Page 26 of Severed Heart

“I like your boots,” I compliment as she smiles back at me menacingly.

“You’re about to hate them,” she relays in threat.

“Oh?” Manufactured by drink or not, a boldness I almost forgotten I’d possessed fills me as I step up and punch her in the mouth before another insult can leave her hag lips. That familiar feeling is almost worth the beating from the women that renders me unconscious before Diane finds me. And the added beating Alain gives me just a few hours later for risking getting fired.

Chapter Ten

TYLER

US PRESIDENT: GEORGE W. BUSH | 2001–2009

FALL 2004

“SO, WHAT’S THISI hear about you and Amy Miller? Because apparently, she can’t stop talking aboutour boy,” Sean chirps, poking his head between Dom and me, where I sit in the driver’s seat of my mom’s van.

A van that’s on its last leg and which Mom refuses to part with. A van we’re also in desperate need to keep running, thanks to Mom’s constant consent to let me chauffer the three of us around since I aged out, being the first of us to get my license.

The situation being temporary until we can finish restoring the classics Sean’s uncle gave us by way of a massive heart attack. The process to get them street-ready has been and will be slow and agonizing due to the expense, but one we deem will eventually be worth the wait.

Sean’s uncle’s widow opted to hand them over with no strings as long as we got them hauled off within her allotted time frame.

We jumped on it, and the minute she opened the yard, I spotted and stalked straight to the ’66 C20. Sean and Dom had done the same with their own cars. It was a fated feeling that day, as if all three vehicles were waiting, predestined for each of us. All three vehicles are now stripped and waiting at King’s—a garage Dom bought with his parents’ death settlement money, paid for, and titled the day after he turned sixteen.

To help with restoration, I called upon Russell, who’s worked on tractor equipment at Jennings & Sons during the last three harvests. All three of us took up with Russell fast before letting him in on the secret per Tobias’s order—an order he’d given us on a night that now remains at the forefront of all our minds.

Months ago, Tobias summoned us to his spot the same way he had before leaving for France. As we all crowded around the bonfire, half a decade after the first, the tension rolling off T had clued us all in that the meeting was going to be far different in nature. And it was, especially when Tobias unveiled his game plan for Roman.

“We’re going to go basic with our strategy,” Tobias declares, staring into the flames, a faraway look in his eyes. His timbre was laced with ire because of his unintentional run-in with Roman earlier that day while picking Dom up from the library.

“Meaning?” I ask, ears perked due to his grave, imparting tone.

“We’ve got to play this just right. The only way to defeat a man like Roman is to play sleeping giant,” he relays as an inkling charges through the air between the four of us.

“Think Helen of Troy,” Dom clarifies, already receptive to his brother.

There was an edge to the words spoken that night that I felt to my bones—an indescribable stillness before, one by one, we spoke our parts to play aloud, me being the first.

“I’m going to be a third-generation Marine. It’s a given, and if there’s one thing I know how to do—it’s build an army.”

From there, the conversation flowed, though the words seemed redundant as if it had been decided before any of us uttered a single one. It was only after, when I watched Dom approach Tobias just outside our circle, asking about the source of the war, and the mythological Helen behind it, that I tuned in, catching the ass end of their hushed exchange.

“What about Helen?” Dom had asked, his back to me where they stood feet away, as Tobias scanned the construction site of Roman’s nearby fortress.

My ears had perked further due to the long pause just after.

“We’re leaving Helen out of it,” T answers definitively.

Both a declaration and rule I silently but wholeheartedly agreed with before dismissing myself and stalking through the woods toward the ongoing war ensuing in my own home. They’d all given me shit that night, assuming I was strung out on ashe. I was too irritated to even explain how complex the truth was—that my worry was divided between two women.

One of them being Regina Jennings and what my father might be subjecting her to that night.

The other was a woman I’d recently gathered from her kitchen floor before tucking her safely into bed. A woman who’s slowly starting to invade my thoughts since our run-in in her living room a little over a month ago.

“Come on, what’s up with you and Amy?” Sean prods, roping me back into the van, away from the silver-gray return stare I haven’t been able to shake.

“Jesus, man, we’re just talking, that’s all,” I sigh as Dom glances over to me, not bothering to hide his grin. “Is that all you think about?” I ask Sean’s rearview reflection, the question rhetorical.

“What’s with keeping it a secret?” Sean counters.