I flew home two days early, my pockets full of cash to finally buy our dream car. But the front door was unbolted. In the kitchen, my elite cousins were using my wife as a footstool while they discussed how to spend my money. My wife’s face was bruised, hidden behind her long hair. I didn’t interrupt their party. I went to the garage, grabbed a gasoline can, and decided that if this house was a prison for her, it would become a tomb for them…
“I worked in the dark so she could live in the light, but my own blood turned her home into a dungeon,” I whispered to the empty, shadowed driveway, the sharp, chemical reek of gasoline successfully masking the sweet scent of the two dozen long-stemmed roses I had bought. “They wanted my money, but they’re going to get the fire instead.”
The Price of a Dream
My name is Elara Thorne. For the past six months, my entire existence had been reduced to a claustrophobic, high-pressure saturation chamber stationed three hundred feet beneath the violently churning surface of the Gulf of Mexico. I am a deep-sea commercial welder. It’s a profession that demands you trade your hearing, your joint cartilage, and occasionally your sanity for hazard pay.
I stepped off the rural transit bus, my heavy canvas duffel bag slung over a shoulder that ground and ached with every step. The crisp, autumn air of the Virginia outskirts hit my lungs like a physical blow, so radically different from the canned, metallic oxygen blend I had been breathing for half a year. My hands were heavily calloused, my knuckles perpetually scarred from molten slag, and my skin held the permanent, salt-worn texture of someone who wrestled with the ocean for a living.
But I didn’t care about the pain. I didn’t care about the exhaustion vibrating deep in my marrow. Tucked securely inside the waterproof inner pocket of my heavy canvas jacket was thirty thousand dollars in crisp, banded hundred-dollar bills. It sat against my ribs like a heavy, golden heart. It was the exact amount required, in cash, for a pristine, vintage 1967 Mustang fastback—the dream car my wife, Sarah, had kept a faded photograph of on her nightstand since the day we met.
