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  2. Severed Heart (Ravenhood Legacy Book 2)

  3. Severed Heart: Chapter 34
Severed Heart (Ravenhood Legacy Book 2)

Severed Heart: Chapter 34

SUMMER 2012

Fourth of Julynoveldrama

Triple Falls, North Carolina

BLINK.
Bone-deep exhaustion keeps every step heavy as a scream ascends into the sky at my back, the pop and sizzle following shortly after. Keeping my eyes on my boots, I push through every step until I get to the familiar crack in the cement. Gripping my dog tags, I run them back and forth along the ridges of the metal chain. With a shuddered exhale, I will my boots to turn, surprised when my body obeys.
Eyes and throat dry, the night’s heat relentlessly batters me as another shriek rips across the sky above, the sound ricocheting through my entirety, threatening to transport me to a different place and time. Places and times that my whole being has been desperately seeking refuge from for months. The collection of hellacious days fueling the notion that the cement I’m taking residence on might give me that refuge, that long-lost sense of belonging—of home.
With the gradual lift of my head, my hungry eyes take in the bungalow-style house I spent years of my youth treating as such a sanctuary. The potted plants on the porch are a welcome sight, though now hanging limply outside the terracotta housing them. The roof is still missing the same shingles, the dwelling forever in a perpetual state of disrepair. Delphine’s reasoning for that echoes back to me through space and time—from the morning I left.
Space and time that seem so fucking vast now, playing barrier. Though, for the most part, the view looks the same, stoking some of the low-lit hope in my chest even as it refuses to fuel so much as a whisper towards the flame.
“Please,” I grit out. “Please,” I beg, unsure of what or whom I’m bargaining with.
The sight of her ancient sedan in the driveway promises an added spark of familiarity, a flash of the memory of the first day I drove it. Our matching smiles across the cabin and the wonder in her expression the first time I took her to the orchard.
Swallowing the memory and pain that recollection stirs, I finally shift my gaze to the large four-squared windowpane that gives an uninterrupted view into her living room. The view provided from where I linger in the shadows is similar to what it was for so many consecutive nights in my last lifetime.
She’s there. In the same chair. Still there, and against all odds, now within reach—never seeming anything close to that in my mind. Even with my consistent trips back to Triple Falls, she was always a world away, a lifetime away. This street, this house, remaining foreign soil to me, crossed off the map. Abandoned in head and heart, and yet, it still exists. Behind her sedan sits Dom’s Camaro, another barrier created by both of us, by her order and my promise. One I’ve maintained to this day. One that keeps me idle now and peering through her window. The only light in the living room is provided by the TV, outlining what little view I have of her in dull color.
Sweat gathers at my temple as I watch her sip from her glass as old hurts start to seep in.
Six years.
For six fucking years, I’ve been absent from this spot, at least to the naked eye. From a distance, nothing at all seems to have changed. The truth is that upon closer inspection, I know life has altered us both in different ways. What remains of me now feels foreign, even to me.
Is she still the same? Would she recognize me, or any part of the boy I was? Inside, I feel that boy with me, begging me not to move, breathe, or exist as the battle begins between us.
Her battles and mine differing.
Her current battle?
Life was kind enough to gift her a curveball by way of cancer.
She was diagnosed just after I got called up to join the response team and began long stints without contact. Tobias told me of her diagnosis when I finally felt safe enough to allow myself back on the Raven radar and fully back in the know. Though relieved by her recent prognosis, she’s been deathly ill, and I haven’t seen her once or spoken a word to her. Maybe as far as she knows, I’ve been aware the whole time she’s been battling and chose no contact, but that isn’t the whole truth. It only became the truth when I was made aware she was sick, and I still maintained my distance. I chose to stay away, until now. Even now, in seeing her so fucking close, the paved street continually stretches in front of me, my boots weighing me down as my inner battle ensues. Getting to this cement from my truck felt like wading through an unforgiving current—through the sands of time. A hellish, slow-motion descent into the battle happening in my mind. Soaking in the view I’ve been fucking frantic for, it does absolutely nothing to calm the conflict between boy and man.
This was supposed to feel different.
But as I take in the sight that I’ve been desperately telling myself I need, it brings none of the relief I thought it would—not after so much time. Eyes burning with frustration, my chest starts to scream with ancient aches as I scour the house, willing myself to cross the fucking street. It’s my limbs that refuse my order. It’s my tired, aching, depleted, battered soldier’s heart that wants inside that fucking house, even if there’s no relief in the view. The vision of her just yards away, right there, across the street, is too surreal to believe. As explosions continually sound at my back, sweat begins to pour from my temple.
Dropping my gaze to my worn boots, I will the eighteen-year-old inside me who can’t forget that morning to recognize the man that now hosts him. Willing him to identify how far we’ve come and how many steps we’ve taken without her.
Just a little further, I tell him and get no response.
I swallow and swallow again as I peer through the window at her, tracing her profile as carefully as I can in the dim light.
I’ve marched endless miles, crawled, crept, ran, carried others on my back in the worst imaginable conditions, but I can’t seem to fucking manage fifty steps, give or take, to cross the fucking street?
