Epilogue
Mark
Two and a half years later…
I was the lucky son of a bitch who’d married his best friend and soul mate. Sound cheesy? Like Layla always said, I’d run out of fucks to give about what people thought.
Our house was now a home. Just over three months after we’d come back from Bimini, we’d moved into it after Dad’s men had finished the work we’d wanted to be done on it.
Yes, I’d initially wanted to do some of it myself, but when he’d offered them up as a wedding/engagement gift, I’d grabbed onto that offer with both hands. Having an architectural firm with a construction company attached to it in the family had ended up being more valuable than even I’d anticipated it being.
There’d been a surprise uncovered during the work. The floor of the office space on the ground floor covered up a staircase that led down to a basement—something I wouldn’t have thought possible given the type of soil we had in Piersville. Sure, some houses did have them, but they’d taken a lot of work during the construction. Given that our house had been built in around 1855, it hadn’t occurred to me that they’d have put a basement in.
But there it was.
Had it been wrong of us to panic that the Marshalls had filled it with dead bodies from their orgies? People who’d died either during or post-coitus? I wouldn’t have thought so, even though during her interview, Mrs. Marshall had told the officers conducting it typically what happened at their parties, not leaving out one sordid detail. When they’d shown her the photos of what they’d found with the black lights, she’d described how they’d achieved it.
If the officers were anything like those of us who’d watched the tape of her interview, scarred for life didn’t even come close.
So, of course we’d been worried there’d be skeletons with erections or mummified swingers with big smiles on their faces. Instead, we’d found artifacts from the first settlers to come to Piersville.
After having them carefully removed—and sending the cadaver dog down to double check—Layla had decided she wanted to put the stone Karma Sutra-esque carvings from the wall in the bathroom down there. I hadn’t been sure about it, but after begrudgingly accepting they’d been deep cleaned, I’d given in and agreed.
The house had turned out beautifully, and the Shaman who’d come to rid it of evil and dirty things had made it feel even better. Finding out that one of my friends from school’s Native American grandfather could do that was what swayed me into falling in love with the house in the end. Sure, I’d liked it before, but its history had left a bad taste in my mouth—and no, it was still too soon for me to make a joke about that.
The cleansing had changed it all for me, though, and now I loved it as much as Layla did.
We hadn’t planned to have kids for a while, but sometimes life throws surprises at you, and this was one of ours.
There had been a family get together planned for a while, so we’d sat on the news until today, figuring it’d be the best place to break it to our families. Layla’s brothers had settled down about our relationship and even admitted—through gritted teeth—that I was the only one who’d ever love her the way she deserved. It’d cost them, but they’d done it.
Then again, the alcohol they’d consumed might have had something to do with it because they’d followed it by telling me how much they loved me and that if Cole and Brett weren’t already married, they’d have wanted to spend the rest of their lives with me. A game of thumb war followed that to see who’d get to have me, and it’d all been recorded by the security camera I had at the back of our house overlooking the pool area.
Uh huh, I had those fucking ‘receipts’ I hated hearing people talk about usually.
Glancing down the table, I paused when I saw Luke looking at his wife worriedly. Isla had been late getting here, so I hoped nothing was wrong.
Dad had just stood up to welcome us all because it was taking part at my parents’ house this time when Isla spun around, pointed her finger in Luke’s face, and said something that made him go paler than I’d ever seen him before in my life.
“What do you think that’s all about?” Layla murmured as Isla pulled something out of her purse and slammed it into his chest. “Is that a letter or a photo?”
The size of it wasn’t that of a standard piece of paper, but it could have been a notecard. But who sent those anymore? Why not just use email or text?
Because of that, I went with “Photo.”
Luke’s hand was shaking as he looked down at it, then lifted his eyes back to his wife warily.
Instead of speaking, Dad stared at them, drawing everyone’s attention to them. All conversations ceased just as Isla snapped, “Twins.”
“Oh, shit,” I breathed, looking over at where the kids were happily eating and playing, to the twins they’d had seven years ago.
Listen, it wasn’t that I didn’t love my niece and nephew because I did, but they were kind of scary sometimes. Their brains seemed to work on a different level to ours, meaning you never knew if they were looking at you as a science experiment or if they were doing it just to see you. And that was no exaggeration. Dad still had a slight scar from the last time they’d convinced him to watch their latest presentation on something they’d read about and had managed to make work.
Layla started laughing silently, her shoulders shaking.
“I don’t know what you’re laughing about, they’re your niece and nephew, too. Now there’ll be another set joining them.”
That comment not only stopped Layla laughing, but it did the same to my other brother, Adam, and his wife, Scarlett.