Black Heart

by R. L. Mathewson

  “Why not?” he asked, doing his best to ignore his wife as she softly cried, “Please don’t.”

  “Half of us were either making our own attempts to break the curse or we were too late.”

  Meaning he’d already been killed.

  “We did our best, lad, to watch after Macha when ye couldn’t, but nothing helped. She was either too far gone in her grief over losing ye or the curse took care of things,” Declean quietly explained.

  “We tried to approach her, but that didn’t end well either, lad,” Finn sheepishly added.

  He had questions, a lot of them, but for right now he was content with just sitting back and holding his wife while this curse and his plan to save his son was explained to him. Besides, he’d have all his memories and answers by the end of the night, but he wouldn’t have her. Right now he needed to hold her one last time before he was forced to say goodbye.

  “We figured that if we couldn’t break the curse fer yer son, then the best thing would be to free him from this curse by making ye promise to stop trying,” Liam explained before adding with a glare, “But ye kept breaking yer promise and pissing us off, lad.”

  Which would explain the ass whooping Liam had dished out, Tristan realized with a wince.

  “We’re not happy that ye broke yer promise and are forcing our hand on this one, Tadgh, but we’ll do what needs to be done,” Liam promised, making Marty tremble harder in his arms.

  For their son, Tristan would do anything, including giving up his own life, but he had one question that he needed answered before they went through with this.

  “Will I be able to watch over them?” he asked, closing his eyes and tightening his hold around Marty as her sobs tore at his heart.

  “I’m sorry, lad, but once ye fail to break the curse, ye won’t get to see her again until the next time she’s born,” Shayne explained.

  And if this worked, and their son was freed, then he would never see her again. This was too much to ask her to go through and it needed to end. It would kill him to never see her again, but he would give her the freedom that she deserved.

  “This time she knows about us before the curse took its hold and we’ll be able to stay by her side without scaring her,” Shayne said, giving him the one promise that would make this situation tolerable.

  He allowed himself another moment to simply enjoy having Marty in his arms before he opened his eyes and did what needed to be done. Ignoring her sobs and the way she clutched desperately to him, he leaned down and pressed a kiss against her forehead, one on each cheek before he pressed his lips to her trembling ones.

  “I love you so much, Marty,” he whispered hoarsely against her lips, “so goddamn much.”

  “Please don’t do this, Tristan,” she pleaded against his lips.

  “Shhhh, it’s fine, baby.”

  “No,” she sobbed, shaking her head frantically as she pulled away from him. “It’s not!”

  “It has to be done, lass,” Liam said soothingly.

  “No, it doesn’t!” she cried.

  “Marty,-“

  “There has to be a way, Tristan! There has to be!”

  “Lass, if we don’t remove him before the curse kicks in, then we won’t have a chance to save yer son.”

  “No,” Marty said, stubbornly shaking her head. “You don’t know that. Maybe you missed something-“

  “Each of us has our own trigger for the curse, lass,” Declean explained, interrupting her. “And yers has always been started by Tadgh getting a babe on ye. It triggers Tadgh’s death and, as a result, yer death. It’s what called us to ye.”

  “Then it shouldn’t make a difference whether you end his life or if you give us a little more time to figure this thing out!” Marty cried, grabbing his hand and squeezing it, making it hard to do what had to be done.

  “If we take him, lass, it won’t be a true death. That’s why he came up with this plan in the first place. We’ll simply pull him out of his body and that will be it. If we let the curse take its toll, his death will trigger a series of events that will end with yer death.”

  “I won’t allow that,” Tristan said, pulling her attention back to him.

  He forced himself to ignore the tears streaming down her face as he leaned in to kiss her one last time, but she wasn’t having that. She pulled far enough away from him so that she could cup his face in her hands as she flat out begged him not to do this.

  “You don’t need to do this, Tristan. We can find a way to beat this thing.”

  “If it means that you and our son get a chance to live,” he said softly as he gestured to Shayne, “then I don’t have a choice.”

  “Yes, you do!”

  “No,” he said, turning his face so that he could press a kiss against the palm of her hand just as Finn and Aidan appeared on either side of her, “I don’t.”

  With a slight nod, Finn and Aidan disappeared, taking his heartbroken wife with them.

  “I’m so sorry, lad,” Shayne said softly as he moved towards him.

  He ground his jaw shut tightly when he heard Marty scream his name from somewhere upstairs, probably their room. He carefully stood up, ignoring the pain in his shoulder and the way his heart pounded in his chest at the thought of never seeing her again.

  “This is why you never pushed me towards her, isn’t it?” he asked as he tried to force his mind away from everything that was happening.

  “Yes,” Shayne said with a sad smile. “I was in no rush to get here, lad.”

  “Tristan!”

  He forced his eyes closed as he fought against the urge to go to her and drag her into his arms, but he couldn’t. If he so much as saw her again, he knew that it would break him.

  “Do ye want to give her a proper goodbye, lad?” Shayne asked and he knew that he was being offered one last night with his wife, but he couldn’t take it….he just couldn’t.

