Inked Babies: Epilogue to Inked Brotherhood

by Jo Raven

  ‘Play with me, little boy…’ a man’s voice whispers. ‘What are you scared of?’

  Fingers dig into my mouth, between my lips, choking me. They taste salty-sweet. The stench of blood and sweat and burned flesh mingles with that of a burning cigarette, turning my stomach.

  “Zane!” someone is yelling in my ear. “Watch it!”

  Hands are on me, fucking hands all over again, gripping, maneuvering my body without permission, and I can’t move, can’t shake them off. I’m held down on my knees, on a filthy mattress, the pain tearing me up inside.

  ‘Take it, little boy…’

  I’m rotting from the inside. A knife is buried inside me, cutting me up. I look down and black is seeping into the sheets, spreading slowly.

  Not black.

  Blood.

  My blood.

  Something is squeezing my arm, hard enough to make itself noticeable. I try to move, to shake it off.

  I’m bleeding. Can’t you see my fucking blood spreading on the bed? What else do you want? I’ve got nothing left.

  “Zane, come on, man.” Asher. That’s Ash, talking to me. “Whatever it is you’re seeing, it isn’t real. You’re not bleeding. You’re safe with us.”

  The dirty, bloodied sheets blur. A blue carpet spreads under my booted feet. I’m sitting on a sofa. The sheets, the blood, the carpet, they all twist into a dizzying spin.

  “It’s been hours. Look at me, Z-man. Focus.” Ash sounds hoarse, as if he’s been talking for hours, too. “You’ve scared Dakota. Hell, you’re scaring me, too.”

  Dakota. My heart gives a sudden, hard lurch.

  “Where is she?” I blink, throwing out a hand to grab something solid, anything, to help me tell apart what is real from what’s not. “Dakota?”

  A hand slides into mine, small and soft, and a sweet smell I know well, like honey and flowers, fills my senses. “I’m right here,” she says. “Look at me. Please, look at me.”

  A soft touch to my face breaks up the image of the bloody sheets. I lift my gaze, and there she is. Beautiful. Unhurt. Her blue eyes are huge in her small face.

  I scared her. I scared Ash.

  Goddammit.

  And I’m still not one hundred percent sure it’s over. The memory is fucking with my sense of time and place. I’m not there, but I’m not here either, not yet. Caught in between, I need a moment before I manage to tighten my fingers around Dakota’s hand, using it as my anchor.

  Then someone looms over me and I flinch, hard.

  But it’s Ash. I see his face. Read the exhaustion there.

  “Okay, I’m leaving you guys. Have to go home now.” He pats my back and says gruffly, “So fucking glad you’re back with us.”

  “Back from where?” I rasp, and why the fuck do I sound even worse than Ash, like I’ve been screaming my lungs out?

  He doesn’t answer, only turns to go.

  “It’s okay,” Dakota says, tugging on my hand. “Dylan will stay here tonight, just in case.”

  In case of what? I frown, trying to pull the pieces together, but not even sure what the pieces are. “Where are we?”

  “Home.”

  A tremor goes through me. “The house. Kenneth Shaw’s house?”

  “That was hours ago.”

  I lost time. It shouldn’t scare me so much. It’s not the first time, after all. But I feel I’m missing more than that.

  “What happened there? Something happened, something…” I grasp at the memory, but it won’t come.

  “Breathe, Zane.” She strokes me cheek and it helps me calm down. “Everything is okay.”

  But it’s not. Something’s wrong.

  “The baby. Where’s our baby?”

  “He’s asleep, there, in his crib.” She nods at the corner of the room and I rip myself from her side to check, needing to see. “Wait!”

  I stagger, dizzy, grabbing onto the back of the couch to stop from falling. The room spins. But I have to see, dammit, make sure this is the truth. That our baby is real, that he’s here, that he’s fine.

  “Whoa, man.” Dylan is suddenly there, grabbing my forearm, and I flinch again before I fully recognize him. “Take it easy.”

  Dakota said… she said he’s staying here tonight. “Where did you come from?”

  “Bathroom.” He lifts a brow at me, the one where silver hoops glint. “You okay with me staying here? Dakota was thinking you may need some help, and with the baby she would be kinda overwhelmed.”

