by BB Easton
Fuck!
Without thinking, I drop to the ground and sweep my leg out, knocking Mac clean off his feet as three gunshots ring out in rapid succession. The first one Mac fired into the air just before he hit the dirt. The second one shattered the passenger window of the SWAT vehicle he was standing in front of, splintering the glass—where his head would have been—like a spiderweb. And the third one came from somewhere to the left of me.
I turn in that direction and find Hoyt standing beside his cruiser, holding a smoking gun over the roof of his car. His face is slack-jawed and wide-eyed, just like the girl in the tree fifty feet behind him. Rain lowers her gun in stunned shock and raises one shaking finger to point at something on the other side of me.
Before I can even turn in that direction, I feel a rush of putrid air ruffle my hair as something hits the ground beside me like a three-hundred-pound sack of rotten potatoes. I swing my head around to find Governor Fuckface lying on the ground, bleeding out from the neck as he coughs and gurgles. His mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water as he holds one of his three chins with one hand and reaches out to me with the other.
“Ew!” Officer Elliott squeals as he walks over and lifts one perfectly polished hard-sole shoe, firmly placing it over the governor’s ribs. “Hoyt, did you have to shoot him in the neck? That’s so nasty!” With a disgusted grimace and a shove, Elliott rolls Beauregard Steele’s gasping body into the hole that was dug for me.
Or was it?
I did notice that it was a little bit wider than usual.
Another man in all-black civilian clothes, like a bodyguard, steps out of the tank and tells the riot cops to stand down. As soon as they holster their weapons, the crowd erupts in cheers. I walk on my knees over to Mac. I can’t help him up because my hands are still fucking cuffed behind my back, but he groans and sits up on his own, pulling his mask off in the process.
“You okay, old man?”
He nods and glares at Hoyt, who’s now getting a shoulder massage from Elliott.
“You’re jealous that he got the kill and not you, aren’t you?” I tease.
Mac’s jaw grinds, and his eyes narrow as they cut back to me. “Who knew those two clowns would have their own fucking plan?”
I chuckle. “Evidently, my girl had one, too. She damn near blew your head off, man.”
“You mean, that girl?”
I follow Mac’s smirk over my shoulder and find the riot cops helping Rain climb onto the hood of Hoyt’s cruiser. She’s wearing that fucking red lipstick again, and she has a red skirt or dress or some shit on under her spray-painted, blood-splattered hoodie.
I pull my lip between my teeth and stare as she hops down, the wind ruffling her hair and blowing her skirt up before she lands with a graceful thud just a few feet away from me.
She’s here.
She’s right fucking here.
I barely register the click of my handcuffs before I’m on my knees with my face buried in my girl’s belly and my arms wrapped around her thighs.
“Don’t look at me like that, little missy,” Mac’s deep voice grumbles behind me. “I wasn’t gonna kill him.”
I laugh. I fucking laugh until I damn near cry as Rain’s fingers comb through my hair and her body sinks into my lap and her swollen, red eyes stare through mine.
“Did you get tear-gassed?” I ask, swiping my thumbs over her wet cheeks.
“No, I’m just really happy,” she sobs, her red lips splitting into a smile that I’ve wanted to put on her face since the moment I fucking met her.
I let myself watch her smile for a whole second, maybe two, just long enough for me to take a picture of it with my mind. Then, I kiss that fucking grin right off her face.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice tells me that I need to be careful. Stay vigilant. That my story doesn’t end like this. That I don’t get to be happy. That my world doesn’t work that way.
But I tell that voice to shut the fuck up.
It’s a new world now.
And in this world, we can be whatever the fuck we want to be.
Even happy.
Epilogue
One Year Later
Rain
I slide the car seat into the red vinyl booth and sit down next to it while Wes goes up to the front to order. Lily smiles back at me as I rock her gently, cooing and kicking her feet under her blanket. She’s so incredibly beautiful. Soft brown hair like her daddy—only hers is fuzzier and sticks straight up. She has giant blue eyes, like mine, but hers sparkle with the kind of pure, innocent joy that only someone who didn’t live through April 23 can know.
