The good kind.
I lace my fingers through Bran’s. We step off the porch together, into the cold, into the mess, into whatever comes next.
Not as bait.
Not as prey.
As two idiots in love in a town that feels like ours.
EPILOGUE
HIM
Ishouldhaveher.
By any reasonable metric, by any story worth telling, Tallulah Gentry ought to be mine already—trussed up in some quiet room that only I know, sleeping in the dark with my fingerprints fading from her skin.
Instead, I’m lying on a lumpy motel mattress three counties over, staring at a water stain on the ceiling that looks vaguely like a rabbit, and listening to ice rattle in the busted AC unit.
She’s alive.
Again.
I roll that fact around in my head like a chipped tooth, prodding at it, tasting the bruise.
She wasright there. Warm and soft and perfect under my arm, her little body going boneless as the sedative took hold. I could feel her pulse against my ribs. I could feel the way she fought, right up until she couldn’t. That spark. That fire.
And then that brick of an Irishman came barreling down the alley like a freight train with a god complex, and Brady—fucking Jack Brady—decided to actually do his job for once and put a bullet where it mattered.
I flex my injured arm, feeling the dull throb where his shot grazed me. Sloppy work. He could’ve taken my head off if he’d been braver or angrier.
I’m almost offended he didn’t.
“Should’ve been clean,” I murmur to the ceiling. “In and out. Lesson learned. Curtain call.”
It’s not the first time a curtain call’s gone sideways.
Once, a lifetime and several names ago, Jason and I thought bigger. We were boys then, though we didn’t feel like it. Angry and invisible. The kind of boys pretty girls laughed at in hallways and on bleachers, in dressing rooms they thought were private.
Pretty girls in glitter eye shadow and matching outfits, who sang sugar songs into microphones and thought the world would always love them.
We wanted them toknowus.
So did he—the third one. The friend who liked to talk big, who said he knew a guy who knew a guy, who thought a blast of attention would finally make us real.
We thought we were writing a sharp little story. A scare. A scar.
The device was too strong. The timing was off. The crowd pushed closer than they were supposed to. One wrong wire, one wrong guess, and half the field turned into smoke and screaming and pieces.
The girl band never even finished the set.
Neither did our friend.
Afterward, Jason vomited behind a patrol car while the sirens screamed and the whole sky tasted like copper. I remember the way his shoulders shook. I remember the waymyhands didn’t.
Too messy, we decided. Too noisy. Too many variables when you try to make the whole world look.
Better to do the work up close, one person at a time. No collateral. No surprises.
