by Coralee June
“Let’s go to bed, Sunshine,” he called out to me.
“Be right there.”
Chapter Seven
Despite Blaise's comforting arms wrapped around me all night in our cozy room as it rained, I strained to listen for Callum's arrival. I couldn't think straight, knowing that he was having dinner with my father. I was angry that after our time in the cemetery, he went to him instead of comforting me, even though I knew why he had to. It wasn't until four in the morning that I heard footsteps down the hallway from my room. I got out of bed and tripped over Blaise's boots on the floor to catch who was outside.
I opened my bedroom door just in time to see a blond head of hair disappear into the bedroom across the hall. I wished that I could have spoken to Callum, asked how he was doing, and seen for myself if he was okay, but I kept my mouth shut. I hated how uncertain things were between us. How could one day change so much? When I got back to bed, Blaise nuzzled into my neck, breathing me in as I tried to calm my racing heart. I was teetering somewhere between feeling pride at my ability to conquer my fears and this sick sense of dread. Everything felt off. Like we were teetering on the edge of disaster, and there was nothing to do but tip the scales.
"You okay?" Blaise asked, his voice warm as he spoke against my skin. His lips were chapped and rough against me, making me shiver.
"I'm worried about Callum."
Blaise pulled away, shifting to hover half of his body over me while stroking my lips with his thumb. Our legs were a tangled mess of limbs. "My little Sunshine, always so worried about everyone else. You're the one about to face some pretty fucked up memories. Let Callum worry about himself."
I opened my mouth to protest. "I just..."
"You know I'll tell you how it is, right?" Blaise asked before kissing my forehead. "I've got chronic honesty. Doctors say there’s no cure," he said with a smirk that made me want to kiss him. I nodded. "Even when we were kids, you'd spend all of your time focusing on us so you could ignore the shit bothering you. I'm not going to let you make yourself sick worrying about us because it's easier than worrying about yourself."
I pursed my lips, wanting to disagree with him, but he was right. The Bullets crashed into my life when I was at the height of unhappiness at home. I focused on them, learned about them, and internalized their struggles because it was easier than processing my own. Even now, I was more concerned with how they were responding to this crazy situation than how I was coping.
"Five years ago, I was okay with you pouring all your attention on us. I was a selfish fuck and wanted to take whatever pieces of you I could. But I've grown up some since then, and I love you enough not to let you use me—us—anymore."
"But what if I want to use you?" I asked with a small smile, knowing that it was easier to be coy than respond to his declaration. I'd never considered him or the others as selfish, but maybe he was right? Perhaps it was time for me to focus on myself.
"You look absolutely kissable right now. How about one last distraction, for old time's sake," he purred before lowering to kiss my lips. Moaning into his mouth, I immediately responded to his kiss, matching pressure for pleasure with my movements. When he pulled away, I found myself pouting. "Promise me you'll take some time for self-care?" Blaise asked. It was infuriatingly sweet how well he knew me—how well he knew what I needed.
"I promise," I replied before grabbing his sleep shirt and pulling him back to me. We didn't sleep much after that. We mostly spent the morning kissing each other and talking about the things I wanted to do but have been too scared to vocalize. Blaise mentioned me going back to school, and I kissed him to ignore the sadness I felt. Right now, going to college and trying to pick up where I left off felt inauthentic to the girl I'd become. I didn't know what I wanted, I just knew I wanted them.
As I got dressed, I made sure to put the knife Joe gave me in the back pocket of my black pants. The tall rubber boots I wore would be perfect for wading through the mud. The rain lasted long through the night, and I bet we'd be in the thick of it today. Blaise met Ryker outside, gathering shovels and supplies should we need to break into the house.
In the kitchen, Gavriel was making breakfast, and I smiled at how domesticated my big, bad mob boss looked, leaning over the stove and flipping pancakes. It was a sight I wanted to wake up to daily. "Smells good," I said, my voice weary with lack of sleep. My lips were swollen from all the kissing Blaise and I did. We were like two teenagers, grinding against one another and exploring the boundaries of foreplay. I'm sure my skin was still flushed, and the ponytail I'd put my hair up in did little to hide how flustered I felt.
