Up in Flames (Rosemary Beach 13)

That was sacrifice.

Because winning her love would now be even more difficult. But I’d never lost a challenge. She was the greatest and most important challenge of my life. That woman owned my heart, and inside her she was carrying our future.

They were my family. The first and last one I’d ever have.

Mase

While the minister spoke, my thoughts were somewhere else. Glancing over the graves in a place where Major and I had played hide and seek as kids, I never imagined actually standing here and lowering his body into the ground. You prepare for the deaths of your grandparents and even your parents but never your sibling or best friend. Major wasn’t just my cousin; he was like my brother and my best friend. In all his mixed-up, crazy ways, he had been the one person I’d told my secrets to, broken the law with, and forgiven for just about everything.

He was wild and always looking for adventure. Like there was a hollowness inside, and nothing filled it. Maybe I understood that before Reese but never to the level he seemed to feel it. His father was a deep root to all of this. I knew that much. This need to find something worth living for. I wanted to hate my uncle, but that was simply because I needed someone to blame. This wasn’t fair. Major lit up a place when he was there. He became the center of attention, and people enjoyed being around him. He never understood that, though. He was never satisfied.

My mother cried softly beside me, with the handkerchief my stepfather had handed her earlier pressed to her nose and covering her mouth. Major had been like another of her children. She’d been as charmed by him as most females on the planet. When he had needed a sanctuary, she had opened her arms and her home to him. Even that hadn’t been enough. She’s given him a mother’s love, but she wasn’t his mother. That was yet another void in his life. Someone else I wanted to blame for this.

Reese was tucked against my other side, sniffling as the minister spoke, holding tightly to my arm as if she were holding me up. She’d known Major for such a short time, but he’d won her over, too. He’d called last week, promising to stop by this week and visit. She had told him she’d make him brownies with the icing on top the way he liked them. I knew he would flirt with my wife just to harass me. Reese would blush, and then we would all sit up laughing and talking around the fireplace.

He’d come back, all right, but not the way we had planned. Never the way we had planned. His need for adventure had finally been too much. Knowing he’d died protecting my sister made my heart swell from sorrow and pride. Even in the end, he’d been a man of honor.

Captain

I held Addy’s hand tightly in one hand and Franny’s in my other. Both my girls stood beside me as we gathered on a hillside in Texas, watching a boy who hadn’t been given a chance to be a man yet lowered into the ground. That could have been me. So many times, it should have been. I had been given more reprieves than any human should have gotten. Bullets that should have ended my time on earth had miraculously missed me.

Squeezing their hands in mine, I now knew why. Fate wasn’t ready to take me, because I had a world I didn’t know existed. I had a family to live for. A family that needed me and a family that would change me.

Major would never get that life. The one more exciting than the one he was chasing. Danger wasn’t the thrill he needed to fill his void. We all had a void. We were born with it. Finding the filler for that void wasn’t easy. Sometimes it came to us and we missed it, sometimes we lost it, sometimes we didn’t know to search for it. If we were lucky, it didn’t give up on us.

I’d been one of the lucky ones.

Major hadn’t been.

This life was an unfair place. One full of pain that no one really understood. I knew the void Major had been chasing to fill. I’d had it once, too. I also knew he wouldn’t fill it with the gun in his hand facing down another man. It had never been enough for me. It had almost taken all there was of me, until Addy found me and saved me . . . again.

Tear filled the eyes of people surrounding the grave Major would soon be lowered into. He had been loved by so many. Had I died at his age, no funeral would have taken place. DeCarlo would have covered it up, and the next day, it would be business as usual. I didn’t have a group of friends and family then.

He had been selfish and had not considered this end. The pain he’d cause if this were to happen. But then, he’d believed he was invincible, even when I’d told him many times that he wasn’t. No one was.

None of them would ever know the truth. Not Mase or his father. They couldn’t know. The truth would be covered up, but at least he was a hero. He’d saved his cousin’s sister. That was what they would remember. I was thankful that he’d gone out this way. If things had gone differently, on a different case, we might never have had the chance to bury Major.

This gave our family the closure they needed and deserved.

Nan

There were no more tears left inside me. My chest ached, and my head pounded. This was all very real, and I never woke up to find it was a dream. Major was gone.

He had been working with the feds all along to protect me from my brief time spent with a crime lord. If I had known exactly how dangerous Franco had been, I’d have been more careful. I wouldn’t have stayed with him like I had for that short time.

Because of my silly stupidity, Major was dead.

Cope was alive, but he had also been protecting me. He’d just survived. I closed my eyes, blocking out the terror that came with thoughts of Cope dead. Even though what he had done had all been to protect me, I still couldn’t hate him. I couldn’t want him dead. Yet his job was one where he would be in danger every day. He would leave, and I’d never see him again. I’d never know when a gun ended his life.