Page 79 of Like Fathers, Like Son
“It’s okay, babe. It won’t be like last time, I promise, it’ll be different.” He was already striding toward the door, with his dark haired dad running ahead to unlock the door. It looked weirdly like an abandoned building from the outside, but I now realised that it was just part of the external security.
“Take her on up and get her patched up, kid. We’ll go get her things from that hotel, then we need to get back to help your mum out.”
“Thanks, dad. Both of you. I uh… I couldn’t lose her.” His voice actually shook a little with emotion then, and I found myself focusing on his face, on the way he swallowed hard and yet any hardness bled from his expression, as he looked at me and caught me staring.
“You’re mine, babe. I’ll never let anyone hurt you again.”
He carried me upstairs and straight to the bathroom. It wasn’t until Blaze was peeling the blanket and clothes away from me, that I started to remember the pain of my injuries, especially as we discovered that his jumper had actually stuck to a few of the larger cuts as the blood dried.
I was crying again by the time I was naked, and he was helping me into the shower. Blaze cradled me against him, my back to his front, as he carefully cleaned each cut, and helped me get clean in general, apologising every time I yelped with pain.
Once he’d carefully dried me off, patting my injured skin lightly with the towel, rather than rubbing like I probably would have done, he grabbed a first aid kit and started bandaging them. He used neat butterfly stitches on the largest ones before he covered them up. Finally, he handed me some painkillers, and a glass of water to wash them down with.
“They’re just paracetamol. I wasn’t sure what’s safe with the baby, but that’s stuff I can look into for later.”
He helped me into the bed in a room I hadn’t slept in before, but it was clearly his room in the house. The bedding was dark grey and the room was fairly muted in low grey tones, except for the dazzling printed canvasses on the walls; large fires depicted in glossy, glowing colour.
“Lay back, there you go, babe. I’ll get you something to eat, then you should rest, okay?”
I caught Blaze’s hand as he backed up, still wearing his soaking wet jeans, his wet hair plastered to his scalp.
“Blaze,” I whispered, and he leaned close.
“Yeah, babe? You need something specific to eat?”
“No, but I wanted to thank you. You saved me. You found me and you saved me.”
One side of his mouth quirked in a slightly savage grin.
“I’ll always find you, babe. Always.”
47
Blaze
Iwastoastingsomesandwiches when my dads returned with Anneka’s stuff from the hotel, and they hung around for a few minutes to check on us. I’d towelled my hair dry and changed into warm fleecy sweatpants and a t-shirt, with my bare feet feeling just a little too cool to be bare.
“How’s she doing, kid?”
Dad Gray started pouring coffee for the two of them, since I already had one beside me. He slid a drink to my other dad, who was sitting at the counter on one of the stools.
“You got her patched up okay?”
I nodded, offering them food.
“Nah, we’re leaving in a few, kid.”
“She’s resting, but she’s clean and I’ve dressed the wounds. That fucker was carving her up with shallow cuts, so they’d hurt like a bitch but wouldn’t bleed out fast enough. I should have done that to him, but I just… I lost my fucking temper!” I was glad he was dead, but the more I thought about it, the more tortured I felt about the fact that he hadn’t suffered for long enough. I should have taken at least as long as he’d taken with Anneka, maybe ten times that, to really drag it out. I wasn’t sure he’d been in enough pain as he died, and he should have been.
“Hey, look at me, Blaze.” I lifted my head, meeting dad’s blue eyes as he grasped my shoulder.
“You avenged her, yeah? You gutted that fuck like the piece of shit he was, but now you need to move on. You don’t dwell on kills, you move on and get on with things. You’ve got a baby on the way, and that needs to be your focus now. You look after that woman upstairs, you fucking treat her like the fragile creature she is, and help her incubate our grandchild.”Fuck. Grandchildren. I hadn’t even considered that, but of course, my three parents would be grandparents when the baby came.
“Does mum know?”
“Not yet. You should be the ones to tell her, don’t you think?” Jesus, yeah probably. And on that note, maybe mum could help more than she knew. She probably understood how Anneka might be feeling, better than her own mother would, at least.
After my dads had left, I took the toasted sandwiches up with me, along with coffees and woke Anneka. As we ate, sitting together against the headboard of my bed, we talked about what came next.