Freedom explodes across the night sky as if mocking me, while my father’s stifling words choose this moment to haunt me.
“I still can’t find the fucking door.”
His tearful confession batters me as the burning in my chest amplifies with that truth. A shriek pierces the midnight-cloaked sky before the deafening boom follows, and another so loud it reaches my bones, rattling them with memory, willing the images to flood me.
Any relief I could have felt at laying eyes on her is trampled and stripped completely as my pulse spikes with memory-induced adrenaline—my body’s way of reminding me of just how many steps I’ve taken since her. Of the battles fought and the blood spilled to get back to this cement. It’s then a notion strikes me that if I would’ve come to her before I left for the GRS, I could have crossed this fucking street. Maybe not with ease, but I could have done it—would have done it. A large part of me, before I joined, was still the boy who ran from her that morning and is taking shelter beneath the rubble of the aftermath now, unwilling to budge.
Every pop and screech at my back confirms I’ve practically erased that starry-eyed kid’s idea of what being a soldier is versus the reality.
Have I erased her now, too?
The escalating pain at the sight before me tells me that’s not the case and that she’s not the cause. It’s me. My decision to continue to march—to take on another mission—that initiated the change. The realization sets in that I understand my father’s blind decision now, in that he probably has no idea which battle it was in which he lost himself, just that he did.
“Go to her, you fucking bastard,” I grit out breaths coming hard. “She deserves a thank you,” I gasp out as I will my feet forward. Even as I scream at my psyche, I can’t and don’t manage a single step.
The need to protect her outweighs any selfish other because if I do manage to cross the street, I’ll bring it all with me—the visions, the adrenaline, the anger, the night sweats, the blood on my hands, as well as my current body count.
“They’ll break you down only to build you up, making you believe you’re a god. They’ll make you feel invincible, but you won’t be. No man is. At the end of it, if you make it out alive, you’ll come home with scars you can’t hide, physical or otherwise, and the fact you can’t hide them will eat you fucking alive.”
Except it wasn’t the Marines who made me believe I was different—I did that all on my own, thinking myself some exception. I trusted it was the truth, up until this very moment as the door disappears from my vision, and I become blinded by my father’s view—no door. There’s no door.
“No,” I rebuke as my chest cracks wide. “Not you,” I condemn both boy and man. “You’re different,” I grunt as failure thrums through me. “You made yourself a different fucking soldier . . . God dammit!”
Cupping my jaw, I run my palm down my face as defeat lodges in my throat, the ache now screaming in my skin, embedded deep in my bones. The longing for the home I swore I saw in her eyes, the shelter I made inside her heart. And now, no matter how hard I try to visualize it, there’s no longer a door. I erased it. She erased it.
Blinking rapidly to clear my eyes, without a single weapon, the hardest battle I’ve ever fought plays out on the cement beneath my feet.
“Please, Tyler, please cross the fucking street, look into her eyes, and t-thank her.”
Just as the words leave my lips—as if she can hear my struggle—she turns in her chair as if searching for my shadow. A second later, I know she sees me when she stands so abruptly that she stumbles back a step.
My starving eyes desperately search her, an unbearable ache detonating when I’m only able to clearly make out her silhouette, nothing more. But I feel it, the connection in the way she’s standing stock still and staring back, as the whisper of home I thought I had in her begins to beckon me. A relieved breath leaves my lips as she begins to walk toward the storm door, just as I finally take a step toward her. In the next instant, our connection is lost as Dom interrupts our connection, stalking into the kitchen and turning on the light. My view of her now blocked altogether, this time by the barrier of a promise—a promise I can’t keep if I take another step toward her.
Searing, white-hot pain shoots through me as I realize I might not ever be able to walk back into that house again. To look into her eyes without any of the affection I felt and still feel.
I still love her and am in love with her, and my thundering heart is telling me now that I always will. But my soldier’s heart is weary, and it needs its sanctuary. It needs her. I need my front fucking door.
“I will never love you.”
I never believed that—never believed her—but maybe I should. Even with evidence of her surprise through that window, it’s her silence in my absence that prevents me from believing anything else.
Swiping my face free of the debris of any foolish delusions of a homecoming, I turn and stalk away from that cement, from the deceiving view, and retreat toward refuge from the unforgiving sky. Once inside the cab of my truck, I slam my fist into my wheel as the guttural pain I’ve been curbing for six years crashes through me like a tidal wave.
You’re her soldier. She made you! She saved you! Turn around and thank her!
Chest heaving, the battle allows no escape as color explodes across my windshield, the smoke slowly tracing its path just after, as if savoring the victory. Shackled to her promise not to ever darken her door with a hint of what I feel for her, I allow myself to hate her for it in that moment—for forcing me to utter those words. With that promise, she took away any chance I had of a homecoming. Putting my truck in gear, I press the gas and don’t let up on it until I’m well past the county line. Speeding toward my reality—now convinced of what was solidified the day I left Triple Falls—that I am now and forever a homeless soldier.
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