Exodus (The Ravenhood)

He died to protect me. He died because he loved me, but damn him for not knowing how hard it would be for me to try and live with it. His sacrifice has left me—more often than not—feeling unworthy of such a love. But love him I did. Wholly. For all that he was and the gift he gave me with his selfless sacrifice.

If only I’d trusted in him enough to believe his love was the truth, he wouldn’t be here.

Of all the mistakes I’ve made in my twenty-six years, the only one I can’t live with was being fearful of my protector the night I lost him.

If only.

Seeing his grave only makes that night more real, our conversation and his parting words more precious. He took sure steps toward his demise, his only request to spend a rainy day with me. A day I would give anything to have shared with him.

“I wish you would have taken me with you,” I manage through a voice full of ache. “But, I guess, in a way, you took us all with you.”

The image of him the first time we locked eyes flashes through my mind.

“You terrified me,” I sniff, as my eyes water and begin to leak with the budding ache. “You were such a motherfucker.”

When I met Dominic, he had barricaded himself behind his purpose, the brotherhood. Still, somehow, I managed to be the one lucky enough to find the undetectable space in his armor because he let me.

“You are in.”

His words from our last date. I can still hear them so clearly.

Pressing my hand to my forehead, I do my best not to fall apart as I speak.

“You left before I had a chance to tell you about the future I dreamt up fo

r you. Maybe it had a little of my dreams mixed in with it too. Maybe it was a daydream for us, but it was a good one. It wasn’t a plan so much as it was a place. A place filled with music and laughter, books, and long kisses, and endless rainy days. It was a place where you didn’t have to hide your smile anymore.”

If only.

Cupping my mouth, I stare down at the stone as a soft sob escapes me.

“I pray now, Dom. Often and for you. Sometimes I pray selfishly, but just for the chance to see your face in my dreams. You never let me see you, not fully. A hint of your profile here and there, but it’s not enough,” I choke on the words, “but I keep trying. I keep chasing after you.” I’m convinced I haven’t seen him fully because I haven’t voiced the one thing I want so desperately to ask him for. And the hardest part, I know the answer is up to me.

“Please, if you can, let me see you,” I choke up, a gut-wrenching cry bursting from me as I wipe the tears from my cheeks and kneel to press them into the freezing ground where he lies beneath the stone, permanently, a truth I’d give anything to change.

I’d imagined none of it. That, I already knew, it’s the mere sight of his stone that makes it more real. I’d fought my way back to some semblance of sanity without an ounce of proof of what happened that night, and finally I have it, but it doesn’t comfort me. Instead, it’s an excruciating ache. One that will never leave me. I never got a chance to mourn him properly. Not the way I deserved to, not as the woman he loved and who loved him in return because everything became distorted before he was killed. But I am thankful for the minutes we spent together, even if they were precious and few.

My eyes drift to the grave next to Dominic’s, and I address the woman who rests by his side, having joined him just months later.

I swallow as I think of the fear in her eyes that night we met and wonder if when she died if she was afraid. “Tell me, Delphine, did you find the back door? Did your nephew open it for you?” The wind kicks up, and I shiver in my jacket, thinking for the first time in a while about my own mortality. I’d come face to face with it just before I left Triple Falls. I don’t fear much of anything anymore, and I’m determined to see my thousand dreams through.

My eyes drift over the cluster of headstones.

The whole of Tobias’s family rests here, and if I have any fear at all, it’s the thought of his mortality. That one day, he’ll take his place beside his family.

I avert my gaze back to Dominic’s grave, and another rush of grief strikes me, and I tamp it down, refusing to let it consume me so soon. I can’t go into this grieving, or I won’t survive it.

Not yet.

“Repose en paix, mon amour, je reviendrai.” Rest, my love, I’ll be back again.

Following the route home, I adjust my rearview as flashes of the day I fled come back in torturous waves.

The gunfire, the smell of my fallen love’s blood, and the feel of it on my hands on the drive home.

The adrenaline disappeared after the first hour or so, leaving my limbs aching before giving way to utter devastation. They were the most agonizing hours of my life.

“You leave. And you never come back.”