by Ann, Bry
Chapter Thirty-One
Seven
He. Is. Gonna. Meet. The. Fucking. Monster.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Adam
Seven Hours Later
This is a mess. A real nightmare. There is something special about that young woman. I understand what Seven sees in her. She’s a light. She brings healing and happiness everywhere she goes, and I fear who Seven will become if she passes.
I’m not looking forward to going to the cells where Trevor Porter is being held. I understand the need for violence as much as the next mafia boss, but I’m scared to see what my underboss is capable of.
I make my way down and take a deep breath before crossing the threshold where Trevor and Seven are.
“WHY HER!?” Seven roars, voice breaking. “Why her? Why fucking her?”
Sliceeeeee. I hear a weapon, probably a sword, break through skin. Moans echo throughout the stone room.
“Seven.”
Stoically, I glance up at Trevor. All I see is red. It’s fitting. ‘Cause I know that’s how Seven feels. Red. Red. Red.
I’ve been there. Oh, have I been there.
“It’s done, Seven. He’s gonna bleed out.”
“It’s too soon,” he growls at me with dark eyes.
“I know,” I tell him softly. “Let him bleed out. I have a job for you. It’ll… help.”
“It won’t bring her back. It was him!” He swings his sword impressively over his head and slams it down into Trevor’s thigh.
“Seven…”
His head falls. “Why her?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper.
My brain flashes back to sad, steel grey eyes. I remember when my wife was just as broken as Isla is now. I remember walking in on her slicing her skin open, people torturing her, imprisoning her. I remember getting her back from the men who almost broke her.
Lacey’s endured a lot more than people know, and I’ve never felt greater pain than when she suffered. That’s why I feel for Seven.
“Do this job, Seven.”
“Fine. What do I do?”
I lead him away so he can do a job where he can swing his sword and kill some bastards like ourselves, because I don’t know what else to do. As strong of men as we are, nothing can render a man helpless like the love of a good woman.
* * *
Seven
Nia’s curled up asleep by Isla’s side, snoring softly. I’m in the corner of the room. I’ve killed a total of ten people since Isla was shot.
Ten.
All slaughtered in the worst way possible. Isla uses her life to heal. I kill.
I should have never fucking been with her!
Boss is trying to help. I know that, as much sympathy as he’s capable of feeling, he does. But it doesn’t help. None of it does.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
The steady rhythm of the machines keeping her alive blare like a siren in the cold, sterile hospital room, reminding me that Isla Grace may never come back from this. After everything she’s been through, she may not come back from this.
I cough to hide the tears rising up as I stare at her clear, pale skin and tangled sunshine golden hair.
A throat clearing has me turning around. In the doorway is a handsome man in a fancy suit, wearing a Rolex watch with the faintest bit of grey touching the tips of his hair. He’s holding a bouquet of flowers that’s worth more than anything I’ve ever gotten her. Of course. I just… failed her all the way around. I hate myself. I fucking hate myself. I failed her like I’m failing Nia and I failed my brothers in the military.
“What?” I bark.
“You must be him,” the man says, entering the room. He has a presence, I’ll give him that. It takes a lot to garner my respect, but he automatically commands it.
It makes me defensive.
Isla is my girlfriend. Mine!
“Must be.”
He pulls up the side chair and takes a seat. I notice he’s avoiding looking at Isla. That chips away at some of my rage and weighs it down with sadness.
“You’re the guy she changed her life for.”
My entire body jolts. “I…”
I glance at the bed. Beep. Beep. Beep.
I don’t know if I can live through this pain. I don’t respond to him. I focus on my daughter. She needs me. Child. Our love and passion for children is what bonded Isla and I.
Focus.
I hear the man suck in a pained breath. He looked at her. A tear rolls from my eye into my beard. I clench my hands and stare at Nia to keep from running.
Nia. Nia. Nia.
“She was my best doctor.”
