His to Own: 50 Loving States, Arkansas (The Very Bad Fairgoods Book 3) by Theodora Taylor

Author:Theodora Taylor [Taylor, Theodora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rom Tell That
Published: 2016-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

15

MASON

All Mason can do is stare at the woman in front of him. He wants to shake her, and he wants to wrap her in cotton wool like she’s a goddamn piece of fine china.

He’s confused as hell.

Mason knows he’s a scary motherfucker. Not quite as bad as before, but still pretty damn intimidating. Yet he’s still surprised and distressed June could think he’d ever try to hurt her under any circumstance.

Especially after that bath.

Especially after that kiss, the one he’d used all his goddamn willpower to hold himself back from for fear of scaring her off.

He wants to howl with rage and despair. He wants to go out to the barn and rip apart everything he’s built.

But worst of all is what he doesn’t want. Mason does not want to remember. But he’s as capable of stopping the onslaught of memories as he is of stopping a speeding train. And he’s finally forced to give in.

He comes home from school. Finds his mother on the floor, slumped like a broken doll against the kitchen wall. Beaten so badly, he knows—even as a child—that something inside her is broken, and she really needed that something to stay alive. Torn up and scattered on the floor next to her are the tickets she’d shown Mason that morning. The ones she’d been so excited about.

Later, Mason found out his mother had confronted his father after her morning meth hit. Had waved the tickets in his face, no longer able to keep them a secret. Wanting him to know. Wanting to hurt him even more than she wanted to escape.

According to Mason’s father, she came at him with a frying pan. And he was trying to defend himself. His father told him, told anyone who would listen, that his wife always gave as good as she got.

“She was,” his father mumbled, drunk and sobbing at her funeral, “a fucking firecracker. A real goddamn woman.”

But not anymore.

“I guess your daddy won this one,” his mother told him through blood-stained teeth.

Mason arrived home too late to save her. And she was already dead by the time he returned with D’s mother, the compound’s nurse, in tow.

They buried her, same as they buried everyone else in the compound: deep in the woods without a marker. The official reason was to protect the privacy of the deceased in case the Feds ever managed to get that warrant they’d been threatening the SFK with. But Mason was pretty sure the real reason had more to do with making it hard for the law to use forensics to find out how many of the SFK dead were victims of drug overdoses, unlawful torture, and—like his mom—physical assault and battery. As Frank always said, “The government is always looking for any excuse to shut us down, so we got to be extra careful.”

Afterwards, Mason lingered in a state of shock for some time. Less than twelve hours after his mother introduced him to hope, his father took it away. Leaving

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