“You have a meeting in San Francisco tomorrow. Leave everything to me. I’ll get it all cleared up by the time you return,” Grandmother purrs.
God, I hate her. Almost as much as I hate him.
“I don’t think he means to cause trouble,” my father says, and I frown. I’ve never heard him say anything good about me before.
“Now, that, I don’t believe,” she replies with a dry laugh. “It comes fromherDNA, not ours.”
“Don’t start, Mother,” he sighs.
“I’m just saying, if you would have married someone of pureblood instead of that vagrant girl, we wouldn’t be in this position,” she tuts, and I hear the clink of glass again. “And then for her to go die like she did, leaving you with those babies.”
“I said not now!” he yells, and the sound of glass smashing is loud and clear. Sabella flinches next to me, and I pull her closer. “It wasn’t her fault she died, Mother. She didn’t choose to leave us!”
“So, whose fault is it, if not hers? Theirs?”
A chill runs down my spine.
Surely she can’t be suggesting we could have killed our mother. We were just babies, seconds old and entirely innocent.
“Sammy?” Sabella whispers from next to me.
“It’s no one’s fault,” my father mutters, sounding defeated.
“It’s always someone’s fault, Maxwell. No one would blame you for getting rid of them. You’ve played along with this for long enough. You’ve proven your point to the world. A Gunner never shirks his responsibilities. But whether you like it or not, they are responsible for her death.”
“She died giving birth,” he says, tired.
“Giving birth tohim,” she corrects. “And look how he’s repaid her memory.”
“Sammy?” Sabella whispers louder this time, and I turn to look at her. She’s still crying, but now, so am I. Her face is blurry through the tears in my eyes, and I realize I’m squeezing her hand too tightly.
“How you can even bear to look at them is beyond me,” Grandmother says.
There’s silence, then…
“I can’t,” my father replies, his voice thick with emotion. “They did kill her. They took her from me, and I wish I could forgive them, but I can’t. I know rationally it wasn’t their fault, but inside, I can’t get past it. I still miss her so much.”
Sabella is crying, and so am I, but it’s nothing compared to the anguished sounds coming from my father’s office. My father is crying.
“There, there, Maxwell.”
“They didn’t mean to, and I know that,” he sobs, his deep voice rumbling through the house—through my soul. “But I hate them for it. For taking her from me.”
I stumble to my feet, needing to get away from here, away from him, away from the pain filling this house. I don’t need to hear anything else he has to say.
I take off running out of the house into the rain. I don’t even know where I’m going, not that it matters. What matters is I’m not inside those walls anymore.
I run until my legs ache and my lungs burn. Until my tears dry up and my clothes are soaked through with sweat and blood from my cane wounds re-opening. I run and run and run.
But I’ll never be able to run from the memories or the words that haunt me.
We killed her.
I killed her.
I’m a murderer.
The crushing misery and guilt that drags at my muscles is agonizing. Everything hurts. My fractured mind, my broken body, my tortured soul. I run until I can’t run anymore. Until I’m broken down and have to put myself back together as someone new.
