His to Keep by Lydia Goodfellow
Chapter Thirty-Five
The front door is already open when I get there. Heat licks the back of me as I stare outside. It’s a misty, humid evening, today’s earlier rain evaporating and disappearing into the trees. Freedom. It’s right there, as Callum said it would be. What he said he’d make happen. Turn around. Turn back. Go get him.
But I swore I wouldn’t, and so I don’t. I take a step forward in the direction of freedom. But then something hard slams against the back of my head. Searing pain erupts, rattling my skull. With a scream, I fall forward onto the porch with a thud.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Turning with a gasp, my heart stops dead when I see none other than Father Aaron towering over me, bloodied face scrunched with evil. Throwing aside a plank of wood he’s just hit me with, he grabs me by the hair and yanks m.
“No!” I kick and flail, but he keeps his grip on me.
“You can die in the fire you created devil bitch!”
Jerking me to my feet by my hair, his hands wrap around my throat.
“Stop!” I choke, seeing thick, black smoke billowing from the door he’s dragging me back to. Oh no, Callum. Where is he? Is he dead?
“You thought you could fool me? Turning my own son against me?”
“You turned my grandmother against me!” I scream at him. “You are not a lord or godly. You’re a monster! You’ll always be one!”
Drawing back his hand, he hits me across the face, far harder than he’s ever done before. I fly back, landing with a horrendous crash on the porch steps that crack beneath me. Tumbling to the ground, I can’t breathe or think about anything other than the throbbing pain as Father Aaron’s deep husk of laughter sounds in the air around me. “Both your attempts of killing me were pathetic. You will never defeat me.”
Grabbing my arm, he pulls me, and it feels like it might tear from my socket. Just before the devil drags me back to the fiery pits of hell, Callum comes out of nowhere. He slams into Father Aaron’s side, knocking him off balance. Letting go of me, he howls out in pain when he lands against the knife still in his back. It buys us enough time for Callum to yell, “Go, Ava!”
He’s alive, and I’ve never felt relief like it as he helps me stand. Though the moment he does, something explodes inside the house, and I scream from the loud, deafening boom. Broken glass and splinters of wood hit me as the force from the explosion knocks us forward.
“Fuck,” Callum rasps after landing on top of me. Reaching behind him, he pulls a shard of glass out of his arm.
“C-Callum,” I whimper, seeing Father Aaron rise and running straight at us. “Look out!”
Father Aaron catapults himself at Callum. Flipping over, I claw at the ground to get away from them as they fight and thrash on the floor. When I hear a yell, I turn back, relieved that Callum has gained the upper hand. With his hands around his father’s throat, Callum leans over him and squeezes his neck. From inside the house is a scream. Penny.
“Wh—where’s Penny?” Father Aaron gasps. “What did you do?”
“Shut up.”
Father Aaron grins cruelly. “You’re…really going to leave…your own mother to burn?”
“She is not my mother!” he yells at him as Penny’s screams for help wail from the house. Callum squeezes his eyes shut, sweat dripping from his forehead. “She…she was going to. I just wanted to get her to stop. She tried to kill me!”
“And now you’re killing her.” Father Aaron laughs. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
“I’m nothing like you!”
“Callum, no!” I scream when he lets go of Father Aaron and runs back to the house where Penny’s screams have gotten worse. Fire licks the doorway now, and when I glance up, the whole house is covered in flames.
It’s impossible. There’s no way he can go in there to get her. That’s why he stops on the porch because he knows it too. But his lapse in judgment gives enough time for Father Aaron to get up. With a devilish glint in his eye, he charges Callum, who hasn’t realized.
Father Aaron’s going to push him inside. There’s no time to yell or warn him. Grabbing a long shard of glass from the ground beside me, I run after Father Aaron just as he grabs Callum’s shoulder. Attempting to use his weight to push him into the fire waiting inside the house. Callum captures the door frame just in time, and I let out a scream as I drive the glass into the back of Father Aaron’s neck. He grunts. The glass slices my own hand as I push it in further, and he gurgles. It allows Callum to grab and whirl him around, flinging him inside where the inferno happily engulfs him. And just like that, he’s gone.
