Page 27 of The Wolf

Poppy

We drove through cavernous ditches and around thick trees. The tires would lift off the ground as Vega took a sharp corner or as the jeep hit uneven earth. I swayed with the motion and bounced in tandem with each hurdle.

The forest eventually opened up to a dirt road, and I expected to feel a sense of relief. But all I felt was this heavy mass of hopeless anger. My life was nothing but lies. Everything I thought I knew and felt and remembered was a mirage—smoke and mirrors.

“I want to talk to him,” I said.

“What?” Vega asked.

“My father. I want to talk to him.”

“That's not a good idea, Poppy. You know—”

“I know what you're going to say, but I have to. I need to know why.”

Vega looked at me for a moment, silently gawking at my request. “The why doesn't matter. He's trying to kill you. The man literally wants you dead, and you want to go ask him about it. He'll take that opportunity to kill you right then and there. I won't put you in that position.”

“You're not putting me in any position. It's my choice. Vega, you said you wanted to help me.”

“And I do, but I won't knowingly bring you to your executioner. I can't do that.”

“I refuse to just run away like some coward,” I snapped. “I deserve to know why. Don't you think I deserve to know?”

“Of course I do. But you're not going to get answers by throwing yourself in front of a moving bus.” The dirt road came to an end. Vega took a left onto smooth, even pavement. “I won't do that. All of this would be for nothing if I show up with you like a damn gift, and he kills you.”

“All of this is already for nothing, isn't it?”

“No.”

“No?” I asked, my brows arching high and my mouth twitching at the corner. “How can you say no? Look at where we are. What do we have? Where are we going? We have nothing, and we're running towards nothing.”

“I think it's possible to still find something good when the world is against you.” Vega's lips thinned into a tight line as he glanced in the rearview mirror before hopping onto an on-ramp for the highway.

“You're so full of shit right now. You don't think that,” I said.

What good was coming from this? The floodgates opened.

Every repressed memory was blown to the surface.

I exhaled a long breath as my heart slowed.

I thought it stopped completely, but I could feel the faint pulse as I placed my hand against my chest.

“What? What is it?” Are you alright?” he asked.

“I'm fine,” I said, brushing off his concern. “Look, I appreciate what you're trying to do, but we both know that's a load of shit. There's nothing good in either of our lives.”

Vega was trying to make me feel better. It's what people did when they were watching you suffer.

They tell you they're sorry for what you're going through.

They try to ease your pain with false promises that things will get better.

Life will go on. The pain won't last forever.

Blah, blah, blah. It's easy for someone on the outside to rub your back and pet your head and tell you things will be okay.

But it wasn't Vega who watched their mother get shot by their father.

It wasn't Vega who just woke up to a living nightmare.

“I'm serious.” Vega flicked his eyes to mine briefly, then back to the road. “If you don't find the good, you'll slowly dissolve into something unrecognizable.”

“Says the man whose mother just stopped caring. What good is there in that?”

“You're missing the point.”

“So you think that all of this will lead to what? A pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.” I rolled my eyes. “That's what I call being naive.”

Vega leaned close to me and whispered. “There's a difference between being naive and seeing what's right in front of you. Maybe you need to look a little closer.”

Look closer at what? I was attacked, abducted, and shot at.

We were currently running for our lives.

Where the hell was Vega even taking us? What was going to happen when we got there?

It didn't matter. I had nowhere to go anyway.

I couldn't go home. I couldn't go to work.

I couldn't go anywhere in that damn town if I wanted to stay alive.

I was done thinking. The future was hard to imagine. At that point, there was no future for me. It was going to be a life of running. A life of looking over my shoulder at every turn. A life of wondering if the floor creaking, or the sound of footsteps, or the wind was someone coming to kill me.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“We just need a safe place to lay low so I can figure out what's next.”

“Where is safe anymore?” I half chuckled as I lay my head back against the headrest and looked out the window.

“I have olive branches, Poppy. I know where we can go. He won't find us.”

“How do you know that? I've known him my whole life, and I have no clue who that man is.”

Vega reached out and took my hand. He squeezed it gently and gave me a tender smile. “Some people have two faces. Your father is one of them.”

“I think deep down, I always knew that.”

