“What about you? Are you going to get a girlfriend?” she asks apprehensively.
“Nope. I’m going to be the scary loner.” The old me tries to laugh off the idea, but it’s lost in translation. It was never funny to begin with.
Young Skyla writhes as if this were the last thing she wanted to hear. “What would we have to do to be together permanently?”
“Take down the Countenance.” I watch as I shake my head as though this were impossible.
Skyla crawls over and sits between my knees. The old me drapes my arms around her, and she leans up and kisses me gently on the lips.
She blinks up at me. “Then that’s what we’ll do.”
Skyla, the one witnessing the spectacle with me, offers a meager applause.
“And so it begins.” Her voice is surprisingly light.
“I’m glad you didn’t say it ends.”
And with that, I whisk us back to Whitehorse, back to the butterfly room that still holds the scent of Skyla’s floral perfume.
“What was that, Logan?” A laugh gets caught in her throat as she pulls me in by the fingers.
“That was me penning you a love story, written across the jagged borders of time all those years ago. I was a pretty good scary loner, wasn’t I?”
“The best,” she says, tugging my shirt off, and I’m quick to help move things along. “Logan”—she pauses as her hands lie flat over my chest, her affect suddenly sober—“we didn’t make a mistake. We did what we had to do at the time to survive.”
“I agree.” It comes out lower than a whisper, unconvincingly. “But this time”—my voice hikes up a few notches, sure as hell as to what I’m about to say—“I’m not giving you up. You are mine, Skyla Laurel MessengerOliver.”
She bites down a smile as I lift the sweatshirt right off her and I bow down and offer her lips a kiss.
She shakes her head up at me, those long lashes taking me before any other part of her ever has a chance. “It’s not just the Counts anymore, is it?”
“I don’t care who it is. If they’re not on our side, they’re wrong. They’re all going down, Skyla. And this time we do it together, at one another’s side.”
She nods, a silent tear rolling down her cheek. “And this time we are going to nail them to the wall once and for all.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do.”
We share a little laugh before we share each other.
The Barricade, the Counts, the Fems, to hell with them all.
And to hell they will go.
24
Wesley
August.
A month rich with birthdays. Eli and Charlie turned one today, and oddly enough, Emma, Kresley, and Laken teamed up to create a backyard bonanza that would appeal to anyone’s inner child.
Emma initially offered to host the event, but since she has a giant hole in her backyard filled with enough water to drown all of Paragon, both Kresley and Laken quickly shot down the idea. Instead, the party is raging right here at the house Laken and I purchased, in the yard large enough to double as a national park, with enough swing sets, jungle equipment, bounce houses, games, and even a petting zoo to please every living soul under five.
The child population is relatively small—the entire Landon mini brood, their parents, Laken’s family, her brother Fletcher who has been pissed at me for a good long while, her sisters, her mother, her fiancé, Dr. Booth, his son Rev, his new girlfriend, Skyla’s sister Mia, the other sister, the brothers and their wives—hell, I don’t know if they’re married. Skyla’s entire family is front and center, including the goofy stepdad and the bumbling mother.
Kresley, on the other hand, has just a few friends, Grayson and some mothers from a mommy group Kres is a part of.
I never thought I’d say this, but I’m glad Kres is still a part of my life. We were hot and heavy at Ephemeral, the boarding school the Counts shoved me into. And then when I woke up from a long stupor and realized that Laken was the love of my life, I brutally broke Kresley’s heart. I admittedly put her through hell when I shoved her on Raven’s Eye in Laken’s place a little more than a year ago. Of course, I had her surgically alter her face to look like Laken’s just to pull it off. But Ezrina has since altered it back—in a sense. Kresley was beautiful before, but Ezrina made her stunning. But alas, not even her newfound beauty could sway me from the most stunning woman of them all, Laken Stewart—LakenEdinger. My Laken. My forever. My everything. And now she is about to become the mother of my child.
