they think like that.”
“You sound smarter than you used to,” he says. “Maybe leadership suits you.”
“We need to get Ellie out, asshole,” I say. “I don’t see her.”
The boys got out first. I insisted. Then Gray came back for me.
“Yeah,” he says. “About that.”
A few hours ago…
Ellie
After the cops caught us in the middle of nowhere, we were all put into different cars and taken away by different officers. Being female, I got put into a cell separate from all the males. I was worried about my brothers, and I was worried about Karl. It didn’t occur to me to worry about myself until the door closed behind me.
And that’s what got me to this point. To lying in the dark, trying to sleep but also trying not to sleep. I know I need rest, but I also want to keep my wits about me. In the end, sleep gets me.
I don’t know what time it is when I open my eyes. Late. It’s dark outside the barred window. I am surprised I somehow fell asleep in captivity. But that’s not the only surprise I get. I am no longer alone in the cell.
There’s a woman with me. She’s wearing a white dress and she’s looking at me with an expression somewhere between love and sadness. Her lips part, and she speaks.
“So. Here you are. Flushed out from hiding after all of these years. I knew you wouldn’t be far away from all that nonsense in the woods.”
I look up into my mother’s eyes. I feel a brief flush of safety and warmth. Then I push it away, because giving into that would be the most dangerous thing I could possibly do.
“Fuck off, Mom.”
She smiles, though it’s not a pleasant smile. It’s the smirk of a woman who serves herself over and above anything else.
“You act as though I’m dead.”
“You are dead. Dead to me. Dead to us.”
I sit up. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Seeing her fills me with sadness and anger now that I think about everything that has happened, and everything that is going to happen because of her.
She gives me a long-suffering look. As if I am the problem in this room. As if she didn’t spend the last decade doing everything but being a mother.
“Why are you here?”
“I’m here because you’re in trouble, and I want to help you.”
“How did you even know?”
She smiles and extends her left hand. She’s got a rock the size of a small island on her ring finger.
“I’m marrying Rainer Katsoff,” she says. “So I know when trouble is afoot. I met the man you’ve roped into helping you the other day. He stormed right into the office as if nothing bad could ever happen to him. I showed him otherwise.”
“Wait. You’re the secretary who broke a bottle over Karl’s head?”
My mother gives me a chaotic little smile and spreads her hands in a sort of self-introductory gesture.
“One and the same,” she says.
She has my begrudging respect for that.
“So you abandoned us, shacked up with our mortal enemy, and you’re helping him destroy our home?”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” she says. “The other is that you are going to jail. You’re responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage, and worse, endless assaults. You’re going to bear the brunt of the blame, because you were in charge. I left you in charge.”
“I was a child!”
“You were old enough to take care of the boys. They’ve all survived, and so have you, so perhaps stop blaming your mother for a less than ideal childhood.”
The fucking nerve of this woman is unbelievable. She is so delusional she is outright dangerous. I feel the hair on the back of my neck standing upright as I try to work out why she is here and what she wants from me. It can’t just be to gloat. She looks more intentional than that.