That was my Cora. Always so wise.
And never bitter.
“Am I upset that I didn’t know days ago? Yes,” I admitted softly. “But, saying that, I’m just happy to know that he’s alive. Four days isn’t going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things.”
Coke scrubbed his face as if he was tired and couldn’t quite figure out how to fix it.
“I just… shit,” he said. “She’s never yelled at me before and really had a good reason for it.”
Cora snickered. “Your daughter’s not a baby anymore. She’s a grown adult with the ability to make decisions on her own without you. It burns, doesn’t it?”
Gabe played his fingers through my hair and pressed a kiss to my forehead.
“When he called.” Gabe’s raspy voice made my heart ache sometimes. “I thought that I was hallucinating.”
***
Coke
My belly clenched.
I couldn’t even imagine what they were feeling.
God.
I’d only spent a couple weeks around him at most.
But shit, hearing Cora’s cry of happiness, excitement, and sorrow when Ember had called yesterday with the news had been bad enough.
Getting a call from your so-called dead son, though?
Yeah, that had to have been extremely hard.
I was thinking about Cora, and how excited she’d been when we’d driven over here through the night, when Gabe’s phone rang.
“Hello?” he answered, sounding tired.
His face went from lost to alert in a little over two seconds.
“You’re fucking shitting me.”
Ember turned to study her husband.
I turned to study him, too.
Something had made him go absolutely alert, and what he was hearing wasn’t something good.
Then Gabe smiled.
A smile so fucking wide that it made me have hope.
When he finally hung up, we all waited for good news.
It was good news… just definitely not the good news we’d been hoping for.
“Who was that?” Ember asked the moment that he hung up.
“Tim,” Gabe answered. “He’s been trying to get a hold of Luca for a while, and finally called me because Luca wasn’t answering. They… shit. Shit, goddamn.”
“What?” Ember raised her voice.
“They’re here. Or almost,” Gabe said as he hurried to the door.
Ember followed, and I was left staring at Cora with a confused look on my face.
“I have no idea what’s going on,” I admitted.
“Me neither,” Cora agreed. “Let’s go look.”
I didn’t know what I was expecting when I saw the passenger side door open, but it definitely wasn’t the man that stepped out.
“Holy fuck,” Ember breathed, staring dumbfounded. “Malachi.”
Chapter 20
I fucking hate everyone.
-Text from Luca to Frankie
Luca
It’d been a long fucking two days.
And, as I stared at my so-called friend, I knew it was about to get longer.
I could see how we were mistaken for each other, however.
Well, we wouldn’t be mistaken anymore.
But we would have been once upon a time.
Malachi wasn’t scarred like me.
But I did see ghosts haunting his eyes.
“This is very unusual,” Gabe, no, my father, said. “I thought that y’all didn’t share this kind of information.”
Malachi had shown up with Tim, as well as the commander and Hayes who had talked with us at the beginning of our stay.
“It is,” the commander agreed. “However, we felt that we owed an explanation.”
Malachi was staring at me, his face a mask of torture and pain.
“Why are you staring?” I finally asked.
Malachi’s lips turned up at the corners.
“I’m staring at you because I’m honestly not sure how the hell you survived,” he admitted.
“Me?” I asked. “According to Hayes.” I gestured to the quiet man that hadn’t said much since this meeting had begun. “You were the one that almost took your own life. That, until just now, we thought had taken his own life.”
Malachi’s head tilted slightly.
“That’s true,” he said. “But I didn’t die. Unfortunately.”
Frankie inhaled deeply.
“Unfortunately?” she asked a bit breathlessly.
Malachi’s eyes turned to her and softened.
“Yes, unfortunately,” he agreed. “We…I…it wasn’t the best of conditions.”
We waited for more, but he didn’t give us more.
He looked rough.
Ragged and worn out. Malnourished and scruffy.
His eyes were sunken in and he looked as if he’d just gone twelve rounds and lost.
His eyes, though. They were more than alert and filled with rage, pain, and sorrow.
Something that I saw in my own eyes a time or two lately.
“Hayes relayed my last known location,” Malachi said. “A place that he heard though he thought it might’ve been a hallucination. The SEAL team that brought him out went to investigate and found me.”
“And obliterated the threat once and for all,” the commander added as an afterthought.
“Why weren’t you mentioned when we were told about Hayes?” I asked curiously. “Why not just tell me you were alive? You look like you’ve been out for a couple of days at least.”
Malachi shook his head. “I had a raging fever. Shit wasn’t good in my head. They were… I was on suicide watch. It was only after the fever subsided that I was able to debrief. Once that was done, I asked to come home. To find you.”
He rubbed his face as if he was trying to clear his mind. “There’s a lot more, I’m sure. But what is this about the cops that we heard on the way over here? Tim has an in with a few people. When we were trying to find you, we were told that you were out on bail for murder.”
