With each word, she moved the gun around in the air, likely not realizing that the safety was off on it. Yup, this close up, you could definitely see that.
“Uh, Sadie, can you give me the gun, baby?” Elijah asked softly, reaching out for it, ducking when she swung it past him again.
“No, it shot me!”
“Technically Moodie shot you, and the safety’s off on it, so you could do the same to one of us if you don’t either put it down or give it to one of us,” he explained warily, cringing when she turned it with the business end facing herself.
“Tell me what button I push, then, ‘cos I’m not passing it to anyone apart from the police or shoving it up that bastard’s arse. See how he likes it!”
Thankfully, she’d turned it to face up at the roof as she looked for the ‘button’ that Elijah was describing to her when a man yelled her name, making her jump, and all of us move away quickly.
“Sadie Odessa, put that damn gun down. I told you when you were little, you were never playing with one again,” the man yelled.
Elijah and I looked at each other wide-eyed, and he muttered, “Play? With a gun?”
Whatever transpired after that was lost on me because when I looked back over at Parker, he was sitting on the floor with his head in his hands. What little I could see of it was pale and his forehead was wrinkled.
Crawling across to him, I gently moved his hands away and scooted into his lap, burying my face in his neck. Wrapping his arms around me tightly, he shuddered and swallowed loudly.
“I’m so fucking sorry, baby. So, so fucking sorry.”
I tried pulling back to look at him, but he kept me anchored against him. “What are you sorry for?”
“This shit never should’ve touched you. She never should’ve gotten to you.”
Sometimes when bad things happen, the people who were there with a front row seat for it aren’t the ones who necessarily suffer the hardest. I was going to find that fact out with Parker. Sadie and I would definitely have emotional, mental, and physical scars because of what Chantal and Moodie had done to us, but Parker would be the one who’d take the longest to recover from it. His past, the part that’d scarred him deeply and made him believe he was dirty, had come back and hurt me. It’d been thrown in his face by the people responsible. And it all came back to torture him in a new way.Sixteen**Disclaimer: I, Mary B. Moore, do solemnly swear that the discussion about ‘thatch’ (you’ll understand when you read it) isn’t based on a real book. No books were harmed in the writing of that part, but I think my brain is scarred for life with the mental images I got from it.**ParkerThree weeks later…
I needed to find a way to relax before I ended up in a grave at the age of thirty-one. I was driving myself nuts worrying about shit happening to Ariana.
The nightmares were back, too, so I’d returned to my old coping mechanism to get me through it. I woke up two hours before I needed to and worked out, and at night I’d go for a run or do another workout. It was a repetitive cycle, but it helped me work out my frustration. I’d also had the tattoo that stopped halfway down my right forearm extended down to my wrist, hoping the pain would give me an outlet for the anger and frustration. It’d been so bad on my last day off that I’d been the one to take Jerry to be neutered for Ari, just to stop myself working out.
I’d just finished doing some weights and was now just starting on the treadmill when I heard a door slam.
“Yo, fart face, where you at?”
Yeah, my brother was staying with me for a while. He’d been involved in the hunt for Ariana and Sadie—something I still couldn’t talk about—and for some reason had requested to finish his orthopedic residency off at the same hospital that I worked at. Until then, he’d taken some time off to stay here for a while.
“In here,” I yelled over my shoulder, watching the lights on the screen of the treadmill change as I went up a hill on the program I’d chosen.
“You ever going to live life like a normal human instead of a machine?” he asked, leaning against the front of the machine I was running on.
Focusing on my breathing, I shrugged and scowled when the gradient of the incline got even worse. I was used to running, but I also didn’t like the burn I had going on in my thighs at that moment because I couldn’t be bothered to stretch before I’d jumped on.