13. Wolf
Disbelief wars with logic inside my head.
She was dead. When I pulled her from that water, she was dead, her chest wasn’t moving, I couldn’t get a pulse. I can’t understand it.
“Maybe her vitals were just so weak you couldn’t get a read on them,” Archer suggests with an awed whisper, threading a needle into Luna’s inner arm. “You were sobbing, it was raining, thunder. You couldn’t think straight. There was a lot going on.”
His hands are so much steadier than mine right now, I wanted to do this myself, but I can’t stop shaking. He was outside in a car. Despite my earlier instruction of leaving me alone, my brothers thought it best one of them stay close by. It only took him three minutes to run inside when I called.
“The water pressure probably helped slow the bleeding,” he says absently, a crease between his brows as he too finds this whole thing hard to believe.
“I thought I was seeing a ghost,” I whisper numbly, trying not to disturb the girl I almost suffocated inside a coffin I couldn’t bring myself to cremate.
It felt too final, too soon to say goodbye when I’d only just found her.
I cleaned her up, laid her inside the casket, covered her with a blanket.
I close the lid.
Hiding her face. All that perfect, ice-white skin bloomed with marks and bruises swaddled in a blanket of mine. The polished wooden top gleams under the harsh white light, my hands sliding over it, running across the wood.
It’s the final nail in the cavity of my chest where my heart has withered and died. I lock it away, ready to bury it with her.
I want to climb inside this box. Curl my body into hers, join us both together in the fire that’s to come next. I thought about putting her in the ground, but laying her in the earth, the weight of it atop her. Letting her rot, worms and insects eating their way through her like a delicacy. I can’t do it.
A cry bursts from my trembling lips and my curled fists come down over the end of the coffin. I don’t feel anything as I bleed, my bones aching, grinding, the skin of my knuckles splitting, spilling, oozing.
It feels as though my heart is weeping as blood dribbles from my abused fists. Crying out for what it didn’t even have.
Thorne has always been my anchor, I his, but then he met Haisley, and she became that for him. It left me floating, far out at sea, no anchor, no tether, no line to draw me back in.
Nothing until her.
Instantaneous.
That’s how it felt when I stopped being angry at the world and let myself see her for the first time.
How delicate and gentle and quiet she was.
Was.
Sickness churns in my stomach, but there’s nothing left inside of me but acid now. Bile choking its way up the back of my throat as my fists continue to smash through wood.
I stumble back, my arse hitting the floor, chest heaving and heaving as I look up at the mess I’ve made.
It’s supposed to be perfect.
She is so perfect.
This needed to be done right.
I should have been the last thing she saw. I would have held her and comforted her and let her know it was okay to go. To pass on, even without me. I would have made her feel safe.
‘Because I’m not free.’
My heart bleeds black and my soul cries blood, but there’s nothing I can do.
As a Blackwell, we deal in death. Create it, clean up after it, bury it eight feet deep.
But we don’t feel it.
We hardly blink, collecting body parts and bones, soaking up blood, and discarding human tissue like it’s everyday trash.
But this…
Staring at the broken coffin of a beautiful girl I could see myself one day marrying, it doesn’t feel like only her death. It feels like my own.
Tears slide down my cheeks, my jaw clenched tight, heat swells across my eyelids and I can’t bear to sit and stare at this fucking box any longer.
There’s nothing left for either of us here.
Not tonight.
Rain.
Blood.
Coffin.
Images of her standing there, trembling, candlelight casting her in an eerie glow. Blood and scrapes and slices all over her naked body. Her knuckles broken, fingernails snapped too low, blood curling around her wrists, forearms, dripping from her fingertips.
She could have suffocated.
“What happened to her hands?” Archer asks softly, as we both study the blood racing down the length of clear tubing now connecting my arm to hers.
Luna.
Her blue veins bright beneath the ashy white of her pale skin, her eyes closed, gunshot wound to the side of her head clean and red. My t-shirt is on her upper half, my boxers on her hips, a blanket covering all of her. I watch my blood rushing down the tube, feeding her with it, and my heart clenches and swells at the possessiveness I feel, a piece of me inside of her.
She infected my veins and now I’m infecting hers.
To heal.
“She beat her way out of her coffin.”
I’m disconnected as I say it. The words foreign sounding to my own ears as I stare down at her, all delicate and soft and alive. I swallow hard.
“Wait, what?” Archer chokes as he fumbles with the plastic wrappings from the tubing and needles.
Slowly, his dark eyes spliced with green lift to mine, his chin over his shoulder, he licks his lips, staring at me silently. We’re in the visitor’s room, an echoey space that feels like a fish tank, one wall of it made of glass with heavy open drapes framing it. The space once used for loved ones to come to view their deceased, but Cardinal House isn’t open for business anymore. Only disposals happen here now, and those bodies are never fit for viewing. But this space has the most room for medical equipment, it felt better than putting her in my bedroom. I want her to want to be there.
“I put her in a coffin because I wanted it to be…” I huff out a breath, shaking my head, nice isn’t the right word. “I couldn’t just throw her in the furnace, Arch.”
He frowns, nodding his head, “I wouldn’t have been able to do it either.” His words are whispers scraping up his throat, his gaze unfocused as he stares down at the floor. “You got her back though.” He blinks up at me, scrunching the papers and wrappers into a ball in his fist, “She’s here now.” His Adam’s apple bobs hard in his throat with his swallow, before he sniffs hard and pushes to stand. “Sit on that stool,” he instructs, checking the tape on the needle in my arm as I do as instructed. “Keep yourself elevated higher than her.”
“Arch,” I say lowly, my deep voice rough, “if I could bring your girl back to you, you know I would, don’t you? All I want is for you to be happy.” Tears prick my eyes as he absentmindedly rubs over his wrists, faded scars from many bindings marking his skin. “I love you.”
He looks up at me then, eyes shining, jaw clenched, “You think there’s any way she’s still out there somewhere?” he whispers the question, holding my gaze, fucking hope shining in his eyes.
I roll through every possibility inside my head, it’s been over twenty years since she went missing. The likelihood of her being somewhere alive and well is slim, but I suppose not completely unheard of.
“Maybe,” I shiver as I say it, licking my lips. “But I don’t think it’s good to go chasing ghosts.”
He cocks his head, top section of hair longer than the shorn sides on either side of his skull, black hair hanging across one eye, he flicks his gaze from me to Luna.
“Hang onto this one, brother,” he says, throwing the rubbish in his hands into the waste paper bin, before his eyes come back to mine. “Don’t let her out of your sight ever again.”