Page 33 of Tiger Betrayal

He pointed to his head. “I was sick up here.”

She sat down on edge of the bed. “What was wrong?”

Stellan winced. “The head got broke around the time I was Turned. It wasn’t even about me, and what happened to me. I watched my brothers die.”

His words were shocking.

“Turned,” she repeated softly.

“My real dad left when we were little. He and my mom hadn’t wanted kids, and then he got her pregnant, and she said they didn’t have money for an abortion.”

“She told you that?” Laramie asked, disgusted. Why would any mother ever tell her child that?

“Yeah. Lots of times. She would say, ‘I wish I had that money to get rid of you.’ It was her favorite line when she was mad. She said my dad left because we weren’t what he signed up for, and my mom was heartbroken. She said it was our fault she lost the love of her life. She had wanted no children and then found out she was having triplets. She tried to do an adoption, but the parents backed out at the last minute, and she got stuck with us. She used to bring them up to us a lot. She hated them for sticking her with us. She used to stalk the woman’s social media pages and harass her. She would show us and want us to laugh with her. I think those parents didn’t want to deal with my mom though. They had been arguing at the end of my mom’s pregnancy with us. My mom painted it like she was their victim, but the stories didn’t make sense.” He shrugged up his shoulder. “It all makes sense now that she’s dead. Time and space make things clearer sometimes.” There was pain in his voice. He swallowed hard. “My mom met my stepdad. The got married fast. He had eyes like mine. Me and my brothers didn’t like him. He was loud and didn’t like that my mom had kids. He took her on trips a lot and left me and my brothers behind.”

“Starting what age?”

Stellan shrugged. “Five maybe. They would put groceries in the pantry and then leave for a few days at a time. We would just watch TV and eat until the food ran out, and they would come back. We were good. We didn’t go outside. My mom said not to ever go outside when they were gone. I remember she would be really happy the day before they left, and really angry when she returned. The day before he took her on trips were my favorite days. Sometimes she would cook a meal for us. A real one, like a normal family. She seemed happy. And then she would come back angry and at first, I thought she was so mad because my stepdad was fighting with her, but then I figured out that she was just fucking’ miserable coming back to me and my brothers.” Stellan gritted his teeth so hard, his jaw muscles twitched. “I can’t look at you when I talk about this.” He turned and sat in the open doorway, facing the trees. “I’ve never talked about any of this. Never.”

“I won’t judge any of it,” she promised. “I’ll just listen.”

He nodded jerkily and rubbed the back of his neck. “She liked to smack us when we were kids if we were being bad, but sometimes I couldn’t figure out what we were doing wrong. I started bringing her flowers when I was little. I saw it in a movie. This kid brought his mom flowers, and she cried these happy tears and gave him a big hug. I wanted that more than anything, but my mom wasn’t like the lady in the movie. Most of the time she just threw them in the trash. I know it was stupid, but it felt right to give her flowers. I hoped that someday she would be able to see me. Dame and Mars shut down on her early, and they were mad at me for holding on. They still get mad about it sometimes. They feel like I betrayed them sometimes by trying with my mom. The funeral happened a couple years ago, and they were angry that I was having a hard time with her death, but that was my mom. She was the only one I got. Anyway, the older me and my brothers got, the more she would travel with my stepdad. Three-day trips turned into three-week trips. I think they had another house somewhere and they could live the life they wanted there. As soon as we were old enough, me and my brothers got jobs and started paying down the eviction notices and late bills. We took it all over so we could keep living in the house. Mars and Dame steadied out in that home with Mom always gone, but my head worked over everything on this stupid loop. Why wasn’t I good enough? Why couldn’t she love me. Why was she always leaving? Why was she always calling us names? Why did she like to hurt me? Why didn’t she care about the goddamn blue flowers. I loved my brothers though, and I got a good job, and I helped, and we were in it together. My mom would come back to the house every once in a while and pick it apart. She’d be screaming about every dish we left in the sink, every line of dust she could find with her finger, every piece of dirty clothes on the ground, which confused the shit out of us because the house was way messier when she was in charge of it. And then after she found out we caught up the late payments on the mortgage, she put a for sale sign in the front yard. My brothers were pissed. I was hurt. That was our home. The house took a while to sell. My brothers were sabotaging the showings, and my mom wasn’t around to stop them. So, she told us to get out. She and my stepdad wanted the money to refinance their other house. She was screaming all the time. Just…hated us.” Stellan shook his head and ran a hand roughly over his hair. “She would send us these voicemails saying all we’d ever done was ruin her life. She would tell us we wasted years of her life. She would get drunk and tell us about our real dad and how in love they were. She said we looked just like him and she hated looking at us because it was like seeing him all over again. And then things changed. She burned on us for a straight year, and then she wrote me and my brothers in this text loop apologizing for everything she’d done. She said she’d been on drugs and drinking too much and had been in a spiral, and she wanted to meet up to sell the house to us. She didn’t want it anymore. We were turning twenty-one, and we could do it. We could get a down payment between the three of us. She wanted forty thousand dollars more than she had paid for it, but we didn’t care. We’d raised each other in that house. She said she wanted to meet on a Wednesday, and she would bring her realtor with the paperwork. Wednesday was our twenty-first birthday, so I thought maybe she was going to surprise us with a present or something. So, me and my brothers…we met at the house, and our stepdad’s truck was already parked out front. We figured they had ridden there together, or my mom had borrowed his truck for the day. We went into the house, but no one was there, so we went out to the garage to see if Mom was there. And she wasn’t.” Stellan got quiet.

