Brother's Betrayal

Chapter One {Shocked}

I thought once that life was fair. I woke up on a day without any clouds in the clear, blue sky and went out to meet my husband to be, Dillan, for breakfast before we went to visit his family. There wasn't anything wrong with that morning or the evening while I played games with his brother and talked with his parents, all people who I had met before at some point and loved to the stage I believed they were really my family. Life was never fair, though, because after the games and idle chatter, I went up to our room and read by the window where I was surrounded by cushions, waiting for the bathroom to be empty so I could get ready for bed. After that came my biggest mistake: I looked up from the book as I flipped the page by pure chance, spotted my almost brother in law running out of the back door at a speed that was almost too fast to follow and watched as his clothes tore from his skin and he fell to the floor, landing on four paws, not his hands and feet, and I left before Dillan had finished his shower.

It was that evening as I escaped in my old car - accompanied only by my suitcase full of clothes that had crumpled in my eagerness to leave and my phone on the passenger seat - that I discovered life wasn't fair to those who deserved it. Where had I gone wrong? I'd always been good (enough) and there was no bad karma which could've returned from the past to smite me. It wasn't fair, especially so soon after finding a love I thought was mutual.

Ending up in a situation like that was something I'd heard about by chance - either from passerbys on the street I'd eavesdropped on or from spending excessive time on my phone. Usually, it's more difficult to escape because you find out what they are in a position that isn't to your advantage, or so I've heard. Luckily for me, that wasn't the case. It still wasn't the most ideal situation for anyone however because now, where would I go? It's hard to trust someone when you're on the run like I was. Worse than that was the fact that most of them were possessive; if I managed to escape, I'd never be completely at ease.

I felt an ache in my chest when I'd realised that if Fletcher had inherited it then Dillan must have done too. I settled into the car seat at that thought, suppressing the need to pull over and vent slightly as thinking of Fletcher brought back the image of him contorted inhumanly and thinking of Dillan, thinking of leaving him, made water blur my vision. Pressing down on the pedal to go faster, I blinked away the tears, watching the road speed by quicker with me going further.

I flexed my fingers around the wheel. With a stronger sense of determination, I'd figured out where I could go. Keeping one eye on the road, I leant over and grabbed the map out of the glove box to my left and tracked the area down.

My phone kept ringing next to me as I was driving. I slowed down when the sky was black but never stopped until the sun had both set and begun to rise the next day (to go to the toilet). I only slowed to turn off my phone, noticing Dillan had been the main caller followed by Fletcher, and after that I didn't turn it on again because I threw it out of my window and onto the grass banks. I couldn't have any connection to them if I ever wanted to be free again. If being free meant being free of Dillan too, I had no choice but to do it. I had to draw in a breath at that thought; we'd both move on in the end, right?

The weight of his engagement ring around my left hand finger began to feel a lot heavier.

*

Distractions were hard to find in a forest. I couldn't spot anything other than tall trees and the dirt road, which seemed to curve for miles but that may have been a hallucination from how long I'd be following it, or from how long I'd been without sleep, or Dillan. I couldn't tell anymore. I was sure this was the right place. Although the building I was headed to wasn't marked on a map for good reasons, that didn't help me. I had no other way of navigating myself through a forest except for following the brown road.