Please stop talking…
“And I didn’t even notice how incredible she is… until it was too late. All this work and money and none of it means anything.”
He stands. I take that time to look up at him. There are tears rolling down his cheeks that he doesn’t wipe away, because he keeps staring at the angel lying in a hospital bed with pain in his eyes.
“Who are you?” I murmur, losing my hate.
“No one that matters.”
“All the same…”
“Thomas Williams, Isla’s… boss.”
I nod. He gives me a clipped nod back and strolls out of the room at an almost desperate pace.
I slide my chair forward and squeeze Isla’s leg with my blood-crusted fingernails, placing my head on her shin.
“Come back to me, angel. Please come back.”
* * *
Nia
Days Later
“What the hell do you mean she’s pregnant?” Daddy yells. I hate when he yells. I flinch and tuck tighter into his chest, since he’s holding me. His whole body is shaking and his heart is beating like mine.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
Princess. Princess. Princess. Princess.
“When we were running tests…”
“She’s in a coma!” he screams. It’s like Old Daddy used to scream, and it scares me. “I used protection!”
What if New Daddy becomes like Old Daddy?
Isla, come back. Why would she leave me? I thought she loved me? I thought I was special to her?
I want to cry, but instead I stare. I feel my heart become colder as I study everyone in the room.
Daddy’s scared even though he’s acting mad.
Danny’s sad. He’s crying and crying, big fat tears.
Frank’s sad for Danny.
Lacey’s sad for everybody.
New friend Sage is trying to help, but her eyes hold a deeper sad, like me.
Miss Isla made everyone happy. Will we never be happy ever again now? I love her. She can’t go.
What would she want me to do right now?
“I know, sir. I understand how hard this is.”
“Do you?” Danny says. “Do you know?”
He starts crying.
“All Isla wanted was to be a mom and she’s not here to…” He can’t finish. “She has to wake up. She can’t have a baby and…”
This time, Frank grabs him and pulls him close as he cries.
I look at Isla.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. All the big lines and ropes around her. She’s still the prettiest girl in the world. Even sick.
“I can’t…” Daddy cries. “I can’t…”
He’s breaking. He needs me.
“Dad,” I croak. Tick. Tick. Tick. His heart. Like mine. It hurts the same.
He looks at me like he forgot about me. I’m a little sad about it, but it’s okay. He’s sad like me. I forget about people, too, sometimes, when I’m sad.
“Hi, sweetie,” he whispers, softly kissing my curly hair. “How are you holding up?”
“Okay.”
His smile is sad. “You don’t have to lie.”
“Yes.”
“No, you don’t.”
I wipe his tears with my thumbs. “Yes.”
“You’re such
a good girl.”
His head falls to my shoulder with a loud noise I don’t understand.
“Let me take her,” Lacey whispers.
I feel Daddy nod yes.
No. Don’t make me leave. Don’t make me leave Isla. But those words are too much. And I don’t know how to say them.
Epilogue
Seven
Two Years Later
It’s been one year, two months, and twenty-three days since Isla’s death.
Officially.
Danny and I would have kept her on life support forever, holding onto the hope that she’d come back to us.
But she never did, and according to her living will, she did not want to stay a vegetable for more than nine months. We gave it an extra week. Both of us in denial. Danny came to my apartment hysterically crying one day and said it was time.
“How can we not follow her wishes, Seven? How can we do that?”
Nia fiddled with a rock on the table and stared blankly into space. She resembled the lost little girl I’d adopted and not the full-of-life princess that Isla and I were beginning to nurture.
I wanted to fall apart that day. Danny, Nia, and I spent every day in the hospital with Isla. Every single one of them since she fell into a coma. Me, Danny, and Nia. A lot of the time, Lacey and Sage, too. I tried to make it good for Nia. We packed “picnics” and read books to Isla. Nia even did her best piecing together words in hopes that it’d bring Isla to life. The longer it didn’t, the more afraid I became that Nia would never speak again and would lose all the progress she’d made.
