To the Love of My Life.
You are the man who taught me that still waters run deep, that Prince Charmings can be bad boys and that love is all the more beautiful for the obstacles you have to overcome within yourself and outside of each other in order to be together.
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2.
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a dead body, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. Not living the kind of life I did as both a student nurse and the daughter of an outlaw motorcycle club Prez.
Blood didn’t freak me out.
Violence didn’t deter me.
One was simply biology and the other was basic MC theology.
I’d seen enough cadavers to fill a classroom, too many bodies to fit out in the pigpen at Angelwood Farm where The Fallen took their dead bodies and so many injuries it was no wonder a bleeding wound seemed as insignificant as spilled beer.
Still, I’d never seen a dead body like this.
Probably because I’d seen my boyfriend, Cricket Marsden, a lot of ways—angry, manic, happy, high, and humored—but I’d never seen him dead.
The blade was wet in my hand, slipping against the blood coating my palm like grotesque red satin gloves. I couldn’t stop staring at Cricket’s handsome face paralyzed in horror and wrath long enough to drop the cleaver to the ground.
Honestly, I didn’t even know why I owned a cleaver. But it had been there when I’d reached blindly behind me into one of the kitchen drawers and grasped the first cool handle my hand made contact with.
I’d expected—at worst—a wooden spoon to jam into his eye. At best, a butter knife to stab him painfully but not mortally in the shoulder.
Instead, fate or something like it had pressed the awful square weight of a cleaver into my hand and in my mounting panic, I hadn’t realized the significance of my improvised weapon until it was lodged in the junction between Cricket’s long neck and his tattooed shoulder.
Blood was everywhere in an instant, all over me like I’d jumped into a rain shower. I choked on the blood as it sprayed between my lips but I didn’t take a step back because my eyes were hooked on Cricket’s brown ones, which were obliterated by his blown pupils from the mammoth amount of drugs in his system. They widened in shock at the impact of the sharp metal as it tore with blunt force and no finesse through his connective tissues and his mouth opened like a second wound as it embedded irreversibly in his clavicle.
We watched each other as I killed him, caught up in a tangle just like we always had been. Our union was destructive, something I’d first sought out just to taste the tang of danger and feel the thrill of rebellion. I was an MC princess, so I knew outlaws, but Cricket wasn’t smart enough to be called even that. He was reckless and always had been, searching for the next thrill because he always grew bored with the last. The only thing he’d never grown bored with was me.
At first, I’d been flattered. He was a hot guy with an addictive personality and I was the drug that lit him up and burned him from the inside out. In different ways with the same heady result, Cricket gave that to me. I was a girl surrounded by men too busy to pay attention to her with a mother who’d rather hit up smack or snort coke than brush my hair.
It was a cliché, but clichés existed for a reason.
I just wanted to be loved and Cricket did that.
He did it so hard it left bruises; metaphorically at first, just around my heart like strangle marks, and then later, physically too.
The drugs whipped his love up like a storm, epic and powerful in a way that had me paralyzed in awe even as it swept me up in its fury.
I’d been telling myself for a long time not to let him hurt me anymore.
I wasn’t the kind of girl to have an abusive boyfriend.
I had things going for me that included more than my abundance of hair and bluer than fresh denim eyes. I knew I was good looking, full of personality and pretty damn smart if I put my mind to it.
I had good friends and more, the best family any girl could ever have known.
Resources to get me out of the thick, stinking mud of Cricket’s hold.
I didn’t use any of them.
At least, not until now, not until it was too late and the only resource I had left at my disposal was an inconveniently placed cleaver.
The blood was cooling on my skin, drying in abstract patterns that pulled my skin tight the way old sweat does after a workout.
Still, I remained there, kneeling over my boyfriend’s dead body.
I was almost a fully qualified nurse, so my training should have kicked in while I watched the blood arch like calligraphy drawn in red ink through the air and over the walls of my small kitchen, over the pristine white of my thin dress. But they don’t train you in university what to do if you accidently sever the carotid artery with a meat cleaver when your high, abusive boyfriend tries to rape you with the butt of his gun.
So, when he’d fallen to the linoleum with the knife lodged deep in the junction of his shoulder and neck, I forgot everything, dropped to the floor beside him and started to pull the thick steel blade from his neck.
Blood gushed over my hands, warm and slippery so that the wooden grip glided through my fingers and thudded to the floor.
Cricket gargled in protest, blood pooling at the sides of his mouth.
It reminded me that you should never pull out a foreign object until you have a way to staunch the blood flow and you know exactly what the damage is to the surrounding area.
It reminded me that there is approximately 5.5 liters of blood in the human body.
It didn’t take a nursing degree to know that most of that measure was pooling hot and smooth like wet silk under my knees.
A man was dying on the floor of my apartment.
Not a man, my man.
And he wasn’t just dying. There was no heart attack, no car accident.
Only me.
His murderer.
My man was dying on the floor at my feet because I had killed him.
I searched wildly for something to save him with even though I knew—I knew—he was going to die and do it soon. My eyes landed on the phone Cricket had knocked to the floor when he’d caged me against the counter. I slipped in the blood as I lunged for it, ignored the bloody smears my fingers deposited on the screen as I dialed the number.
I was on autopilot, but that didn’t explain why I called him.
My dad was the best person to call. The President of The Fallen MC and a ruthless protector of his loved ones, Zeus Garro would know exactly what to do with a dead body, how to clean up the mess and make it seem like nothing had ever happened. He’d make it so I could return to my life as I’d known it, princess of fallen men but removed from the taint of their sins. I could wake up tomorrow morning and do as I always did, grab my Double-Double coffee at Tim Horton’s and make my way to the last of my exams as a normal student, your average girl. The blood would still coat my hands like phantom gloves as I filled in the little bubbles in the answer booklet but no one else would know because my dad would have disappeared the body and the trauma of it all like some kind of outlaw magician.
I could have called my brother by blood or any of the brothers by the club, Nova would have charmed me out of my panic while Priest, silent and competent as a predator, took care of the body. Curtains would make it seem like Cricket had never even been to my apartment, deleting snapshots of footage from random street cameras that had captured my dead boyfriend on his way to my house. They’d think about calling in Cressida, my brother’s girlfriend and one of my best friends, but they wouldn’t because they’d know better than I would that it was my dad’s wife I needed, the husky, strong tones of Loulou Garro in my ear telling me I was a warrior just like her and I’d fought a battle there had been no choice but to win.