I told him, the commander, Tim and everybody else what I’d learned in the last twenty-four hours, not leaving a single thing out.
Because honestly, I was so fucking tired of other people dictating my life.
I wanted to goddamn live it.
I didn’t want to play any games anymore.
Not only had I been held as a prisoner of war for over a year, but I also had to deal with this shit when I came home?
Yeah, this was a fuckin’ joke for sure.
“I…”
A polite knock sounded at the door.
We all swiveled our heads to find the repaired door swaying on its hinges.
It was repaired, just not very well.
Ember—my mom—got up to answer it, but my father pulled her back down and answered it himself.
I, as well as everyone else in the room, was surprised to find the detective who’d questioned me the majority of the time today and yesterday at the door.
He was looking quite sheepish.
“Um,” he said at seeing the room full of people. “Uhhh.” He licked his lips. “I’ve come to offer an apology.”
Malachi stood as well as me.
Frankie was soon to follow.
I felt her pressing up against my back as my dad let the detective in through the ruined door.
The detective took in the room full of men and two women, then flushed.
“Uhh,” he said again. “We had a man come in to offer a confession. You’ve been exonerated of all charges.”
He’d said that to Hayes of all people.
Or, more importantly, he’d said it to me, but had kept his wary eyes on Hayes who looked like he’d lose his shit at any second.
Malachi laughed darkly.
“That’s it?” he asked. “Are you going to tell us everything else?”
“You his twin?
” the detective wondered.
Malachi crossed his arms over his chest. “Yeah, he’s my brother.”
And something felt so right about that statement that I felt it deep in my heart.
Hayes moved to my other side, and it was then I realized that it wasn’t only Malachi that I had.
Tim was fast to flank Hayes’ other side.
The detective stiffened at seeing four fucked-up Navy SEALS staring him down.
“The…” He cleared his throat. “There was this boat captain. Apparently, the kid thought to come back after an altercation. The boat captain witnessed him slap the girl he was with. The boat captain punched him so that he wouldn’t hurt her again. The kid fell and cracked his head on the side of the boat. The captain pulled him out of the water and tossed him on the beach next to his friend that apparently the kid had slapped the hell out of over something, rendering her unconscious.”
“What something?” Malachi asked.
My question exactly.
The detective’s gaze moved to look at Frankie.
I stiffened.
“Apparently the kid had a thing for her,” he said, gesturing to Frankie with a jerk of his head. “Some more things were said about a shooting near your place.” He gestured at Frankie with his head again. “About Brent getting jealous about this other kid that lived across the street from her. Watched her workout in a sports bra, how hot she is, shit like that. She accused him of shooting this kid. Brent didn’t take kindly to being accused. And when the girl called him on it, he hit her. When she woke, it was to find the captain running away. Her eyes were unfocused, and all she could see were the scars. She immediately thought of you.”
That simple.
A mix-up of epic proportions that had fucked up all of our day.
“You will fix this door,” my mom ordered. “And you’ll find a way for us to stay here for another week.”
The detective looked as if he was going to argue, but my mother wasn’t taking no for an answer.
“We’ve all driven at least twelve hours straight through the night,” she said. “You’ve inconvenienced quite a few people with this little stunt. Y’all will find a way to fix these two little things because otherwise you’ll be meeting with our lawyer, and shit won’t be as pretty and easily fixed as what I’m offering you right now.”
The detective didn’t have a thing to say to that.
But a few hours later we were called and informed that we had the house for not one week, but two if we wanted it. There was also a repairman that came to the house to fix the door within an hour.
Giving a few fucked up souls time to heal.
Chapter 21
I suffer from that disorder where I speak the truth and piss everyone off.
-Luca to Frankie
Luca
I stared at the phone in my hand, wondering what to do next.
Apparently, my parents had decided to pay for my phone plan for the last two years, keeping it up to date just in case.
A just in case that turned out to be needed seeing as I was now home.
The phone that was in my hand was actually the phone that had been mine in a previous life.
Or, at least, all of the shit on it.
Upon hearing that I was ‘alive,’ my mother had gone to make sure that I’d have everything I needed.
Meaning, she went to the phone store, bought a new phone, and had all of my stuff transferred over from my last update—over two years ago.
I also had a wallet—apparently again the kind that I liked—with an ID in it she’d somehow been able to get without me being with her. An insurance card for my truck that they’d never dropped the insurance on either. And a new bank card that accessed my bank account.
My joint bank account with Frankie was considerably less healthy than Malachi’s, yet still way more than I might ever need any time soon.
I was also staring at the keys to my parents’ house.
Ones that I wouldn’t be using.
“What are you thinking?” Frankie asked softly.
“I don’t know my passcode,” he said.
She quickly took the phone from me, making sure I could see it, then typed in the passcode.
“Your birthdate,” I found myself saying.
I wasn’t sure how I knew that, but I had.
“You didn’t choose it because it was my birthday, though,” she explained. “You already had that as your passcode way before we even met. It was just circumstantial.”