“You felt it, didn't you?”

“I felt something. I'm not sure if that's what it was, but there was always something lingering in the back of my thoughts.”

“Sometimes your gut knows things your eyes don't want to see, and your brain doesn't want to imagine.”

“I'm naive, aren't I?”

“No,” Vega said quickly as if anticipating the question. “You're not naive, Poppy.”

“Then what would you call me? Ignorant? Stupid? Benighted?”

Vega shook his head sternly. “No. I wouldn't call you any of those things.” His thumb stroked the hard nub of my wrist as he sucked in a quick breath. “Look, you can't blame yourself for anything. Even if you knew every last detail of what he did, you wouldn't have been able to stop it.”

“I could have done something. I could have saved my mother.”

“Your mother was already gone before he killed her. Pulling the trigger only took her body. It might have been a blessing for her, honestly.”

I yanked my hand out of his and twisted in my seat to glare at him. “How can you say that? She didn't deserve to die!”

“That's not what I mean.” Vega patted the air in an effort to calm me down. “What I'm trying to say is that she was suffering. He was torturing her. He stole everything from her. He even stole you. She had nothing.”

My heart hammered inside my chest at the thought.

Vega was right. My mother couldn't ask me for help because I was a child under his spell.

As she slowly went crazy, I pulled away from her.

I stopped listening to her ramblings because my father told me she was sick.

I stopped feeling anxious about her pain because my father told me it wasn't real.

I stopped sympathizing with her because my father blamed her for what was happening.

He told me she refused his help. She wouldn't take her medication properly. She pushed him away. He made me believe that if she had just done what he told her to, none of it would have happened.

“I told her I hated her that day,” I said quietly.

“What day? What are you talking about?”

“The day she died. She was in the kitchen, walking around like a zombie and mumbling things to herself.

I had gone to get a glass of water because I had a headache and my father had given me some medicine to take.

When I went to take the medicine, she slapped it out of my hand and screamed in my face.

It was just a scream; she didn't yell anything specific. It was just this guttural screech.” I sniffled as my eyes welled up with tears.

“I asked her why she did that, and she said, 'The devil makes him do it.

' I asked her what she was talking about, and she went into this manic episode where she just kept saying it over and over again, 'The devil, the devil, the devil.

' So, I told her she was crazy and that I hated her.” I wiped my eyes with the edge of my shirt and looked out the window.

“I remember the look in her eyes when I said it. I broke her. Right at that moment, I broke her.”

“She knows you didn't actually hate her. Your mother, my father, they know their own children don't hate them regardless of the things we might have said.”

“What happened with you and your father?”

Vega shifted uncomfortably in his seat as he adjusted and readjusted his hands on the steering wheel. “All I'm saying is that kids say stupid things to their parents all the time. It's normal.”

What was he not telling me?

His chest began to rise and fall rapidly as his eyes grew shifty. He wouldn't look directly at me; his gaze danced around the car. Vega looked regretful, sorrowful. His skin flushed, and his eyes clouded, turning the dark iris into cataracts.

“We didn't see eye to eye on things like most parents with their children. He had a different vision.”

I twisted to face him. “What does that mean? I thought you followed in his footsteps?”

“I did, but I didn't want to do things exactly the way he did. He took unnecessary risks.”

“What about your mom? What did she want for you?”

“I don't know, honestly. She never said. But I sucked in school, barely passing my senior year. I hated sports—”

“I thought hunting was a sport?” I asked with a sarcastic tone.

“You know what I mean. A physical sport. I didn't play football or soccer or baseball. I had no interest in it.”

“Did she know what you and your father were doing?” Vega didn't answer, he just shrugged. “So, what happened between you two?”

Vega's face drooped, his eyes dulling to a matte finish. “She just stopped being my mother,” he said without emotion.

I arched a brow and pursed my lips. “What do you mean?”

“She just stopped everything. She stopped talking to me. She stopped calling me. I was like a ghost to her. I didn't exist anymore after my father died.”

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“Don't be. It's not your fault. It's my fault my mother abandoned me. I'm the reason she walked away. There's no one else to blame but myself. My mother wanted a son, and instead, she was given a purebred killer. Her baby had died a long time ago, and she knew it.”