The heaviness of his sadness was overwhelming. Laramie stood and padded over to him, sat behind him and rested the palm of her hand against his back. Stellan hung his head. “We’d never seen my stepdad’s animal. We’d always known something was different about him, but we didn’t have any idea what he really was. He was waiting there to kill us.”

“Oh my gosh,” Laramie uttered. “Why?”

Stellan shook his head. “I don’t know. Dame thought mom had asked him, but Mars thinks he did it so he and Mom could move forward and cut ties with her old life. He thinks Mom was talking about our dad too much because we grew up to look like him, and he snapped. Sometimes in the wild, cats kill other males’ offspring on instinct. I don’t know. I just know what happened in that garage. I will never forget the sound of my brothers’ screaming.” Stellan slowly pressed his hands to his ears. “It plays in my mind. I tried to help them. He got me quick. He was huge, and God it hurt so bad. Some of the screaming was mine. I remember telling my brothers to run, but we couldn’t, you know? There was a big bond there. We couldn’t just leave each other. I remember when he was done, his Cat just sat in the corner, watching us bleed out. Mars stopped making noise first. Then Dame. I was the last one, and I hated it. Hated him. I remember talking to my brothers, telling them it was going to be okay. That everything was going to be okay, but their bodies were twitching, and my vision was going. Everything got dark, and all I could hear was the growling. I thought my stepdad had come back to finish me.”

Laramie slid her arms around him and rested her head against his back. Every muscle in his body was tense. He slid his hand over hers, as if to keep her there, hugging him from behind.

“I wish he would’ve just finished it.”

What a heartbreaking admission.

“Why?” she asked on a breath. “You are okay. You are here. Your brothers are still here.”

Stellan had started shaking though, and he rested his cheek against his shoulder. “I woke up broken, and I didn’t feel right in my own skin until two years ago. It’s a lot of damage, Laramie. It would’ve been easier to stay asleep.”

“But then I would’ve never met you,” she said, her voice thick with emotion. “I’m glad you didn’t die. I’m glad.” A warm tear slid to her cheek and she hugged him tighter. A tiny whimper escaped her as she imagined what he must’ve seen in that garage—his last memories as a human. She imagined him comforting his brothers while his humanity was dying.

“Your stepdad is gone?” she asked.

He nodded.

“How?”

“I killed him.”

The admission should’ve chilled her blood. It should’ve made her afraid, but honesty escaped her lips as she whispered, “Good.”

“My brothers don’t know that part. They think it was self-inflicted. They didn’t really give a shit to ask questions. They had checked out the day their Cats had been born.”

“And your mom?”

“She lived for a while. Got cancer and died a couple years ago. She died alone. Sometimes, I put blue flowers on her grave still. It’s habit. It’s not for her. It’s for me.”

“Did she ever find out it was your stepdad who did that to you?” she asked softly.