6
Logan
Istare at her in dumbfounded silence. “How can you have forgotten?” I ask at last. “We spent a whole lifetime together. How is it possible you forgot?”
The anger is still there, but it’s edged with devastation now. It had never occurred to me she could have… forgotten.
Even when she was talking about the Memoril her father was injecting her with. I remember what Damien said about it—how it causes temporary amnesia. But he used the word temporary.
Besides, nothing could have made me forget her. No amount of drugs, no amount of torture. She’s imprinted herself into my cells, into my DNA. How can you forget the fabric of your own soul?
And just like that, anger surges up again. Anger that’s cut short by Piper’s words.
“What about me?” asks Piper.
Lia shakes her head helplessly. “Don’t you think I would have found you before if I had known?
I didn’t know. I think I lived… a different life.
I was a different person.” She flushes under my gaze.
“And when the memories came back, it was so strange. At first, I didn’t think I was remembering real things, only dreaming.
The first time I saw a vision of you, Logan…
or when I heard my children crying… I couldn’t understand any of it.
My mother wouldn’t tell me a thing. But the visions started after I missed that dose.
And they only intensified as time wore on.
By the time my father found us, I was a prisoner to them.
Until I realized it wasn’t a prison; my mind was finally setting me free.
But until you showed up here, I wasn’t entirely sure. ”
Piper rises, sitting on the armrest of Lia’s chair before hugging her again.
“You were sure enough that you didn’t want me to know,” I accuse her.
It’s just like how it was all those years ago. I’m furious, and I want to be. I resent her for making that anger impossible to hold onto. She destroyed my life. She doesn’t get a free pass.
And yet, Piper is holding onto her as if she’s the victim, and even Quill looks like he feels bad for her. And I didn’t think Quill had it in him to feel bad for or about anyone, except Piper.
“With the visions, I…” Lia swallows with difficulty. “I saw a lot of things. Things I couldn’t make sense of. Moments where you seemed to love me, Logan, but also, moments where…”
This time, when tears bubble out of her eyes, I can’t say I’m hard, but, but somehow, I do want to lick them from her. And then bury my face in the hair that remains. From here, I can barely see the bald patches, but Piper’s noticed them.
“It’s like a grey-out,” continues Lia. “Just like you said, Aurora. Or Piper. I don’t know how I should call you now.”
“You can call me however you want,” says Piper softly. She marks a beat, then adds, “I’ve been Piper my whole life.”
“Your whole life,” repeats Lia softly. “Yes, that’s right. You have had a whole life without me, haven’t you? Piper—I’ll try to get used to it.”
Piper holds onto her tightly. “I’m going to have a whole other life with you… mama.”
I grit my teeth so hard. “Piper will have the life I decide she can have, with the people I decide are allowed in it.”
“Logan!” she protests. “You don’t own me.”
“No, he doesn’t,” says Quill, glowering at me as he pushes himself off the wall once more and places a possessive hand on Piper’s shoulder. “I do.”
Piper rolls her eyes while Lia blinks hers, fog swirling in her pupils.
“Please continue, mama,” Piper urges her.
“Well…” Lia hesitates. “The moment I heard your voice on the phone, everything came rushing back. I knew it was true. I had a daughter… you. And yet, I’d been a prisoner to my mind for so long that I couldn’t really believe it until you showed up.
And then…” She keeps her eyes averted from me.
“I was so scared of him. Because I remembered everything. It’s not that I didn’t want to see you, Logan.
I just needed time. Time to accept things.
Time for myself, too, because I’d been imprisoned for eighteen years, and I wanted to know what it felt like to be free.
And I just knew…” Another strangled sob.
“I just knew that when you found me, you’d… you’d kill me.”
Piper glares at me, and I fist my hands by my side, still lost in a turmoil of conflicting emotion.
“But he didn’t kill you,” she murmurs, turning back to her mother.
“Yes.” Lia lets out a sad laugh. “Maybe that’s worse. Maybe I wish… I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say that.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” I say coldly. “Not in front of your daughter.”
