she was more than happy to hang on to him until night fell and reality called. He nudged her back to the bed in short little steps and sat down, pulling her into his lap.
“It was my fault.”
She tensed. “It couldn’t possibly be.”
“Cillian was drunk. We all were. I thought it’d be brilliant to walk home.” He sounded like a man kissably close to rock bottom. “They caught us less than two blocks from the pub.”
Her heart stopped. “They?” Even as she asked, she knew what the answer was. She’d been a stupid fool not to consider it before. If something happened to Teague’s youngest brother, there was one likely culprit. God, she never hoped she’d be wrong so much as in that moment.
“The Hallorans.”
She closed her eyes, the weight on her shoulders threatening to crush her. If Teague was looking for someone to blame, he had to look no further than the woman in his arms. Her fault. Her actions had put this whole thing into motion, and now his little brother’s death was on her hands.
If Teague found out, he’d never forgive her.
She wasn’t sure she’d ever forgive herself.
* * *
The tide that had been drowning Teague since he realized Devlin would never follow through on his many dreams retreated slightly with Callie in his arms. It wasn’t gone. He knew that. He didn’t want it gone. To move on his with life as if nothing was wrong would be unforgivable. There was a gaping hole in his chest and it didn’t show signs of closing anytime soon.
He closed his eyes and inhaled Callie’s rose scent. “Devlin was…” His throat tried to close.
She hugged him tighter, careful of his bruised side. “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”
“I know. I want to. I need to…” He didn’t even know. His life hadn’t been untouched by pain up to this point, but calling what he was feeling pain was a gross understatement. There was an abyss inside him that had never existed before, ready to swallow him whole.
She nodded against his chest. “You want to remember him how he was in life, not how it ended.”
“Yes.” That was it. That broken, bloody body wasn’t his brother. Everything that made Devlin Devlin fled the moment he took his last breath. Fuck, this never should have happened. I should have protected him, gotten him and the girls out of town and safe until I knew the danger had passed. The wound in his chest pulsed in agony, the abyss opening wider. He’d been damn near cocky, sure that he’d find the identity of Brendan’s killer before something terrible happened.
The price he paid for being wrong was too high.
“I’d do anything for a time machine to take me back a week.”
“I know.” The quiet grief in her voice snapped him temporarily out of his spiral. Because she did know. She’d lost her brother less than a year ago. It hadn’t been in violence, but that really didn’t make a difference when someone so young was suddenly gone, taken too soon.
“Does this feeling ever go away?”
Callie shifted. “There will always be bad days, I think. Days where you wake up and forget that he’s gone, and then the realization hits and it’s every bit as bad as what you’re feeling now. But there will be good days. At first they’re so few and far between it’s like they don’t exist at all, but then one shows up and it’s this soft ray of sunshine in the midst of a hurricane. You barely notice it, and then it’s gone. And then, sometime not too long after that, another one shows up, and another, until the balance shifts and you have more sunshine than storm.”
The sheer amount of time he’d be forced to deal with this feeling was nearly overwhelming. Teague closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Devlin deserved it. He deserved to be mourned. Life couldn’t just go on as it had before, with only the slightest of hiccups. “He’ll never finish his degree. He’ll never get to backpack through Europe and have that great adventure he’d been dreaming of since he was a kid. He’ll never fall head over heels in love with a pretty girl and lose his heart. He’ll never have kids.”
She leaned back and framed his face with her hands. “I know there’s nothing I can do to make this right, Teague. I am so terribly sorry.”