The Heavy Snow Covers Everything

1
It was New Years Eve. Id just dropped off my last ride when a G-Wagon rear-ended me. The driver was Serena Croft, a ghost from my past.
She stormed over, her impatience shifting to disbelief as she looked at me. Ethan Vance are you a man or a ghost? she whispered.
I slid my drivers license forward. You have the wrong person, maam.
Her eyes sharpened. Dont play dumb. Id know you if you were ash. Though her voice was harsh, her eyes shone.
I felt a bitter twist of old pain, but before I could speak, Julian Thorne appeared behind her. He glanced at my right leg with open contempt.
Serena, our parents are waiting. Just pay him and lets go. We dont need a cripple trying to cause trouble.
The words died in my throat. As a former stepbrother and an ex-lover, a disabled man with a rape conviction had no place in Serena Crofts world.
The other drivers, my co-workers, started gathering around, trying to smooth things over.
"Ethan's not the type to shake people down. He's a good guy"
Another one tugged at my arm, whispering, "She's driving a G-Wagon, man. Doesn't matter whose fault it is, it's our fault. Just apologize."
Serena's knuckles were white where she gripped her dress. She stared at me, her eyes growing redder by the second. "Don't you have anything to say to me?"
The glare of surrounding headlights made my head throb.
I closed my eyes for a long moment, then spoke, my voice a rasp.
"I'm sorry, ma'am."
In an instant, her expression shifted. The wounded sorrow vanished, replaced by the same sharp, aggressive woman I remembered from years ago. She turned her head with a cold laugh, then lunged forward and grabbed me by the collar, her eyes glinting dangerously.
"John West, is it? You just wait."
She gave me one last deep, unreadable look before letting Julian wrap an arm around her waist and lead her back to their car.
The engine roared to life. It wasn't until the taillights disappeared down the street that I clutched my chest and finally let out a long, ragged breath.
Five years. Five years since I'd last seen her.
The pain I'd buried deep came coiling back like a venomous vine. Knowing her, this wasn't over.
Sure enough, at ten o'clock that night, the call came from the cab company.
"John, don't bother coming in tomorrow. We got a complaint about you driving with a disability. The company can't take that risk."
"I'll give you severance. The money will be in your account by morning. Consider this your last night."
I held my breath, clinging to a final, foolish sliver of hope. "Who filed the complaint?"
"Some guy named Thorne. The woman was even worse. Threatened to report us to the IRS if we didn't fire you."
A small-time operation like ours wouldn't survive an audit.
I forced a bitter laugh, said a few words, and hung up.
Sitting in the damp, mildewed corner of my room, I felt like I was back in the sweltering heat of that afternoon five years ago.
All because I had refused Serenas demand that we start dating, she had gone to my father and told him I, her step-brother, had "improper thoughts" about her.
That night, my father broke three steel pipes over my back in the grand hall of our family home. The skin split, the bones fractured. My step-mother cried and tried to intervene, but my fathers eyes were filled with a righteous fury.
"I'll beat the filth out of this animal until he learns his place!"
As they carried me to the hospital, Serena followed behind, a triumphant smile on her face. "Julian was right. You have to be cruel to break someone who plays hard to get."
The pain was so blinding I didn't fully register her words at the time. But from that day on, Julian Thorne became a constant presence in our lives.
The next day, I called my old contacts, trying to find another driving gig. The answer was always the same sigh.
"Did you piss someone off, Ethan?"
"They hear your name and just shake their heads. They're afraid of getting hit with an audit. Maybe you should lay low for a while?"
I knew it was her. She was squeezing me, trying to force me to admit who I was, to come crawling back to her.
I looked at my reflection in the mirrorprematurely gray, exhausted, a broken body.
I was no longer the "Star of the Force," the most promising young cop in Port Sterling.
Was this twisted game of hers even worth playing?
A loud, insistent knocking at the door startled me.
I dragged my prosthetic into place and opened it. Serena stood there, a cigarette dangling from her fingers, her eyes cold.
"Ethan Vance. You're coming back home with me."
"We'll forget the past. We can start over."
She reached out, her pale fingers tracing the line of my jaw, her expression one of profound love.
The words were so absurd, I wanted to laugh.
And I did. "The person you love most?"
Serena nodded, her eyes shining. "Yes."