Only Danny and I were there for Isla’s final moments. I cried. And cried. I thanked her for bringing light into my dark world. I promised to forever seek help for my PTSD and to never give up on Nia’s speech. Then I did the right thing and gave the last moments to Danny. I wasn’t sure he’d survive saying goodbye to her. He was pale and barely breathing. As much pain as I felt, I couldn’t imagine being Danny. I couldn’t even begin to compare the two of us. Danny knew everything there is to know about Isla Grace. I was just beginning to uncover her magic.
The only, and I do mean only, reason I survived that day and the preceding months is because of my daughters.
Daughters.
Nia and Grace Jones.
Grace Jones. Born exactly two and a half months before Isla left us. That was harder than her death for both me and Danny. Isla would have given anything to meet her daughter. I’ve never been a person to believe in heaven and hell and an all-knowing God. With a piece of shit mom, the death of my sister, my time in the war camps, and with the mafia, I learned fast that there’s no way there could be a God out there.
But with Grace’s birth, I knew there had to be. There had to be a heaven where Isla could meet her—our—baby girl.
Pregnancies in coma patients are rare, but if anyone was going to produce a healthy baby in a coma, it’d be Isla Grace. She always was a miracle worker when it came to children. Our baby girl was born 6 pounds, 11 ounces with speckles of blonde hair and big, hazel eyes just like her mother. She doesn’t look anything like me, thank God. Boss and Lacey were there for her birth. He put all business aside to be there and had Frances deal with whatever couldn’t be avoided. Lacey teared up and I think Boss did, too. I wanted a black hole to suck me up. I wanted to say fuck the mafia, fuck my stupid life, fuck it all. I wanted to slit my throat with my own sword, but I had Nia. I’d never abandon my child, even if I was being an admittedly horrible father at the time. Marley helped me a ton during that time.
That all changed when I held Grace for the first time and saw the look of love on Nia’s face.
We bonded again immediately. Grace brought that same sense of unity and light to our quiet family that her mom did.
So, we took it one day at a time. Slowly, so slowly, we worked on being everything Isla would have wanted us to be. Because that’s all we had left.
I worked on my PTSD. I saw a therapist four times a week, initially. Now I’m down to two. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but as my therapist quickly pointed out, I could lose it on my kids one day if the trigger was strong enough.
That smacked me in the face like a bomb and I silently thanked Isla for once again seeing things I couldn’t.
I never left the mafia. I didn’t lie when I told Isla it was too late for me. It is. I like what I do. I like seeing blood run down my hands. I like doing illegal shit that makes me tons of money, and mostly, I like the camaraderie and order of it all. I need that. I’ll never leave. I belong to the Mafioso. I always will. But I’m a single father as well and I’ll always be that. My life consists of blood, diapers, swords, dolls, rare steaks, princess books… and it’s the happiest life I could ever make for myself.
Nia suffered the loss of Isla immensely. Even though Isla was in our life for a short time, she made an impact. A huge one. One that will reverberate through the decades. I was terrified that Nia would stop talking since her voice failed to wake Isla, and she was too young to understand that wasn’t her fault or anything she did wrong.
But Nia did the opposite.
She threw herself full force into Dr. Petti’s lessons. She dove head first into speech therapy. She stared at books and struggled ‘til her eyes were tired with exhaustion. She forced me to push her to learn new things and talk. It’s what I always wanted, but it made my heart ache knowing why she was doing it. A year after Isla’s death, I found a small stash of books hidden in a box under Nia’s bed. They were all princess themed. The books she’d peel out when I left her at night.
I cried all night that night. I broke laws left and right the next day with Frances by my side.
Danny. He’ll never be the same, but he’s doing his best. He never broke his engagement to Frank, though I know it was hard for him not to. He did it for Isla and because Frank has been everything a partner should be. They haven’t gotten married, but Frank has made it more than clear that he’s willing to wait for whenever Danny is ready, even if he never is.