Father Aaron is dead.
Grabbing my wrist, Callum drags me down the steps, and we run. The cool, smoky breeze hits me as our feet pound the dirt until we can’t anymore and collapse on the grass a little away from the fire.
Breathing heavily, Callum rolls onto his back, black hair clinging to his forehead from blood and sweat. A sheen of moisture gathers in his eyes as he stares up at the sky, and my bottom lip shakes.
“Callum.” I crawl to him and grab the sides of his face, smearing some of my blood on his skin. “Are you okay?”
“She wouldn’t stop,” he whispers, wisps of smoke coming from his breath. “I-I lost it. I pushed her, and she fell down the stairs. I just wanted to get to you. I didn’t mean—”
He’s talking about Penny.
“She deserved it,” I say, surprised by the ferocity in my voice. I don’t sound like me. Am I callous now? She was his mother and a victim in her own right. But I won’t forget her helping Father Aaron to rape Maisie and me. “She deserved to die in that house with him.” He turns his head away, but I drag him back. “Look at me.” He does, eyes locking with mine for the first time. “It wasn’t your fault. You saved my life.”
“With consequences. You can’t come with me, Ava. We can’t have a life together.”
“Wh—what do you mean?” Tears tumble down my face from his words. “You’re…breaking up with me?” I wince from the stupidity of how it sounds, knowing I shouldn’t even call it that.
“There are things I had to do, things you don’t know about, to get you out. And you’ll hate me for what I’ve done.”
“What are you talking about?” I never imagined, after listening to his plan about murdering his father and escaping, would involve losing him in the process. He nearly died, and now he’s saying we can’t be together? My chest tightens, and I suddenly can’t breathe. I have no one else but him.
“There was a problem with our plan, and that was John. I knew it all along; I just didn’t tell you because it’d distract what you needed to do. I couldn’t take them both on if it came to it.” My head shakes, and I’m confused at what he’s trying to say. “I went to his room. Maisie was there. He saw the knife in my hand and asked if I was going to kill him. I told him only if he got in my way. He said that he was bored, bored of serving my father who had promised so much but failed to give, and knew I’d eventually snap and kill them all. He bargained with me. Promised if I let him live, he’d leave, and I wouldn’t see him again. He’d give me money and leave the door and gate open so we could get out if we succeeded, and he wouldn’t tell the Brotherhood. He wouldn’t tell them about you, under the condition that I leave Maisie with him.”
Eyes widening, I let go of him to put my hand over my mouth.
Oh God.
“Y-you—”
“I left her there.” Clenching his teeth, he sits up so I can no longer see his face. “I understand if you hate me, but my loyalty was to you, and I couldn’t save her. Not when you’re all I care about.”
“John murdered her. In the worst way. You knew he would, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I told you about him, remember? He’s a psychopath, Ava.”
“And you left her. You let him live!”
“I let him live so I could save you!” He turns to me and grabs my arms. “How else did you think we’d get out? He was the only way.”
“And you’re going to take his word for it?”
He pushes his hands through his hair. “I had no choice.”
“You did have a choice. For all I know, you left her because you hated her!”
“I hated her,” he agrees. “But that doesn’t mean I wanted her dead. I tried to reason with him, but he refused. It was either you or her, and I chose you. Hate me all you want, but I’d always choose you.”
“And now you’re tossing me away.”
“There’s nothing I can give you. I’ll be the omen that will remind you of everything that happened here. The nightmare you can’t shake. And if John does break his promise, if you stay with me, you’ll be dead anyway, and all of this would’ve been for nothing.”
My bottom lip shakes, and I feel like I’m going crazy. A part of me disagrees with him, even hates that he turned his back on Maisie and subjected her to a violent death at the hands of someone he shouldn’t have let live. But then, he never said he was going to save her when we spoke about the plan. That’s the other part, a dark piece of me that doesn’t seem to care about the wrong. My little black heart craving his. Even now, after his confession, I want him to stay with me forever.