“I can handle it,” lashes out Piper. “I’m an adult. And you’re cruel, Logan. She’s hurting, she’s a victim. I can’t believe you’re treating her like this.”
I turn toward the window, resting my head once more on the cold pane. I don’t know what to do anymore. I just don’t. I try to access my anger again, but I know Piper’s right. Lia’s the victim, but…
But how can I possibly forgive her for stealing all those years from me?
Even though I’m beginning to realize it wasn’t her fault.
“Is it…” Lia’s voice grows shaky. “Is it too late, Logan?”
I don’t answer. I don’t answer, because she should know.
Of course it’s too late. It’s eighteen years too late. How the hell can we start again now, after all this time? I grieved her. I grieved her for so long, and now I’m just supposed to accept that I spent nearly half of my life living a lie?
I know it’s selfish, but I’m only human. I walk toward the door, preparing to return to the car. I don’t know what comes next. I can’t think. The air in this place is getting oppressive. It feels like my whole body is compressing with the pain beating down on me, and I can’t breathe.
I put my hand on the door, ready to open it, when Quill’s voice makes me jump.
“What the hell do you mean, children?”
I turn around slowly, my mouth parted in shock as the word Lia mentioned in passing suddenly registers. But before I can say a thing, the window shatters behind me, and a thundering explosion makes me fall.
_
“Logan. Logan!”
It takes me a moment to hear the voice over the loud ringing in my ears. Then I bring a hand to my throbbing head. It’s wet, and when I look, there’s blood.
What the fuck?
Lia!
I stumble up into a sitting position, darkness threading through my vision. Quill is the one who yelled my name. He’s somehow managed to get to Piper and is holding her firmly to him. He got to her during the explosion and protected her.
And me… I was injured like a fucking idiot. I fell like a fucking idiot. And I left Lia alone.
I left her alone, just like I did for years. I failed her.
The truth suddenly, devastatingly, clicks into place. I failed her.
“Lia!” I groan.
Piper opens groggy eyes, and Quill hugs her to him in undisguised relief. I’m relieved too, to know she’s okay. But I can’t see Lia.
The small living room, with its stuffy decor, is filled with smoke and debris. I cough, trying to find enough oxygen to fill my lungs and failing.
“We’re going to the car,” chokes out Quill, lifting Piper onto his back and beginning to crawl through the ruins of the cottage.
“Wait, wait,” I gasp. “Don’t go out by yourselves… whoever threw the grenade… or whatever… it was…”
“You can’t take care of Lia, let alone anyone else,” lashes out Quill in contempt. “Get your girl. I’ve got mine.”
With that he turns from me, beginning to make his way through the smoldering ruins. His words hurt, because I know they’re true. But I can’t let myself get affected by them right now. I need to find Lia.
I hobble through the debris, hunting for her. Panic is just starting to get a hold of me when I spot her.
She’s lying unconscious under broken, burning slabs of wood.
I grab her, ignoring the way the wood burns the skin off my hands when I move it, and lift her in my arms. I don’t bother to get on my hands and knees like Quill did.
I know it’s the smart thing to do, but I’m far too panicked to think straight.
Squeezing Lia to me, I stumble through the cottage toward the front door.
My skin is singed with burning debris, and I can feel the blood trickling down the side of my face, but my body hums with a single purpose: get Lia to safety.
Shots ring out as I run toward the car, but I hold her to me, twisting my body unnaturally in my attempt to shield her. It’s only when I reach the back seat that I realize I’ve been hit. My arm is soaked, but I huff out a sigh of relief when I see that Lia seems uninjured.
Only she’s still unconscious.
“Close the door! Close the fucking door!” yells Quill.
He backs out in reverse before taking out his gun and shooting through the cracked window. I know I should help, but I’m struggling with the fog that’s invading my vision. And my thoughts are fixated on my unconscious girl, and on Piper, huddled beside her on the floor, shivering.
“Hey, it’s okay… it’s okay…” I try hard to speak, but I can hear that my words are slurred. Fuck. Useless, weak. Weak, weak, weak.
