Page 45 of Hideaway Whirlwind (Big Boys of Berenson Trucking #4)
Teagan
Elliott catches me around the waist when I spring up and try to run past him, and I yell, “Get your hands off me!”
Elliott instantly lets go, but says, “She might not be alone. Remember the plan.”
It’s enough to get me from flying right out the back door. We’ve been over the plan so many times that it should be ingrained at this point, but I hadn’t anticipated the absolute raging gut punch it would be to finally see Mom all these years later.
Elliott and I duck walk into the kitchen, and then he rises enough to peek over the counter before squatting again with his phone pulled from his back pocket. With the push of two buttons, Elliott calls his brother. “She’s here. Backyard.”
“On our way,” Russell answers with a deadly rumble, the screen going dark when they end the call.
An eerie tap tap tap from the kitchen window causes goosebumps to break out all over my body as we press our backs against the kitchen cabinets out of view.
“I know she’s in there!” Mom screams after the next boom of thunder.
The sound of her fury is electrifying, like a live wire has been shoved into my spine, my heart slamming against my ribs. “She doesn’t belong to you!”
“Fuck you!” I yell, legs tensing with the need to run outside and confront her, and Elliott hugs me hard.
Another thing I hadn’t anticipated—Mom deciding to reveal herself instead of trying to sneak her way inside or attempting to ambush us to kidnap Sydney.
Would it even be kidnapping with Sydney being her biological child?
It’s a testament to just how mentally deranged or delusional she is that, after all this time spent watching us, she thinks she can use brute force or threats to get what she wants when she looks like she could keel over at any second.
Delusional and deranged …a deadly combination.
I grip my shotgun. This could all be over in seconds. Just stand and shoot. Blow her head clean off. But then the blood and brain matter would be a bitch to clean off the deck, and replacing the window would be inconvenient.
“Remember the plan,” Elliott reminds me again, kissing my cheek.
I hate the waiting, and apparently so does Mom, because she screeches an unearthly sound as she races across the deck, her steps uneven, and something sharp is thrown at the cabin, inches to the side of the window.
“What’s happening?” Sydney wails from the mouth of the hallway, huddled with Dustin. Storm abandons the back door to trot over to them, giving Dustin a lick before running back into position.
Angling my body to hide my gun, I tell Dustin in a harsh whisper, “Keep your sisters locked in my bathroom. Do not come out until we tell you to.” We’ve kept the spare mattress up, blocking the bedroom window, but should anyone try to gain access through it, the kids have their own plan to follow—grab the two baseball bats that we’ve stowed in the en suite bathroom cabinet, then wait for Cora, who has been given a code word and key to the cabin.
Without argument, Dustin grabs Sydney’s hand and starts dragging her back down the hallway, kicking and screaming.
“No, no! I’m scared! Mommy!” Sydney yells, wrestling with her brother.
I run in a crouched position and hook my free arm around both of them. Sydney squeezes my neck tight enough to choke me.
“I need you to be brave, baby, and take care of Kendall,” I say, giving her a task, something she can focus her energy on instead of what’s going on outside.
“She’s going to be scared, too.” Sydney nods, and I say with a tiny hitch of relief, “I promise, after tonight, you’ll never have to be scared again.
” Then I push them both roughly. “Now hide and lock the door!”
“They’re in position,” Elliott says when I make it back to him, and his phone lights up with a text. “This is it. You ready?”
I nod. No more waiting or worrying. “She dies tonight.”
Elliott drops his phone, then surprises me by grabbing the back of my head and pulling me in for a hard kiss, cutting our bottom lips when our teeth clack together. “I love you so fucking much.”
I lick my lip, then his. “I love you, too.”
“Zaxsha!” Mom shrieks, hurling what I suspect is another rock at the house. “I want Zaxsha!”
“Who the fuck—Sydney,” Elliott says with a sneer and disgusted twist of his mouth, answering his own question. “ That’s her name?”
“Was,” I say. “Her name is Sydney, and she is our daughter. She belongs with us.”
“Yes,” Elliott growls, his chest rising and falling faster as his form seems to grow taller, wider, his knuckles turning white on his gun with a murderous rage to match my own. My twin flame. Mine.
We both look down when Elliott’s phone lights up with a text message.
Russell: She’s alone. Go.
