Battles of the Broken (Sons of Templar MC 6)

There was no control for me.

Me, the woman who needed to control her life in order to survive it.

But there was no surviving Gage.

Not after today.

I had expected a thousand and one questions from my grandmother when I’d finally emerged from my bedroom, dazed and confused from Gage’s exit. But I didn’t get a thousand. Or even one. I got a cup of peppermint tea all but thrust at me and a pat on the cheek. My grandmother’s warm, dry hand stayed there for a beat, her eyes twinkling, giving me silent support I didn’t know I needed and didn’t know she was capable of.

Then she demanded I drink my tea, then change out of my birthday suit and get into yoga gear so I could stretch.

She gave me a knowing look. “I’m thinking you need it.”

I didn’t even have time to blush or cringe a thousand and one times because she was already breezing down the stairs, yelling how she’d meet me at the yoga studio and not to ”dillydally.”

So I didn’t.

I drank my tea, changed into my yoga clothes, and did yoga with my grandmother. And she was right, I totally needed to stretch. My entire body ached like I’d run a marathon.

Upon inspection while I was changing, small bruises of varying colors covered my body. Fingerprints on my breasts. Hand marks on my hips. More fingerprints on my inner thighs. Faint marks on my upper arms. It sounded like a catalog of abuse. Instead, it was a road map of worship.

Gage’s worship.

And I needed more.

I forced my aching body into healthy exercise in order to try to distract it from its need. From its fear. Because fear was my default. There were two states of human emotion, only two. Everything else was a byproduct of one or the other. Those two states were love and fear. Both lived within the other. One was magnified by the other.

I didn’t love Gage.

Not yet.

But I feared him.

Worse, I feared loving him.

Because I would.

Despite how utterly insane the certainty of that thought was, I knew it to be true. In my bones, the ones I was sure held the evidence of Gage’s touch, I knew it.

My grandmother must’ve seen something in my actions that communicated how delicate I was. How fragmented my normally ironclad state of mind was. Because not a word was spoken of him until the early evening, when she was curled up on my sofa with her glass of wine and me with my coconut water.

Of course, that was after she’d ruthlessly made fun of me for drinking coconut water.

“It’s not fortune that’s given me this carefree, crazy life, my dear. It’s tragedy,” she said, after I’d listed the health benefits of coconut water and she’d pretended to go deaf.

My body jerked at the words, because they weren’t spoken in the same tone as the ones moments before. They didn’t even seem to be uttered by the same person.

No, it was like my grandmother had aged ten years in the ten seconds between topics.

I blinked at her.

She smiled sadly, taking a hearty gulp of her wine. “I know, you’ve known me as fabulous, funny, beautiful, and adventurous your entire life,” she said, her voice only holding a hint of that lightness that usually burst from every syllable. “But I’ve kept things from you. Because that’s what grandparents do. Keep their trauma from their young, fresh-faced, naïve grandchildren so they don’t tarnish them with the ugly truth. No, that’s not the grandparent’s job. Or a parent’s. The world does that well enough. And the world has done that to you. In the most brutal and ugly way possible. In a way that made me lose not only one precious grandchild, but a large piece of another too.”

My hands shook as I set my glass down beside me, afraid of squeezing it too hard and smashing it in my hands.

My grandmother never spoke of David.

Never.

I used to think she did it because she wanted to respect my wishes. Because she knew I couldn’t talk about him when every breath I took was him. Because she saw how tenuous my grip really was on sanity.

But now, her eyes, the absolute and utter sorrow entrenched in them, told me something different. Told me I wasn’t the only one holding onto sorrow.

“I was terrified that I had lost my lively, adventurous, spirited Lauren. I was heartbroken by the thought that David’s death would not just happen once, but a thousand times over forever,” she continued, voice sounding older and more tortured than I’d ever heard it. “I had faith though. I had to, because there wasn’t a thing I could do to bring you back to yourself. I know that because I’m wise and worldly and I’ve had tragedy in tenfold. I’m not talking about us losing our beautiful David, because that’s something more than tragedy. There isn’t a word for the pain of such a thing. There shouldn’t be a word. It shouldn’t happen. But this world is ugly and cruel, so it did. My heart breaks anew every single morning when I wake up and remember it wasn’t a terrible nightmare.”