When Gavriel looked at me with his exploratory gaze, I refrained from rolling my eyes. He was taking in each aspect of my appearance and cataloging it in his crazy, overprotective brain. "You look like you got no sleep," he said before giving Blaise a scolding stare.
"I was worried about Callum, is he up yet?" I asked while spinning around to look down the hall, wincing once I realized that I was doing precisely what Blaise told me not to. I couldn't change a lifetime of concern in one night.
"He should be out soon. Is everything okay between you two?" Gavriel didn't skirt around the hard questions, he just bulldozed through my defenses and hit my memories with a punch.
Ah, the man I knew was back.
"We fucked at the cemetery yesterday," I said in a nonchalant tone, but I knew that he'd hear the slight way my voice wavered.
"Oh really?" Gavriel asked while setting down the spatula he was holding to brace himself against the kitchen island. He wasn’t wearing his usual suit and button down shirt. Sweatpants hung low on his body, and the black shirt he wore was tight enough to show off every carefully crafted crevice on his body.
“Really.”
Ever since our reunion, there was this unspoken understanding that they were okay with sharing me, and since revealing the trauma from my past, no one seemed willing to broach the subject once more. For now, we were just...surviving.
However, Callum seemed to be on the outside of that agreement. Gavriel initiated him as a Bullet against his will, but was he truly one of them? Would they share me at all, let alone with him?
I saw my uncertainty reflected in Gavriel’s eyes. There was a war going on in his dark gaze. Gavriel dived into his need to take care of those he loved. He claimed and led with an iron fist, clinging to his control because it was the only thing in this world that was certain. “I told you I’d give you all the things you’re too afraid to ask for,” Gavriel said before straightening and picking up his spatula.
“I’ll take care of you, Love. But with that comes removing the things you’re too scared to lose. I’m going to give him—and you—time to navigate this. But at the end of the day, I’ll do what’s best for you. I’ll always do what’s best for you.”
I swallowed as Gavriel turned around and resumed pouring batter into the frying pan with an easygoing posture, as if he hadn’t just taken my heart out and stomped on it. I knew that Gavriel would do what was best for me. Giving him that sort of control over my life had its consequences. But it still hurt, and the idea of not having Callum anymore left me feeling gutted. Could Callum let go of his guilt and truly accept the darker parts of himself? The parts of himself that wanted me more than he wanted normalcy?
With his back to me, Gavriel then called over his shoulder, “You hear that, Officer Mercer?”
I spun around to face Callum, nervous about how much he’d heard. His hair was wet like he’d just gotten out of the shower, and he was clutching a jacket to his chest, squeezing the material like it had personally offended him.
“Loud and clear,” he growled out before settling at the kitchen island beside me.
There was an entire summer I lived at the library. I bathed in the bathroom sink, napped on one of the couches in their reading lounge. It was my home, my safe haven. The public library was like a homeless shelter full of books. Since I was spending a lot of time there, I spent every wakin
g moment reading. I studied trauma first. I wanted to understand what my mind was going through; I tried to hack my way out of a painful situation and get back to being a healthy, functioning human being.
I’d read once that when a person experiences severe trauma, sometimes the brain warped your memories. It twisted your perceptions into a pretty little box that was more manageable.
That scared me almost as much as my father did.
I didn’t want to forget. I didn’t want my brain to compartmentalize my experience into smaller, easier to chew bites. I forced myself to get better and swallow the bitter pill that was my experience, because the alternative was forgetting what my father was capable of.
But now, sitting in the SUV Gavriel rented for the weekend while driving up the main highway near the lake, I doubted myself, wondering if I made it all up. What if my brain had tricked me into believing that I got away? There was a gravesite with my name on it. Maybe this was all an elaborate joke.