By the time Lily arrived, the world was safe again. Orderly. Militant. After Governor Steele was assassinated, we went from zero laws to martial law in the span of about a week. It turns out that all over the country, members of the military were gearing up for a government takeover. Officer MacArthur and Governor Steele’s bodyguard, Jenkins, were in the Green Berets together and had already been in talks with Army officials about organizing a coup in Georgia when Wes suggested that they do it at his execution.
It’s kind of hilarious that Officer Hoyt beat them to it.
Georgia was the first state to fall, but after that, the other forty-nine toppled like dominoes. Within a few days, the military completely seized power. Existing laws were reinstated, mandatory curfews were enforced, and the released prisoners were put to work—rebuilding businesses, clearing the roads, cleaning up the graffiti, and burying the dead. It’s still weird to see tanks driving down the street every night at 8 p.m. and generals giving press conferences instead of men in ten-thousand-dollar suits, but if it means my daughter and I can go to the grocery store without getting raped, robbed, killed, or kidnapped, I’ll take it.
Once the state governments started being overthrown, the president read the writing on the wall and just … disappeared. Rumor has it that he flew off to Tim Hollis’s private island along with a bunch of the other “one-percenters” and is living quite comfortably in the tropics.
Burger Palace didn’t survive though. After Lamar’s footage of what happened at Plaza Park made the national news, boycotts and vandalism spread across the country. Here’s your sponsor, Fuck your sponsor, Not my sponsor, or some other variation was spray-painted over every image of King Burger from California to Connecticut.
After the Burger Palace in Franklin Springs shut down, Mr. and Mrs. Renshaw bought it for cents on the dollar and turned it into a mom-and-pop barbeque joint. They’d actually liked cooking for all the runaways at the mall and decided to try their hand at the service industry. It’s the only restaurant in town, so even though it’s not the best-tasting barbeque you’ve ever had—and every once in a while, you might find some buckshot in your brisket—they do a ton of business.
I’m happy for them. I might not ever be on speaking terms with Agnes again, and I still low-key hate her guts, but … I guess we came to some kind of a truce. When Wes kicked them out of my house after the riot, Jimbo forced Agnes to apologize for having Wes arrested and for tying me up, and I apologized for knocking her out and stealing their truck. But I did not apologize for running over Carter’s foot. He deserved that shit.
Carter ended up getting a job as a police officer, and get this, his first assignment as a rookie is to patrol the area around the Pritchard Park Mall and make sure there’s no resurgence of Bony activity. He’s a real mall cop now! Q would die! Actually, I’m sure she already knows. Her mattress is probably a regular stop on his route. Gross. They deserve each other.
My phone dings from somewhere inside my diaper bag.
“Hold on, little lady,” I say, pinching my munchkin’s toes. “I just gotta … err …” I dig around in the bottomless bag as Lily watches me in amusement. “Got it!”
I yank my phone out and illuminate the screen, giggling at Michelle’s all-caps text.
THREE MONTHS OF MATERNITY LEAVE IS BULLSHIT. IS IT NEXT WEEK YET?
I smirk and drop
the phone back in my bag. I always thought I would go to school to become a nurse like my mama, but I think I’ve seen enough bloodshed for one lifetime. After the Green Mile riot, Michelle insisted that I keep working as her co-reporter and personal assistant. I couldn’t tell her no after everything she’d done for me, but I also realized that I didn’t want to. Nobody had ever listened to me until Michelle handed me a tube of red lipstick and a microphone. She showed me that I don’t have to roll over and let bad things happen to me anymore. To the people I love. I can fight for them with nothing more than a camera and a press pass.
Only now, I do it under my new name, Rain Parker, instead of Stella McCartney.
My mama’s wedding rings gleam on my left hand as I walk my short nails up baby Lily’s chubby thigh. I blow a raspberry on her squishy cheek and feel my insides turn to mush when she lets out a tiny, breathy giggle.
