Excerpt

Prologue

What really got to him was the silence. In the dead of summer, even in the deep, early dawn, there should have been sound. Frogs croaking in the marshlands. Insects buzzing incessantly. Birds twittering high up in the trees. Fish splashing in the gently ebbing tide along the dock. People….

In all Matthias Lassiter’s days of life, Crystal Cove had never been silent, instead always bustling with life, with the business of people renting boats for coastal exploration or fishing, or booking guided activities led by any one of the extremely knowledgeable Lassiter family. But this morning: nothing but heavy, deafening, oppressive silence. It was as though after everything that had happened throughout the night, the world was now afraid to breathe, afraid to live in the wake of so much despair, destruction, and death. But instead of respectful, the silence was eerie and violent, a great ugly beast that took Matty’s already battered and bleeding heart in its gaping maw and rent it even further.

Matty raised a shaky hand to his face and was surprised to find that he was still crying, silent tears rolling down his soaked cheeks. He’d thought he was all out of tears. He’d thought he was all out of feelings in general. After all that had happened, all that had been done to them, what he’d done…how could there be anything left in him?

Matty looked helplessly around himself again from where he sat slumped on his knees in the mud and ash, looking at his scraped and bruised knuckles, looking at the charred remains of his life and the lingering smoke wafting through the air. There weren’t even the sirens of a firetruck to lance through the silence, not given who owned the town, not when faced with open threats of exactly what would happen to the emergency responders and their loved ones if they came.

Matty moved mechanically and slowly rose to his feet, numb and exhausted legs barely able to hold him upright. Somewhere deep in his heart, he knew what needed doing, even as his brain could no longer process anything. Face blank and throat so dry and tight it throbbed, he gathered the bodies one by one and brought them into the garden behind what remained of the main house. With each step the smell of death clung to him, greedily saturating his clothes and hair, pressing up into his nose and pouring itself into his mouth and down his throat so that it was all he could taste and know.

His father was difficult to carry, viscera dangling loosely from a large hole through his torso caused by a shotgun slug. His mother was whole but for the deep and gaping holes where her eyes had once been and the tongue that had been ripped from her mouth. Daniel, his brother-in-law, was unrecognizable in the blackened remains of his burned body, recognized only because Matty had watched him burn, held frozen and impotent from the horror that’d seized his very soul.

By far most difficult, though, was his little sister. Matty dropped heavily to his knees beside her, and finally, the world was no longer silent. The air shuddered and throbbed around Matty as he choked on his anguish. His head pounded as his eyes ran dry, his body too dehydrated to produce more tears, but still the dry sobs wracked his body, heart, and soul, grief far from done with him yet. With trembling hands, he took hold of Amelia’s arm—her once beautifully tanned skin now waxy and gray, her youthful warmth now gone with shocking and unnatural cold in its wake—and he made himself look upon her face. Once radiant with joyful anticipation, it was now forever frozen in terror and anguish. She could almost be asleep were it not for the harsh, indelible tension he could still see etched in the lines of her face and mouth.

He rested a trembling hand on Amelia’s belly, once enormous with new life that now would never see day, not now that the belly sank concave, a macabre cavern of viscera and blood stomped into submission by countless strikes of merciless boots. Matty curled in over his sister’s body, bent under the weight of unbearable agony.

“Amelia,” he croaked brokenly into the void where only he could hear. “Amelia, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he whimpered. “For this and…and for….” He choked. “…I know you’re disappointed with me,” he whispered tightly. Not angry. His sister never got angry with him, never got angry with anyone, not even…Tristan. No, she was only ever sometimes disappointed in their choices, which just hurt even more. Especially now upon her untimely death and the utter destruction of her hopes and future.