  Help? Why would I need help?

  “I wanna see my son,” I whisper, lost. This is all too much. I need… space. A moment to gather my fucking wits.

  “Sure. Come on.”

  He’s still holding my arm, and Dakota comes on my other side, taking my hand. She smiles up at me, her gaze both happy and sad. They walk with me to where the crib is standing, and there he is.

  “Lee.” I pull my arm free from Dylan’s hold. “I wanna hold him.”

  And why the hell do I feel like I need to ask permission? Dakota lets go of my hand, and I reach inside the crib, lifting his small body carefully, supporting his little head as I bring him to my chest.

  He blinks up at me, his dark eyes heavy-lidded, and waves a tiny fist at me. Then he yawns, showing me his bare gums.

  Dakota laughs softly.

  Dylan coos. He fucking coos at my kid, standing there with his huge shoulders like the hulk.

  I shake my head in disbelief.

  The baby blinks at me. He has my eyes, I think, but his hair is much lighter. He blows a bubble of saliva at me and wiggles in my hold.

  “Hey, buddy.” My mouth twitches, an almost smile, as a splinter of ice lodged in my chest begins to thaw. “Just checking on you.”

  Just checking that my little world hasn’t fallen apart while I was off to fucking la-la-land inside my head.

  Turning, I reach for Dakota, and she comes to me. I slip one arm around her, the other securely wrapped around Lee.

  My heart isn’t racing anymore. I feel like I can fucking breathe again.

  “Where are the others?” I glance up at Dylan who’s leaning against the wall, arms folded over his chest.

  “Went home. It’s pretty late.” He glances at his watch. “Past midnight.”

  “Past…” Fuck. The panic returns. “What did I do?”

  “Nothing.” He pushes off the wall. “Why don’t we go sit?”

  “Don’t…” What, patronize me? I’m the one who lost time, who can’t remember what he did for the past few hours. Holy fucking shit. “I had a flashback.”

  “Yeah.” He winces. “Look, it’s fine—”

  “Goddammit, man, don’t you dare tell me it’s fine.” I’m shaking now. This is a joke. “I’m not getting any fucking better, am I? Been to the therapist, took the fucking pills, and—”

  The baby gives a thin wail, shaking his small fist at me, and I freeze, stopping mid-rant.

  What am I doing? And why am I so damn angry—at Dylan?

  Dakota takes Emmanuel from my arm, and I let her, unable to stop the new tremors wracking my body.

  “What the fuck’s happening to me?” I whisper. It’s as if the floor is being ripped out from under my feet.

  “Come sit down with me, Z-man.” This time Dylan just taps my shoulder, gives me a light shove, and I stumble back to the couch.

  Sitting sounds good right now. My legs feel like jelly, and my head feels three sizes too big. “What’s happening?”

  “In the world? Same shit.”

  “Shut up, fucker.” I sink into the cushions and press my thumbs into my eyes, wishing the headache would leave and go fuck up someone else instead.

  I’m fucked up enough in the head as it is.

  “That’s a good sign,” he says, sitting down across from me.

  “You serious right now?”

  “Sure am.” He shrugs. “Swear at me all you want. For hours you weren’t… yourself. Know what I mean?”

  I stare hard at him. “Nope
.”

  “Like you were in pain. Helpless. Scared.”

  I’m fucking terrified of what my mind is doing to me, but I’m not about to admit that. Bad enough that Dylan, and probably all our friends, saw me like that.

  “What do I do?” I wipe a hand over my mouth. “Do I rock back and forth in a corner? Drool? Froth at the mouth? What?”

  “When you have flashbacks?” He seems surprised by my question.

  I have no idea what flashbacks look like to others. All I know is that I am reliving all the bad shit in my past, over and over, without any way to escape.

  “You’re quiet mostly,” he says. “Not that I saw you having many of those. But this time you just kept muttering things and… and moaning.”

  “Moaning.” My voice is flat. “What the fuck. Why would I do that, I just—”

  Pain, burning pain, and fear. No, not fear: terror.

