Epilogue
Dixie
Memory was a funny thing. My images of the night I was attacked were sketchy at best, mostly made of mental pictures Cassie had given me rather than anything real.
Probably a good thing, because remembering being doped up then cut by some bitch with a big-dick complex had the chance to drive me out of my tiny mind.
It…didn’t sit right either. Something felt off, though I couldn’t pinpoint what exactly. A shape. A figure. Harsh words I couldn’t place.
Moniqua had confessed, and that was all that mattered. There was evidence on her knife, though not of me, which had settled everyone’s doubt.
I’d let it settle mine, too. I had a long history of squashing bad memories, and this was just going to be crushed in the don’t-think-about-it pile.
I left my follow-up appointment with the hospital’s plastic surgeon and stepped into the cool corridor. Manny waited downstairs to take me home, the poor guy overprotective as hell since he’d been the last one to see me after dropping me off at home. A month had passed since I had woken up to a ruined career and certainty that my life was over. Misery passed over me, and I shook it off. Pain meds were a bitch. They’d made me depressed, and I’d kicked them to the kerb as soon as I could.
After healing enough to handle the world, I was ready to go back to the warehouse and tentatively agree to a new job.
I was trying to be happy. I’d been through worse than this.
No , I swallowed and faced facts. Everything I’d been through in the past, I’d been able to pack away in that box in my head. No one else would ever know from my outward appearance. With the deep scar across my throat and the puckered skin where it healed, I was shit out of luck in continuing that plan of delusion.
Even with surgery, it could never be completely erased. For the rest of my life, anyone who looked at me would see that first and me after. I’d made my name on being perfect. Any guy now would run a mile.
It wasn’t just my clientele that I was miserable over.
I hadn’t told Cassie, but I’d had a small thing for one of the skeleton crew, Arran’s intercept guy who came and went from the warehouse with some regularity, and whose solid form had caught my attention and not let go. In another world, I would have maybe got brave enough to ask him out. Not now. That part of me was as dead and buried as I had almost been.
Heat pricked my eyes, but I forced away the sadness, ready to go home.
I liked the sound of Cassie’s job. Got all excited over helping her track down men who deserved pain, though for more reasons than she knew.
At the end of the ward, a burly nurse assisted a tall man who was walking with an IV stand and clearly struggling. One arm was heavily bandaged, and his leg was in a cast like he’d broken it and was only just back on his feet.
I squinted at him, recognition flickering as I examined each feature. The hair that I’d remembered being a lot shorter. The snake tattoo around one wrist. It took me a moment to work out what I was seeing, and for several heartbeats, I didn’t believe myself.
I was looking at a ghost.
I’d heard all of Cassie’s stories about the destruction of the Four Milers’ brothel. She’d nearly died in that church and would’ve if it hadn’t been for the undercover member of the skeleton crew who’d saved her ass at the cost of his own life.
The man stared at me for a moment then continued past, his helper giving words of gentle encouragement over his slow progress. His pain was clear, even if any recognition of me wasn’t.
Convict was alive, after all.
The End.