“Let me go,” I demanded.
“Not gonna happen.”
“Let me go!” I screamed as another shot, this one somehow louder than the rest tore through the air.
My head jerked toward the action and I saw with startling clarity, my father, his arms around someone smaller, rock back from the impact and fall to the ground.
I screamed.
I wasn’t old enough to have a worst nightmare, but if I’d been forced to think about it before then, seeing my father fall would’ve been it. He was my idol, my favourite human on the earth, the person who’d taught me what loving even was.
Not understanding that, not needing to, I felt my entire world imploded as I watched him fall.
I screamed so long and loud without breath for well over a minute that in the end, Lionel’s arms around me, pulling me up and against his body so he could carry me away from the scene, I passed out.
And later, when I woke up on the couch at my house, King arguing with my mum in the kitchen about the fact that Dad was in the hospital and would be arrested for manslaughter and I knew that I’d been right, that my whole life had changed in the course of a Sunday morning, there was a rose on the table beside me.
I’d never held a rose before—my family weren’t exactly flowery people—so I wondered at the depth of the red petals, tightly furled but just opening in the center, a vortex as complicated as it was beautiful peeking out for me to see.
There was a sticky note stuck to the table beneath the rose.
Sorry for your loss, Rosie.
You need me, you call.
-Lionel
Then his phone number scrawled underneath.
“Almost threw that shit out,” King said, stalking into the living room with both his hands stuck in his long hair. “Shouldn’t get close to a Danner.”
My hands automatically clenched around the rose and the note, a thorn pricking my thumb so blood smeared over the phone number.
King was smart enough to pick up on it, and he sighed as he flopped down beside me and tugged me into his arms. For the first time since I’d heard those shots, I felt like I could breathe again smelling his fresh laundry scent, feeling my brother’s arms so much stronger than mine wrapped around me.
“Kills me, but the guy was right. I can’t do much to protect you and now Dad’s,” he cleared his throat when it broke over the word, “now that he’s goin’ to prison, we gotta fend for ourselves. Want you to keep the number, H.R., and I want you to use it if you gotta, even if it means goin’ against mum and what the club stands for.”
“But,” I whispered through the tears in my throat. “The club comes first.”
“Nah,” King said, his voice so heavy with wisdom, I wondered how the words didn’t pin down his tongue. “We’re just kids. Thinkin’ we need to put ourselves first for now.”
I carefully unfolded my fingers from the crumpled note and touched my bleeding fingers to the small, block script there. My mind memorized the digits immediately and over the course of my adolescence, I would come to call that number dozens of times over, whenever I needed Lionel Danner to shield me just as he had that day from the massacre at First Light Church, but to this day, I kept that bloody Post-it note carefully folded in my wallet as a reminder of the first time he saved me.
When I woke up, it was to the smell of bacon and I knew what that meant.
My dad was there.
I hoped like hell Loulou was there too because she always had a calming effect on him and I knew he was pissed as hell at me. He’d been cool with me while I recuperated from the incident at his house in Entrance, taking me for a ride on his bike like I’d loved doing since I was a girl, touching me affectionately whenever we passed each other, and basically, giving me room to recover without getting all up in my shit about my poor choices.
Clearly, that time was over.
Hero was pressed full length to my side, his sweet chops on my thigh facing the door when I opened my eyes, but he’d turn to look at me when I lifted my head.
“Hey, buddy.” I rubbed his ears and smiled as he licked my hand. “I’m surprised you didn’t freak out at my dad breaking into my apartment.”
“He did,” Zeus Garro said from the doorway to my bedroom, his great big body taking up the entire width and height of it. “’S a good thing Lou was ’ere and the beast knew ’er or I’d be seriously chewed up by now.”
“Can’t believe I slept through that,” I muttered, looking down at Hero as he lapped at my hand happily, totally at ease with my dad.