I’d hated him for so long, blamed him for everything, and I’d been wrong. We’d had heart-to-hearts, talks about how I felt about his life of politics and how I sacrificed for him as a kid… he’d told me he’d walk away from the mayor’s seat if I asked him to.
It was too late for any of that now. There was no walking away from death. Death came for all of us.
But it shouldn’t have been today. It should have been years from now. We were mending the bridges between us, we were on the up and up. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair, although I bet a lot of people had those two thoughts when it came to death coming for someone in their life.
Time crawled on. Or maybe it stopped altogether. It was hard to say. I was a shell, vacant, nothing more than a body sitting there, waiting for whatever would come next.
What would come next? I didn’t know. How did someone plan a funeral? What did my dad want—to be buried or cremated? It wasn’t something we’d ever talked about, so I had no idea, and the thought of choosing wrong made me want to vomit again.
I didn’t know how long it was until the detective came back, only when I looked up I saw it wasn’t the detective. It was a familiar face, and a beautiful one at that.
Lola.
She rushed toward me. “Laina,” she breathed out my name as she pulled me to my feet and wrapped me in a hug. “Sorry we took so long. Sylvester just got word from one of his men here that—well, I don’t have to explain what’s going on to you.” She held me at arm’s length, studying me, her blue gaze intrusive. “How are you? You look like you want to be sick.”
All I could do was shrug.
“Come on. We’re getting out of here.” She slipped her hand into mine and pulled me along, leading me toward the door. “If they need you for something, they can get in line.” Out in the hall, we met Sylvester, who looked pretty stern while he spoke with a pair of detectives. After a few moments, he followed us along.
No one tried to stop us, although we did get a few questioning looks as we went. Feeling Lola’s hand in mine grounded me somewhat, even though I still felt like I wasn’t really here. This was some terrible movie I was watching, and I couldn’t pause it and end it. No rewind button anywhere.
As we exited the station, Lola’s hand squeezed mine and she walked a little closer to me as she whispered, “Having friends like us has benefits. You’re coming home with me.”
I couldn’t argue with her, not that I would. Where else would I go? What would I do? I supposed I should contact my guys. Everything just felt so… so pointless. Useless. In the end, we all died, so what did any of it matter?
Sylvester drove us to Lola’s house, where he promptly said he’s going to look into this. Lola took me to her bedroom and told me to get some rest—but how could I rest at a time like this? How could I do anything but think of that sight, of the way my dad had stared so evenly at the ceiling?
“I’ll order some food for us and call your guys,” she told me, acting like the supportive friend who’d been through something similar, even though I knew she hadn’t.
No, Lola didn’t lose her dad. She killed him, just like she killed her mother and, eventually, her brother. They got what was coming to them, but my dad? He didn’t deserve an end like that. He was far from perfect, but he definitely didn’t deserve that.
She squeezed my shoulder once she sat me on her bed. “We’ll figure this out together, okay? I know you probably feel like it, but you aren’t alone in this, ‘kay? I got you, girlie.”
I didn’t say anything as she left, and even though I didn’t feel tired in the slightest, I still laid down. My head on her pillow, I moved my right hand beside my face, staring at it. The hand I’d touched my dad with. Even now, I could still feel that coldness, how it had chilled me to the bone.
I’d gone from riding high to the lowest of the low. The whiplash was unwelcome, as was the event that led me to where I was now. The thought of my dad no longer being here, no longer being alive—the realization that I’d never sit next to him and have dinner with him while he awkwardly talked about my love life—it was crushing.
How were people the same after such immeasurable loss?
Chapter Nineteen – Fang
By the time I got to Lola’s house, I was the last one there. It was a very chaotic scene. Lola, Maddox, Viper, Kieran, and Mike were in the living room, discussing what came next. Sylvester was in a separate room, making calls. When I arrived, I made a big show of glancing around and asking, “Where is she?”
“Upstairs,” Lola was the one who answered me. “In my room.”
Kieran was sitting in a recliner, though he wasn’t leaning back. He leaned forward, his hands on his knees, a distraught expression on his face. “She doesn’t want to talk to anyone right now. We tried.”
Mike stood near him, his arms folded over his chest. For once, he agreed with Kieran, nodding along.
“I should still let her know I’m here,” I said. Even if she didn’t wish to talk right now, simply knowing we were all here would hopefully make her feel better, if at least only a little.
I left the living room in search of Laina, and I indeed found her upstairs, in the only room where the door was shut. I knocked softly before poking my head in, and when I did, I saw she was laying on top of the sheets, with her knees bent and her hands in front of her chest, on her side.
She didn’t move an inch for me. She was hurting. I couldn’t blame her for shutting down, and I hoped the others wouldn’t, either.
Slowly, I made my way to the bed, gingerly sitting on the edge as I placed a hand on her side. “Hey,” I whispered. “The others told me you probably wouldn’t want to talk, but I still wanted to let you know I was here. We’re all here for you. We all love you. We want to help. You should let us.”
All Laina did was sigh the world’s weariest sigh, as if she held an ungodly amount of weight on those thin shoulders and finally, after all this time, that weight had started to crush her. And it would, little by little, until there was nothing left—unless she let us help, unless she allowed us to each take some of that weight and bear it on our own shoulders for her.
