“Yup. Even Gracie. Until Mom and Dad took her home with them last night.”
Lola shook her head. “Why?”
“Because I called them and told them that the woman I’m going to marry got hurt.”
She felt the small skip of her heart in her chest, felt her stomach twist sideways at his words. “You told them we were engaged?” she asked.
He shook his head in a so-so motion. “Not yet.”
For some reason, she felt disappointed. Yeah, her proposal had been unplanned and completely fear-driven, but…something about the idea of marrying him felt…like coming home, like finally finding her place in the world.
“I wanted to wait until you had time to relax and get back on your feet now that James Barrowman is dead.”
“He’s dead?” she asked, forging ahead where she sensed that he wanted to give her time. She wanted it over with. Hell, she thought, she’d give Jacob her statement right now if it meant that she’d never have to think about the last two weeks. Ever. Again.
“He is. His wife, Mary Jane, shot him when he was strangling you.”
“She knew what he’d done?” Lola asked, thinking about the girls, about Mary Jane Barrowman, and the fear she must have lived in for so long.
“She says that she only found out at the press conference…when she saw their pictures on the board. Said that James played ignorant, but that she knew.”
“How did he find out? About the girls trying to help his wife?”
“We’re trying to figure that out, but it looks like he was monitoring all of his wife’s personal communications. He intercepted the emails from Veronica Tally planning her escape to her family on the east coast, and the last one saying that they’d be waiting for her in the diner. He…he beat her within an inch of her life.”
“And then went to the diner at the meeting time?” she asked.
“Yeah.” He squeezed her hand. “As far as Mary Jane knew, the girls had just left when she hadn’t shown up. Then at the press conference…”
Because she knew what had happened from there, she asked, “What will happen to Mary Jane?” As much as she knew that the woman had murdered her husband, she couldn’t stand the thought of her being locked away for killing that…that animal. James Barrowman had murdered three women, three kind, hardworking women. He deserved what he got.
“I think she’ll be just fine.”
“How?”
“Well, she’s actually from a very well-connected family. They’ll have her living in a plush retirement community under the guise of it being a psych ward, or whatever else her lawyer conjures in her defense.”
“Good.”
Eyebrows raised, he leaned his elbows on the bed. “Good?”
“She lived in complete fear of the one person who was supposed to be there for her through thick and thin.” When his eyes softened, she added, “But she stood up to him. Brought a storm of judgment down on his head.”
“Valkyrie.”
“Mnnn?”
“She’s Valkyrie,” Jacob said with a small shrug.
Lola thought about the name. Had Veronica Tally chosen the name for Mary Jane? Given her another comic book pseudonym like she had with herself and with HAK? Or had Mary Jane Barrowman picked it, maybe, wanted a name that resonated with her in some way? “Coincidence?”
“That her pseudonym happened to be the name of the Old Norse figure who chose who lived and who died in battle?”
Lola nodded.
“Meghan, Veronica Tally’s roommate, said that they picked the names of characters who they wanted to embody. It was a…”
“A self-fulfilling prophecy?”
“In a way. They were supposed to embody the figure that they wanted to be more like. It was a way to give them self-agency…or something like that.”
“Makes sense.” Lola leaned back into her pillow, planning on closing her eyes for just a second. Within a minute she was fast asleep, dreaming of a place where Cat Woman and Valkyrie were friends from different worlds and different walks of life, heroes, living in their own place, a place where they had power and freedom, a place where nobody could hurt them ever again.
Epilogue
It took a month for things to die down, a whole thirty days for the local and international media to move along to the next disaster, the next horror that was bigger than the well-respected City Attorney strangling and killing three women before his own wife had put a bullet through his back.
Jacob was glad.
He’d lived the last four weeks in and out of the courtroom for Mary Jane Barrowman’s trial, one that had been expedited to try and control the associated media frenzy.
As he’d predicted, and to Lola’s delight, Mary Jane was found not guilty. To his surprise, she did not plead insanity. The fact that she’d walked in on her husband trying to kill another woman seemed to leave the jury with no doubt that her motive of self-defense was a valid one, but, still, Jake had found himself thinking about Mary Jane Barrowman often. She’d shot and killed her tormentor, the man who’d sworn to love and cherish her but, instead, had physically and psychologically abused her for years. She’d killed her husband, used his own gun that he kept in his desk drawer to shoot him in the back.
Jacob wondered what her life would look like now that her husband was gone. He wondered if she would ever truly recover? And, although he couldn’t say it aloud, he wondered how Mary Jane knew that James kept a Glock in his desk drawer at his office. Because, surely, James Barrowman wouldn’t have told the woman he abused where he kept his registered weapon?
In between the trial and his regular work, which had not lessened at all, Jacob had barely had time to function, but when he’d figured out how he was going to ask Lola to marry him, he’d spent his lunch breaks and every other spare minute that he’d been able to get away making appointments and running all over LA to get to them on time.
He’d come to the conclusion that he needed to ask her officially as he’d watched her lying still as death in the hospital, in a coma that the doctors had wondered if she’d ever come out of. He’d sat with her through the hardest thirty hours of his life, holding her hand when he hadn’t been able to speak, talking to her when he’d been able to choke out the words, and he’d known that if she woke up, he’d do everything in his power to convince her to stay. Permanently.
Having his family there had helped, had made him feel like he had some small distraction from staring at her pale face, holding her thin, cold hands in his own. Maggie had even stayed for the entire thirty hours until Lola had woken up; although, Jacob wondered if his older sister had also been avoiding the fact that Logan Cane had arrived back in town the day before Lola had been hurt.
Jacob had yet to see him, but according to his mother, Maggie had opened the door, taken one look at his wide grin, and slammed it in his face with a solemn oath to never speak to him again. Which probably wouldn’t end well for her considering Logan had come back to town specifically because his own mother had tracked him down in the Central African Republic and told him he was a father. And if there were two things that Jacob knew about Logan, they were that he’d take a bullet for Maggie and that he didn’t take no for an answer.