“I’ll fix it,” Matty mumbled, twining his fingers into the sleeve of her jacket, pleading with his touch and words and soul. “I swear to you, I will. I’ll find him, and I-I’ll fix w-what I d-did.” He choked on a sob. “I’m sorry. Please, Amelia,” he moaned. “I-I’m sorry.” He clung to her and begged and begged over and over as if his feeble words could ever be enough for what had happened, what he’d done, continuing his litany until his throat croaked and cracked and finally gave out.

Exhausted, Matty carefully slid his arms beneath Amelia and lifted her, staggering hard beneath the burden. He carried her over to be with the rest of their family, trying desperately with each step to not think about his little niece and how excited he had been to see her, to hold her, to spoil her, to love her. Trying not to think about how much he already had loved her even though she’d yet to take her first breath. Matty laid his little sister carefully alongside her husband, taking great care to bring their hands together as best he could.

Then he stood and looked around helplessly, wiping at his tear- and sweat-streaked face with the back of his hand like a child. He felt like he should do more. Wished that he could. At least bury them or speak over them but…. He sighed, completely drained. He had no time or words left. Eventually, once they knew it was safe, once they knew there could no longer be any survivors lingering, someone would come out, and they would do what he couldn’t and lay his family to their final rest.

With a respectful nod of his head, Matty swallowed thickly and locked down his heart, pushing every sharp, shattered edge aside and behind firm walls where they hopefully couldn’t hurt him anymore. Eyes deadened, he turned away from his loved ones for the final time and headed to the primary dock in front of the home that he’d grown up in. He knelt at the end and reached down to the water, scooping it up in handfuls and scrubbing the blood and ash and death from his hands and arms, also bringing the salty water higher up to his face and neck, cleansing himself as best he could.

An abundance of recent storms had thrown off the currents, and as he slumped there at the edge of the gently swaying dock, his arms submerged into the sea past his elbows, he could feel a powerful undertow pulling at him. Come with me, it seemed to say. Let go and give in. What purpose is there in your pathetic existence? Matty clenched his eyes shut against the call, against his painful yearning to comply. Rallying everything within him, he suddenly jerked away, losing his balance and landing splayed out on his back on the dock. He stared up at the brightening sky and felt the dawning sun bringing the heavy humidity of the day to the air. He had to go before…before they came back to finish the job.

Rising to his feet, Matty paused and stared at the ocean one last time. So powerfully, he wanted to heed its call, but he had one more thing he had to do first. He had to fix things. He had to make wrong right. He had to find Tristan. He had to take back what he’d said.

