Chapter 48
Rafe
“The fuck you want now, you fucking bastard.” The bottle leaves my hand before I finish the words. It smashes behind him, a burst of glass and liquor like my soul cracking open.
“Came to re-live a moment.”
“Relive this.” My fist lands on his jaw, and he laughs. The fucker laughs, rubbing his chin and leans against the window as I walk away.
“It gets worse before it gets better, Rafe.”
The door to my office slams behind me drowning out Rafe’s voice, the morning light already too bright for the state I’m in.
I stagger. The town already scuttles around, boots on cobbles, merchants shouting down the lanes.
The kind of morning that makes you wish you’d stayed buried under the covers and let the world burn around you.
Too bright. Too fucking bright out here.
I haven’t slept. Not properly, anyway. Spent most of the night with a bottle of something sharp and sour and unkind, the rest of it watching for her shadow.
But there was nothing. No sight of her. Not even a whiff of her flowery scent.
Nothing but dead ends. Near misses. Rumours.
Whispers in alehouses and alleys of a girl with a silent mouth and brawler’s fists apparently.
That’s not my Lina.
All useless stories, but I still chased her ghost and every night drink like it’ll bring her back.
It doesn’t.
I thought I was getting closer. But the world’s gone strange.
I lean against a lamppost, the cold iron grounds me for half a second, and I drag a hand down my face, stubble rough beneath my palm, then step out into the street.
Cool air hits my skin like a slap; it does nothing to lift the throb in my head.
The town moves around me, oblivious—the living rubbing shoulders with the grieving.
A man bumps into me and curses under his breath, though I barely register it.
Because something sharp and sickening turns over in my stomach.
A memory.
Not one I had before. A new one.
It hits like a crack to my temple and almost sends me to my knees. A twisting pain behind my eyes like a knife of ice sliding between my thoughts.
Memories.
Not mine. Not yet.
I choke down a gasp as they crash in, one after the other, forcing out the ones I’ve held for sixty years.
Sixty fucking years just fading away, and I’m powerless to stop it.
Sam.
Alive.
Not dead on a bloodstained battlefield. Not a name on a cleric’s death roll.
Not in a letter by his commanding officer.
But standing beside me, leaning against a tavern wall, smirking while I lose a game of cards.
Laughing that rough, unfiltered laugh when I try, and fail, to punch him for stealing my drink.
Memories I never lived.
Memories I’m living now.
I stagger into the path of a passing cart, the driver shouting something crude, but his voice is miles away. My heart thunders against my ribs, and I can’t breathe. I can’t fucking breathe. The air warps, the ground sways like the whole damn town is folding in on itself.
Another memory slams into place—a night by the river, a bottle of cheap liquor, both of us howling at the moon like idiots.
I fall.
Hard.
Knees cracking against the stone.
My palms scrape the ground, the world spins, breath becoming ragged, the weight of it all too much.
He’s alive? He’s alive and my head’s trying to stitch together a world where he never died.
I dig my fingers into my hair, half-mad yanking at the roots, trying to claw the truth from my skull.
The grief and guilt, ancient and familiar, and now over it just like that.
New memories scrawl over my bones; drinking, laughing, dancing.
Travelling the seas and lands, different women, a wedding, fights, a broken nose, dinners, building my cabin, building his cabin, his military parades.
All these memories pour in, drowning my old ones, and imprint on my brain.
Decades of them. Grief, loneliness, birthdays missed, letters I never wrote because he wasn’t there to read them. They’re slipping through my fingers, turning to smoke.
A shadow breaks through the blur.
Boots on stone.
A figure I’d know in any lifetime.
A scar now runs along his jaw. That crooked grin always made me want to punch him and pull him into a bear hug in the same breath.
“Brother,” he says like it’s nothing.
Like six decades of loss didn’t crack open inside me.
Sam.
Sam is here.
I can’t speak. Can’t move. I stare, heaving air like a drowning man, brain melting, throat thick, as my soul tries to catch up. He crouches, one hand on his knee, the other raking through his hair.
“Bloody hell, Rafe, you look like shit,” he says with a lopsided grin. “And I should know, I’ve seen you drunk enough times.”
