Cade had been different with her. Had a connection. He’d loved her like the softer, more innocent sister he never had.
And he’d lost her.
I glanced to the moving reaper.
Cade was losing his brother too.
“Rosie, you shouldn’t be in here,” he said flatly.
I sucked in a ragged breath. “Where else should I be?” I whispered.
I didn’t know why I whispered; neither of the other two people in the room could hear us, both of them gone in different ways.
The girl formally known as my best friend had to be in the place reserved for all the best souls. The man sitting beside her broken body had forfeited his soul to the worst of all places.
Cade merely looked at me, that same empty expression hollowing out his features. “I don’t know, kid,” he whispered back. “I don’t know.”
He just stood there, unable to offer me the support he’d given me over the entirety of my life, unable to protect me.
He couldn’t protect me from the death in this room any more than he could protect me from the smoke from a fire.
For the first time in his life, Cade was helpless.
And heartbroken.
I reached out to squeeze his hand.
It was stone underneath my fingers.
He stared at me for a long moment.
“You should go. You don’t need to see this.”
It wasn’t a command. It wasn’t anything. Just a last-ditch attempt to save me from something.
He didn’t even wait for me to comply, just leaned in and touched his icy lips to my head, then strode toward the bed like there wasn’t something yanking at him, holding him in place. He waded through it, all the death and turmoil, until he stood at the center of it, hand on Bull’s shoulder.
“Brother,” he said.
There was something in his voice then. I got it now. Whatever strength he had left in him, he was saving for Bull, trying to use it as a life raft to stop him from drowning.
Bull didn’t move. He just continued to drown.
“Don’t fuckin’ touch me right now, Cade.”
I flinched again.
Bull was never exactly expressive, but the voice that came out of him wasn’t just empty.
It was hardly human.
It was like death itself was forming the words, with no personality, no individuality behind them.
Cade’s form was stiff. He heard it too. But he didn’t shy away from it. “This isn’t your fault,” he tried.
“The fuck it isn’t,” Bull snarled.
At least it was Bull. At least he wasn’t really gone, that disembodied and terrifying voice not replacing the low boom of the man I considered blood. But then, hearing the raw and exposed pain in his tone was even worse than hearing nothing at all.
“This shit”—he jerked his head toward the bed in a violent movement—“is all on me.”
A tear rolled down my cheek. His tone was full of certainty. Of sentencing. He had already thrown himself into the pit, taking on a blame that wasn’t his, owning up to a crime that he didn’t commit.
I nearly moved then, nearly braved the death and broken image of my best friend to comfort him, chase away the devil that licked at his soul.
“Bull,” Cade said, full of the fight that I was desperately trying to rouse in myself. The fight to save one member of our family so we didn’t have to dig two graves.
Bull’s head moved in a blur. I could see his profile, witness half of the grief etched in his face. It wasn’t even him. I barely recognized the man glaring at my brother.
“They fuckin’ raped her!” he bellowed.
I clapped my hand over my mouth to stifle the guttural moan of pain that stabbed me with his words.
Horror echoed through my skull.
“Repeatedly,” Bull continued, not finished torturing himself, or me. “She’s scared of mice,” he said on a low whisper, the words cutting with their broken edges. “Laurie’s fuckin’ terrified of tiny things.”
A single tear trailed down my cheek. He was right. She couldn’t stand bees. But she’d never kill one. Never hurt a living thing. She cried once when she accidently hit a rabbit driving home, calling herself a murderer.
That beautiful girl considered that murder.
And this was her fate?
How could the world be so cruel?
“She’s afraid of mice,” Bull repeated. “How do you think she felt when they were doing that to her?”
I choked on his words. On the images. Of the broken and bruised and burned parts of my best friend that I glimpsed lying in that hospital bed. Every glance was a knife, tearing away at my soul, carving away at my interior flesh.
“Yeah, that’s on me,” Bull said. “Girl who lived her life in sunshine, losing it in the blackest, ugliest depths of hell.”
My grief swallowed me as the hurt, the utter defeat in Bull’s voice ricocheted through the room.
The silence that followed meant that we could hear it.
Or couldn’t hear it.
The mechanical beeping stopped, signaling that even Laurie’s heart couldn’t take it anymore.
And that was it. I was no longer standing between life and death anymore.
Death was all around me.
I wanted to cry.
Scream.
Break down.
But most of all, I wanted revenge.
Flashing lights in my rearview mirror illuminated the inky blackness I’d been driving through.
“Fuck,” I cursed.
I considered putting my foot down. It felt heavy, ready to press down on the gas and speed away from the law. From everything.
Grief and anger may have warped my thoughts, but it didn’t take them away completely.
I slowed, pulling off the road and onto the shoulder. I had been so close, just outside of Amber’s limits, which meant I was going to be out of the watchful eye of anyone patrolling the place.
I had been thinking of the club, not the law.
I didn’t even attempt to hide the gun laying heavily on the passenger seat. I had a permit. I was also a Fletcher. No cop would fuck with me.
Not any day.
Not today of all days.
I stared forward, winding down my window as dirt crunched beneath the feet of the approaching officer.
I didn’t let myself think it was him.
Didn’t let myself hope.
I prayed it wasn’t.
God had been looking the other way for the past twenty-five hours, so he didn’t hear my prayer. A light illuminated my car and I squinted, accustomed to the darkness surrounding me, in both my exterior and interior worlds.
“Jesus, Rosie,” Luke snapped.
I glared up at him and saw his furious eyes were focused on the gun in my passenger seat.
“Get out of the car,” he ordered.
I clenched my hands on the steering wheel. “I haven’t broken any laws, wasn’t speeding. I’m not sure why you need me to do that, Officer.” I was horrified to notice that my voice was disembodied, mimicking that empty and emotionless tone that Bull had employed before he tore half the hospital room to the ground.
I flinched.
Before Laurie died.
My hands tightened to the point of pain. Or what I imagined might’ve been pain if I wasn’t focusing on the hot agony pulsing from my heart, pumping poison to every inch of me.
“Rosie, get out of the fucking car!” Luke bellowed.