Not the flat his mother had moved him into when she remarried and decided she needed her new husband more than she needed her son.
Not the boys’ school with its locked doors, rules, and quiet cruelty.
Home was stone walls and cold hallways and a fire always burning in the hearth.Home was Keir MacLaren swearing at the kettle and strumming a guitar at midnight like sleep was optional.Home was being hauled out of a place that smelled like bleach and punishment, and being told, without softness, without pity?—
You’re coming with me.
“You understand?”Bell asks.
Callum lifts his head slowly.His eyes burn.He swipes at his face, furious at the betrayal of tears.
“Yeah,” he croaks.“I understand.”
“I’ll be at the castle when you arrive,” Bell says.“There are legal matters we must discuss.And…someone else.”
Callum frowns.“Someone else?”
Bell hesitates.“We’ll speak when you get here, Mr.Fraser.”
The line goes dead.
Callum sits in the silence, as if he’s waiting for the solicitor to call back and correct himself.
Keir is dead.
The sentence repeats in his head, useless, impossible, obscene.For the last week, he’d been on the road performing at different pubs, playing and doing what he loved.
And now he would be returning to an empty castle.
A truck roars past on the highway, wind buffeting the car.The world keeps moving.The world is disrespectful like that.
Callum laughs once, a short, broken sound.“Fuck,” he whispers.
He turns the car around.
He drives like a man chasing a ghost.
Hours compress.Gas stations blur into one another, bright aisles, bitter coffee, fluorescent lights that make his skin look sick.He doesn’t remember eating.He remembers buying something wrapped in plastic, taking two bites, and throwing it away because it tasted like cardboard and grief.
As the miles pass, his mind returns to the crash that changed his life.
Callum is twelve again, sitting on the floor of a living room that smells like lemon polish and his father’s aftershave.His mother’s hands shake around a glass she never drinks from.The news says private plane, crash and burn, no survivors.His father, who had finally made enough money to buy the kind of freedom men brag about, had learned to fly like it was a trophy.
Callum remembers the way people said,tragic, senseless,with their sad eyes and their softer voices, like tragedy was a thing to be admired.
He remembers that after, everything got quieter.His mother got sharper.Less patient.More tired.And then she remarried, as if love was a doorway out of grief, and Callum became the thing that didn’t fit in the new life.
By fourteen, Callum is made entirely of rage.
Rage at his father for leaving.Rage at his mother for moving on.Rage at himself for still wanting anyone to choose him.
He gets into trouble, real trouble.Not childish rebellion, not scraped knees and foul language.Trouble that lands him in court.Trouble that his mother can’t stand to see in her new husband’s house.
So she sends him away.
The boys’ school is all stone and discipline and silence.It smells like damp wool, bleach, and hopelessness.The staff speaks in clipped commands.The older boys learn where to hide bruises.Callum learns to punch first.To keep his back to the wall.To sleep with one ear open.
He tells himself no one is coming.
