Page 90 of Torn By Fate

Fire.

The smell hit me first. That acrid, chemical sweetness that I would spend the rest of my life trying to scrub from my nostrils. Gas. It had been gas, leaking from the stove in the kitchen, filling the house with its invisible, suffocating presence while I stood in my room and listened to the conversation I wasn’t supposed to hear.

“Burn it. All of it. I want no evidence that Angelo Garza ever existed.”

The voice on the phone had been low, controlled, unmistakable.

I was too shocked to move for a minute. And I had been a minute too late to react.

Then, there was an explosion.

The sound was the loudest thing I’d ever heard, louder than the thunder I was scared of at night.

It tore through the house like a living thing, shattering windows, splintering walls, and I was thrown backward, the door slamming shut behind me.

The fire came next.

Not slowly, not gradually—all at once, a wall of orange and red that devoured everything in its path. Everything vanished.

Everything between me and the door became an inferno, and I heard them.

My father.

His screams weren’t the sounds of a man in pain—they were the sounds of a man being unmade. Raw, animal, stripped of every layer of composure and dignity. I heard his body hit the floor, heard the wet, crackling sound of flesh meeting flame, and I screamed his name until my throat bled.

“Papa! Papa, I'm here. Please—”

But he couldn’t hear me. Or if he could, he couldn’t reach me. The fire was between us, a breathing monster that consumed everything it touched.

And my brother.

God, Caleb.

His cries were different. Higher, thinner, the terrified wailing of a child who didn’t understand what was happening to him. He had been in the kitchen, where he had gone back to show our father that he had completed the Mario level he had previously been stuck on.

He was six years old. Only six.

His voice rose and fell in a rhythm that I could still hear in my nightmares and would for the rest of my life. Sharp, piercing screams that dissolved into wet, gurgling sobs as the fire found him, as it crawled across his small body and ate him alive.

I heard it. Every brutal, torturous second of it.

The sound of my father and brother burning to death, trapped in the kitchen while I stood on the other side of a wall of flame, helpless, useless, alive.

The smell was the worst part.

It permeated everything—the smoke, the burning wood, the furniture, and beneath it all, something darker, cruel, and utterly horrifying.

The scent of charred flesh, of hair and skin and muscle burning, filled the house with a stench that was so dreadfully wrong that my body rejected it before my mind could process it.

I remembered the way I had gagged at the smell, the retching, and the sickening sound I made while I suffocated.

I remembered pressing my face against the carpet and breathing through the fibers, desperate for clean air, but there was none.

There was only smoke and death and the cruel sound of my family dying on the other side of the wall.

I had watched the fire crawl across the ceiling, blackening the plaster, eating through the drywall with a voracious hunger that seemed almost sentient.

It consumed the curtains, the bedding, everything it touched with a ferocity that was utterly terrifying.