So, when he’d fallen to the linoleum with the knife lodged deep in the junction of his shoulder and neck, I forgot everything, dropped to the floor beside him and started to pull the thick steel blade from his neck.
Blood gushed over my hands, warm and slippery so that the wooden grip glided through my fingers and thudded to the floor.
Cricket gargled in protest, blood pooling at the sides of his mouth.
It reminded me that you should never pull out a foreign object until you have a way to staunch the blood flow and you know exactly what the damage is to the surrounding area.
It reminded me that there is approximately 5.5 liters of blood in the human body.
It didn’t take a nursing degree to know that most of that measure was pooling hot and smooth like wet silk under my knees.
A man was dying on the floor of my apartment.
Not a man, my man.
And he wasn’t just dying. There was no heart attack, no car accident.
Only me.
His murderer.
My man was dying on the floor at my feet because I had killed him.
I searched wildly for something to save him with even though I knew—I knew—he was going to die and do it soon. My eyes landed on the phone Cricket had knocked to the floor when he’d caged me against the counter. I slipped in the blood as I lunged for it, ignored the bloody smears my fingers deposited on the screen as I dialed the number.
I was on autopilot, but that didn’t explain why I called him.
My dad was the best person to call. The President of The Fallen MC and a ruthless protector of his loved ones, Zeus Garro would know exactly what to do with a dead body, how to clean up the mess and make it seem like nothing had ever happened. He’d make it so I could return to my life as I’d known it, princess of fallen men but removed from the taint of their sins. I could wake up tomorrow morning and do as I always did, grab my Double-Double coffee at Tim Horton’s and make my way to the last of my exams as a normal student, your average girl. The blood would still coat my hands like phantom gloves as I filled in the little bubbles in the answer booklet but no one else would know because my dad would have disappeared the body and the trauma of it all like some kind of outlaw magician.
I could have called my brother by blood or any of the brothers by the club, Nova would have charmed me out of my panic while Priest, silent and competent as a predator, took care of the body. Curtains would make it seem like Cricket had never even been to my apartment, deleting snapshots of footage from random street cameras that had captured my dead boyfriend on his way to my house. They’d think about calling in Cressida, my brother’s girlfriend and one of my best friends, but they wouldn’t because they’d know better than I would that it was my dad’s wife I needed, the husky, strong tones of Loulou Garro in my ear telling me I was a warrior just like her and I’d fought a battle there had been no choice but to win.
I could have called them all, but I didn’t.
Instead, I called a ghost, a man I hadn’t seen or heard from in three years. A man I’d had a crush on since I was a girl because he was everything good and straight and true. Even as a child I’d known, he was too good for me. We existed in the same world but in the way of the hero and the villain. We crossed paths but only in times of disaster, when I found my mother blue with near-death on the floor of our kitchen, when my father went to jail for manslaughter or when I stabbed a pencil into Tucker Guttery’s thigh because he stole a kiss from me in seventh grade. I was a storm of calamity, cast adrift on a sea of black doings and loosely drawn rebel rules. He was an old growth oak with roots sunk deep into rich earth, limbs stretching wide across the sky, standing sentry across centuries as the world toiled away beneath its leaves. I could whip around that kind of man, cause hurricanes with my spirit, quake the earth with my tempers, but none of it mattered. He would remain untouched no matter what I did, no matter what anyone did.
He was just so simply and profoundly good. I think that’s why I always liked him.
And it might have even been why I called him.
To punish myself by facing a man who wouldn’t disappear my sins but rectify them. It was his duty as a cop to arrest me for what I’d done to Cricket and part of me yearned for that kind of justice, and to be properly defined as an outlaw in a way that my outlaw family refused to do. To be punished for the first time in my life for all of my many misdeeds, big and small.