I’m sitting up straight and moving towards him so fucking fast, placing my hands on his shoulders, the water soaking right through his shirt.
“Don’t say that,” I tell him, feeling like my heart is being ripped in two from his words alone. “I belong here, with you.” I see a tear fall down his cheek and it pains me to see him like this. Hurting. Suffering. Blaming himself.
I wipe the tear away with my thumb and look at my beautifully broken man. My husband. My enemy once upon a time, but now my whole fucking world.
“Don’t you dare blame yourself for any of this. And Zoey just thought she was doing right, she wanted to protect you because she knew you wouldn’t be able to cope with killing a woman.”
“But if I hadn’t made you marry me––”
“Then I would still be living a shitty existence not knowing what this love ever felt like,” I say, interrupting him. “You saved me,” I whisper as my eyes fill up again, even though I didn’t think it was possible to cry anymore. But this time, it’s in a different way. It’s not because I’m scared and in pain. It’s because my love for him is so fierce, so true, that I could never be without it.
“You saved me too,” he whispers against my lips, and fuck… if I wasn’t a goner before, I would be now.
“Come in with me,” I say, and he kisses my lips before standing up and discarding his clothes. He steps into the tub, and we take up our usual position of him sitting behind me, his arms wrapped around me, holding me to him.
We lay like that for I don’t know how long. Just being with each other. And I appreciate every single second of it.
* * *
Nate
I don’t know what I did to deserve the love of Kat.
I mean, I made her marry me. I forced her to live this life. And she loves me despite all of that.
Something changed between us all those weeks ago. She let me in. She chose to forgive me for what I had done. And in doing so, she changed me.
The only person I ever cared about before her was my sister. She was my family and the one person I would have protected to the ends of the earth.
But Kat made me realise that I wanted to do that for her as well. And when I love, I love fiercely, and thank fuck she seems to like that.
I’m not going to lie and pretend that I’m not pissed at my sister for putting both of them in the firing line, but I also understand why she did it. And I know I shouldn’t have let her kill Jessica, but I knew something had changed in her a few weeks ago. I saw it in her eyes that day in my kitchen. I knew she had done something that she couldn’t ever take back, and it turns out that she had beheaded some guy that had been pawing at her as she made her way back home from a dinner date in town. Turns out, it was the guy she went for dinner with, and he turned out to be a predator.
So, she took matters into her own hands and cleaned the mess up herself. I’m a little shocked she never told me, and that she dealt with it herself, I mean, that’s what I’m here for, to clean up her messes and deal with anyone who causes her harm. But with everything that has been going on, I guess she felt she couldn’t come to me, or that she didn’t want to bother me.
I need to make more of an effort because I have dropped the fucking ball recently.
Zoey is staying in one of the guest bedrooms, and Kat is still sound asleep in our bed. I’m sat in my office, processing everything that went down yesterday.
Jessica is dead.
Those two assholes are dead.
My brother is six feet under, and I really have no thoughts on that whatsoever. I cut the cord with him a long time ago. Popping a bullet in his head was all I was capable of because I needed to get to Kat more, but I wish I had been able to skin him alive and make him scream for mercy. Although, he probably wouldn’t have ever screamed, he always liked pain, but I would have done my damndest to try and make him squeal. He always hated me. Was always jealous of me. And he made the mistake of thinking that I would be too preoccupied in my mind to be able to take him down. I guess the joke’s on him because now he’s as dead as a dodo and no one will mourn him.
And then there’s Stefan. Dead. My right-hand man gone forever.
I sigh and drop my head in my hands as I realise that he isn’t here anymore. My only friend––or as close as you can get to a friend in this world I live in. We had been friends a long time and his death has me questioning everything about this life I lead.
I nearly lost my sister. I nearly lost my wife. And I did lose my main guy.
Is this life for me anymore?
I’m not sure.
I need to grieve, but my hard-ass nature isn’t letting me. I don’t even know where to begin. I’ve lost guys before, and sure, it sucks, but I never cared for them. Never thought of them as family. They just worked for me, and they knew the score when they signed up and passed the vigorous tests I put in place to make sure they were up to the task.
But Stefan… he’d been with me since the beginning. Always there. Always had my back. And now he’s gone.
