I loved when he was honest with me. I loved the way his words flew around my insides, decorating me in tinsel and candyfloss.
A pregnant pause turned heavy with things we weren’t ready to say. Eventually, he muttered, his voice dark and gruff, “Steal me something, Pim. After all, you’re already stealing something of mine.”
My heart stopped.
Vocabulary had never tumbled so fast in my mind.
What am I stealing?
Your heart? Your love? Your lust?
What?
But the phone went dead.
The call ended.
Elder left me full of sparkling questions.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
______________________________
Elder
I PLAYED MY cello harder, longer, more brutal than I ever had before.
Note after note. Chord after chord. The calluses on my fingers weren’t enough for the fury I poured into my music.
I bled. It was only right.
I ached. It was only fair.
I conjured dark melodies and broken hymns and mournful classics and blended them with death metal, punk, and techno.
For two hours, I played until my shirt was drenched and breath was ragged. And only once the magic of music had restructured my brain to focus on rational things and not the crazed fixations I struggled with or the nightmare I’d just witnessed this afternoon, I returned to earth a little better, a little safer, and hopefully sane enough to give Pim one night of pleasure before I lost control again.
Afterward, in the tiny shower at the warehouse, I washed away my cello-playing sweat and let my mind return to my house upon the hill.
To the disaster where there’d once been order.
After leaving Pim, I’d requested Selix to drive me there for no other reason than to make sure my mother was truly gone. I stepped over the threshold full of stupid fantasies that my okaasan and uncle would finally decide to talk to me—to sit and listen and forgive and move on. That there might be a future where she wouldn’t hate me.
After all, I’d earned the love of one woman.
If I could do that…didn’t I deserve a second chance from my family? What I wouldn’t give to have a network of loved ones to introduce Pim to. To show her how good a big family could be—how protective and wild and heart-breaking all at the same time.
But those dreams were dashed and pointless as I entered my house, noticing the Chinmoku had done what I’d always feared and found me.
Tables were upended, drawers open, windows smashed. The cupboard housing the shrine to my father and brother wrenched wide and massacred with brutal force. My temper turned black with fury that their memory had been desecrated by the same filth who had killed them.
This was where I came to pray, to forgot, to beg for forgiveness.
Snippets of happier times played in the silence of the house. My father’s laugh. My brother’s tiny punches. It physically hurt to remember them.
But the fucking Chinmoku’s version of a cleaning crew had been through and yet again destroyed my temple.
I stood in my ransacked lounge and breathed war.
My mother should never have used her passport to travel here. She should never have left the anonymity of her new home with family members the Chinmoku didn’t know about.
Now, they knew where she would return to and where I was.
It had finally begun.
In a way, I was glad.
I’d been waiting for this day for far too long.
They wanted to kill me for leaving their brotherhood and I wanted to kill them for murdering my loved ones. This deadly chase would end in either their deaths or mine—it was just a matter of who found who first.
Game on, motherfuckers.
Stalking around broken pieces of furniture and eyeing up the kitchen knives imbedded into my walls, I sought clues as to how many had trespassed and if they’d left a calling card—just like they had when they’d burned my childhood house to the ground.
Moving into the master bedroom—where my mother had made herself at home—I found it.
Not written in blood this time but just as invasive in black dripping spray-paint. The acrid stench of chemicals replaced any comfort the house naturally permeated.
My eyes skated over their message: ‘Once a Chinmoku always a Chinmoku. You ran like a coward. Now you will die like a traitor.’
The promise was reminiscent of the last one. My rage turned into a tar ready to creep and suffocate anyone who so much as touched me and mine.
Pim…
She was out there…on her own.
The heartbreak at losing my father and brother was nothing compared to the heart-destruction at the thought of Pim being executed by the bastards of my past.
I had to find her.
I had to protect her.
I had to do a better fucking job than I did when I was thirteen.
The ocean called to me—its waves urging me to sail away and never return to shore. Out on the watery horizon, no one could sneak up on us. Alrik might’ve asked me to install weaponry on his ill-fated yacht, but his suggestions were nothing compared to what I’d adorned the Phantom with.