as she cooed in her cage, and mopped up the spill of water in her bathroom with those fluffy ass towels.
Somehow, I found myself in front of the ornate gold mirror and caught sight of my reflection. Those empty eyes, pale and green as always, didn’t look the way they usually did.
They weren’t tired and wane, empty as jade vases.
They were bright, lit by some inner flame Bea had ignited like a torch that wouldn’t extinguish.
Agony flared through me, followed swiftly by anger.
I couldn’t feel again.
I couldn’t go through that again.
Mam, Pa, Keely, Danae.
Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
Mute. Dead.
Me. Dead. Having died in that church a long time ago beneath a stained-glass window that hung in The Fallen MC chapel.
Despite it all, I was being dragged, kicking and screaming, back into the land of the living by one much too young and entirely too naïve girl with moonshine hair and a soul drawn dangerously to my dark.
Without thinking, I reared back and punched my right hand into the mirror. It cracked into an elaborate web, my feral face at its center. My knuckles, already raw from beating in Cal Mulligan’s face, were torn open and bleeding heavily.
I dipped my finger into one of the open wounds, pressing ruthlessly so my panic smoothed into pain. I took a few deep breaths through my gritted teeth to center myself in it and then resolved to get the fuck out of that honey-trap of a house.
Before I did, something in me forced me to stop.
To take my blood-painted fingertip and brush a message for Bea on the porcelain bowl of the sink.
A rún mo chroí.
Secret of my heart.
And as I left the house, locking the door behind me with the spare key I’d found in a drawer in the kitchen, and made my way to my bike where I waited until Wrath, Bat, and, surprisingly, Dane, turned up to take guard duty, I felt exactly as if I had left whatever semblance I had of a heart and soul curled up in a pink bed in that pink house.
Bea
I woke up Sunday morning with a prayer on my tongue. It was so popular with Christians that it was almost a cliché. My grandpa often avoided the passage even though it was one of the most requested for him to recite at weddings. The passage from Corinthians began with stating love was patient and kind, but that wasn’t what grew in my mouth like a newly budded rose when I opened my eyes and knew I was alone in my bed after a night of sin and sex with the love of my life who might never, through no fault of his own, love me back the same way.
It was the end, the whimper at the end of the bang.
Love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
It perfectly articulated the vast wealth of hope and patience I felt for Priest. My love for him was not something I could force on him, especially when he had no context for it. Instead, I chose to think of it as a home I created and tended for him, a place I fashioned like a haven where he might lay his weary head and be free of his demons. Where he might, one day, decide to live along with me, happy in our own way, in love under our own conditions.
I sighed wearily as I slipped out of bed, absently leaning down to pet Sampson as she snaked around my ankles on the way to my bathroom.
He ran from the room when I gasped as I caught sight of my shattered mirror. As I moved closer, I saw a single, long shard of glass in the basin, lying beneath the bloody entrails of words Priest must have written on the white porcelain.
A rún mo chroí.
I traced my finger over the dried blood and shivered even though I didn’t know what the words meant. Whatever the Gaelic denoted, I knew it was inherently some kind of declaration. Of course, the only love letter a man like Priest would ever write was one penned in his own blood.
I fingered the shard of glass, shivering as I remembered the way Priest had used the sharp edge of his blade on my body. I’d never known such a thing could be erotic, but the feel of that cold steel was incendiary. Knowing he had the skill to split me in two, but the restraint and talent to