“I swear it was here,” I choked out. My eyes were starting to water as we drove. My fingers shook as I clutched my knees. The road I’d taken to escape the cabin was gone. “It was just right here, I know it.”
By now, I was mostly talking to myself, willing my brain to remember everything that had happened five years ago. I didn’t look around the car, knowing that looks of sympathy and annoyance would greet me. My chest grew tight as Gavriel pulled yet another U-turn on the road. Muddy tracks covered the pavement, and I focused on breathing in and out.
“Sunshine, if you want, we can go back and rest for a while. We don’t have to…” Blaise offered.
“Stop the car,” I pleaded while knotting my sweater in my lap. My fingers were cold, and when I stepped out of the too-suffocating car, I let out a short scream of frustration, my cries sharp and crisp in the chilly air. It was real, wasn’t it? My perceptions of what was real and what wasn’t were starting to get warped. My mind and my memories were betraying me.
I wrapped my arms around myself while staring at the sky. To my left, memories of my phone call to my mother flashed in my mind’s eye. Right there, next to that sign welcoming everyone to Chesterbrook was where I parked and cried for her to save me. Right there was where she denied me, where she picked her fear of Paul Bright over me.
“It was right here,” I whispered, mostly to myself. Ryker had his arms crossed over his chest as he stared at me while Joe kept an eye on the road. Gavriel and Callum stayed behind in the car. From here, I could see that they were arguing about something, despite the tinted windows. Gavriel had grabbed the collar of Callum’s shirt and yanked him closer to look Gav in the eye. I took a step to intervene, but a gentle hand on my shoulder stopped me. Blaise.
“Remember what I said...worry about yourself today, Sunshine,” he whispered. I wanted to curse him and stomp forward anyways, using anything to get my mind off the fact that the drive leading to the cabin had disappeared. But just before I could, Callum got out of the passenger seat and made his way towards me, a determined look on his face.
“Summ-Sunshine. Baby. Look at me,” he said before pulling me in for a hug. “Close your eyes,” he instructed. I didn’t really care what we were doing, the fact that he was finally holding me meant that things were getting better, right? Even if Gavriel was forcing him to do this, I didn’t care. I greedily took his comfort.
“Think about where you were. Think about the smells. The scenery.”
I dropped back into that forgotten part of my brain, the part that hid away the sordid details. It was unseasonably humid that day. It smelled like fresh dirt. Dad’s car smelled like cigarettes and rust. The leaves were green. The road was...rocky.
I opened my eyes and pulled away from his hug to go inspect a small clearing in the trees that looked oddly placed in the woods. Looking around at the men staring at me, I then walked over to the clearing and bent over, inspecting the mud.
I heard a car door slam behind me, but instead of turning to look, I began digging. Dirt seeped under my nails, and I sunk to my knees, the cold, wet earth making my denim pants wet. I probably looked like a mad woman, playing in the mud, searching for the road to hell. I kept digging through the mud until my fingers hit rock. Shoving all the dirt aside, I smiled when I saw the white gravel beneath.
“Good job, Baby,” Callum said as I let out a sigh of relief. This was real. I was real. Sometime during my digging, he had moved to stand over me. My protector. I turned to look at Callum and itched to hug him once more, but he shied away.
Guess he was only okay with comforting me when it suited him.
“I’m not trying to avoid a hug. You’re covered in mud,” he said as if reading my mind. I looked down at my jeans and legs then laughed.
Ryker traveled further up the muddy trail and crouched down a little ways away. “There are tracks here,” he called out over his shoulder, and we all followed him.
Sure enough, distinct tire markings were deep in the mud here. They were fresh too. Sometime last night, someone with large tires drove through then somehow covered up their tracks near the main road.
“Do you think whoever it was is still there?” I asked in a shaky voice. My father was in town. If he were here, then things would come to a head much sooner than we’d initially thought. Ryker stood, dusting his hands off on his thighs before exchanging a predatory look with Gavriel. His determined expression was haunting beneath his bruised skin, which showed just how familiar with pain he was.
