“Oh, fuck. I’m so sorry, baby,” I whispered into her hair.
Fran didn’t reply.
Only held on while she shook. And shook hard.
My eyes met Chief Wilkerson’s, and I quietly asked what happened despite the shaking woman in my arms.
“Tell me,” I ordered.
Chief looked at the woman in my arms, then back to me.
“She showed up in your house, and he was already in it. We’re thinking, in your haste to leave, you forgot to set the alarm, and Pasqual took advantage. He was in here waiting, likely for you, when she arrived alone. He took advantage and tried to…” Chief Wilkerson trailed off.
“He didn’t succeed,” she whispered. “I channeled my inner Taos and got away when he was trying to undo his pants. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed that paring knife you refused to let me put into the dishwasher. When he grabbed my hair, I fell to the floor, and swiped out.”
“She severed his Achilles tendon,” Chief Wilkerson said when the woman in my arms trailed off. “Around that time, Madame Pope came in the door, ready to rip you a new asshole, and found them fighting instead. She held him at gunpoint with a fifty caliber and accidentally ruptured one of his nuts, that were still hanging out, might I add, with the end of her cane.”
“She took a swing at his hard dick, too, with the handle of it,” she whispered into my ear. “I didn’t tell them that part.”
I shuddered at the thought.
Both were downright heart-attack-inducing.
The woman sure did know how to go for the heart of a man.
“We arrived to find her still holding him at gunpoint. He’s currently at the hospital getting his dick and balls looked at,” Schultz said as he came into the room with Easton. “We got everything.”
My brows rose. “What?”
“He confessed. To everything,” he said. “Citing his anger at you for taking his buddy away that he used to play with. Worked his way back here, planned on doing it in his old stomping ground. Succeeded for a few months, and then you figured it out. The connection with their hair.” Schultz gestured at Fran’s hair, that was the only thing you could see since her face was buried so deeply into my neck.
I had to take a seat as the ramifications of the day hit me.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry for causing you trouble on this day.”
I pulled back, fisting my hand lightly in her hair to pull her back from my neck, and stared into her tear-filled eyes.
“Don’t you ever, not ever, think that you don’t come first with me,” I ordered. “Hell or high water, you need me and I’m here.” I paused. “I’m just sorry that you had to go through that alone.”
“Let me get to my sister, motherfucker!” I heard Mavis yell.
“Mavis,” I heard Murphy’s low voice urging her to be calm.
“Fuck you,” Mavis growled. “Thanks for the ride but go the fuck away.”
“Let me have your kid.”
The growl came, and then Mavis entered a few seconds later sans child, staring wildly around the room until she found her sister.
She came straight for us, throwing her arms around both of our necks as she buried her face between us and pulled Fran in close.
“I fucking hate our grandmother, but I love what she did,” she declared.
“I think that we’re going to have to invite her to our Vegas wedding,” I found myself saying, wanting to lighten the mood.
Mavis and Fran snorted in unison. “We wouldn’t go that far.” Fran sniffled.
Then I had two crying women in my arms, and I couldn’t help but think how lucky of a man I was.
I just wished that I had one other woman here with me.
• • •
Later that night, as the wee hours of the morning started to creep up on us, I lay in the bed, eyes wide open, holding the woman that meant the world to me.
“You’re thinking pretty hard up there,” she muttered as she flipped her head from resting on my right pec.
She moved until her head was in the middle of my sternum, and even in the dark, I could tell that she was staring at me.
“I…” I paused. “I can’t believe that I almost lost you.”
My admission caused her to pause for such a long time that I wasn’t sure she was going to reply.
But then she did.
“That could’ve broken me,” she whispered. “I dissociated for a little bit. Closed my mind off to what was happening, and it was really bad.”
I heard her swallow, but the thickness in my throat was so tight that I couldn’t get the words to leave my mouth.
“I kept hearing you tell me to fight. Fight, Fran. Fight.” I felt the wetness of tears on my chest, and I knew that she was crying again. “And I knew that I couldn’t do that to you. I couldn’t let you find me like that. So I fought.”
Thank God.
Thank God that she fought.
“I’m selling my house,” I told her. “I can’t… we can’t stay there anymore.”
She sighed. “I don’t think I want to, either.”
We were quiet for a few long seconds and then, “I want to kill him.”
She sighed. “I know you do. But just think, Grandmother is going to do things worse to him than killing him. Just let her do her thing.”
At her words, I realized she was right.
Pearl Pope had already done her best to make the fool’s life a living hell.
Pasqual didn’t have any idea what was coming. Pearl Pope was a force of fucking nature.
CHAPTER 25
Pinning book ideas should give you some kind of developmental credit.
-Taos to Fran
TAOS
There was nobody at the service.
Nobody, that was, unless you counted the two quiet women, and the babbling little baby at my side.
Sure, Chief Wilkerson, Madden and even Schultz, had offered to come, but I hadn’t wanted them there. I’d wanted to do this alone, yet two females hadn’t allowed me to have what I wanted.
They were being nice. I knew.
But I didn’t want false platitudes on a day like today. A day that felt dark and deep and didn’t really feel like there would be an end in sight.
I just wanted my girl.
And my girl had a sister that had insisted on coming, too.
So, though it was a sad affair, the giggles of Vlad filled the air despite the darkness.
It actually felt more right than anything.
“Would you like to say a few words?”
I looked up at the man that was helping officiate the service.
Though my grandmother went to church, she never went to the same one two weekends in a row.
I swear she was at every single church in the area, and never let on that she liked any particular one better than the rest.
So we’d decided to have just the funeral home put it on at my grandmother’s house, and not tell anyone when and where.
It was… freeing.
I didn’t have to deal with the false platitudes. And my grandmother’s true friends, the ones that lived thousands of miles away, were all too old to be traveling themselves. So we’d done a video conference of the service, and that particular torture had just ended.