I had no idea that Wes had saved Mama’s rings for me until he surprised me on Mother’s Day, a few days after the assassination. He took me to the Fulton County Courthouse, and in the exact same spot where Governor Steele had sentenced him to death, Officer Marcel Elliott pronounced us husband and wife. When I asked Wes why he wanted to do it there, he said it felt like “a nice fuck you.”
And it did. It felt perfect actually. Lamar walked me down the aisle. Officer Hoyt and Officer MacArthur were our maid of honor and best man. Michelle and Flip were in the audience, taking pictures and videos, and Wes even invited his mama, who cried like a baby the whole time.
After Lily was born, Wes had a tattoo artist transform the wilted pink flower on his ribs into a vibrant orange tiger lily. He said he didn’t want to be marked by what had happened to his sister anymore. He wanted to move on. And a big part of that was letting his mama back into his life. Rhonda has stepped up and become the mother he and I both needed. She’s clean and sober, she has a job and an apartment, and she comes over for dinner every Sunday. We don’t let her babysit though. Wes’s trust only goes so far. Besides, we have Lamar for that. At least, until he goes off to college.
I turn my head and smile as Wes saunters over. He’s wearing his blue Hawaiian shirt—my favorite—and carrying a tray full of the world’s most mediocre barbeque. We don’t normally eat at the Renshaws’ place—things are still pretty tense between us—but today is special. This is the anniversary of the day we met, right here in this very restaurant—or as Wes likes to call it, the day he kidnapped me at gunpoint from Burger Palace. But he knows he saved me that day. I was as lost as a person could possibly be. My house was a crime scene. My parents, the victims. My friends were gone. My boyfriend had abandoned me. I was being jumped by half the town while high as a kite on my daddy’s pain pills. And the world was supposed to end in a matter of days. All I wanted to do was stay numb and die.
All Wes wanted was someone to help him survive.
But somehow, together, we figured out how to live.
Wes’s full lips curl into a smug grin the second he catches me staring, and my heart does a little backflip. I can’t believe I get to keep him. I can’t believe we actually got our happily ever af—
Without warning, the lights go out, and the doors on either side of the restaurant burst wide open. Police sirens blare, and blue lights splash across the darkened walls as hundreds of shoving, screaming bodies run full speed into the restaurant. The customers all around us stand up on their chairs and benches, and they’re all wearing riot cop gear—gas masks and shields and billy clubs and guns. When I look back at Wes, he’s gone, swallowed by the chanting, fist-thrusting mob.
Chairs and punches are thrown at cops. Tear gas and bullets fly into the crowd. Noxious smoke fills the room as Lily begins to cough and cry behind me.
I pull her blanket over her face and stand up on my seat, hugging the car seat to my chest as I try to find Wes in the crowd. I scream his name, but I can’t see or hear anything through my own stinging, watering eyes and the painful wails of my baby girl. I get closer to the edge of the crowd, searching through the blinding, burning smoke when someone reaches out and grabs me, pulling me in.
The crush of fighting, clawing, panicking bodies is so forceful that I can’t breathe. I can’t even move, except when they shove me in one direction or another. Someone climbs onto my back, trying to get above the crowd, and my knees buckle under the weight. I curl my body around Lily’s car seat, trying to protect her as feet and fists and billy clubs rain down on my head and back.
“Help!” I scream as loud as I can. “Help! I have a baby!”
Then, two hands reach out from the smoky darkness and grip me by the shoulders.
“Baby,” Wes whispers, gently shaking me. “You fell asleep nursing again.”
I open my eyes with a gasp to find a shirtless green-eyed man smiling down at me and a sleeping infant in my arms.
“Oh my God,” I cry, clutching Lily to my chest. “Oh, thank God.” My heart is pounding as my brain sluggishly tries to grasp the fact that we’re not going to be trampled to death.
“Another nightmare?” Wes asks, his dark eyebrows pulling together as he crouches down next to me.
I’m sitting in a rocking chair in my old bedroom—Lily’s room now—in the dark. My white nursing gown seems to glow in the moonlight, and my breast is still exposed from her midnight feeding.
