Pike (The Pawn Duet #1) - T.M. Frazier Page 0,77

Another one of the men fires at my feet in warning, creating a patchwork of holes in the asphalt.

“I love you, kid,” Gutter says with a jerk of his chin.

It’s only a second, but it feels like hours as the man rears back and bashes in the back of Gutter’s skull.

Bullets or not, I race over to Gutter, firing my own gun at the truck that’s now speeding away.

I drop the gun and pull Gutter into my arms, but there’s no way he’s alive. There’s too much blood. I lift his head, and chunks of it fall to the parking lot. And not enough skull. I frantically try press the fragments of bone against the blood and gore oozing from his brain as if I can bring him back to life if I can just make his head whole again. “Gutter. Fuck, Gutter. Don’t be dead,” I yell at him. “I didn’t die on you, so you can’t die on me,” I say on a strangled sob. Dropping the piece of his skull to the asphalt, I tug his gaunt lifeless body against mine. “You can’t fucking die on me!” I yell, but I know he can’t hear me.

He’ll never hear me again.

Mickey

“The sound of the tires on the pavement. It will always remind me of that moment. Of him,” Pike says, sounding far away, as if he isn’t in the same room as me. He’s still covered in Gutter’s blood.

I make a move to touch him, and he steps away.

“Echoic memory. Another name for sound memory. It registers specific moments and connects them to auditory information,” I rattle on, realizing that a lesson in how sound memory works isn’t really what Pike is looking for right now. I grimace, “Sorry.”

He smiles, but it only makes him look sadder. “Don’t ever apologize for being smart, Mic. It’s your thing. Own that shit.”

His gaze wanders around the bedroom like he’s noticing it for the first time. He pads around the room, running his hands against the walls, looking truly lost.

He stills when he comes to a picture on the nightstand of him and Gutter holding up fish and grinning like idiots. He picks it up and runs his hands over the image.

My heart breaks for him as his eyes glass over. His shoulders slump in defeat. Slowly, he sets the picture back down. Straightening it several times. “How did you survive the death of your entire family?” he asks in a whisper that I wouldn’t recognize as his voice if I hadn’t seen the words pass through his lips with my own eyes.

Pike drops to the floor, and I join him, our backs to the bed. I recognize the pain in his eyes. The questions. The blame. I feel it as if it’s my own because in a way I own that kind of pain. I don’t think before I act. Reaching out, I wrap my arm around his head and pull him down onto my lap.

“In some ways, I didn’t,” I confess, smoothing back his hair, petting him as if he were a stray cat in need of affection. “A big part of me died when they did, and what’s left of me isn’t someone I recognize anymore.”

Pike leans into my touch. I clear my throat, choking back tears he doesn’t need to see me shed right now. “You know,” I offer, “One thing that helps is talking to them.”

“I’ve heard you talking to them before,” Pike replies. “You were talking to them when I first met you that night. Thought you were crazy.”

“You weren’t wrong. I was delirious that night, but even now, it’s not something I try and hide. I don’t care if people think I’m crazy. It helps me to imagine that they’re all around me, here whenever I need them or when it all gets to be too much and I think I can’t…” I sniffle. “You know, even in my own imagination, my sister Mallory still pesters me.”

“I think I would have liked Mallory,” he says softly.

I smile. “I think she would have liked you.” I chuckle, imagining how Mallory’s boy-crazy eyes would look the first time she saw Pike. “Too much.”

“Does it ever stop hurting?” he asks, staring up at the ceiling.

“No,” I reply honestly. “But the hurt changes over time. It morphs from something that feels like hands wrapped around your neck choking you to something that’s like someone constantly pinching your skin. It still hurts, but it’s a pain you learn to