  “No,” he forced the word out of his mouth as he opened his eyes and faced his oldest friend and protector. “Send me home, Shayne.”

  “Verra well, lad,” Shayne said quietly as he moved his hand towards Tristan’s chest. “Let’s bring ye home.”

  *-*-*-*

  “You’re making a mistake!” Marty snapped as she tried to push past Finn.

  “I’m sorry, lass,” he said again as he gently gripped her shoulders and stopped her from going to the closed door.

  “Would ye like something to eat or drink?” Aidan asked with a polite smile as he gestured once again for her to lie down and rest.

  Ignoring him, Marty ducked away from Finn’s hold, furious with herself for losing it the way she had. Instead of crying and pleading with Tristan not to go through with this asinine plan, she should have slapped some sense into him. She’d been so focused on losing him that she hadn’t done anything to stop it from happening.

  Now she was trapped in their bedroom with two guards while her husband was downstairs making the biggest mistake of their lives and she had no idea how she was going to stop him. Screaming and crying certainly hadn’t helped, she thought bitterly, pissed that she’d screwed up what was probably her one and only chance at saving Tristan.

  At saving them.

  She needed him and so did their baby. She didn’t care what Tristan or these men thought. Deep down she knew that this was wrong. It wasn’t just because she didn’t want to lose him, she didn’t, but because this plan felt wrong for so many reasons. If they’d been cursed together, then that’s how they needed to break this curse, together.

  If the curse had a hold over their baby, then it was just as trapped as they were and tying to cheat this curse was not going to help or change things. She also didn’t think that this plan of theirs was going to free their baby. Their baby surviving to be born wasn’t a guarantee that it would be free from this curse one day. For all they knew, the baby would return to wherever it had been all these years once it was his time. Now since Tristan was so hellbent on this plan of his, the baby would never get
another chance to escape.

  Their only chance to beat this curse for their child and for them was to face this thing head on together. They needed more details on the curse so that they could do some research. They also needed to know more about what had happened in their past lives and the events that triggered the curse. What they didn’t need was Tristan destroying their only chance at breaking this curse.

  It had to be the hormones, she thought with a sigh as she pulled her foot up and slammed it down on Aidan’s instep. That was the only explanation there was for it, she decided as she ignored Aidan’s curses and focused on Finn, the only thing standing between her and the door.

  “Now, lass, we can talk about this,” Finn said, licking his lips nervously as he stumbled back a step.

  “Move,” she simply said, moving towards him, more than prepared to take a shot at the family jewels again if that’s what it took to get him out of her way.

  He opened his mouth to argue, but she was done playing around. She kept moving towards him, knowing without a doubt that he would never hurt her even to protect himself. She didn’t want to hurt him again, but she would if she had to and he must have realized that because he suddenly disappeared.

  “That was easy,” she murmured, more than a little confused as she shot a look over her shoulder at Aidan to make sure that he was still distracted, but he wasn’t there.

  She didn’t know what was going on and she wasn’t about to waste precious time trying to figure it out. They could be back at any moment and she needed to be out the door and heading down the stairs before that happened.

  Realizing that all they’d need to do to return her to this room was to lay their hands on her had her moving quickly. She threw open the door, half-expecting someone to be waiting on the other side to grab her. When she didn’t see anyone, she bolted out the door, hoping that her luck would hold.

  All she wanted to do was get close enough to Tristan so that she could talk some sense into him. If that didn’t work, then she’d use the chokehold on him that her father had taught her in the second grade when some large fourth grade girl kept pushing her off the swings and stealing her turn. It had worked like a dream back then and she hoped that it was just as effective this time. This was her only shot and she wasn’t about to blow it. Well, not again.

  This time she was going to…..going to……

  Why was Tristan calling someone a bitch and telling him to man up?

  Chapter 35

  “Fucking do it!”

  “If ye would shut the fuck up I might be able ta!” Finn snapped back, his focus never shifted away from where his hand laid on Tristan’s chest.

  Tristan ground his teeth shut as he waited for it to happen. Any second now it would be over. The pain would be gone, the fucking stress from waiting for this bullshit to be over with and hopefully the agony of knowing that he would never see Marty again would be gone.

  This needed to end and now. Deciding to take himself out of the game was hard enough, but the way that each and every one of his so called brothers kept wimping out on him and prolonging this was fucking torture. He didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to walk away from Marty and their child, but he had to do it. If his being around was a factor in triggering their deaths, then he had to be taken out of the situation.

  It was supposed to be quick. One pull and everything should have been over, but ten minutes of bitching later and he was still standing here waiting for someone to grow the balls to do it. When Finn shot a nervous look over to Liam, Tristan knew that this whole thing was about to take a lot longer than any of them had expected.

  “Just do it,” Tristan bit out through clenched teeth as he reached up with his good hand and placed it over the one Finn still had pressed against his chest.

  “I’m trying!” But they both knew that he wasn’t going to do it. He had that same expression on his face that every man before him had just before they’d stepped back, made up some bullshit excuse and told someone else to do it. Now the only problem was that there was no one else left to do it.

