“Are we quite done?” Phoebe asked with a wan sigh as if I was a ridiculous teenager acting out because she wouldn’t extend my curfew.
“Yeah,” I said, suddenly filled with a bone-deep weariness because I knew whatever love she’d harboured for me was based on a sense of societal obligation—the way she felt a mother must love a daughter—and not on anything real like who I was as a person. “Yeah, Phoebe, we’re done. I won’t bother you again.”
“I’d prefer it. We both consider ourselves childless now. It’s for the best.”
Agony blew straight through me like a cold wind off the coastal cliffs, and I shivered violently as I hung up the phone and tossed it, a little too forcefully, to the window seat beside me. I closed my eyes, hugged my knees to my chest, and let my head drop back against the wall, trying to breathe through the pain as I compartmentalized it.
I took a moment to text King, who was working at Hephaestus Auto that day, to tell him what happened, and in typical fashion, he sent me back something both simple and profound.
King: Family isn’t in the blood.
It’s the echo of each name
That sounds with the beat of your heart.
I closed my eyes again, clutching that poem on my phone to my chest as I exhaled all the poison my mother had sown in my mind so I could replace it with the beauty of King and his words.
“Appreciate now’s a fuckin’ bad moment, but I’ve been waitin’ a while, and I can’t stand here and watch her do that to you without makin’ myself known.”
Instantly, my eyes flared open because I would recognize that voice even at a rock concert, even in gale force winds.
My brother.
A sob bloomed in my bruised heart and clogged my throat.
I hadn’t seen him in ages, and he looked so much the same.
Lysander had always been so handsome, almost too handsome once, but the time and prison had worn away that edge like waves on rock so he seemed weathered now, smoothed into something manlier than pretty. He was even bigger than he’d been after getting out of prison, so wide across the chest I doubted I could wrap my arms around him if I tried. The muscles bulging out of his tight grey tee were tatted from shoulder to fingertips in a series of images I knew depicted Greek myths, our favourites like Apollo and Adonis, Paris with his gold apple and the three goddesses, Hera, Aphrodite, and Artemis. I’d helped him pick each one, once upon a time, and to see them again made the duality of my reaction all the more intense.
I missed him acutely. He had been my one constant growing up with my parents and William, the one person who always tried to put me first even when he wasn’t in a position to do so. He cared for me so much that he’d even gone to prison for me after killing the man who’d tried to rape me.
He’d been my hero and my saviour until he wasn’t. Until he’d gotten in so deep with the Nightstalkers MC that he’d used my position with King to get an in with The Fallen in order to inform on them to the rival club. Until his actions had perpetuated my abduction by that club and my torture at their hands. The center of my palms still burned sometimes when I remembered the agony of being impaled by inch wide nails.
Yes, he’d helped save me in the end.
Yes, a year later, he’d shown up out of the blue and helped save Loulou, Bea, and Harleigh Rose from an ambush.
But there was so much water under the bridge, the structure had collapsed, and I wasn’t sure it could ever be rebuilt.
“Sander,” I said, noting the way he shoved a hand through his masses of hair the same honeyed brown as my own. “What are you doing here?”
“I come here.” He cleared his throat awkwardly and shifted from one big foot to the other in a way I didn’t want to think was adorable, but was. “Come here a lot since you opened, but I try to stay outta the way.”
“So…you stalk me?”
“No, fuck!” His eyes, green swirled through the brown, widened comically. “Jesus, Cress, I just wanted to see ya. It’s been years, and now that I’m back in town, I couldn’t resist.”
“Back in town?” I couldn’t help my curiosity. “You got a job?”
His lips twisted in his short beard, and I knew it was the kind of job that didn’t require a resume. The same kind of job he’d always had.
“Somethin’ like that. Listen, I just came because I heard about the engagement, and I wanted to say congrats. Like King a helluva lot more than that fucker William, and I’m glad as fuck you got a man like that at your side.”