What kind of a man lets his girl get hurt? What kind of a man can’t even protect her? What kind of a man abandons the love of his life for eighteen years?
It took glass shards to the head for me to see things correctly.
She didn’t abandon me. I abandoned her.
I should have known she wasn’t dead. I did, in a way. I felt it in my body—I wasn’t hurting at the cellular level. My limbs weren’t revolting at the loss of one of theirs. My body didn’t feel ripped apart, like it would have had I really lost its most important part.
But I accepted Emilio Cabello’s version of the facts. I allowed him to keep her a prisoner for eighteen years.
Who could have saved her but me? And I didn’t. I failed her.
I hold her to me, tears making me convulse.
“L-l-logan… I’m sorry…”
The words spill out of her mouth as her eyes flutter open, and she reaches up to touch me shyly, like she’s still terrified of me. I did that. I made her scared like that. What kind of a man terrifies the girl he’s in love with?
“Shh. Don’t speak, baby.”
I know it’s not a good idea—what if she has a head or neck injury?—but I just can’t help it. Still sitting on the floor of the car, I lift her up again, easing her into my arms. Piper inches toward us and rests her head on my shoulder.
I wrap an arm around my daughter, keeping the other one firmly around Lia, and let myself sink into the feeling.
And just like that… we’ve gone back eighteen years, and I’ve got my two girls in my arms. I know it’s a lie, but I let myself embrace it, just for now, because it helps me breathe easier. Because the truth hurts too much.
I’m twenty years old, and all is right with the world, because my two girls love me.
Two girls.
The words are like a shock to my system when I remember the last thing Quill said before the explosion.
Children.
“I don’t know if you noticed,” Quill lashes out from the front seat, forcing my thoughts away from that mystery word, “but it’s fucking war. We’re getting shot at, and I killed some of them, but not all. I’m driving and trying not to land at the bottom of a cliff. I’m not a fucking multitasker.”
“Right…” I blink away the fog in my vision and brain, and struggle up, tearing myself away from Lia and Piper. I need to protect them. I grab my gun around my belt, cock it and aim it out the back window. It’s only then that I see who is following us.
“What the absolute fuck?”
Three men in pitch-black masks are driving dirt bikes like maniacs behind us, and one of them… has a fucking bazooka.
I guess that’s what caused the explosion before. And I can tell he’s about three seconds away from detonating it again.
“Get down! No, get off the road! Fuck!”
There’s no getting off the road—we’re driving down a tiny path on a steep cliff.
I shoot wildly, my bleeding arm preventing me from aiming correctly.
But my bullets dislodge a cloud of dust, delaying the hit.
The bazooka guy coughs, his bike swerving dangerously, before he collides with another biker.
He discharges his weapon, and I can feel the top of our car vibrate with the near hit.
I fall over the girls, shielding them from it.
Another shot, this time from Quill, and then he slows the car down.
I can’t see outside anymore, but I assume the fact that he’s stopping means he got the third guy.
“That was fun,” he says casually, the car sputtering to a stop. “I don’t think I’ve ever been shot at by a bazooka before.”
“You don’t think?” questions Piper, her voice shaky. “Wouldn’t you know, if you had?”
Quill shrugs. “Probably, yeah. Logan, want to go get it?”
“Is that why we’ve stopped?” asks Piper. “We’re in the middle of the road, and more bad guys could come at any minute! And you stopped over a gun?”
“It’s not a gun, cricket. It’s a bazooka. And I didn’t stop because of that. I stopped because our tires are blown out. I guess we’re going camping.”
“Ah, fuck.”
“Language, cricket.”
“Fuck. You know I hate camping, Quill.”
“Come on, it’ll be fun…”
Trying to ignore the ringing in my ears, I exit the car, stumbling toward the bazooka lying on the ground, a few feet back.
Between the injury on my head and the shot on my arm, the fog is back, and it’s getting worse by the minute.
I reach down to grab it, and suddenly, the spots overwhelm my vision until the world is blotted out.
I just have time to hear Piper shriek, “Shit!” before I lose consciousness.