“And you look like you read with your finger.” I laugh. Or maybe I sob. I don’t know, but it rips out of me like something raw and broken. My hands shake and my vision blurs. “I… you were… you died,” I manage, voice wrecked, and not even sure who I’m trying to convince anymore.
He shrugs. “Nah. Kinda. Didn’t stick.”
The ache in my chest turns to fury, to hope, to something unbearable. I grab his wrist to feel his pulse and the solid heat of him. He’s real.
I’m shaking too hard to stand, but Sam grips the back of my neck in a way only he can ever get away with.
A rough touch saying I’m here, you stubborn prick.
“How?”
He’s alive.
Sam is alive.
My. Brother. Is. Alive.
My throat burns. “How?”
His grin falters, eyes darken, shoulders dropping like the weight of it settles on him too. He glances away, breathing out slow.
“Long story. One I’ll tell you, promise. But right now, you need to get your shit together because you’re making me look bad.”
A choked, broken laugh shoves its way out of my chest. “You were dead, Sam,” I gasp in some more air, somethings becoming a little clearer. “It was her, wasn’t it?” I whisper, “Lina did what I couldn’t… didn’t she?”
His gaze snaps to mine, and I see it. The guilt. The grief. The gratitude.
He nods once.
“I’ve a story to tell,” his tone rough as gravel. “Been dying to tell it for sixty years.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, the tears burning, and when I open them, he’s still here.
Solid. Unchanged. Mine.
“Come on,” he says quietly, helping me to my feet. “Let’s get you a coffee. Get you upright, and then I’ll tell you everything.”
I lean into him without meaning to. I can’t help it. Because this—what I thought was impossible—is soon to be all I have left of her.
My brother claps me on the back, grinning again like I haven’t just cried in the middle of the street.
“Stop sobbing, you’re embarrassing the family name.”
I huff a chuckle, and we move. Or shall I say get dragged is more accurate. Toward the café. Toward answers. Toward what comes next. And the memories, old and new, settle into place. His life rewritten. And somewhere in the shifting shadows of my mind, I feel her hand in it.
Feel her eyes on me.
My vision warps as more memories filter in through the fog, and my legs struggle to carry me. Folk notices, a red-haired woman rushes to my other side, wrapping her arms around me.
I don’t like her touch.
“Off!”
I didn’t mean to snap, but unless a woman’s touch is Lina, I don’t want it.
“Rafe!” The shock and scold in her voice is unmistakable. “Sam, what’s going on? What’s wrong with him?”
Sam swallows, his nostrils flare and all colour drains from his face at a rapid speed.
“He was fine this morning. Sam!”
“Who…”
“Rafe…” Sam’s voice sounds strained, and my body begins to turn inside out.
Clarity becomes all too sudden, and I jerk away, pulling myself back from their grip, stumbling on a cobblestone.
They both stand before me, and that guilt I saw in Sam’s face was misplaced, this is what that guilt represented. And Ava… she puts her hands on her curvy hips, less than pleased with me. Like she’s about to thump her husband over the side of his head if he doesn’t explain himself soon.
Because that’s what I am. A husband.
A husband who currently studies his wife like she’s the most wretched thing ever to be born.
A wife.
That’s my wife. Not Lina. But Ava.
No. No, no, no.
No.
Bile and alcohol pour out of me, burning my throat and nose. I grip my knees, spilling my guts and gasp for breath beneath the hand covering my mouth, and I see her.
I see her, I fucking see her.
The woman who’s become my absolute world, trembling in front of the alley beside the café, like she stumbled out of her hiding spot when all unfolded right in front of her eyes.
She sees the man who made love to her, who hoped the Fates would bring us back together, now promised to another.
Our eyes lock, my surroundings fade away, because all I see is her.
She presses her wobbling lips in a flat line, a single tear trailing down her rosy cheek and I ache to wipe it away for her.
Lina.
So much sadness wrecks her form.
‘It’s ok,’ she mouths, bobbing her head and I’m not sure who she’s trying to convince, her or me.
Her face, gods, her face shatters my soul. So many emotions mar her delicate features. Sadness. Regret. Rage.
A look of betrayal.
I take a step forward, she takes one back, shaking her head at me.
‘Don’t run from me.’ I mouth back, just for her.
Please, Lina, don’t run from me.
…But she does just that.