InsaneJournal

“I want to be free.”

Kaja looked at her son worriedly, biting her lower lip as she paused in her work. He looked up her, brown eyes peering out from under a wild mane of pale hair, and she felt her heart break.

“I know, baby,” she murmured. Then she continued winding the bandages around his injured hands, trying to ignore the livid whip marks underneath. Those were just another sign of the monster the man she had married was. “But…none of us are really free.”

Walker frowned and said, “I want to be free of him.”

“Baby…he’s your father.”

“That monster doesn’t deserve the name.”

Kaja couldn’t disagree with that, couldn’t find the words to say to convince him otherwise. How could she say something like that when she didn’t believe it herself?

Sighing, she fastened the bandage together with a pin and said, “He’s still your father.”

“Pff,” sniffed Walker. “He’s just the man that sired me. You can’t be a father if you’ve never loved your son.”

“He loves you!”

“Don’t lie to yourself, Mum. It doesn’t help any and you know it.”

Kaja frowned and clasped his hands carefully, looking up at him as her lower lip trembled with fear for her son. She loved him so very much but she couldn’t do a thing to protect him from his father – to keep that man from turning her baby boy into a cold killer.

Oh, if she could but go back in time!

“I’ve been lying to myself for years, baby,” she murmured. Lifting a hand to his cheek, she continued, “I wish I could help you.”

“We could both get away,” hissed Walker, his eyes bright of a sudden with the idea. “All in the dead of night, get our things and leave whilst he’s gone!”

“He’d find us.”

“I know how to hide, Mum!”

“Yourself,” pointed out Kaja. “Not me. I’d be nothing but dead weight for you.”

“Mum…”

“No,” she snapped. She straightened up and gave him her best motherly scowl, cowing him under it. “Only you can get away from this, baby. And I’ll see that you do.”

Walker’s eyes widened and he hissed, “He’ll kill you.”

“I’ve accepted that one day he would from the moment I found out just what he was.”

“Mum!”

Her son’s voice was horrified and well so – no child wants to hear their parents speak like that. But Walker hadn’t been a child for so long…at least not entirely. Not since his father had first taught him to be silent and taken him along to carry out a contract. She still remembered the horror in his nine-year-old eyes when they came back, he with a spatter of blood on one cheek.

Now he was seventeen, would be eighteen within a month or so if she calculated correctly. And eighteen was the age when – in the family of his father – young assassins became the killers they were trained to be.

If she didn’t get him away from that man before then, he was lost. A cold-hearted monster would replace her kind, gentle, compassionate boy and she didn’t think her heart would bear that.

“We have a month at the least,” she said aloud, turning her back towards him. “By then I can only hope those wounds will heal. I’ll begin to pack now and hide it out by the old oak; you remember the one I used to take you out to?”

Walker nodded absently, only just listening. He was more focused on the fact that he knew if she did this, his mother would die because that man would know she’d helped him.

“Mum…”

“I’m not changing my mind, baby.” Kaja turned and threw her arms around his neck, burying her face against his shoulder. He stiffened then returned her embrace, clutching her as violently as she did him, both of them shaking with the realization of what they were plotting. “I want you to be free of him too.”

“But…none of us are free…”

She pulled back from him a little and gently touched his face, smiling.

“Sometimes, baby,” she murmured, “sometimes we can be free for a little while. And that’s what matters.”