Keeping Secret (Secret McQueen) - By Sierra Dean Page 0,73
lifted my shirt and showed him the new bullet scar between my ribs.
He sat on the bed, and for a moment I was reminded of our first fight in this bedroom.
I pleaded with him, using his own words from that fight. “You told me once nothing could match how you feel when you’re with me. So stay with me.”
“It’s different now.”
“Why?”
“Because now you’re really his.”
“I don’t belong to Lucas. I don’t belong to anyone.”
He looked at me, and that one look said it all. One look broke my heart. “No. You don’t belong to anyone. You don’t belong to me. Not anymore.”
The bag re-emerged from the closet, and he put his things in it. I sat in the chair by the door and watched him. The tears didn’t come now. I didn’t cry or scream. I didn’t say a thing as he packed up his half of the life we’d built together like all we were were items in a drawer.
When he went to the door and pulled on his jacket, I stood in the middle of the living room and let out one shuddering wheeze.
“I’m sorry,” he said, like apologizing would somehow heal the hole he was punching in my lungs.
“Then don’t go.”
He shook his head. “I can’t stay. Seeing him all over you… I can’t touch you with him on you. I can’t be here with the constant reminder. I love you, but I can’t be the loser who held on long after the battle was lost.”
“It’s not…”
“It’s over.”
“But—”
“I want to love you. But if I do it like this…it will kill me.”
He stepped through the open door and closed it behind him.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The following places are within a two-block radius of my house—a liquor store, a fae-run weapon shop and a grocery store. I visited all three in the hour after Desmond left me.
Leary Fallon—the merman or whatever the male version of a siren is—who ran the weaponry didn’t want to sell me a new gun. He looked at my streaked mascara and the paper bag with two bottles of Jameson whiskey in it and shook his head.
“I don’t facilitate suicides, McQueen.”
“Fuck you, Fallon. I’m getting married in three days.”
“Yeah, do you know what the leading cause of suicide is?”
“Being denied guns?”
“Divorce.”
“Bullshit. Just give me the SIG.” I made gimme fingers. I might have already opened one of the Jameson bottles on the way here. Maybe.
“What are you going to use it for?”
“Feral werewolves took my last one. I need a replacement.”
Leary was a weird-looking guy. Not conventionally handsome at all, but because of the whole dude-siren thing he had an unusual appeal to him. His face was too thin, his hair was too long and his eyes were the color of seaweed. He was wearing a shirt that said, It’s Okay, Pluto, I’m Not a Planet Either.
Hilarious.
“I’ll pay double.”
“P226 or P229?” He unlocked the glass cabinet and put two guns in front of me. Nice to know money trumped concern for my life. For enough money he would probably turn one of those guns on me himself.
I almost dropped my bottles.
“You look like you just saw a ghost.”
Not quite. But I had had a booze-fueled epiphany. “226.” I tapped the gun on the right. “How much silver do you have?”
“Only three clips that would work for this. You’d have had to special order if you wanted more.”
“I’ll take them. Do you have a holster I could strap to my thigh?”
“Have you seen this gun? And your thigh?” He held up the big weapon then pointed to my leg. “You wouldn’t be able to run for shit.”
“I don’t need to run.”
“Then what the hell do you need a thigh holster for?”
“Because I can’t wear a shoulder holster over my wedding dress.”
A half hour later I emptied my bounty onto the loveseat.
First, two pints of Häagen-Dazs peanut-butter chocolate ice cream, which the sixteen-year-old at the grocery store assured me was the number-one choice of dumped women in the entire Hell’s Kitchen area. Next, the two bottles of Jameson, one with enough missing that my vision had gone wonky and the bottles appeared blurry, making it look to me like I had four of them. Lastly, a new SIG, three silver bullet clips and a thigh holster that came with the warning, “I hope it isn’t a mermaid gown.”
Leary had thought the joke was hilarious.
He thought a lot of things were hilarious…namely himself.
I cracked the top of one pint of ice cream, peeled off the protective covering, scooped out