Cracking his knuckles, he finally answered me. “We’ll sure as fuck find out.”
Chapter Eight
I couldn't force myself to feel anything as I walked through the woods. I tried, I really did. I wanted to feel fear, at least. It would show that I was alive. Maybe even curiosity? I could work with curiosity. I tried to conjure regret. Remorse. Grief. But since seeing the proof of the road, all I could feel was numbness. My pesky mind was doing that protective shield thing again, anticipating emotions too strong for me to handle. I was thankful for it, really. Because at least this meant I could prove to The Bullets that I could handle this.
I was in self-preservation mode and wrapped up in a destructive blanket. I was a shell, going through the motions and preparing for the inevitable fall, the crash and burn that I just knew was on the horizon. Why did I let Gavriel convince me to do this? How could I claim my power when there was none left to claim?
The muddy ground made my boots sink deep in the earth with each step, almost like even the woods didn't want me to continue. The whispering trees knew something I didn't, begging me to stay back. My intuition was telling me—screaming at me—to turn around and let go of the past. Did anything good ever come from digging up forgotten history? Each struggling step had me gasping for air.
I felt a hand on mine as I struggled to lift my boot through a particularly muddy section. The calloused palm guided me through the slippery terrain, pulling me upright. It was Ryker, strong despite his soreness and bruises, helping me through. Callum was on my left, wading through the mud with about as much ease as I was. Where I sank through each staggering step, he persevered through, determined to get to the end of this road.
"What did you and my father talk about last night?" I asked, breaking the silence with Ryker's grip still firmly on my elbow. I knew the hard questions would make me feel something again, but I didn't care. I was curious. I was grasping at straws.
Callum sucked in a deep breath, and I noticed Gavriel giving him a warning stare from over his shoulder, as if daring him to say something that would make me spiral. We should have never come here.
"First, he talked about politics. Then he talked about...your mom. I think he was trying to gauge if I blamed him? He seemed manic.” Callum’s voice was distant as he thought back on the night before. Something was off about his tone. “But it was when I was leaving that things got...weird. He asked if I was going to the cemetery and told me to tell you hello..."
I stopped walking, my heart like a hammer in my chest
. Gavriel let out a curse then spun around to glare at Callum, his hand resting on the gun in his holster. "I'm not going to sugar coat this for her," Callum said to him, spit flying from his lips. There was no bite to his tone, only hopeless resignation.
"He knows I'm here," I whispered as Ryker pulled me closer to him, as if to shield my body with his own. Slowly, tiny nudges of emotion made themselves known but never fully broke the surface. Terror. Sadness. Anxiousness. I took a moment to lean into Ryker, stealing a bit of his strength for myself. And my mind, being the powerful thing it was, shut each emotion down as I straightened my spine.
"Good," I finally said before trudging forward, even more determined to get to the cabin. "He should be scared. He's getting reckless, showing his hand.”
Gavriel cocked his head to the side, squinting in disbelief at me as a raven flew past. The sounds of his caw and wings slicing through the chilly air were haunting. My labored breath made a steady fog fill the space around me as I heaved. The mud soaked through the knees of my pants, making me shiver as we continued our trek. I started to take in my surroundings, the barren branches, the distance between us and the car. The mud would be a problem if I had to run, but I could roll in a pinch…
“You okay?” Ryker asked as I remembered Joe's words last night.
With a steadying breath, I answered him, “Yeah.” Instead of obsessing over the forest, I pulled the knife from my pocket and started to touch the edge of the blade, running my thumb across it and smiling as I counted the notches in the handle.
One. I was safe. We had a team of people.
Two. I was in charge of my emotions, I was the master of my own brain.
Three. This cabin had no power over me.
“I don’t recognize you when you look like that,” Ryker whispered as we walked. I’d almost forgotten that he was still clutching my elbow.