1
LIAM
The last trickle of daylight disappears behind the highest peak of McBride Mountain, taking with it any ability I had left to plaster on a fake smile and pretend I was actually enjoying the Memorial Day Festival this year.
It used to be my favorite time of year.
The start of summer.
When McBride Mountain truly comes alive again after making it through the cold, snowy winter that often feels never-ending.
Days grow longer and warmer.
The sun stays up well into the evening.
All the plants and animals wake up and begin relishing it all.
But the days of enjoying the beauty of this place and the traditions I grew up with are well behind me—irrevocably tainted by the ugly truth that looked back at me with the same eyes that day up on the mountain when my world came crashing down around me.
Now, as I pull away from the parking lot behind the church near town square, confident we’ve finished cleaning up from the crowd of locals and tourists who flocked downtown for the festivities today, I know there’s only one place to go.
Home.
Up the mountain.
To the land the McBrides have lived on, worked, and protected for generation after generation.
The McBrides did…
A shudder rolls through me at the thought of going back there, to the only place I’ve ever called home, just as it has every day for the past nine months since I learned the truth about who I am, about where I came from, about the blood that runs through my veins.
My driver’s license may say Liam McBride, but I know—and now, so does everyone else in town—that I’m a Byers. That my father brutally killed my mother after she risked her life to get me away from his abuse.
And they know what he did to Willow…
Something I can’t help but see every time I look at her.
Those bruises, cuts and scrapes that marred her body when Killian dragged her from the river weren’t merely caused by the rocks and logs in the water, and the emotional scars she now carries are far worse than anything physical she endured.
All because of the man who is my father.
My stomach turns violently, and I grip the steering wheel tighter, sitting at the single stop sign in town for far too long, unable to force myself to take the long, winding road past the falls and up the mountain to my cabin. Because as soon as I get there, I’ll have to spend another night alone, with nothing but my thoughts that keep me awake and nightmares that attack the moment I do manage to fall asleep.
And I don’t know if I can survive another night.
They’ve only gotten worse as the weeks have passed.
Each night, when I close my eyes, I see his.
The violence in the green orbs when he faced down Killian on the mountain. The way he looked at Willow and didn’t see her at all, but rather, the woman who gave birth to me and then died to save me. The way he didn’t even see her as a person but as something to possess, to control.
That’s what I have to look forward to when I get home—those images, those realities.
But I don’t have anywhere else to go.
I’ve never left the mountain.
I’ve never even left this town.
