Ruined Vows Read Online Stasia Black

Categories Genre: Alpha Male, Dark, Suspense Tags Authors: Stasia Black Advertisement1

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“Do you think your mom wanted to be there?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says with a sudden sob. He buries his face against my back. “I see her face, too, right beside mine. She’s so beautiful but so fucked up. And there’s my dad, except it’s not my dad, it’s Elmer’s. Oh, Jesus, they’re all there at once⁠—”

His words break off as he erupts into more hard, body-wracking sobs as a burst of frantic Spanish spills out of his mouth. “Déjame sentir la alegría y el regocijo; que se gocen los huesos que dañaste.”

I try to turn around so I can hug him, but he just keeps me in place, face down on the bed with his face smushed in my back as he cries. His arms wrap around me, though, and it feels good that he seems to be taking some comfort from me even as I feel his body-wracking sobs continue.

“I see it all. Oh god, Red. I see it all.”

FORTY-EIGHT

ISAAK

All the faces I see are wailing.

Our ancestors and theirs, wailing and wailing with their mouths open and screaming. The sinew of their necks stretches while skin falls from their bones. So much violence and sand and dirt and blood, and I see it—I feel it—all at once.

But more, I understand. In shocking, deep waves that bowl me over as I crouch here and weep.

Understanding upon understanding.

My mother. Desperate and beautiful and wanting so much more. Wanting out, but she couldn’t get out. Or at least, before she could, she caught the eye of my father, a dumb and brutal local gangster. But even as I point the finger of blame at him, understanding smashes into me as I see the string connected to his back.

He must’ve been a little boy once, too. I see the bright being he might have once been. But then, like me, he was pressured to fight his whole life because of our big, brutal size. I don’t even know who my grandparents were on his side. I just have a vague memory of Abuelita saying they were trash junkies like him. He was part of an MC that worked with a gang peddling poison in our neighborhood, and he got my mom addicted.

She thought he was a way out, but he was only a worse option that turned her all but feral sometimes in her desperation for her next fix.

Then Abuelita. Her husband beat her, so she fled with her daughter here in search of a better life. And this was what happened. More violence and a daughter who lost her mind to poison so bad that she left her own son at the local daycare.

Maybe because she didn’t want the responsibility. Maybe because whatever shit she’d shot up had been mixed with something bad and she OD’d. I don’t even fucking know.

“Isaak?” Kira asks. “Are you still with me?”

I grab the sheet to wipe my dripping nose and nod, then realize she can’t see.

“Yes.” Eyes still closed, I look at all their faces. So clear and glowing in front of me. “I’m not ready to come back yet. I see it all. Can’t talk.” There’s too much understanding for words. It’s too big. Too much.

“Okay,” she says. “I’m here if you need me.”

I keep watching the faces morph. First, my mother, in all her screaming pain, changes to my grandmother in hers. Pain all the way until her death. And then the string yanks us all back further.

To her ancestors and my father’s ancestors, who came here on ships from a distant land and the horrified faces of the first peoples they met here. Met with violence, and disease, and death. My distant righteous holy fathers.

Those strings combine with the ones that yanked me forwards, landing me in the sandbox. As if we were all children playing with paper guns and pretend bombs.

My mother’s face morphs, and now it’s mine. Screaming, “I just want to get out! I just want to get out, like she never did!”

But they put me on airplanes, and I landed in a desert I never understood.

Elmer’s wanted to stick to me like glue, but for once I was dressed just like everybody else, and I had friends. I was normal. For fucking once. It wasn’t like when I was a little kid or even when I was the weird kid bouncing between foster homes and group homes.

I was finally fucking normal. I was tired of sticking up for all the other worse-off kids. And why did it always have to be me, anyway? I had friends now, and so what if when my friends laughed at Elmer’s-stick-to-my-ass-like-glue, I didn’t stand up for him?

Even though it woulda been so easy to jostle Art over and make space for Elmer’s on the bench. There was room.

There was fucking room.


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