Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 142050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 474(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 474(@300wpm)
When he brought them out again, he gasped at the black oily substance upon them.
“What is it,” Conrahd demanded.
“Nothing,” he muttered as he wiped his hand off. “Nothing a’tall.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The following evening, Lyric was back at the Wheel, sitting on her bed in a bathrobe with wet hair. As she stared off into space, she decided it had been the longest twelve hours of her life. Fifteen. Whatever.
And now she was here, in familiar pastel surroundings that looked strange, a hollow feeling where her heart needed to be, a headache spearing into her left eyebrow. The fact that every time she so much as blinked, all she saw was that final breath of her granmahmen’s? That just made everything worse.
Putting her head in her hands, she replayed the immediate aftermath in her mind. After she left the bedroom, the first people she’d gone to had been her mahmen and Xcor. Her other parents had been waiting just outside the door, and the way the two of them had hugged her, hugged Rhamp, hugged Blay and Qhuinn, and her grandfather, had made her feel proud of her family. Always supporting each other, through good times and bad, both sets of parents steady and true.
And then there had been all her uncles and their mates, the fighters who came by, plus other members of the community, including Fritz.
The only people who had gone into the bedroom had been Doc Jane and Dr. Manello. The decision for cremation back at the training center had been made years ago, and though it had been hard watching the body be removed, there had been closure in that, too.
And then dawn had come.
With the guests departed and the shutters down, the eight of them had sat around and talked about the past, and shared food, and cried—
Seven.
Oh, God, there were only seven people in her family now.
And though she’d merely been grieving for half a day—well, if you didn’t count the anticipation of all this that had been going on for weeks—she had learned one thing about this very specific kind of sorrow: Your brain struggled to adjust to the new normal. Even though intellectually, she was very well aware that a big part of her life had just died, she kept having to get used to it, over and over again. Like the seven, not eight. Like the fact that there were going to be no more Sunday night dinners.
And tonight was Sunday.
Or at least… not family dinners as she remembered them.
“Who’s going to make lasagna for Father,” she murmured.
Maybe she could learn how, although why hadn’t she asked her granmahmen to teach her before—
As her phone went off with a text, she glanced over her shoulder at her bedside table.
Dev?
She’d turned off the preview function as soon as her brother had fixated on her dating someone human, so she had to get up and go to her phone. And as she did, she prayed like hell that man wasn’t canceling their meet-up tonight. There was nothing more to be done about her granmahmen at the moment, and she had no interest in sitting around here with a frozen smile on her face as people continued to express their sincere condolences or look at her with that grave expression of banked sadness. It wasn’t that she didn’t love them all, she just felt suffocated by the emotions—
“Thank God,” she murmured as she checked the time and texted him back.
Dev was complicated for sure. But not as complicated as the rest of her life—
Knock-knock.
Sending the text, she hid her phone in the pocket of her robe. “Come in?”
When Rhamp was the one who entered, she was surprised—and didn’t have the energy to try to hide the reaction. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in her room. Then again, this was hardly normal times.
Oh, and you know, he was right about one thing. There was a lot of pink in here—
Annnnnd he was shutting them in together. So this was clearly not just a quick check-in, how’s-Dad, update kind of thing.
As Rhamp leaned back against the door and crossed his arms over his chest, she braced herself. “What’s on your mind?”
There was a beat of silence. Then he cleared his throat. “I just wanted to thank you. For what you did last night at the bedside. I couldn’t… I just froze. And if you hadn’t reached out when you did? You’re right. I would have regretted it for the rest of my life.”
Wow, she thought. This was unexpected—
“And it dawned on me,” he continued, “that you were much kinder to me in that moment than I’ve been to you in a long time. Especially recently.”
His eyes roamed around her room with its silk-upholstered furniture and its canopied bed. Dressed in his black leather, he was like a Goth who’d gotten lost on his way to a graveyard and wandered into a dollhouse.