Inked in Lies (The Fallen Men 5)

But I focused on it. Why wasn’t she blinking as she stood looking hollow and pale in my doorway at two in the morning on a school night.

“Lila,” she whispered, and it was more breath than sound, wet at the edges with tears she hadn’t yet shed.

And then Diogo was at the door behind her, and he wasn’t blinking either as he stared at me with the same dark gaze as his sons.

“Li girl,” he said in that same waterlogged tone.

And I knew.

I knew, and I realized I’d known all night. Somehow, in ways I’d never understand. Ways so metaphysical I wondered if what I’d thought as a child was true, and Dane and I shared one soul.

My phone started to ring in my hand, vibrating my suddenly hollow bones so painfully I dropped it from my numb fingers to the floor where it broke apart with a soft pop and scattered in pieces across the floor.

They started talking. One of them, or both, but I couldn’t hear them because I was underwater. My eyes fixed on the oceanic scene Nova had painted on the wall around the door of my bedroom, on the inky depths giving way to the turquoise middle where a sea turtle swam and a school of silver fish flashed in a zig zag over the doorframe.

I wasn’t breathing.

But that was okay because you had to hold your breath under water.

And I wanted to stay there, submerged, at peace in the silence and stillness under the turbulent waves on the surface.

I didn’t want to hear.

I didn’t want to see anything other than the deep blue ocean on my wall.

I didn’t want to feel anything, not even the breath through my body or the pulse of my blood.

I wanted to die.

Because I knew, even though I was struggling so hard not to think, that Dane, my Dane, mi hermano, was dead.

I don’t know what happened after that.

Apparently, Molly and Diogo tried to revive me from my stupor, but I couldn’t be reached. I sat numb, having slumped to the floor, half propped against the window seat, my eyes blank and unblinking as I stared at the wall, my limbs as limp as cooked noodles.

I was comatose.

Shell shocked.

Molly became hysterical, and she ran out of the room to get Hudson.

He was my baby brother, and maybe he could reach me, she’d thought.

He tried.

He wrapped himself around me, ivy around a crumbling building, trying to hold me together.

He whispered in my ears, a few distorted words reaching me through the warbled depths.

Love you, we got you, you’re okay.

Then Milo and Oliver were there, and they were hugging Molly who was sobbing and arguing with Diogo who was about to call an ambulance because there was something wrong with me and they didn’t know what to do.

I wasn’t crying.

I wasn’t screaming.

I was barely even breathing.

I was nothing because I needed to be nothing, or I would shatter like my phone into small, irretrievable pieces across the floor.

My broken phone continued to ring, and finally Hudson answered it.

He spoke with someone.

Minutes later, another figure appeared in the doorway.

I knew, even underwater, who it was, and that’s when I started to float up from the depths.

I screamed.

Like a banshee, like a demented, lost soul haunting the moors, yearning for their loved ones long dead but unable to reach them.

I screamed so loudly my throat went raw in minutes.

Hudson scrambled away from me, and released from him comforting bond, I started to thrash because it felt, literally, like my body was coming apart at the seams.

Sound shredded over my vocal chords as I flailed, and Milo, Oliver, Diogo, and Nova tried to pin me to the ground, to still me so I wouldn’t hurt myself.

I’d find out later that I broke two of my fingers in the struggle.

“Lila!”

Someone was screaming, and it was a dear voice, but it wasn’t Dane’s voice.

A voice I would never hear again.

My screams got impossibly louder.

Outside, a dog began to bark.

Lights popped on in our neighbor’s houses, and the cops were called.

“LILA!” Someone bellowed, and I could feel the word as well as hear it, the sound stuffed into my face the way we’d used to shove Dane’s face into his favourite tres leches cake on his birthdays.

I blinked, and it felt so wrong when no one else had been blinking. When it started with Molly’s big, hydrangea blue eyes staring at mine.

I blinked again because my eyes were so dry they stung, and then again because Nova was there, and I wasn’t sure how that had happened.

“Nova?” I croaked, surprised that my throat hurt because I didn’t remember screaming.

“Hey, Flower Child,” he said softly, and I realized he was speaking in Spanish. “Come back to us, okay? We’re here for you.”

All I could think was when had Nova gotten so good at Spanish?