Branded(52)

Dax continues muttering and cursing about pig-headed women while DJ and I get up from our chairs and leave him to deal with his burning balls.

“Who would have thought filling out a police report could be so much fun?” DJ asks with a smile as we head out of the building and across the parking lot to his truck.

I hear my cell phone ringing in my purse so I stop and dig for it. When I pull it out, I see that it’s from an unknown number. DJ looks at the screen questioningly and I just shrug my shoulders, hitting the answer button and bringing the phone up to my ear.

I hear nothing but silence for a few seconds and I start to pull the phone away when I hear someone clear his throat.

“You sure are a hard woman to get ahold of.”

My stomach plummets all the way to my feet and vomit makes it’s way up into my throat. It’s the voice from my childhood, the same one I hear in my nightmares every night calling me a whore and telling me I’m not good enough.

“Baby, are you there?” he asks.

“Don’t you dare call me baby,” I whisper angrily into the phone.

DJ wraps his hand around my arm, but I barely feel it. He asks me who’s on the phone, but I can’t speak.

“I got out, but I’m sure you already know that,” he laughs.

My hands shake and I can barely hold onto the phone anymore. Why can’t I just hang up the fucking phone? Why can’t I just tell him to go to hell and leave me alone?

“I had a lot of thinking to do while I was behind bars, baby. A lot of years to become an old man and think about all the things I’ve done. I’m supposed to make amends to the people I’ve wronged, so I figure I should start with you.”

His voice through the line is like nails on a chalkboard and my arms pebble with goose bumps.

“Did you get any of my notes?”

I whimper and squeeze my eyes closed.

“Give me the fucking phone,” DJ curses right next to me.

I turn away from him and wrap my arm around my waist, trying to hold myself together. It feels like my insides are going to spill out of my stomach and splatter all over the ground at my feet. I don’t want DJ to see me like this. I don’t want him to know how weak just the sound of this man’s voice makes me.

“I’m comin’ clean now, baby, it’s time. Your momma, she didn’t run away. She talked about it all the time, but she never had the guts to do it until that last day. I came home from work and found all her shit packed. She told me she was done and she was leavin’ both of us. I just couldn’t have that, baby. I couldn’t have her leavin’ me with a kid to take care of all by myself. I took care of it, though. I wouldn’t let her leave unless I was the one makin’ it happen.”

A sob works its way up my throat, but I force it back. I don’t want to hear the next words out of his mouth. I don’t want to know that he’s even more of a monster than I ever thought.

“I killed her, baby. I’m sorry, but I killed your momma. She was a whore and a worthless mother, but I’m still sorry about it. I just didn’t want you to turn out like her. You didn’t turn out like her, did you baby? You didn’t turn into a liar and a whore and a cheat, did you? People burn in hell for something like that.”

The phone falls from my hand and clatters to the ground. DJ snatches it up and screams into it, but I know he’s not there any more. He said what he needed to say, he messed with my mind and my heart and there was no reason for him to stay on the line for another second. Somehow, he killed my mother and made me believe she left because she didn’t love me, that she went away to start a new family because I wasn’t good enough. He tried to burn me tonight to send me to hell where he thinks I belong.

I finally turn around and look up into DJ’s angry face and I realize he’s probably right. I do belong in hell. I deserve to burn for dragging DJ into my life and putting him on my father’s radar. How could I ever think that I was deserving of a good future, when the sins of my past would never let me go?





Phina hasn’t said more than two words to me the last few days. It scares me more than thinking about everything that could have gone wrong the other night if we hadn’t been parked right out front of a fire station. What if Brad hadn’t been with us all night and I just pulled over on the side of the road? We would have been trapped. Not only could the gas tank have exploded, the back of the ambulance is filled with compressed air oxygen tanks. If it had gotten any hotter inside of that thing, we would have been blown to bits. Once again, I was fucking helpless with Phina. I couldn’t do anything but stand inside that fucking tin box on wheels and wait for someone else to save us. This shit has GOT to stop.