The Hunter's Prey

Chapter 11- A deal with fate

CASSIDY TYLER- The Boss' Angel

The magnitude of regret I had concerning a lot of things in my life was alarming, particularly because I was just twenty-one years old, yet I'd managed to rack up an impressive resume of outrageously embarrassing feats which in turn cascaded into the biggest clusterfuck in the history of clusterfucks, with Kyle Chad standing atop it all.

I suppose the entirety of my meeting with Kyle Chad started way before I even arrived in Barsons, perhaps since the very moment my mother got her terminal diagnosis.

We were told she had months to live, and a large chunk of those months I spent alternating from the hospital to my high school. By the time I graduated, I'd gotten accepted to three neighboring and close by colleges and granted a scholarship to my dream university, Barsons College.

Barsons was an amazing college, it was well-known, and famous for its high-quality education, Its appeal to me however wavered slightly outside its scope of academic standards as I was more interested in the fact that it had an outstanding two-thousand-mile difference from its location in New York to my small town in Arizona... it was perfect for a girl who wanted absolutely nothing more to do with the man who raised her.

While my mother's sickness only got worse, I watched my chances of ever leaving disappear right before my eyes. I didn't mind it, it had to happen... which was why I did it. I threw my acceptance letter right in the trash. Internally mourning the pain of having my dreams scorched by my unpredictable fate.

I hid my tears from her every day, how couldn't I, each time our eyes met she offered a consolatory smile, one seemingly riddled with the despair of imminent death and the guilt of having her daughter watch it happen. She was getting sicker, we both knew it, and as weeks passed, I began actively dreading the day I'd call out for her and she wouldn't answer.

About a week after my high school graduation, my heavily bedridden mother sat me down, with tears streaming down her bloodshot eyes all the way down to her pale cheeks and that sickeningly apologetic smile on her face, she handed me an envelope. My acceptance letter to Bastion, the apparently overzealous hospital cleaners had fished it out of the trash and handed it to her.

She offered it back to me with tears in her eyes and a smile on her face as her hands rested on mine and she told me to go.

"Life is not something you should ever put on hold Cassidy, and if you must... you have to make sure you're doing it for yourself, and not for anyone else..."

  And so at the end of that summer, with a few bags of my stuff in hand and an envelope full of some of my mother's savings which she wanted me to use to pay for dorms, I got on a bus and headed for New York, and a few months later... she died.

Flashback

My chest tightened as I stood in front of my mother's grave, my gaze intent and focused on the carved structure, its intricate stonework, and the name written across it. In loving memory of Meredith Tyler, cherished wife and mother.

"Cherished wife..." the words left my lips in almost a whisper as I scoffed at the absurd irony. She wasn't a cherished wife... she was a helpless one, a terrified one, an abused one. Yet I supposed it was just like my father to have them write such an obscene message on something as sacred as a gravestone.