Dark Vow (Blackwoods College)

But if you can’t, then I will hire three men to find your father in prison. Two of them will hold him down while the third cuts him open with a rusty shiv. My men will unwind your father’s guts like rope and strangle him with them, nice and slow. He’ll suffer, I promise.

I won’t stop there. Your mother will be next. I’ll hire four men for her, but I won’t go into details about what they’ll do.

Suffice to say, it won’t be nice.

So please, do yourself and your family a favor, and stay away from Calvin.

Sincerely yours,

Raymond Solar

I lowered the page.

Mom’s face was ashen. I saw it then. I’d gotten so used to her floating around like a ghost that I almost missed it.

The fear. The pain.

Those fucking bastards.

I crumpled the paper up. “Mom, I’m sorry you read that.”

“Is Calvin your new boyfriend?”

“No, he’s not.”

“This Raymond seems to think so. Does Calvin make you happy?”

“No, Mom. He doesn’t.”

“Darling, boys are temporary. Always remember it. They’re never what you think they are.” She took a long drag. Her hands were shaking. She stood and drifted into the living room, still smoking, and turned on the TV.

I stared after her, mind whirling.

Strangling me was bad enough. Hunting me down like a dog and nearly killing me in the last safe place in the world was awful.

But this was so much worse.

My mother. My poor mother. She’d been through enough.

She didn’t need to read that.

Fury rolled along my spine. My teeth ground together and I stomped on the fucking letter.

I wanted to hurt them.

Not Calvin. I wanted him hurt him too—but not like I wanted to tear Noah and Raymond to shreds with my fingernails. Calvin was a bastard, but some stupid part of me wanted him, and believed that he cared.

Raymond and Noah were the enemy.

My mother wasn’t innocent. She stood by while my father hurt me, over and over, for years. She enabled him by keeping silent. She ignored the beatings, the pain. She let it all happen.

I hated her for that.

But she was still my mother, and she was suffering.

She didn’t need to suffer more.

Maybe that made me weak. A stronger person would’ve wanted her to hurt for allowing her husband to hit her child and her nephew.

I wasn’t that person.

I saw her waste her life on a man that ruined her. I couldn’t imagine how it felt to know she’d given herself to the wrong person, and watched him twist her life into a shell, into a nightmare. I pitied her, and I hated her. I felt it all.

But nobody would torture her. Nobody had that right—except for me and Jarrod.

I stormed upstairs. Coffee sloshed over the mug and fell onto the carpet. I cursed but didn’t stop. Let it soak. I didn’t give a shit.

I found my phone and called him.

Calvin answered on the first ring. “I was wondering when you’d reach out to apologize.”

That knocked me off balance. “Apologize? For what?”

“Slapping me.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Or maybe thank me. For getting you off.”

“You were nothing more than a convenient object. Don’t flatter yourself.”

“What can I do for you, love?” There was humor in his voice.

I took a deep breath and released it. “I want to hurt them.”

A short silence. “Who?”

“Your brothers. I want to hurt them. What can I do?”

Another silence. Longer this time.

“What happened?”

I told him from the beginning. “She read the whole thing,” I said, pacing around my room.

Pacing like he did when he was agitated.

“That asshole,” he said with a long sigh. “I shouldn’t be surprised. Raymond thinks he has tact, but the man’s an ogre.”

“What can I do?” I spoke the words like bullets. “Can we kill them? I want to kill them, Calvin. I’ve never felt like this before.”

“Try to calm down.”

“You calm down. You’re not the one dealing with a broken mother and a fucked-up, abusive father and all the scars that comes with. I’m still living in the house where my father used to hit me, can you imagine? And now my mother’s smoking again, which is disgusting.”

“Robyn.”

I clenched my jaw to stop the torrent of words. I could go on and on, about how I felt like I was losing my best friend and my cousin as they fell in love, and how selfish that made me, and how much I hated myself, how worthless, how horrible my entire existence had become, and Calvin, this killer, this demon, he was one of the few good things, even if he was a double-edged sword, a poisoned flower. I wanted to tell him all that and more, but I was too pathetic, and too angry.

“We can hurt them,” he said, his voice cool, like velvet, like water on a hot day. “We can hurt them very badly. I told you I’d kill Noah for what he did.”