Dad sighed and backed away, raising his arms in defeat.
The moment he was out of the way, I was launching myself at Luca as if he held the secret to life.
He caught me with barely a sway in his step.
The moment he had me in his arms, I buried my face into his neck and burst into tears.
***
Ember
I was staring in sympathy at Coke.
“Well, that went about the opposite of how I expected it,” Coke admitted.
“I think that you’re probably expecting this to be a normal situation and it’s not,” Cora explained. “I realize that you were pissed on my behalf, Coke, but shit. I can’t say what I would or wouldn’t do if this situation were reversed. You’re going to have to let them handle it the way they think it needs handled.”
That was my Cora. Always so wise.
And never bitter.
“Am I upset that I didn’t know days ago? Yes,” I admitted softly. “But, saying that, I’m just happy to know that he’s alive. Four days isn’t going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things.”
Coke scrubbed his face as if he was tired and couldn’t quite figure out how to fix it.
“I just… shit,” he said. “She’s never yelled at me before and really had a good reason for it.”
Cora snickered. “Your daughter’s not a baby anymore. She’s a grown adult with the ability to make decisions on her own without you. It burns, doesn’t it?”
Gabe played his fingers through my hair and pressed a kiss to my forehead.
“When he called.” Gabe’s raspy voice made my heart ache sometimes. “I thought that I was hallucinating.”
***
Coke
My belly clenched.
I couldn’t even imagine what they were feeling.
God.
I’d only spent a couple weeks around him at most.
But shit, hearing Cora’s cry of happiness, excitement, and sorrow when Ember had called yesterday with the news had been bad enough.
Getting a call from your so-called dead son, though?
Yeah, that had to have been extremely hard.
I was thinking about Cora, and how excited she’d been when we’d driven over here through the night, when Gabe’s phone rang.
“Hello?” he answered, sounding tired.
His face went from lost to alert in a little over two seconds.
“You’re fucking shitting me.”
Ember turned to study her husband.
I turned to study him, too.
Something had made him go absolutely alert, and what he was hearing wasn’t something good.
Then Gabe smiled.
A smile so fucking wide that it made me have hope.
When he finally hung up, we all waited for good news.
It was good news… just definitely not the good news we’d been hoping for.
“Who was that?” Ember asked the moment that he hung up.
“Tim,” Gabe answered. “He’s been trying to get a hold of Luca for a while, and finally called me because Luca wasn’t answering. They… shit. Shit, goddamn.”
“What?” Ember raised her voice.
“They’re here. Or almost,” Gabe said as he hurried to the door.
Ember followed, and I was left staring at Cora with a confused look on my face.
“I have no idea what’s going on,” I admitted.
“Me neither,” Cora agreed. “Let’s go look.”
I didn’t know what I was expecting when I saw the passenger side door open, but it definitely wasn’t the man that stepped out.
“Holy fuck,” Ember breathed, staring dumbfounded. “Malachi.”Chapter 20I fucking hate everyone.
-Text from Luca to Frankie
Luca
It’d been a long fucking two days.
And, as I stared at my so-called friend, I knew it was about to get longer.
I could see how we were mistaken for each other, however.
Well, we wouldn’t be mistaken anymore.
But we would have been once upon a time.
Malachi wasn’t scarred like me.
But I did see ghosts haunting his eyes.
“This is very unusual,” Gabe, no, my father, said. “I thought that y’all didn’t share this kind of information.”
Malachi had shown up with Tim, as well as the commander and Hayes who had talked with us at the beginning of our stay.
“It is,” the commander agreed. “However, we felt that we owed an explanation.”
Malachi was staring at me, his face a mask of torture and pain.
“Why are you staring?” I finally asked.
Malachi’s lips turned up at the corners.
“I’m staring at you because I’m honestly not sure how the hell you survived,” he admitted.
“Me?” I asked. “According to Hayes.” I gestured to the quiet man that hadn’t said much since this meeting had begun. “You were the one that almost took your own life. That, until just now, we thought had taken his own life.”
Malachi’s head tilted slightly.
“That’s true,” he said. “But I didn’t die. Unfortunately.”
Frankie inhaled deeply.
“Unfortunately?” she asked a bit breathlessly.
Malachi’s eyes turned to her and softened.
“Yes, unfortunately,” he agreed. “We…I…it wasn’t the best of conditions.”
We waited for more, but he didn’t give us more.
He looked rough.
Ragged and worn out. Malnourished and scruffy.
His eyes were sunken in and he looked as if he’d just gone twelve rounds and lost.
His eyes, though. They were more than alert and filled with rage, pain, and sorrow.