"Then what about Julian Thorne? The news of your engagement is everywhere." I tried to smile, but my lips wouldn't cooperate.
"I thought you were dead They all said you died in that explosion. I had to"
"You had to what? Play the grieving lover while you were screwing Julian Thorne?"
My words turned her helpless expression to pure rage.
"You were dead! What else was I supposed to do?" she shrieked, her chest heaving.
She looked exactly as she had the day she found out Id enrolled in the police academy.
Back then, we had been secretly dating, hiding our relationship from our parents. I couldn't say if it was love that had grown over time or if she'd simply won me over with the taste of her mothers homemade cooking. My father's beating had backfired; after I healed, we became inseparable. She would laugh and run her fingers through my hair, sneak into my bed in the middle of the night to hold me.
Those first green shoots of a future, of a life together, had just begun to break through the soil.
And then they were crushed.
The night I got my acceptance letter from the academy, she stared at me in shock. "You're not going abroad with me?"
I shook my head, trying to reason with her. "The family business will be yours one day. I want to inherit my uncle's badge number."
I braced myself for a fight. Instead, she was unnervingly calm. She just told me to take care of myself and left for Europe alone.
Years later, she returned.
At her welcome-home party, she stood before our families and the city's elite, pointing to her torn dress, and accused me of attempted rape.
She showed them the bruises on her neck, on her arms.
The marks of our lovemaking from the night before had become the weapons used to destroy me.
My step-mother screamed at me, calling me a disgusting animal. My father, without asking a single question, slapped me across the face again and again. The city's high society watched, pretending to intervene while whispering that I was playing some sick game, using a taboo relationship to get back at my father for his own past infidelities.
I grabbed Serena by the throat, demanding to know why. Why was she lying?
She whispered, so only I could hear, "Ethan, I'm doing this for your own good!"
Then, her voice rose to a scream. "I have proof! I'm not lying!"
Right on cue, Julian Thorne burst in with a lab report.
"The DNA found on Serena's person has been confirmed. It belongs to Ethan Vance."
Serena collapsed into his arms, sobbing. "Brother, please don't keep doing this"
Overnight, I became a pariah. The step-brother molester. The rapist. The promising young cop was now a cockroach to be crushed.
My father, in his rage, refused to listen to a word I said. He had me charged and put on trial, determined to see me "reflect" in a prison cell.
In the end, it was Serena who signed the victim's statement, agreeing to drop the charges.
The day I was released, she was waiting for me, her laughter bordering on hysterical.
"Stop fighting me. You can't be a cop anymore. Just relax and be my man."
I stared at her beautiful, triumphant face and felt a chill cut straight to my bones.
I turned away and pointed to the door of my small apartment. "Get out. You're not welcome here."
She just laughed again, pulling a document from her purse and tossing it at me. "See this? I bought the building. This is my house now."
Her voice softened, pleading. "I told you, I still love you. If you just come back to me, Julian and I will only ever be friends."
My fists clenched so hard I bit through my tongue to keep from screaming. "What the hell do you want from me? Can you and Julian Thorne just get out of my life? Can you just leave?"
"I don't want to see you! Not for the rest of my life!"
I used to think time healed all wounds.
What a fucking lie.
The betrayal of the woman I loved. The distrust of my own father. The death of my dream, the ruin of my body Everything I was, everything I had, was destroyed by her.
And she has the gall to stand here and tell me she still loves me?
I laughed, a raw, broken sound that shook my whole body. I laughed until tears streamed down my face.
The anger that had been rising in Serena's eyes died when she saw the wetness on my cheeks.
She reached out to touch me, but I slapped her hand away.
"Don't touch me! What's it going to be this time? Are you going to accuse me of a second rape?"
The color drained from her face. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
I held her gaze as I reached down and unfastened the buckle on my thigh.
I yanked the prosthetic off and hurled it against the far wall of the hallway.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The sound echoed in the dead silence.
Serena's eyes widened in horror, fixed on the empty space where my right leg used to be. A strangled, gasping sound escaped her throat.
My voice was a ragged whisper, laced with the bitter satisfaction of revenge. "Unfortunately, this broken body probably can't give you what you want."
A moment later, a choked, sobbing question cut through the air. "Your leg what happened to your leg?"
Yes. What happened?
