“Because now you’re really his.”
“I don’t belong to Lucas. I don’t belong to anyone.”
He looked at me, and that one look said it all. One look broke my heart. “No. You don’t belong to anyone. You don’t belong to me. Not anymore.”
The bag re-emerged from the closet, and he put his things in it. I sat in the chair by the door and watched him. The tears didn’t come now. I didn’t cry or scream. I didn’t say a thing as he packed up his half of the life we’d built together like all we were were items in a drawer.
When he went to the door and pulled on his jacket, I stood in the middle of the living room and let out one shuddering wheeze.
“I’m sorry,” he said, like apologizing would somehow heal the hole he was punching in my lungs.
“Then don’t go.”
He shook his head. “I can’t stay. Seeing him all over you… I can’t touch you with him on you. I can’t be here with the constant reminder. I love you, but I can’t be the loser who held on long after the battle was lost.”
“It’s not…”
“It’s over.”
“But—”
“I want to love you. But if I do it like this…it will kill me.”
He stepped through the open door and closed it behind him.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The following places are within a two-block radius of my house—a liquor store, a fae-run weapon shop and a grocery store. I visited all three in the hour after Desmond left me.
Leary Fallon—the merman or whatever the male version of a siren is—who ran the weaponry didn’t want to sell me a new gun. He looked at my streaked mascara and the paper bag with two bottles of Jameson whiskey in it and shook his head.
“I don’t facilitate suicides, McQueen.”
“Fuck you, Fallon. I’m getting married in three days.”
“Yeah, do you know what the leading cause of suicide is?”
“Being denied guns?”
“Divorce.”
“Bullshit. Just give me the SIG.” I made gimme fingers. I might have already opened one of the Jameson bottles on the way here. Maybe.
“What are you going to use it for?”
“Feral werewolves took my last one. I need a replacement.”
Leary was a weird-looking guy. Not conventionally handsome at all, but because of the whole dude-siren thing he had an unusual appeal to him. His face was too thin, his hair was too long and his eyes were the color of seaweed. He was wearing a shirt that said, It’s Okay, Pluto, I’m Not a Planet Either.
Hilarious.
“I’ll pay double.”
“P226 or P229?” He unlocked the glass cabinet and put two guns in front of me. Nice to know money trumped concern for my life. For enough money he would probably turn one of those guns on me himself.
I almost dropped my bottles.
“You look like you just saw a ghost.”