Branded (Ignite #2)

“You sure are a hard woman to get ahold of.”

My stomach plummets all the way to my feet and vomit makes it’s way up into my throat. It’s the voice from my childhood, the same one I hear in my nightmares every night calling me a whore and telling me I’m not good enough.

“Baby, are you there?” he asks.

“Don’t you dare call me baby,” I whisper angrily into the phone.

DJ wraps his hand around my arm, but I barely feel it. He asks me who’s on the phone, but I can’t speak.

“I got out, but I’m sure you already know that,” he laughs.

My hands shake and I can barely hold onto the phone anymore. Why can’t I just hang up the fucking phone? Why can’t I just tell him to go to hell and leave me alone?

“I had a lot of thinking to do while I was behind bars, baby. A lot of years to become an old man and think about all the things I’ve done. I’m supposed to make amends to the people I’ve wronged, so I figure I should start with you.”

His voice through the line is like nails on a chalkboard and my arms pebble with goose bumps.

“Did you get any of my notes?”

I whimper and squeeze my eyes closed.

“Give me the fucking phone,” DJ curses right next to me.

I turn away from him and wrap my arm around my waist, trying to hold myself together. It feels like my insides are going to spill out of my stomach and splatter all over the ground at my feet. I don’t want DJ to see me like this. I don’t want him to know how weak just the sound of this man’s voice makes me.

“I’m comin’ clean now, baby, it’s time. Your momma, she didn’t run away. She talked about it all the time, but she never had the guts to do it until that last day. I came home from work and found all her shit packed. She told me she was done and she was leavin’ both of us. I just couldn’t have that, baby. I couldn’t have her leavin’ me with a kid to take care of all by myself. I took care of it, though. I wouldn’t let her leave unless I was the one makin’ it happen.”

A sob works its way up my throat, but I force it back. I don’t want to hear the next words out of his mouth. I don’t want to know that he’s even more of a monster than I ever thought.

“I killed her, baby. I’m sorry, but I killed your momma. She was a whore and a worthless mother, but I’m still sorry about it. I just didn’t want you to turn out like her. You didn’t turn out like her, did you baby? You didn’t turn into a liar and a whore and a cheat, did you? People burn in hell for something like that.”

The phone falls from my hand and clatters to the ground. DJ snatches it up and screams into it, but I know he’s not there any more. He said what he needed to say, he messed with my mind and my heart and there was no reason for him to stay on the line for another second. Somehow, he killed my mother and made me believe she left because she didn’t love me, that she went away to start a new family because I wasn’t good enough. He tried to burn me tonight to send me to hell where he thinks I belong.

I finally turn around and look up into DJ’s angry face and I realize he’s probably right. I do belong in hell. I deserve to burn for dragging DJ into my life and putting him on my father’s radar. How could I ever think that I was deserving of a good future, when the sins of my past would never let me go?

Phina hasn’t said more than two words to me the last few days. It scares me more than thinking about everything that could have gone wrong the other night if we hadn’t been parked right out front of a fire station. What if Brad hadn’t been with us all night and I just pulled over on the side of the road? We would have been trapped. Not only could the gas tank have exploded, the back of the ambulance is filled with compressed air oxygen tanks. If it had gotten any hotter inside of that thing, we would have been blown to bits. Once again, I was fucking helpless with Phina. I couldn’t do anything but stand inside that fucking tin box on wheels and wait for someone else to save us. This shit has GOT to stop.

Dax got a court order to pull Phina’s phone records and the call that she got right outside the PD came from a payphone on the other side of town, only a few blocks from the fire station. An APB has been put out for Phina’s father, but so far, there’s been no trace of him. It’s like he just keeps disappearing into the fucking wind.

I glance at Phina on the opposite end of the couch, watching her stare blindly at a movie I put in after dinner. I want to reach over and pull her against me. I want to hold her and tell her everything will be okay, but I can’t make that fucking promise. I can’t make her any kind of promise when her father is still out there. I have no idea what he said to her on the phone and after I questioned her a few times on the ride home that night, she completely shut down and told me it didn’t matter. She’s quickly retreating back to the person she was just a few months ago: cold, aloof and pretending like everything that happened between us isn’t real. I hate that she won’t trust me. She’ll give me her body and she’ll give me the words, but they mean absolutely nothing when she doesn’t really believe them. She doesn’t believe that she’s good enough to be loved and nothing I do will change her mind.

The doorbell rings and when Phina looks at me with curiosity, I don’t say a word as I get up from the couch to greet my guests. The only thing I have left is emotional manipulation. Hopefully, it works.

As soon as I open the door, my small townhouse is filled with so much noise you’d think I invited a hundred people over. I hold the door open as my sisters and my mother file inside, each one wrangling a child or two and helping them remove their coats and shoes. Kids yell, women argue, shoes are thrown around the entryway like landmines and I couldn’t be happier.