I grinned.
“I like the background,” I said, seeing a much younger version of Frankie on the screen.
She was sticking her tongue out and making Bullwinkle ears.
Frankie laughed and made a face.
One that I captured with my camera.
“This is weird,” I said as I looked at the screen with all the other photos. “That’s the first picture I’ve taken in a while.”
“You didn’t take one with the phone you had that I’ve been texting you on before?” she asked.
I felt myself blush.
Fucking blushed.
Luckily, the scars concealed it to where it couldn’t be seen all that well.
“One,” I said. “Of you.”
She tilted her head sideways and stared at me thoughtfully.
“What was it?” she asked.
I pulled that phone out of my pocket—a shitty prepaid one that had about four minutes talk time remaining on it—and tossed it to her.
It didn’t have a passcode.
Hell, it didn’t even have a decent camera.
That was why when she first looked at the picture when it popped up, it took her a second to realize what she was seeing.
Then she burst out laughing.
“I was eating a hot dog, Luca!” she cried out.
I felt my composure crumble as I could no longer control it.
“It was the way you had your mouth open that did it for me…” I said.
She smacked me on the shoulder, and I winced.
The pain was bearable, though.
Anything felt bearable when Frankie was at my side.
We’d been home for a week now.
Christmas was in the morning, and not only would Frankie and I be celebrating, but we’d be doing it with Hayes, Malachi, my family and hers.
Cora and her dad had driven down the night before and were staying in my parents’ spare bedroom.
Malachi had taken over the apartment that I’d rented for myself—and Hayes was staying with him.
I’d permanently moved into Frankie’s place the moment that we’d gotten home.
I hadn’t acquired much stuff, but my parents had saved all my shit—not that any of the clothes fit anymore.
Seems I’d grown a lot since I’d last worn some of the stuff.
But at least my belongings didn’t make me feel like I was somebody else like Malachi’s had.
“What did the department say today when you went and met with Luke Roberts and Captain Morgan?” Frankie asked, her hand stilling on the icing bag that she was using to decorate cookies with.
“I start back to my old schedule on Monday,” I answered. “The departments had to go through some legal tape with my name and the no schooling thing. But it’s been waived for the time being. Luke suspects that I won’t have to do anything about it since I’ve already taken the refresher course with the department. We’re waiting to hear back from legal on that officially, though.”
She grinned and decorated another cookie.
I came up behind her and stole a cookie from the cooling rack.
“Hey!” she said. “That’s not fair!”
I popped it into my mouth, and she rolled her eyes.
“You’re going to have to run an extra mile to get the cookie off your ass,” she teased.
Malachi came in then, stole a cookie, then walked straight back out.
We watched him go.
Frankie looked worried.
I was more considerate.
“You’re not at all worried about him?” she asked curiously.
I shrugged.
“Worried?” I hesitated. “Not really. More like…considering. I think he’s going to be fine. He and Hayes will work it out.”
Though I couldn’t remember Hayes and Malachi, I felt a deep sort of knowing that I could trust them with my life.
That at one point in time, we’d all been very close.
I was glad that they’d decided to stay in Kilgore.
But it was still upsetting that I couldn’t remember.
More so, I hated that I couldn’t remember my memories when it came to Frankie, though.
Which I told her in the next moment.
“Then I’ll tell you something every single night, every single detail, until you know everything,” she promised.
As we closed our eyes that night, preparing for tomorrow, she told me the sweetest memory we had together yet.
“The night you told me you loved me, we were sitting in your truck,” she whispered. “You were eating peanut butter ice cream, and I was having a brownie Sunday.” She laughed softly against my chest. I wanted so badly to take my shirt off and feel her skin against mine. But I stayed still. Unable to make the first move. “I don’t really like to share my food. I don’t know why. I never have.”
I grinned at her apology. Even though it wasn’t needed.
“Anyway, I was sitting there, enjoying my ice cream, and you suddenly offered me a spoonful of yours.” She smiled; I felt the pull of her cheeks against my sensitive skin. “I looked at you suspiciously. So, at this point, we’d only been seeing each other for like two weeks. You were nice, and you made me constantly have freakin’ butterflies, and I can’t say that I’m ever thinking good. You’ve literally made my brain turn into a fried crazy mess. So, you say, ‘Want a bite?’ and I ask, ‘Why?’”
She starts to laugh.
“I was thinking you were literally about to offer me a bite, then take it away or something before I could actually get a bite, I guess. I don’t know. So, I lean forward really slow, and you don’t move the spoon at all.” She snickered. “I guess the entire time I’m leaning forward to take a bite, you’re looking at me. But all I’m looking at is your ice cream. And when I take the bite, and you lean back, you tell me that you love me. Just like that. Between swallows. You say, “I love you, Francesca.’ Nothing more, nothing less.”
If You Say So (KPD Motorcycle Patrol Book 6) Page 19