It’s shortly followed by an explosion of noise outside, and Elliott bursts out of his crouch, the back door cracking open. The slanted rain floods the interior while Storm sprints ahead of Elliott, who does a running leap over the deck railing with his gun raised, shouting at Mom to drop her knife.
I rush out, careful not to slip on the slick stairs, finding a lifted teal truck fishtailed in the backyard, having driven up the right side of the cabin beside the creek.
Mom’s hands are thrown up over her face in the truck’s ultra-bright LED headlights, flashing the metallic tip of her knife, a fair bit of blood snaking down her spindly arm.
Guns drawn, Paul rounds the back of the shed while Russell approaches from the woods.
With the creek at Mom’s back, she’s surrounded, and Storm darts in and out, circling her like a ravenous wolf.
“Birdie?” Elliott says over his shoulder without taking his eyes off Mom, his index finger curling over his trigger. “This is your call. What do you want to do?”
It’s the final part of the plan that I have yet to decide. How can I with so many fantastic options to choose from ?
Mom squints when I saddle up next to Elliott.
Storm comes running to my side at the sound of my voice when I giggle abruptly.
Just a little bit to see Mom standing amid a pile of river rocks, wearing her familiar, long, tattered apron tied at her waist to protect her hideous dress.
In fact, I can’t stop giggling as I walk toward her with a confident swagger and Storm following me step for step, my gun pointed up and resting on my shoulder since she’s no threat.
It’s absolutely hilarious when Mom nervously but bravely rolls her shoulders and brandishes her pitiful little kitchen knife.
“Hello, Mezzarx,” I say, using the Zeraxist title for all the mothers at the compound. “Don’t you look like shit.”
Eight years into living with the cult, she hardly looked like the same woman who’d given birth to me, underweight and rapidly aged beyond her years without proper sunscreen and medical care in the Nevada desert, which she proudly touted was the “natural order of things for Zeraxy’s warriors” , building the mental strength needed for the coming trials of battling the Gonarfans. What a load of crap.
Now, she makes it look like our time in the cult was a motherfucking all-inclusive resort, her lighter brown eyes now shrunken deep into her skull, her cheekbones even more pronounced.
The skin along the left side of her body is shiny and puckered, painfully and sloppily knitted together.
Burns, I realize, from the explosion, which I doubt she sought medical attention for, else she might have been arrested.
Oh, how she must have suffered , I think gleefully.
She still has that same maniacal, fiery devotion to the Zeraxists, despite everything, and if I thought for even the briefest of moments that she had finally opened her eyes and come to throw herself at my feet, begging my forgiveness for what she did to me, this whole shtick has snuffed it out.
She never would have found forgiveness here, anyway.
Even as Mom sways listlessly, she points her knife at me, her hair dark at her roots, stringy, faded yellow hair matted to her ghoulish face. “You took Za—”
I whip my gun down and fire near her filthy, white sneakers, making her dance like a puppet for me. “Damn fucking right I did! And her name is Sydney. She’s doing wonderful, by the way. Happy. Healthy. No longer engaged to someone before she even took her first step.”
Mom wheezes for breath, a wet, hacking cough making her bony chest cave in after that tiny bit of exertion. This just gets better and better.
“Engaged?” The tooth-pick skinny kid, Trace—who looks the very picture of health compared to Mom—takes his bucket hat off and hurls it at the ground, pacing beside his truck with a handgun held in his left fist.
“Oh yes,” I say, spitting out the water that streams from my hair into my mouth after a lightning bolt strikes close by, making everyone jumpy. “The Zeraxists plan that sick shit from the moment the women give birth.”
Steam rises from my skin in the cold, hard driving rain, my blood scorching hot with vengeance rushing in my veins as I step closer to Mom, grass and mud squelching beneath my bare feet. I’m grounded to this land, and it strengthens me, this solid foundation I’m building my new life upon.
I take a wide stance and raise my voice when I demand, “Tell them, Mezzarx, who you planned to marry her off to when she turns twelve!”
Someone cocks their gun with a deep growl from their chest that resonates within my very soul, my heart beating and my thoughts in sync with his—Sydney’s Papa.
Mom lifts her chin, the tendons in her neck taut and freakishly sliding beneath her nearly translucent skin like maggots. “Her marriage to Guxxer would have made Zeraxy proud. Their children—”
I scream the sound of a thousand ravens taking flight, my throat raw as I rush forward with my gun aimed at her head.