“That’s true.” I clambered to my feet, taking the tea she brought me with a kiss on her cheek. “You look better today; do you feel any better?”
She nodded. “I think the worst of the drugs and things is definitely passed now. I think that… that maybe I feel more like me.” She bit the inside of her cheek. “Well, I feel like shit. But I didn’t wake up screaming, so I am taking that as a win now – as a sign that I am ready to go back to being myself and that I am not stuck somewhere with only voices and screams for company.”
She’d told Lincoln one night, after a terrible nightmare that she’d woken up fighting from, that the only thing that had kept her company in the silence had been the crying in the walls. The one that came and went sporadically. She thought she’d been going insane until she’d seen Yumi and realized that the cryinghad belonged to the feisty girl who hadn’t once seemed afraid since she was freed, despite how much she had gone through.
If anything, we ought to have been scared of her. She had a terrifying aura and loved nothing more than playing with knives. She and Diamond had become fast friends and now Diamond was walking around with a switchblade too, added to her stun gun that she had refused to let go of since the break in.
Not that I blamed her. It had saved her life, and it had done what Angel promised her it would – got the bad men away.
“And what does being yourself entail, pretty girl? Because if you need something or want something, you only have to ask and I’ll sort it.” There wasn’t much I could do to make her happy, but I would try to do it all anyway. Even if she wanted me to find her a unicorn, you would have best believed I would have hunted to the ends of the earth to find her one.
Sapphire put a hand on her hip, leaning as she smirked at me.
“I want a big bomb for my enemies.” She said.
“Done. I’ll build it.” It wouldn’t be hard to figure out, and I already had everything we needed in the garage.
I wasn’t interested in becoming a bomber, but seeing as bombs had been involved with us far too closely lately, it seemed smart to learn even more than I already did. John may not have been the smartest of men, but he had access to explosives and I wanted that to change – I wanted to be the guy who put bomb collars on his enemies and made them regret the day they were ever born. So far it had been working. Every week, without fail, Beau had come to collect a box of IEDs from me to hand out to the Red Diamonds gangsters, who had been working non-stop to take apart and ruin every ounce of Vice King or Jackal business.
Diamond Grove had been on fire for weeks. Vegas was almost as bad. And Hendrix City?
It barely existed anymore.
But that had been more Widow’s doing than ours.
Sapphire stared at me with a bright smile as I sipped my drink.
“I want a tank.” She came out with her latest ridiculous request that I was more than happy to fulfil.
“I’ll ask Beau where to buy one; it seems like something he would know.” My girl couldn’t fight her laughter as I offered her my hand and used it to pull myself toward her.
Being in her vicinity was somewhere I had always wanted to be, only now it was worse. I hated when she left my sight. I worried constantly each time she moved off to do something else. And though I would work on getting over my trauma response to her kidnapping, right now I had no intentions of doing anything but holding her, kissing her, and making sure I could remind my brain that I hadn’t lost another person I loved – I hadn’t lost the other half of my soul.
“Anymore requests, beautiful? I’m open to anything.”
“I want you to kiss me – to kiss me and remind me that we are real.” She asked.
It was hardly a chore to do it for the handful of minutes that followed, as we gently made out by Linc’s nearly recovered car. If anything, I wanted to do it more – until she was sick of me. Not because I wanted her sick of me, but because for a handful of minutes she’d been dead and that could have been permanent. They could have meant that I would never had gotten to kiss her for the rest of our lives.
I never wanted that, and I refused to lose another kiss ever again.
“Come on; I was supposed to call a meeting. I wasn’t meant to just make out with you.” Sapphire giggled when we broke apart, breathing heavy, far too close for a public space.
“We can continue this later then.” I said as she used her grip on my hand to lead me inside to the kitchen, whilst shewhispered about the chat she’d had with Henley before coming down to see me.
“She finally told me more of what happened to her.” Sapphire mumbled, as I ordered her to sit at the dining table and summoned everyone else from around the house with our group text chain. “She showed me all the scars and told me each little thing he did to her. It made her cry a lot and now she’s napping in Widow’s bed whilst he and Delilah watch their cartoons.”
“Shit, really?” I grabbed one of the many baskets filled with snacks that Kody had started leaving around the house and put it in front of Sapphire, waiting until she took something before I grabbed the seat beside her.
She nodded as she opened up a bag of mini pretzels. “Henley is one of the reasons I made myself feel better, too. It felt wrong to be so messed up when I had it easier than her; it feels wrong.”
“I wouldn’t say that, pretty girl. You both went through unimaginable-”
She cut me off with a soft smile filled with pain. “No. Iwillrecover. My mind will fix and my body is barely different. Henley will never have that – she will never be able to get rid of that monster’s touch from her skin. Nor will she bring her family back from the dead. Or her sight back properly into her eye. So as much as I wish to wallow in my pain, I will not do her the injustice of being a victim when she… she…” Sapphire’s voice broke, the tears in her eyes burning. “She is a child, Logan. A child under my care at that. She is almost sixteen years old, and she is broken far more than even an adult could handle. And I refuse to think of me right now, not until I see her look like she does not want to take a blade to her wrist each time she thinks nobody is looking.”
It was a concern we’d all had. A valid one too, seeing as Price had caught her with a razor blade on her first night home.He’d gone to check on her, like we all did every so often, and she hadn’t heard him knocking. He said she hadn’t used it. She’d just been holding it against her wrist. The moment he entered the room, she’d chucked it in the trash and sobbed into his arms for a while until she’d felt well enough to stop and promise she was going to be okay. But either way, we weren’t taking the risk; she’d been watched far better since then, even if she hadn’t known it.
Delilah had even taken it upon herself to crash in Henley’s room nearly every night, often joined by Widow and his friends, sometimes even Yeva, Diamond and now Yumi. When Rika came over, she had offered her help too and between all of us, the poor kid had been surrounded by as much love as we could offer.
