Tasting your lips.
Kissing you.
Talkin’ ’bout Cinderella while you scared me with your zombie impression.
I’m comin’ back, babe. Be warned. You’ll be the first place I run to.
So I can stand still again.
PS: I’m also coming back to find out whoever “he” is. And I warn you, I don’t order hitmen either. I do my own dirty work. Especially when it comes to you.
Yours,
K
I read it.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
A single tear ran down my cheek.
Then I deleted the e-mail.
Then I got up from my desk, snatched my Chanel and my coffee and stomped—on my uncomfortable yet fabulous heels—my put-together but disastrous body out of the office.
“You can’t leave, Lucy,” my editor shouted. “You’ve got a deadline.”
I ignored him.
I didn’t have time for that. I was running.
I took his advice and ran right in the direction of the battle. At least the remains of it.
The cemetery was perched up on a hill out of town, overlooking the ocean. Laurie’s headstone was as close to the edge as we could get it. So she could always look at the sea she loved so much.
She used to sit out on the beach for hours, watching the waves, reading, laughing with Bull at her side. Living.
It seemed only proper that in death, she could figuratively be watching it.
I doubted that if she was anywhere, she was in a graveyard full of bones and sorrow. But there was no other place to go, no other battlefield to run to, so I was here.
I parked beside the black Harley, surprised and resigned to see it at the same time.
My shoes sank into the grass on my first step, so I bent down and took them off, carrying them in my hand when I reached the polished stone.
I was met with the grim reaper.
Riding a Harley on a road of skulls brandishing a skull.
Sons of Templar MC – California.
I regarded the leather. The club that brought me together with my favorite people in the world.
And took one from me.
I remember the day of the funeral. Being so angry. At them. At all of the men I considered brothers and friends. Because they took my sister away. The one who couldn’t kill spiders yet Spiders killed her. Ironic. The gang that kidnapped, raped and murdered her were the namesake of the insect that terrified her, yet she couldn’t even bring herself to kill them.
I’d been smashing up every single photo I had of them. The men who were responsible for taking her from me. The club that I had always been so proud to be a part of, so quick to defend when Luke or any of the other buttoned-up lawmakers tried to find a way to take them down.
I had wondered, perhaps wished for that to have happened. For them to be taken down before Laurie had been taken away. Then I wondered whether that would’ve made any difference.
Our names, our dates, life and death were etched into some faraway stone before we even took our first breath and well after we took our last.
Polly found me. She had red eyes and was wearing a white sundress.
Because she knew Laurie would have wanted that.
I was wearing a black pencil dress that channeled Audrey Hepburn. I needed Audrey today. And I needed black.
Because that was the colour of my soul. Because Laurie wouldn’t even fucking know what color dress I was wearing. Because she was dead.
I smashed another frame.
The destruction didn’t make it hurt any less, but it distracted me. Anger was always a welcomed friend when it came in the place of sorrow.
A small hand circled my wrist.
“It’s their fault,” I choked out between sobs, looking at the men in the leather beyond the smashed glass. And the small blonde-haired girl tucked into the side of a large menacing tattooed man who was staring at her like she made the sun. Because she did. And now the sun was gone. And all there was left was black. “It was all because of them. What they are.”
Polly gently took the frame from my hands, shaking out the glass so the picture was visible, so it wasn’t broken anymore.
“No,” she whispered, her seventeen-year-old eyes bursting with too much grief and sorrow for my little sister to have to bear. “It’s not because of what they are. It’s because of what they’re not. It’s because they’re good people. A family. It’s because they’ve got something that those people will never have. Nor understand. Love. And the people, the animals that did what they did to—” she sucked in a strangled breath—“Laurie, they don’t know how to possess that so they have to destroy it. It’s not because of them.” She ran her thumb across Laurie’s curls. “It’s because of them that she was happy. Could you imagine her without him?” She paused. “No. It’s because of ugly people like that in the world that we need to hold onto what we have left that much tighter. We’ll not let them win. Let Laurie die for nothing.”