  The memory hits me like a punch in the teeth, complete with the taste of blood in my mouth, the stench of urine and rot, and the fiery pain inside me.

  I keen like a wounded animal, curling in on myself, trying to get away from it all. It fucking hurts, and it’s killing me, tearing me apart.

  “Shit, that’s the sound,” Dylan breathes, and he’s in my face, his hands on my shoulders. “The sound you kept making. That keening sound.”

  I blink, falling quiet. My breathing sounds too loud, too harsh. My back hurts like a bitch, but his hands feel heavy on my shoulders. Real.

  “Snap out of it,” Dylan says. “Enough for one day. Focus on me.”

  “Why focus…” My words slur a bit and I try harder. “Why focus on your ugly mug, fucker?”

  He laughs, an incredulous sound. “Thank fuck.” He rocks back on his heels and sits down on the carpet, that blue carpet I first saw when my eyes cleared earlier on.

  The carpet Dakota picked out for our apartment when she moved in.

  I turn my head to find her standing by the window, rocking the baby in her arms. She’s looking at me, though, and she meets my gaze with a smile.

  It unwinds the twisty string of panic inside me, helps shove down the lingering phantom pain and take a good deep breath, at last.

  My girl. My kid. My home.

  “You have to tell me.” I turn back to Dylan whose back is propped against our old coffee table, one leg drawn up to his chest. He looks awfully young like that, with his blond hair cropped short and his white T-shirt and blue jeans—or maybe I just feel too damn old tonight.

  “Tell you what?”

  “What happened tonight. We went to Kenneth Shaw’s house. I remember that.” I scratch the shaved side of my head, tug on the hoops in my ear. “We went looking for the basement, because… because of something the police said.” The memory is right out of my grasp, and my head is fucking killing me.

  “You were there, Zen-man,” Dylan says. “The basement was your guess. We did what we did because of you. Thanks to you.”

  Thanks to me. That doesn’t sound that bad. I try to think. “It was something about the house in Wausau. Something about… Tyrell. Tyrese.”

  Dylan nods. “He was never found.”

  Never found. My hands start to shake. “So we went back and found the door to the basement. Rafe and Megan, they went down first. And then we followed them. We found…”

  … flashes of unwashed faces, frightened eyes, stench of rotting blood and shit and sweat steeped in terror—

  “Z-man, focus.” Dylan grabs my hand, lowers it from my face. I blink at him, confused. “What did we find in the basement?”

  “Kids,” I whisper. “Motherfucker had kids locked up in the fucking basement.”

  Jesus Fucking Christ.

  No wonder I keep slipping into the past. Son of a bitch went and did it again. Hurting children. Making them fucking bleed, locking them up in places nobody will hear their screams. Did he… Did he do to them what he did to me?

  I’m not even aware I asked the question out loud until Dakota comes to sit down beside me, the baby in her arms, and leans into me. “We don’t know yet. They’re at the hospital. The doctors are examining them.”

  I wrap an arm around her, drawing in her scent, letting it drench me all the way to my bones.

  “You saved them,” Dylan says. “Thanks to you, those boys were saved from more pain, more torture, maybe even from death.”

  Is it possible that a good thing has come out of this? That because I told my story I helped save those kids?

  A crushing weight is shifting on my chest, slowly lifting.

  Until I ask, “And Kenneth Shaw? Did they catch him?”

  From the dark look on Dylan’s face and Dakota’s sharp intake of breath I realize they’d been hoping I wouldn’t ask, not yet.

  He’s still free.

  And I need to climb out of this fucking rabbit hole before it sucks me back in for good.

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Dakota

  “What’s wrong, baby?” I lean over him, touch his cheek. “Nightmare?”

  Lee wails again, wiggling in his crib, tiny fists wagging back and forth. I scoop him up in my arms and flip him on his stomach, then rock him gently as I pace the bedroom. That usually calms him down. He has colic pain sometimes and being on his stomach helps.

  “Shh…” I walk in the dark, because I know the room well. I know the darkness. My heart has been full with it these past weeks. “It’ll be all right.”

  Even if I’m not sure I believe it, I can’t give up.

  I’ll never give up on Zane.

