“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.