can never get over the loss’a Dane. I don’t give a fuck ’cause God knows I’m never gonna get over him either. What I do give a fuckin’ colossal fuck about is you. You’re still fuckin’ here, Li. You’re here, and Dane isn’t. It sucks. It’s the worst kinda thing to happen to a girl who already had tragic eyes at six. But it happened, and you. Are. Here. You wanna cherish Dane and respect his memory? You live for both of you. You like the life of freedom and joy you deserved but never got. You do it for the both of you ’cause you guys were always a package deal, and you still are. You can still love him and live for him just like you did before.
Don’t give up, Li. Don’t die with him. Don’t take both of you away from mum and Dad, Milo, Oliver, Hudson, and me. Not when we fought so hard to get you both, and we’ve lost Dane too.”
I was arrested by his speech, both because Nova wasn’t the kinda guy that gave into seriousness for long, and also because it hurt to hear how selfish I’d been in my grief. Faintly, I’d been aware of Molly crying when I entered a room only to stop and force a smile onto her face. Distantly, I’d been aware of Hudson clinging to me while I slept like he was afraid to lose me too. Then a single memory of Diogo, staring blankly at his wall of tools in the garage. I’d asked him what he was doing, but he hadn’t heard me. He just stood there and stared blankly at the wall, rubbing at his heart as if it pained him. I’d left him there, and when he’d finally come inside for dinner an hour later, I hadn’t really noticed his eyes were shot through with red.
God, we’d all lost Dane and his considerable light.
I wasn’t the only one struggling through the sudden darkness.
The sigh that left me felt like a tsunami wave of ugly, selfish mourning expelled from my lungs.
“I’m sorry,” I said to him, eyes locked because I wanted him to read my sincerity there.
“You’re thirteen,” he replied. “You’re just a girl still. I’m not mad at you. I’m tryin’ to remind you that Milo, Oliver, and Hudson are just boys who lost a brother. Molly and Diogo are just parents that lost a son. I’m just a man who lost his best friend and brother, the first one I ever made by choice. We’re all in it together, and we’re all gonna get through it together, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I agreed even though I wasn’t sure exactly how to get past it. “Okay.”
“Good,” he nodded curtly then grinned rakishly. “Now you ready for why I really brought you here?”
As if on cue, a huge, leather clad biker opened a door toward the back of the shop and stalked through it. I recognized him because he had a daughter around H.R. and my age named Cleo.
Axe-Man trudged forward and sat down heavily on a stool at the station beside Nova’s. “Sit,” he ordered.
I watched as Nova moved over to his chair, peeled off his shirt, and dropped onto it. He winked at me as he raised his arms above his head and tilted his chin to the ceiling.
“Gettin’ somethin’ done for Dane,” he explained as Axe-Man pulled over a wheeled table topped with tattooing tools to his side and started prepping. “Thought you should be here.”
I nodded, struck dumb by the sight of Nova spread out over the chair like that, shirtless and easy with his half-nakedness.
He had a long torso with broad shoulders and a waist defined by hard rows of sculpted muscle I would have loved to trace with a pen. He had ink on both arms now, sleeves done up in a myriad of seemingly random art that I knew he’d drawn himself. Flowers, skulls, a pair of brass knuckles over a heavy fist, an anatomical heart shot through with an arrow fired by a demonic cupid sitting up on his shoulder. The art was beautiful and made his already extraordinary body almost sinfully handsome.
I touched my fingertips to my gaping mouth, and they came away slightly damp with drool.
Staring at him, heat rushed from the top of my scalp down to my heels as if a bucket of scalding water had been dumped over my head. My skin tingled with heat, my heart beating faster against the onslaught.
Desire. The