Page 54 of Promise of Destruction (Destruction & Vengeance Duet #1)

fifty-one

Declan

Though my words rattled her, Soren eventually falls asleep with her head on her shoulder and her legs curled beneath her.

She’s so desperate to make herself small in every way she can.

It grates on me, makes me wonder. I thought I had her figured out, thought I’d pieced her together in my mind and understood why she did the things she did.

I’ve been busy and haven’t had a chance to find all of the answers that I need, but I do right now.

I slip my laptop out of the bag at my feet and crack my knuckles while it powers on. When it does, I navigate back to the birth certificate I saw yesterday.

Soren Palmer, no middle name, was born to Tracy Palmer on July 30 th , 2003. There’s no father listed on the birth certificate—just a blank space.

Tracy Palmer’s death certificate was administered in 2013. Cause of death? Injuries sustained in vehicular crash.

I should feel bad, but I’m a little grateful that this is at least the kind of death that’s documented.

I pull up another tab, navigating to the highway patrol report that shows Miss Tracy Palmer was labeled dead on arrival. The other car that appeared to have been involved had fled the scene, leaving Tracy to bleed to death as she drowned slowly in the river in what remained of her car.

Soren Palmer, ten years old, was thrown through the shattered windshield of the car she was sitting passenger in, presumably as the car tumbled off the bridge. She’d been found lying on the opposite side of the riverbed, unconscious, in shallow water.

I guess that explains her thing with seat belts. If she’d been wearing it that day, she’d have been stuck in the car with her mother, unable to escape as it filled with water.

The picture painted by the police report is brutal.

It’s hard not to feel for that version of her, a child I’ve never met.

When she was ten dying in dirty water with her mother deceased across the way, I was probably groaning that my mother had embarrassed me for screaming my name too loudly during one of my football games.

Tracy was an attractive woman, but she clearly didn’t create Soren without assistance. The only similarity I see is their thick, dark hair and high cheekbones. Otherwise, everything that I see when I look at Soren came from someone else.

There’s a marriage certificate and a petition for divorce for Tracy to a man named David Palmer.

Their marriage lasted approximately two years, ending before Soren was born.

That doesn’t mean he isn’t her father, but the DMV photo that pops up when I search him are a good enough indication.

David Palmer is as fair skinned as they come.

I say is , because he’s still alive according to his social pages.

He doesn’t post on them often—a new profile picture every five years or so, none of which I can glimpse any similarities to Soren in.

But David and Tracy did have a child together—Ashlynn Palmer, born August 6 th , 2001.

I’m just thinking about how Soren’s never mentioned a sister when the death certificate appears.

Ashlynn Palmer, drowning accident November 2005.

I’m not sure what I’m looking for, but I’m not finding whatever it is. All that I am learning is that Soren Palmer has lived a life shaped by tragedy after tragedy. And yet, she’s still here.

Sitting curled into herself across from me is a girl who grew up with no father as far as I can tell, who lost a sister when she was still too young to understand what that meant, survived an accident that left her an orphan.

And all of that was before Vincent D’Anerio came into her life.

I may have never heard of Vincent, but I know Tony. If he’s anything like his uncle, Vincent was a cockroach who didn’t deserve to so much as look at Soren Palmer. And yet, he’d weaseled into her life.

As much as she seems to be shaped by the loss of her husband, I assume their marriage wasn’t bad. If it was, surely she wouldn’t be so upset that he’s gone.

But I know better than that. My own mother proved that to me, time and again, falling in love and letting herself be ruined over a man that would have killed her if I didn’t intervene.

She’d find the courage to walk away, she’d mourn like she’d lost a loved one, and then she’d be won back by the same piece of trash or a man just like him. The cycle would begin again and again.

It’s why I was so eager to leave at the first chance I got. It’s why, when I saw my opportunity, I took it.

The football scholarship wasn’t much, but that was my first taste of power.

That was the first moment I realized I could do something great with my life…

not that I wanted to go pro. My name never ended up on jerseys, which was just as well.

I never wanted recognition for being decent at something that didn’t mean anything to me.

The scholarship was just a foot in the door, something to get me out of the purgatory my mother had made for herself and into a place where I could make something of myself .

But then she got cancer, and I quit football, because it had always felt a bit ridiculous to chase a ball around the field. It never felt as ridiculous as it did during my first practice the week after she had called me to tell me she was sick.

It was early and she’d put my mind at ease by letting me know that we had time, telling me she wanted me to finish what I’d started.

She had looked so good—healthy and strong, no bruises on her skin.

She had me going, at first—enough for me to go back to school and try to pretend everything was fine.

If my lukewarm feelings for football weren’t enough, my coach’s lukewarm feelings over me quitting were the last thing I needed to know I’d made the right choice. He’d told me he was sorry to lose me, clapped me on the shoulder, and said he wished me luck.

I was already halfway out of his office before he said, as if it was an afterthought, “You know you’ll lose your scholarship, right?”

Of course I knew.

I just didn’t care.

I don’t regret quitting football or leaving without a degree, just twelve credits shy of a bachelor’s. I don’t regret moving home to live with her.

The biggest regret I have—my only real regret in life—is that I didn’t give up on her sooner.

Once she realized that I’d “thrown away my dreams” and wasn’t going back, she finally let me know that things were so much worse than she’d let on.

That’s when I became obsessed with fighting it, with keeping her by my side for just a little longer.

That’s when I let myself falter, when I took a deal with people who knew they could manipulate me, when I sold my soul for the possibility of more time with my mother.

I got money.

I got every penny I needed and more to fund plane trips and experimental medications, to get second and fifth and eighth opinions.

I got a collar around my neck for the rest of my life, a mother who grew rapidly weaker as I dragged her from bed in the dead of night because we’d gotten a call about a transplant that would never be given to her because of her illness.

I got exactly what I had asked of the men who sat down with me in the back of that bar, telling me they could help me—that we could help each other. I got every penny I needed to care for my mother. I got everything I asked for, but I asked for the wrong thing because all of my efforts were wasted.

We didn’t get more time.

When my mother was buried, I thought that would be my biggest regret for as long as I’d live.

No matter how angry I was with myself for not asking for the right thing— things I know now that they could have given me—I knew that I had been wrong to ask her to sacrifice the last of her good time on Earth to give me hope.

Now, I look at Soren.

Beautiful and broken, a masterpiece that’s been handled carelessly and put back together without all the attention she deserved.

Soren, whose biggest regret in her life will be putting herself in my life.

Soren, who has just now confirmed what I’ve known in the back of my head.

Soren, who has me re-evaluating every step I’ve taken for the last five years.

The greatest mistake of my life wasn’t trying to buy more time with my mother or hoping that there was a chance I could cheat death.

The greatest mistake of my life was agreeing to do business with men that I knew were going to corrupt what I’d built— men that are going to try to take her from me.

Soren Palmer has been shaped by one tragedy after another. She knows pain like what Ancient Greek poets used to write about.

But the greatest tragedy Soren Palmer will ever face—perhaps the last one she will ever face—hasn’t even happened to her yet.