Danny’s about thirty pounds lighter. He works at a new clinic now as a psych nurse. That job has been good for him. He likes bringing light to the mentally ill. It forces him to be the goof Isla knew and not the dark, angry man I know he can be. A piece of himself is missing, though, and that piece will always belong to Isla Grace. His sister. His bug, as they would say.
“Dad!” Grace comes running into the house, her little yellow dress tangled around her knees. “Dad, you have to come!”
Her words are a little muffled from her young age. Whereas Nia is quiet, Grace could talk by the time she was like, ten months old or something crazy.
“What is it, Grace?”
She grabs my hands and tugs, leaving me no choice but to follow. She pulls me out into the backyard. I got a new place for the three of us when Grace turned one.
She pulls me out to the large oak tree surrounded by bright yellow grass.
“We have to help him, Daddy!”
“Who?” I ask quickly, suddenly alert.
“Look!”
She points to the bottom of the tree by the trunk. There’s a little bird fluttering his wing and failing to fly.
A bird, Grace? Really? I sigh.
Grace definitely got Isla’s heart and my grit, that’s for sure.
I’m leaning down to scoop him up when Grace leaps forward onto my arm, crashing all her weight upon it to stop me.
“No!” she cries. “You can’t touch him! His mommy won’t love him anymore. Bird mommies are strict.”
She turns to the bird.
“Flufferson, it’s okay,” she coos. “We’ll help you.”
I smile at her. Flufferson? She named the bird Flufferson.
I forgot to mention that she’s as weird as Isla was with her wild imagination and crazy emotions.
“We need to go to the bird store.”
She juts her lower lip out and places her hands on her hips while giving me a firm, “I won’t take no for an answer”
sort of look.
… and there’s me in her.
“Grace, we are not going to the bird store right now. I’m tired.”
She bats her eyelashes. “Pleaseeeeee.”
There it is. The word. Her mom knew how to use it, too.
“Fine,” I grumble. “Go get Nia.”
“Yay!” Her hands wrap around my legs in a tight hold. I place my hand on her head, cherishing her youth and innocence. “I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you, too, angel. Now go get your sister.”
And she skips off to bring light to someone else's world, leaving me with… Flufferson.
* * *
Ten Years Later
My heart is beating out of its chest.
I know we’re in a secured location off the island of Hawaii. I know I pulled every card I had to get men here and bodyguards for Nia and Grace.
But that isn’t stopping my heart from pounding. Thump. Thump. Thump.
We’re at Danny’s wedding, twelve years later. He came to me a year ago and asked if I’d hate him if he got married. He explained how he and Isla had been planning his marriage for years. Back then, it was to spite his father, but it grew into Isla’s desire for him to find love, and Frank is his true love. Frank stuck by Danny as he dealt with alcohol dependence and weight loss and weight gain and anger and depression. He stuck by him through it at all, all these years, and Danny was as ready to get married as he’d ever be. It was kind of him to come to me, even though I truly had no say. I said I was fine with it, but if he expected Nia and Grace—his nieces, fuck blood—to be there, then there had to be guards.
He agreed.
And here we are.
“Grace!” I yell. “What did I say about staying by my side?”
Sweat beads down my forehead.
“Seven!” I keep hearing Isla’s desperate scream in my head. Over and over and over. Nia sees it in my eyes and that kills me. Her brown eyes bore into me. She stays right by my side, occasionally taking my hand in hers and squeezing with the same hand that has her princess tattoo in cursive across her wrist, in honor of Isla and who Isla believed she could be. Nia went alone and got it on her sixteenth birthday. How she pulled that off with the legal tattoo age being eighteen plus, I don’t know. She didn’t say a word about it, but I saw and just hugged her. That was it. I love Grace and Nia equally, but Nia will always hold a special place in my heart.