He had to fix what he’d done.

~~~

The thing was, it was so easy to both love and hate Tristan. Full of boundless confidence and charisma, he drew in everyone, even as he also outshone them all. Being his friend was a painful dichotomy. On the one hand, being held in his gravitational pull meant gaining friends by proxy and being viewed as “cool” as him. On the other hand, considering the family Tristan came from and the wretched way his uncle and cousins abused their power to the detriment of the town, including Matty’s own family, being friends with him left a sense of shame and betrayal deep in Matty’s gut.

Throw on top of that complicated, contradictory feelings toward Tristan in ways decidedly not unromantic and yet also not traditionally sexual, Matty was probably doomed by fate well before things took such a disastrous turn. Especially with much of their friendship taking place during the height of their awkward teenage years, and especially given that any hint of something between two boys was enough to get you dragged out to the back country and beaten to death. That his parents neither liked nor trusted the young man from the wrong family didn’t help matters either.

But Matty knew Tristan couldn’t help it that his last name was King, even if his parents seemingly refused to acknowledge such an irrefutable truth. Just the same, Matty also knew that Tristan felt a reciprocal sense of guilt in his own gut from being friends with a member of his family’s enemies.

Such guilt was compounded only further by the naturally strong sense of morality that Tristan had developed despite being raised through his teen years by a pack of jackals after his parents—estranged from the family—died unexpectedly, heavy truths that Tristan and Matty shared with one another during the darkest hours of night when they snuck out to see one another. But with each passing year of their friendship, which each passing moment spent in secret with one another, they marched ever onward toward an inevitable end they couldn’t yet see.

The Kings were dangerous, after all. Every one of the Lassiter family members hated them. Even gentle Amelia, who could barely kill a spider, couldn’t help but hate them as, after every futile argument with her parents to just leave clashed with their insistent stubbornness, she would clutch her pregnant belly and worry for the future of her baby under the hateful rule of the Kings.

The Kings were a small but mighty family of corrupt cops and officials that had oozed from the nearby city into their small hometown and rural county nearly two decades prior, drawn by the lucrative promise of tourist traps along the Pacific Ocean. Corruption and brutality stuffing their pockets to overflowing, it hadn’t taken them long to control the surrounding area with an iron fist. Extortion in the name of protection money was their forte, as was outright bullying and taking whatever they wanted.

Few in the entire county, much less the Lassiters’ small town and other neighboring towns, had the courage to stand up to them, but the patriarch and matriarch of the Lassiter family did through sheer defiant will. They’d tried to support other families as best they could too, and they’d stood their ground, flat out refusing to cave to the Kings’ demands, even to the detriment of their family.

Fearful of retaliation from the Kings, Matty didn’t even consider going to college when he graduated high school, a freedom he’d watched Tristan reluctantly seize as the pressure of his hateful family grew stronger and stronger between them each year. Similarly, Amelia’s long-term boyfriend Daniel, who practically lived with the Lassiters given how much time he spent with Amelia, shirked responsibilities with his own family and his final year of high school to dutifully look out for his love’s family and their property instead.

While others around their ages got to start lives and have fun, Matty and Daniel, trapped between the greed of David King and the irascible obstinance of Jim and Jess Lassiter, had instead spent many long hours carefully guarding Crystal Cove, thwarting attacks and sabotage from the Kings constantly. Even as customers dwindled as time passed—driven away by anything ranging from outright threats to false negative reviews in tourist magazines, which left their business struggling financially—Matty’s parents still stood unmovable, unwilling to cave under the pressure, even if they wouldn’t retaliate outright. Not even their daughter’s pregnancy announcement and a soon-to-arrive grandchild coupled with their daughter’s desperate, tear-filled pleas to retreat were enough to sway them from their pride.

It all came to a head, though, when Tristan returned from college with a shiny new degree that Matty couldn’t help but glare envious eyes at, even as his heart elated at the return of his closest friend. But things had changed, and they no longer fit as they once had. While Tristan had been away and free, able to forget and ignore all that his uncle David King and his cousins Jeff and Michael had done, Matty had lived it every day.

And so, too riled up to clear his head, Matty had pushed and pushed at Tristan to choose a side, right there in full public view, right there in front of Jeff and Michael King. Matty hadn’t known who had been more shocked, himself or the King brothers, when Tristan hesitantly chose him over them. And Matty had been foolish enough to feel smug elation, to feel his little heart swoop strangely and think maybe he and Tristan might have a future before them, even despite his confusing repulsion toward sex, which Tristan had always loved to tease him for. The hope that Tristan himself had brought Matty’s very soul had been blinding, just as the beaming light of his personality always was, and it’d blinded Matty from reality. And his foolish idiocy had cost his family everything.

Could he have known that stubbornly clinging to Tristan would bring a militant assault down onto the Lassiter home, business, and family? His brain whispered faintly a logical “no,” but his heart wailed a guilt-ridden “yes.” And that guilty wail had drowned everything out, even the pleas of Matty’s dearest friend as—confronted with the death of his whole family—he had seized Tristan by the neck and thrown him down, punching and slapping and kicking and tearing and screaming and blaming until Matty had finally run Tristan off, finding himself slumped alone amidst death and ruin.

In the end, none of that mattered. In the end, it changed nothing. In the end, all of Matty’s family was dead in the span of one short night. In the end, Matty had said what he’d said, had done what he’d done. In the end, it was his fault that his family was destroyed. In the end, it was his fault that Tristan was missing.

In the end, it was his fault that he was all alone.