Chapter Two #3
So, when he rounded the car and opened my door next, I launched myself into his strong arms and wrapped my legs around his waist. He smelled of musk and man, of mornings on the ranch, sweet hay and cut grass.
It reminded me that he was born and raised a cowboy before he’d ever been a cop or a P.I.
, and no one was more capable of wrangling my restless rebel soul than him.
As if reading my thoughts, he wrapped a hand in my mess of hair and yanked it back to take my mouth in a searing, possessive kiss I felt all the way to my toes.
When we broke free, we rested our foreheads together for a moment to regain our equilibrium.
“You go on in with your sister,” he offered. “I’ll buy my girl a coffee.”
I smiled slightly at how well he knew me. I couldn’t survive on anything less than three cups of Joe a day.
“You don’t want to come in?”
“Oh, I won’t be far behind. I never am. But I’m thinking this is a good moment to go in alone.”
“I have to pee,” Cress admitted with a playful wince. “The joys of being pregnant. You go in, and I’ll just be a minute, okay? Old Sam’s already waiting for you.”
The thought of my old friend warmed my calamitous heart. This place and Sam had been my oasis throughout my entire childhood. Anytime Farah was on a rampage or when Dad was in prison, music and Sam had always been there.
I didn’t want to go in by myself, but I told myself I was being a chickenshit.
I could do this.
I could do anything.
Farah made me believe for most of my life that I was lesser, not good enough for anything or anything worthy. Cricket had only cemented that feeling, casting me in stone so I was trapped by it.
But then Lion had broken me free, and every moment since then, I’d struggled and worked to love myself.
To feel worthy and act worthy of all the goodness life had seen fit to bless upon me.
My family, my friends, my man, and my sweet dog who trotted happily by my side as I walked slowly to the glass door of the record store. He was tall enough that I could thread my fingers in his silky coat for comfort as I pushed through into the music-filled interior.
“Oh, Sister” by Bob Dylan thrummed through the cramped rows of records and CDs.
Instantly, my throat closed up, and my fingers tightened in Saint’s fur. He pressed his big body against my side and whined low in his throat.
“’S okay,” I soothed him, but my voice was ravaged by the emotion growing like a thicket of thorns in my throat.
It wasn’t okay.
Why had Sam put this record on?
I didn’t need to hear about a lost brother apologizing to the sister he left behind.
Because suddenly the lyrics were sung in Bob Dylan’s throaty vocals, but King’s infrequently heard, lyrical murmur.
I stood in the middle of the record store and squeezed my eyes shut.
I will not cry. I will not cry. I will not cry.
The mantra helped to steady me against the deluge of poignant words.
“Hey, Sam,” I called, eyes still closed, voice a little stronger. “Are you trying to kill a girl? Change the record, will ya?”
“Sorry, H.R., but I put a lotta thought into this, and I’m thinkin’ this song is the only song for this moment we’re about to have.”
Agony seared through me like a lightning strike, leaving me electric with anger and vibrating pain.
“He isn’t here,” I muttered to myself like a fucking nutbar. “Get a grip.”
“You’re not crazy.” His voice again, rougher than I remembered, choked up almost as bad as mine. “Not yet, anyway.”
Saint tensed beside me, another whimper escaping from his throat.
I opened my eyes to soothe my dog because my unsteady emotional climate was clearly worrying him.
And that was when I saw him.
King.
He stood like a mirage in the middle aisle of the shop, not twelve feet away from me, in one of his countless white tees that fit too tight beneath a leather jacket I didn’t recognize because it wasn’t his Fallen MC cut.
Maybe that was why I was convinced he was a figment of my imagination.
My brother wouldn’t wear leather without his patch.
He’d worked hard for the club we called family, and he’d never willingly give up the cut he’d earned time and time again.
But…
When I blinked, he was still there, staring at me with those pale eyes like cubes in a glass, so clear I could see straight through to the bottom of the purest soul I’d ever known.
Did I love King so much I could make up this image of him in even that exquisite detail?
I didn’t know because I’d never allowed myself to try.
There was wet on his face, slipping down the steep cheekbones into the hollow of his cheeks and off the hard edge of his jaw. One fell all the way to the laminate floor and splashed next to his feet.
Did hallucinations cry?
“My sweet Harleigh Rose,” he said the way he did in the big moments—when Dad went to prison the first and second time, when I came home after killing Cricket, when I told him I was marrying the only man he’d ever felt was worthy of me.
I was Lion’s Rosie, always, sweeter for him than anyone else.
Save my brother.
I’d been born to him sweet Harleigh Rose, and he never let me forget it, especially in the moments like this when all I wanted to do to survive was throw up thorns.
“You’re not real,” I told his ghost, but there was a waver in my voice and an odd tickle in my belly.
A wry grin twisted his mouth into something too misshapen and ugly for King’s beautiful face. He held out his hands, open to the sky, and shrugged weakly.
“I’m real enough to feel the pain I’m lookin’ at on my sister’s face. Real enough to feel it like a dagger in my fuckin’ chest, knowin’ I’m responsible for puttin’ it there.”
“No.” The word escaped on a sob, bursting from me like an exorcized demon. I swayed on my feet, my equilibrium shot to hell, my vision a blur of warped wet.
The waterlogged image of King moved closer, and a moment later, it was touching me.
He was touching me.
King Kyle Garro.
My King.
My brother.
“No,” I whispered again as my legs collapsed beneath me, and my entire weight went crashing to the ground.
Only King didn’t let me hit. He hauled me into his arms roughly, my chest colliding with his, his arm so tight around my torso that I couldn’t breathe.
I didn’t want to.
I wouldn’t breathe ever fucking again if it being back in my brother’s arms like this.
If I was dreaming, I didn’t want to wake up.
If I was dead… well, that fucking sucked, but maybe King and I could haunt our loved ones forever together.
“Harleigh Rose,” he murmured again and again, and I felt my heart thump to the beat of that cadence as if set to a metronome.
He held me and swayed slightly, back and forth, back and forth.
It took me a while to realize I couldn’t hear the music anymore because I was crying so hard, I choked and yelled with it. Then when I realized, I cried harder and started to fight.
Because my anger made this real.
This moment.
This man.
He was here. In my arms and not in the afterlife.
Which meant he’d left me.
Us.
He’d lied.
My brother, who had never lied in my whole life, had constructed the most horrific, lasting lie in the history of the world.
He’d manufactured his death and the grief in my heart and the hearts of so many others.
“How could you?” I wailed, curling my hands into his chest so hard, my nails tore through the fabric into his flesh. “How could you?”
He hummed wordless apologies as if he was soothing an unsettled baby. I felt like one, incapable of finding the words I needed to express myself. Incapable of pushing him away even though I hated him at that moment and the long few that followed.