How can I move on with my life without him? What life would I even live?
“Where will you go?”
“I haven’t thought that far ahead.” I wipe my dripping nose with the back of my hand, my heart splitting into two. “I’ll just drive away. You won’t see me again, I swear.”
Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out keys to his father’s black Mercedes. “You can drive?”
“He taught me, and I watched him a few times. Can’t be that hard.” My head hurts too much to worry about licenses and the cops pulling him over. And why Father Aaron would teach Callum to drive when he hated him. “And there’s something else.”
Reaching into his back pocket, he pulls out a folded chunk of paper. His ruined sketchbook. The only thing, aside from the clothes on him that he took from the house. Taped back together. “I know what you saw, and I know you probably never want to look in it again. But I want you to see that it’s not what it looks like. To see that it was always you.”
Dropping the journal on my lap, he gets up, expression scrunching with pain as he stands. Whether it’s from his injuries or walking away from me, I can’t be sure. Either way, it looks too easy for him to do it.
Without saying another word, not even a goodbye, he limps over to his father’s car parked nearby. My heart pounds as I flick through the pages, once again laying my eyes on the beautifully sketched imagery of Callum’s world.
The pages that follow have me choking up and sobbing. They’re vivid, detailed, and it’s like looking at an old movie reel. Some drawings are a handsome young boy, often lost and scared as he witnesses things that a child never should. Young Callum, I realize, living a life of absolute torture. Lonely and sad. My heart connects with the lead that’s created him.
Turning to the next page, my stomach twists. A pair of wrists slit open and gushing with blood. Even though it’s just a drawing, it still pains me, knowing that he did this to himself. Knowing it’s from memory. But then it changes. First, there’s Orla, only two, one the picture I saw when Maisie showed me. But then Orla’s face changes to mine, and every page I turn, there’s me.
In the room together. Me asleep, awake, smiling, crying, and angry. As if he watched me when I wasn’t looking, studied me as much as I did him in secret. Compared to the other drawings, these are lighter, happier. Glassy eyed me with flushed cheeks. My face, my hair, and my hands his favorite to sketch. Touching him, holding him. I’m fully naked in one, and I can hardly believe my eyes at the transformation I never noticed in myself. For the first time, I consider myself beautiful and womanly. Page, after page, after page. It’s obsession and darkness. Those times he ignored me. When he was silent. He still drew me, thought of me, wanted me.
I am different to him.
With my heart in my throat, I tear my eyes from his book. He’s nearly at the car, and my head spins. What will my life be like without him? Nothing would be the same because I’m not the same.
Gran’s dead. My parents might as well be. I’ll be on my own, living a lie and holding onto a secret nobody would ever understand. And if I did tell anyone, I’d get unwanted attention for all the wrong reasons. The girl that was kidnapped and raped by the local priest. That’s if I’m even believed.
My body shakes as I stand, knowing I can’t let him drive away from me. Not like this. “Wait!”
He stops, and I start running. He turns around, and I jump into his arms, making him fall back against the car.
“Don’t leave me,” I plead, kissing his face, his parted, shocked lips. He stares at me like he can’t quite believe that I’m here. That I ran after him. Always thinking he doesn’t deserve it. “Don’t leave me, please. Don’t drive away and leave me here.”
“The Brotherhood—”
“Will never find us,” I say with determination. “We can change our identities and move away. I’ll sell my grandparents’ house, and you can get your inheritance. We can run. Go wherever we want. Don’t do this to me—don’t leave me. Not after everything.”
“You’ll be running for the rest of your life.” He grabs the back of my neck and leans his forehead against mine. “I can’t do that to you—I love you too much.”
“I’ll run until I can’t if it means I stay with you.
“Ava…” His lips crush against mine, stealing my breath and giving me my answer. Wrong or right, it doesn’t matter as long as we’re together. In the end, we’re just silhouettes against a house on fire. Inside burns the soul of a girl who lost everything, only to gain so much more from the ashes.