a few years ago, so it’s a little bigger than I expected too.”
“You called it a cabin!” I accused.
“Clearly that is just a mocking name my family uses for it. You can’t seriously have expected to find Troy Memphis vacationing out here in some filthy shack, can you?” Saint looked at me like I was the one who needed his head checked and I just kind of stared back.
“Please tell me I’m not the only one who thinks this is fucking ridiculous?” I implored and Blake laughed.
“Nah, man, it’s not insane. It’s Troy Memphis. He’s like Saint on steroids with a god complex. Nothing he does should surprise you,” he said.
“Wait a minute, are you trying to say Saint doesn’t have a god complex?” Tatum scoffed in disbelief and Kyan roared a laugh. “He literally set himself up to live in a church.”
“Not to mention the fact that you enjoy worshipping me on your knees, siren,” Saint teased, looking nowhere near embarrassed by the accusation.
I shook my head at him and focused on the ‘cabin’ once more. It was still a good distance away, but at least now we knew we hadn't fucked up and gotten ourselves lost out here.
The others all dropped their packs and started setting up the tent in the trees, but I found myself just standing there, staring across the forest that filled the valley and wondering if my fate awaited me beyond it.
I'd given up everything I'd ever been to get here. I'd sacrificed all I had left of myself after my family was torn from me that night. Sometimes I couldn't even remember the boy I'd been before my brother and mom were stolen from me, and the knowledge of that cut me deeply, because if he was gone then that was the last piece of them destroyed too.
Would killing Troy Memphis offer me a reprieve from all of this pain at last? Would I be free of it? Or was I always going to hurt like this? Would the sting of the injustice he'd served up to my family always be there? Was there any true hope of me making peace with this?
A hand slipped into mine and I looked down at Tatum as she stood there with the fading light reflecting off of her golden hair.
"Tomorrow we put our ghosts to rest," she said, knowing what I was thinking about without even having to ask. "We face the Devil and send him back to hell with our demons in tow. We need to let it go then, Nash. All of it."
"What if it isn't enough?" I murmured, my brow furrowing.
"It won't be," she replied, surprising me. "How could it be? Killing Mortez may have helped pay for my dad’s death, but it didn’t heal my wounds. Vengeance won't bring the people we love back to us. Our families are a piece of our souls which will always be missing. But they're not lost. They're here with us." She placed her hand over my heart. "They'd want us to find happiness. To live and remember them, but not to use them as an excuse to keep punishing ourselves. We let our anger die with the people who are responsible for the pain of their deaths. Then we focus on the love we had for them and they had for us. That's how we move on. By making peace with the way they were taken and holding on tight to the best memories we have of them."
"Tell me one," I prompted, and she hesitated a moment as she thought on that.
"When we were kids, this one time, Jess and I were camping with our dad and we played hide and seek with him. But he couldn't find us. We'd managed to wedge ourselves into the hollow of a tree and we must have stayed in there, silently giggling for half an hour or more. Finally, he started yelling for us with this fear in his voice, telling us the game was over and that he really needed us to let him know that we were okay. So we burst out and ran to him, finding him wild-eyed and worried, but the moment he spotted us his face split into the biggest smile you've ever seen. He wrapped us in his arms and squeezed us so tight that we couldn't breathe. I asked him what would have happened if we hadn't come out. Would he have given up on us and just gone home alone?