He bobs his head in compliance, and I add one more stipulation.
“You aren’t to be within twelve miles of her.”
“My house is less than eight miles from your resort,” he protests.
“Pity.” I make a show of peering around the home he obviously takes pride in before I stride away. “Looks like you’re moving. Make sure they use a level on the next one.”
“We were never here, Hunter,” Cash hollers back as he holds the door for me. “Not a fucking word.”
“And clean yourself up, man,” I tack on. “You fucking stink.”
When we step onto the porch, there isn’t a cloud in the sky. We both put our sunglasses on as the birds chirp and another catchy tune ushers our exit.
There’s nothing like a good playlist.
MADDOX
It isn’t only silence that slices into me. It’s the scent of soot. The echo of sobs from the little ones my mom left behind. The cadence of a reporter’s voice.
The endless ring of a phone.
All things that transport me back to that night, when my siblings and I became a fractured whole.
We broke and grieved and rose and grew.
After the three youngest and I watched our house go up in a blazing inferno on TV, Ryker busted into the room, turned off the news, and comforted Jax and Rena, who were only eight and six, respectively.
I’m not sure what Cash did, but I snuck into the bathroom, crawled into the empty tub, and called my mom. Maybe she was trapped inside the house. Maybe she was on her way. Maybe it was all a big mistake.
Maybe my father really had burned with one of his whores and I’d hear my mother sing again.
Of course, none of that happened. Instead, the jarring trill of a line never answered became the ghost that kept me up at night, one only drowned out by music. And even that took time.
For months afterward, songs were painful because I could picture her records. The album collection she’d curated over the years, organized and loved and used to teach us all how to dance through life, had been liquefied.
Melted vinyl.
The brutality of the loss was eventually eclipsed by the brilliance of restoration that only an upbeat tempo could offer.
But that night, it was a well of tears and my sanity hanging on by a frayed wire. I’m convinced that if it wasn’t for my little sister, a part of that fourteen-year-old boy, who couldn’t stop crying or begging his dead mom to pick up the goddamn phone, would still be stuck in that bathtub.
In the midst of the aftermath, Rena ran to the dock in her pajamas. She was so young that I can’t be sure she understood what she was doing in terms of saving us. My guess is, she knew we needed a five-minute reprieve from our grief.
She hollered to get our attention and jumped into the moonlit lake, disappearing beneath the surface and causing a ruckus that disrupted our disillusionment. One action that pulled us from our separate pain and morphed us into a unit. We came together on the dock that day.
In the years that followed, Axel and Ryker steered our ship. But Rena was the wild essence we all needed, the seed of promises our mother had left behind.
A singing knife.
Cash and I rush into a wing of the maternity hospital that Rena’s family bought. Just for them. It sounds ridiculous, but they’re part of a secret society—KORT—that makes Noire life seem like a Hallmark movie. A dark and gritty Hallmark movie with lots of fucking dancing, but still. There are four couples,including Rena and Ty, and they all live together in a massive French chateau. It’s kind of weird, but it also makes perfect sense. Safety in numbers. Comfort in belonging.
Even with the added privacy, it’s a madhouse. My brothers, Mercy, Remy, Bernard, the three other couples—Ivy, Wells, and their one-and-a-half-year-old daughter; Celeste and Liam, the cyber genius who helped me track the missing funds; Leigh, Gage, and their infant son—and Natasha (Ivy’s mom) are all here. Not to mention the dedicated staff of nurses and doctors here for the sole purpose of tending to the princess.
It’s crowded and full of so much excitement, which I’m thrilled to see my little sister surrounded by, but the most unsettling feeling of missing something sweeps over me. It’s Tessa. She should be here. She’d refute that adamantly. And I haven’t voiced it aloud yet. I’m moving her into La Lune Noire this week, and I called her mine, told her she was my queen. I meant it, but afterward, I wondered if it was mainly due to the danger we’d found ourselves in, how jealous I’d been while watching Hunter chase her down, and the protectiveness I’d felt, seeing her mother lay into her. Still strong reasons for the emotions, but not necessarily foundational.
As I stand in a waiting room, brimming with family and loyalty and love, the notion dominating my thoughts is that I want her to have this. That I want her to have everything and I want to share everything with her. That’s so much more than being swept up in lust or jealousy. I’m not sure what to make of it, but I don’t want to fuck it up by overanalyzing it.
Pausing in the middle of greeting everyone, I send her a quick text.