I stood in the shadows, letting the tears and snot run freely down my face.
By signing that statement, Serena had become the family's savior. That same day, my father announced she would be the new heir to the family corporation. She ascended to the very pinnacle of Port Sterling's elite.
Not long after, I got a call. Serena had been kidnapped.
I'd crossed paths with this crew before. I knew they were ruthless. They didn't negotiate; they just killed their hostages.
Her voice on the phone was terrified. "Ethan, I was wrong, I'm so sorry, please, come save me!"
"I didn't want you to be a cop because I was afraid you'd get killed I love you so much, I couldn't let you die"
I thought my heart was too scarred to feel anything. But hearing her cry, I softened.
I contacted my old unit while I gathered the ransom money and went to the drop point alone.
But when I got there, only Julian Thorne was waiting.
"Where's Serena?" I demanded.
He turned slowly, a smirk playing on his lips. "Ethan Vance, you really are a fool. The kidnapping was fake. The ransom was fake."
"The only real thing is your death. There's a bomb three feet in front of you. Move, and it goes off."
My police instincts screamed. "Who are you?"
He smiled. "Let's just say I'm the drug lord you've been hunting. The one they call 'Thorne.'"
"You've been looking for me for so long. And here I was, right beside your precious Serena the whole time. In fact, turning you into a rapist? That was my idea."
He savored the look of horror on my face, then held out his phone.
On the screen, Serena was straddling him, her face flushed with pleasure.
In the video, Julian asked, "Aren't you worried Ethan won't come back tomorrow?"
Serena laughed. "They won't kill him. They'll just rough him up a bit. He's tough, he won't die."
The rest of the video was a sickening mix of their moans and laughter.
"While you were waiting for her back home," Julian sneered, "we were in bed together every night in Europe. That little toy you bought her before she left came in very handy for me"
My hands balled into fists.
"I'll give you a chance," he said magnanimously. "Call her. If you can convince her to come save you, I'll let you go."
I looked at the smug bastard, dialed Serena's number, and spoke the moment she answered. "Serena, listen to me. Julian is a liar. He's a drug lord. He's set a trap for me. Call the police, now!"
There was a pause on the other end, then a cold laugh. "Ethan, stop trying to drive a wedge between Julian and me. Just because he helped me, you don't have to slander him like this."
"So you'll believe him, even if it means I die?"
"Die first. Then we'll talk."
She hung up. In my final moments, she chose him.
Then, the bomb went off.
"I survived," I told the woman standing in my hallway, "but I lost a leg. I became 'John West' and lived like a stray dog. And now you've found me, just to grind me further into the dirt. Are you satisfied?"
Compared to my calm, Serena was frantic. She shook her head, her voice trembling. "No Julian wouldn't do that"
People only believe what they want to believe. Even with me standing before her, a crippled wreck, she still believed him.
But it didn't matter anymore.
I picked up my prosthetic. As I turned to leave, she grabbed my sleeve.
"You can stay. I'll go"
I was exhausted. The stump of my leg ached. I just turned and shut the door in her face.
When I woke up, I wasn't in my bed. I was in a deserted field.
Julian Thorne smiled, squatting down beside me. "Ethan Vance, you're a hard man to kill. But this time, you die for good."
He brought his foot down, grinding his heel into what was left of my right leg.
Then the clubs and pipes began to fall. Pain crashed over me from all directions. The feeling of suffocation was absolute, my ribs splintering under the blows. I passed out, only to be woken by fresh agony. Every bone in my body screamed. My eyelids were glued shut with blood.
My fingers twitched, closing around the tiny GPS locator hidden under my thumbnail.
"This bastard cost us a lot of good men," one of them snarled. "Can't believe he's still alive. Finish him!"
Another kick slammed into my head.
As my consciousness faded, I thought I heard Serena's voice coming from a phone nearby. "Julian, Ethan's leg was that you?"
"It was me," he said. "But only because I love you so much"
There was a long silence on the phone, then a sigh. "Well, don't do it again. I'll send him some money to make up for it."
Hearing her pathetic, self-serving "compensation," I closed my eyes and smiled. It was a smile of pure release.
The South Precinct was only a five-minute drive from here. They weren't getting away.
Uncle, rest in peace.
The man who killed you I got him for you. It just cost me my life.

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