I nod and reach a hand out to cup Wes’s concerned face. I thought the nightmares would go away after April 23, but they’re just different now. Instead of demonic horsemen, it’s real monsters. Ones we’ve already defeated whose ghosts now haunt us while we sleep.
But that’s okay. As long as I get to wake up in this beautiful dream, I don’t mind a few nightmares now and then.
“You okay?”
I smile and nod again. “Better than I was a few minutes ago,” I whisper, echoing the flirty response he gave me from inside his jail cell.
Wes smiles and kisses me on the forehead. “Here, I’ll put her down.”
He scoops the sleeping bundle out of my arms, and I watch, awestruck, as he lazily carries her across the room. She’s barely the size of one of his biceps, but he’s so gentle and loving with her. He kisses her fuzzy head before laying her down in the middle of her crib, his back muscles rippling as he leans over. Wes is wearing nothing but a pair of gray sweatpants, and when he turns to face me, his lips curl into a sinister smirk. I follow his gaze down to my chest and laugh silently as I go to pull my nursing gown back up.
“Don’t you dare,” Wes growls, stalking toward me.
He started a construction company, rebuilding houses that had been damaged during Operation April 23, and one of the perks of the job is this body. Good Lord. He was cut before, but now he belongs on the cover of a romance novel.
A really gritty one where the hero has tattoos and drives a motorcycle and cusses a lot.
Wes reaches his hands out, and I take them, letting him pull me to my feet. Then, I let out a surprised yelp as he grabs my fuller than usual ass and lifts me off the ground. My legs wrap around his waist, and my arms wrap around his shoulders as he chuckles softly, smiling against my parted lips.
“How long until she wakes up?” he whispers, carrying me out of the nursery.
I cringe as we walk past Lamar’s room, thankful that his door is shut and lights are off.
“Two or three hours, depending on how long I was asleep.”
“Challenge accepted.” He smirks, kicking the master bedroom door shut behind him.
When we moved back in, we got all new furniture, painted the walls a dark gray, and I even had a pastor from my old church come and say a blessing, just in case. We made it our own, and I love it. It’s not home—Wes is my home—but it’s not scary anymore either. It’s just a house—wood and nails and screws and paint … and bedroom doors that lock.
Holding me up with one arm, Wes turns the silvery latch on the doorknob. The click sends an excited shiver down my spine. I tighten my thighs around his waist and let my longer hair fall around us as I
tilt my head down to kiss his parted lips. Wes captures my mouth with an appreciative moan. Squeezing my ass with one hand, he reaches up and hooks a finger into the top edge of my nursing gown, yanking the stretchy, gauzy white fabric down until my other breast is exposed as well.
“That’s better,” he murmurs into my mouth as his rough palm caresses my tender, swollen flesh.
I arch my back as his thumb swirls around my oversensitized nipple, breaking our kiss and allowing Wes to suck and nip his way along my jaw and neck.
I can feel him pressed against me through his sweatpants, so reaching between us, I slide my fingers into his waistband and shimmy it down over his swollen length. Hot, velvety flesh fills my hand, and I lick my lips as I pump him slowly.
“Fuck,” Wes growls, his teeth scraping my collarbone as he grabs my ass with both hands again. “I want you just like this.”
I squeal as he pushes away from the door, tightening my grip around his broad shoulders as he crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed. I land on his lap with my knees spread on either side of him and moan when he bends me backward and pulls one straining pink nipple into his mouth. His heavy cock presses against my slippery center, and my hips grind against it instinctively, needing more.
Wes’s tongue swirls and flicks and sucks until my breasts begin to tingle and burn.
“Wes!” I hiss, trying to pull away, but he only chuckles and continues his assault. Milk drips from my other nipple and down my breast as I grab his head and try to pull him off me. “Wes, you’re gonna get milk in your—”
Holding my stare with blazing emerald eyes, Wes slowly drags the flat of his tongue over my nipple, collecting every drop of milk that falls.
Swallowing, he brings his lips back to my mouth. “I told you …” he rasps, lifting my ass until the head of his cock drags through my folds and presses against my entrance. “I want you just … like … this.”