Dark Vow (Blackwoods College)

I touched my neck. “And Raymond?”

“He’ll suffer too.”

“How?”

“Come home.”

I stopped pacing. “I’m already home.”

“No, love. Come home with me. Come meet my father.”

That stopped me dead.

Meet his father.

The patriarch of the Solar family. The one man both Noah and Raymond desperately wanted me to stay away from.

That would hurt them, all right.

That would make them angry.

“Keep my mother safe.”

“I will.”

“Promise me, Calvin.”

“I already have men stationed around your house. I’m not sure how Raymond slipped through, but he wouldn’t have gotten inside.”

I rubbed my face. Of course he had soldiers watching me. I shouldn’t have expected anything less. A man like Calvin would never give me an ounce of freedom, not if he could help it.

That wasn’t fair. He knew I was in danger and sent men to protect me. They did a shitty job—Raymond still managed to post a letter. But at least he’d done something.

That was more than I could say about most people in my life.

Jarrod was the only other human to ever step up. Over the years, he’d taken more beating on my behalf than I deserved. I still didn’t know why, but I’d be paying that debt forever.

Calvin was like Jarrod in that regard. He went out of his way to try to keep me safe—while simultaneously dragging me down into the depths.

“When do we leave?”

His voice, when it came, was delighted.

“Soon. Pack a bag. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”

I hung up the phone and sat on the edge of my bed.

The Solar family home. I’d meet his father, his mother. I’d see where he grew up.

The place that shaped him.

I didn’t know how I felt. Scared, excited.

Angry.

So damn angry.

At everything. At my circumstances, at my life, at myself.

But I wasn’t going to roll over and let the world happen to me.

I’d do something about it.

Noah and Raymond wanted to fuck with me? Then I’d fuck with them back.

I grabbed an empty suitcase from my closet and began to pack.

At least this time I’d have my own clothes.

Dear Robyn

Picture cliffs. Steep, rocky. Gray stone. Beneath then, roiling ocean, slamming over and over against their base, grinding away, breaking it, shaping it over millennia.

I’m the cliff, and my father was the ocean.

He broke me and left behind something in his image.

Most people have happy memories from their childhood, or at least they have a place they can look back at and smile.

The Solar Manor was like a nightmare.

A waking dream. A living horror.

It was opulent. My father treated it like a museum. The staff had orders to keep me and my brothers from touching almost everything. It was antiseptic, too clean. There was nothing comforting in the marble floors and ornamental furniture.

I was surrounded with money and power, and it was the worst way to live as a child.

I’ll show it to you one day. I think you’ll understand why there’s something missing inside of me.

Something warm and comforting.

I don’t know warmth.

Only the cold. Freezing, bitter. Never-ending.

I was raised by a string of nannies. Strangers. They never lasted long. My parents were distant entities that intruded onto my existence. They only ever brought pain.

There was grass. Rolling hills. Trees. The forest was the closest I ever came to feeling free and happy. I’d hike along the trails and follow the streams and listen to the birds.

And more often than not, my brothers would ambush me far from the house where nobody could hear me scream.

Nothing was safe. Came you imagine? Growing up without safety?

I wasn’t even given the illusion.

I’ll take you there. I can’t wait for you to see it.

Love,

C

15

Robyn

Calvin was on edge during the flight to Maine.

I hadn’t expected his family’s mansion to be out in the northern wildness, at the furthest reaches of the country. I figured the Midwest, or out in California, somewhere central, somewhere close to power.

“Wherever the Solar family goes, everything else follows,” he explained as the plane began to land at a small private airport. “My father likes his privacy.”

I couldn’t imagine anything more private. Everything for miles was trees. Forests, oceans and oceans of forests. The air was crisp, nearly freezing. Matthias met us with a fleet of Range Rovers. He seemed jubilant as he shook Calvin’s hand.

“It’s been a while,” he said.

Calvin scowled. “Not long enough. Let’s get this over with.”

We piled into the back of a car and led down a long, winding road. It was a twenty-minute drive down a tree-packed street, no more than a path, until the manor appeared like a wraith in the mist.

It sat on top of a steep hill. A black fence surrounded the inner yard and Calvin’s driver had to get out and open the gate. The building itself was austere from the outside, with marble columns and understated carvings along the roof. There were windows, so many windows, furnished and covered by deep bolts of cloth. It looked as though sunlight never went inside. It was huge, and stretched back further than I could see. An army could live in a place like this, or an entire prison population.