Death and revenge didn’t mean shit if you were going home to an empty house with an empty heart. So we went home without revenge, but without any more holes in our family.
“Never been more scared in my life,” Luke murmured against my head.
We were naked on the sofa. We hadn’t even made it to the bedroom, our desperation to find peace in each other too chaotic to make things like proper horizontal surfaces seem important.
Nothing was really important but each other right then.
“Me either,” I admitted.
He stroked my hair. “You went willingly, with him. Knowing you might never come back. Never be right here with me again.” His voice wasn’t hard or angry. It was soft, proud.
“You know I had no other choice,” I whispered.
“I know, Rosie. You were protecting everyone, just like you always do. “That’s what scared me the most, still fucking does. You have a choice like that, there’s no hesitation, even though I know how hard it is to make. I’m not gonna beg you to not to make a choice that will take you from this world, take my world from me, ’cause I know that’s never gonna happen. You’re a warrior first, and you’ll always fight. Just askin’ you to let me be by your side while you fight.”
That right there was what made us us.
He knew that my life was never going to be normal, that I wasn’t normal. I needed action and I needed a man by my side, not in front of me, trying to protect me. I needed him to know that I could protect myself and not want to change me into something that made him feel more like a man and me less like a woman I was proud to be.
He was proud of the fact that I was strong, and he was man enough that it didn’t make him look weak.
“I’ve got a strong woman. She can fight not just for herself but for everyone in her life, including me.” He paused. “Me shooting Kevin that day, it wasn’t me damning myself and saving you. It was you saving me. From the fucking bars I’d trapped myself in. You’re so fucking strong, and that doesn’t make me weak. It makes me into the best man I could ever be. Any man who would think different ain’t a man at all.” He kissed me hard and deep. “Plannin’ on being a man, your man, till this world is done and the next one begins. After that too.”
“And I’ll be right next to you, fighting,” I promised.
Sometimes in real life, the good guys didn’t win, love didn’t conquer all. Mostly because in real life, it wasn’t as simple as creating good guys and bad guys. Sometimes the bad guys were the ones who did the most good. Or the good created the most evil. Most of it, the world—me included—was gray.
Love did a lot. Destroyed a lot. Put some of it back together.
But it didn’t conquer all.
Four-point-five million people are trapped in forced sexual exploitation globally.
The shadow of Fernandez’s threat still hung over our heads. We hadn’t given up. That wasn’t our style. We were playing the long game, which wasn’t exactly our style either, but we were adapting.
We settled into routine, slowly gathering intel, slowly figuring out how to bring the operation down without a single drop of Templar blood hitting the ground.
It was going to take a while. A long while. Because Wire told us that he’d dropped off the face of the earth again, but he would almost certainly be watching us.
So we had to appear like things had gone back to normal while we looked for ways to end it.
Our version of normal wasn’t exactly normal.
“You want to shoot him, babe, or should I?” I asked Luke.
Luke grinned. “Well, it is Valentine’s Day. Consider it my gift to you.” He gestured with his gun.
I smiled. “You get me the best gifts.”
The boom of the gunshot ricocheted through the empty warehouse, the bullet finding its home just above the kneecap.
The man screamed.
“Remember that pain, my friend, the next time you think about breaking the restraining order your wife has against you and beating her so bad she can’t walk for three weeks,” Luke said. “If you do, maybe we won’t be back to do the other one.”
The man continued to scream.
I wandered up to Luke and kissed him while I waited for him to stop. “Love you,” I whispered against his mouth.
His arms went around me. “And I love you, babe.”
There was a lot of shit that stopped my life from being completely perfect, but those three words meant it didn’t matter if it was or not.
Luke
One Week Later
“Rosie know you’re here?”
“What do you think?” Luke sat down at the table that he’d thought he wanted to destroy. Strangely, it felt right, easy, slipping into the seat and looking around at the men of the Sons of Templar. “I value my fuckin’ balls, so yes, she knows,” he continued. “Told me she was ‘sick of chattering like a bunch of women’ and we were to call her ‘when the action started.’”