  From the start I knew that loving him wouldn’t be easy. He never stopped having nightmares since I moved in with him, but they had grown infrequent, milder.

  It feels as if he’s been gone from my life for years, when it’s only been weeks since the flashbacks and nightmares took over.

  The timing was terrible, too—having him fall into the horror pit of his past right after Lee was born, when I needed him by my side more than ever. When we should have been making happy memories together with our son.

  But how can I complain when it wasn’t Zane’s fault? When I felt at times I was losing him and didn’t know what to do? If he comes back to me… that’s all I’m asking for. We can make happy memories from now on.

  “Do you miss Daddy?” I whisper down at Lee, shushing him again when he lets out a small wail. “I know…”

  Me too. I want my man back. My boyfriend, my husband, my baby’s daddy. The guy I love most in the world.

  I’ve missed him so much.

  Missed the banter between us, his strength, his unapologetic need of me in his arms, in his bed, his wicked grin. God, I’m thinking about him as if he’s—

  “Let me hold him,” his voice says from the door, and I yelp, stumbling.

  “Holy shit, Zane!”

  “Fuck, sorry.” His arms are around me in a split second, steadying me. “Easy there. Did I scare you?”

  You can say that again.

  “Zane.” I stare up at him. As if conjured from my thoughts, he’s right here, the lines of his gorgeous face, his Mohawk, his dark lashes gilded in the light of my bedside lamp. “Can’t sleep again?”

  He’s been sleeping on the couch this past month. Part of why I’ve missed him. I go to sleep and wake up in an empty bed. A mostly empty life, apart from the joy of having Lee in it, and the pain of seeing Zane suffer.

  “I’m here.” He drops a kiss on top of my head. “I told you I’d never let you fall.”

  My heart thumps. He did tell me that. He’s the sweetest, the best man in the universe. Not fair that he should go through so much sorrow.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been there for you,” he whispers and draws back a little to look down at me, then at our baby. “Both of you.”

  “Not your fault,” I whisper back. “Don’t ever think it’s your fault, not for one second.”

  “I won’t let go again,” he says, and I’m not sure I know what he’s talking about. It must be three in
the morning, and my brain isn’t firing on all cylinders, but the feel of him against me, his arms around me, his familiar, sexy spice winding its way into my subconscious, it all feels right.

  “Then hold me.”

  He tugs us toward the bed. I place Lee back into his crib, and he’s quickly falling asleep, his small face relaxing.

  I turn toward my husband. Winding my arms around his neck, I lay my cheek on his chest, over the thin cotton of his T-shirt, listening to his heart.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, and the question almost breaks me.

  He’s been so lost in his own private hell, it’s the first time I recall him asking me this in a long while.

  “I’ve been scared out of my mind,” I admit, easier to do without looking up into his dark eyes, safe in the half-darkness.

  “That I was going crazy? That I wouldn’t be able to fight this?”

  “No.” I rub my face on his shirt, over his thick pecs, feeling the piercings in his nipples under my cheek. “That you’d pull back more, put distance between us, not wanting to hurt me. It would kill me if I couldn’t be by your side through such a hard time.”

  His hands slide up my bare arms, leaving behind goosebumps, and his strong fingers slide into my hair, tugging. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “I know.”

  “But never in my right mind would I leave you.” He pulls my head back to look into my eyes, and his gaze is dark, yet clear and true like an arrow to my heart. “Fuck, woman, you won’t be getting rid of me so easily.”

  That makes me laugh, and then I’m crying, the line between the two so blurred I don’t even know what I’m feeling right now.

  Exhaustion. Relief. Sadness. Love. Hope.

  “You really are back?” I tug on him and he bends his head so that our mouths are inches apart. “For good?”

  It’s as if he’s been on the other side of the moon, where I couldn’t reach him.

  His brows draw together. “I’m trying. I need help.” He cups my face, brushes his thumbs over my mouth. “Even if my memories were real, my mind is kinda twisted. I’m going back to the therapist. Asher chewed my ear out about it, said I should. That talking about it will help stop the flashbacks and nightmares.”

  The tears are now slipping faster, hotter down my cheeks. “Good.”