  “Try harder,” he ground out, willing Finn to do it and end his suffering.

  The pain from knowing that he would never see Marty again was surprisingly more brutal than his fucked up shoulder and that had him seeing black spots and struggling not to give into his shaky legs and drop to the ground. He knew that if he gave into the pain that they’d use it as an excuse not to do this and he desperately needed them to do this.

  He couldn’t stomach the idea of Marty or their baby suffering. He didn’t want to keep putting her through this hell and he didn’t want her life shortened because of him. He wanted her to go on and enjoy her life, raise their son and if she had to come back again, he wanted her to have a chance at being happy, growing old and-

  “This ends now,” Marty said, shoving Finn’s hand away as she smoothly stepped in front of him. Looking relieved, Finn quickly retreated away.

  “Go back upstairs,” he ordered, looking anywhere but at her, knowing that one look at her would probably break him and have him doing anything to stay with her even if it was only for one more night.

  “No,” she said simply as she placed her hand on his good shoulder and shoved, taking him off guard and knocking him on his ass.

  Not that it would take much right now to kick his ass, he thought as he fought against another wave of dizziness. As soon as his ass hit the chair, Marty was climbing on his lap, looking pissed and determined.

  “Get off,” he said, his voice sounding hollow as he struggled to stay with it.

  “Yeah, I don’t think so,” she said dryly as she settled more comfortably on his lap.

  “Maybe we should leave the room and give these two some privacy,” Shayne, the fucking coward, said, already making a quick retreat for the door.

  He’d been the first one to back out of doing what needed to be done, sprouting some bullshit about not being able to do it, because it would damage his video game playing hand. It hadn’t exactly surprised him that after all these years of protecting him that Shayne wouldn’t be able to do anything that would hurt him, but the others didn’t have that excuse.

  They’d come here specifically to take him out of the game and should have been able to do it without any problems. When Shayne wimped out on him, he’d expected Liam, who’d stepped up next, to get the job done. After five of the longest minutes of his life, Liam backed up, shot him a glare and flipped him off when Tristan called him a fucking pussy, and gestured for Declean to take a shot at it.

  “Put her back in her room and let’s finish this,” Tristan demanded, needing her out of the room before he lost his nerve to do this.

  “I’m not going back to the room until you and I have a talk.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” he said absently as he shifted to move her off his lap and do whatever it took to finish this when Shayne said, “We’ll be back in a few, lad. We need to discuss strategy and all that.”

  Before he could argue they disappeared, prolonging something that was becoming harder and harder to do with every passing second. Why did she have to make this so damn difficult? He was doing this for her and their baby.

  Right now it was hard to accept, but one day, hopefully, soon she would understand the gift that he was giving her. He’d do anything to see her belly swell with their child, to hold him and to be by her side as they watched their son grow up, but that wasn’t in the cards for them. This curse explained so much and made him wish that he’d listened to his fears and stayed away from her. Then again if he had, their child wouldn’t be getting this chance to escape.

  He knew what it was like to be alone and defenseless. Just thinking about their child suffering like that was enough to make him sick to his stomach. No child should suffer and he was going to make damn sure that his child’s suffering ended now.

  Letting them end his life was taking a huge risk, but right now that’s all he had. His only hope was that he wouldn’t have to wait
very long before he had access to all the memories from his prior lives. That was one of the main reasons that he was doing this. They needed that information.

  He knew that Marty was pissed with his plan and wanted to figure this out together, but if they had any real chance, this was it. It would hurt like hell to walk away from her, but he had no choice. As soon as he had all of his memories back, he was going to go through each one and try to find something that would help save his wife and child. It was the only way.

  “You’re not doing this, Tristan.”

  “It’s the only way,” he said tightly, refusing to look at her or touch her, knowing that it wouldn’t take much for him to lose his nerve.

  “No, it’s not,” Marty stubbornly said and he knew that there was nothing that he could say to convince her otherwise, so he didn’t bother.

  “I’ve made my decision.”

  “And I’ve made mine,” she said as she cupped his face in her soft warm hands and moved to pull his gaze to hers, but he wouldn’t allow it. Not when he was so goddamn close to breaking.

  “This is the only way to save you and the baby, Marty. It’s not a choice that I’m making lightly, but it is my choice,” he said evenly as he reached up with his good hand and gently removed her hands from his jaw, careful not to look at her.

  “Uh huh, I tell you what, Tristan. Look me in the eye and tell me that this plan is our only hope and I’ll let you go, no questions asked.”

  Without looking at her, he said, “When they remove me, I’ll get my memories back and hopefully some answers so that I can save you and the baby.”

  “How very noble of you, Tristan,” she murmured. “Now why don’t you try looking at me when you say that?”

  She knew him too damn well, he thought with a sigh as he closed his eyes and let his head drop back. “Marty,-“

  “We need you, Tristan,” she said softly.

  “I’m doing this for you,” he said, hating how his voice broke and wishing that Shayne and the rest of the cowards would get back in here and finish this. Honestly, he didn’t think that he could take much more.