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What did I know? I knew how to stitch up bodies. That’s what I fucking knew. Okay, normally, they were dead bodies, and I was sure I wouldn’t know what the fuck to do if Cal had an internal bleed…
Squinting and looking around the room, I quickly realized that I was in Ryan’s room. Fuck. Bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad! The man himself was, thankfully, nowhere to be seen. Perfect.
“Have you forgotten who’s in charge here?” He rolled his eyes, and before I could react, the sassy bitch reached forward and poked me in the side, right in my fucking bullet wound. “AH! Whaddafack!” I barked, jerking away from him.
“Big boys don’t cry! You’re a mercenary, Callum. It’s time you start acting like it.”
‘Die, die, die!’ my mind chanted. Eliminate the threat! Kill the target! Kill, Kill, Kill! Kill him, then you can rest. No one can hurt you if you kill him.
“Maybe we need to cut back on the T3s. The drugs have clearly gone to your head. You’re being ridiculous.” “Am I? Look at him! Doctor’s are only that hot in porn! I may be injured, but I’ll be damned if I let you play check-up with my ginger snap.” He snarled.
Wait. Someone I loved?
Did I love Cal? Did I even know what love was? I had never been in a relationship before… I didn’t even know if we were officially dating!
Because you’re the fucking devil. You’re an unlovable, evil piece of shit, and I never wanted you in the first place. You forced your way into my life, and now you expect me to actually want you?
Undertaker! Faggot! Freak!
“Say that shit to me or my brother again, bitch, and I’ll break more than just your nose,” she spat.
“‘Cause Ryan said no butt whores. And you, sir, are the literal definition of a butt whore.”
He trusted me with this. No one else had ever been inside Ryan like this. Just me.
“Fuck baby, you’re so tight. You feel like fucking heaven,” I murmured, barely even registering the words as they left my mouth.
“Ryan I… I’m in love with you.”
“If you ever get lost in the dark, I’ll make sure you find your way back, angel,” he whispered, gently sucking on my lip ring in that sweet way he now seemed to have a habit of doing. “You will?” I asked, my voice gruff and my throat tight with emotion. He nodded, kissing my lips again and again. “I’ll always bring you back.”
I peeked at the ruined flesh of my arm, and my eyes widened. He hadn’t been just carving random slices into me. He had carved his name. A crude and bloody ‘Callum’ had been cut into the flesh of my arm, and my cock throbbed between my legs at the sight of it. Why was that so fucking hot? “Thank you, master,” I whispered again, this time meaning it.
‘Who could ever love you, Callum?’ ‘Demon boy!’ ‘You’re nothing. You don’t deserve to be loved.’ I blinked and realized I had carved another word in Ryan’s thigh. A bloody and crude ‘mine’ was staring up at me,
“Listen, it’s okay to mourn the loss of someone and still not be okay with everything they did while they were still here with us. When people die, we tend to try to focus on the good in them so we can remember them fondly, which is nice. But grief is complicated. Just because someone has passed, it doesn’t wipe away the times that they might have hurt us.”
Vox seemed weirdly grumpy about the whole thing, but I just chalked it up to his overprotective big-brotherish behavior. He’s always treated my sisters like family, and I could tell he was worried about sending Naomi off to school without one of us around to watch over her. If you asked me, it was super fucking cute, and I low-key loved it.
“Yeah. You have some… unsavory hitchhikers.” What the fuck?
“What! My fucking mom?” I gaped, and Ryan’s cheeks turned a brilliant crimson. “Yeah.” “That fucking bitch!” I snarled.
Ryan nodded. “Not just her. You have a whole gaggle of ghouls that follow you around. If I ever lost you in a crowd, all you would need to do is drop your talisman, and I would be able to find you just from their yowling screams.” “That’s… metal as fuck.” I breathed, and Ryan burst out laughing.
“Fuck being normal, Ryan. Normal is boring. I love that you see dead people. I think it’s bad fucking ass that you live in a funeral home. On top of that, I think it’s hot that you’re a freckly red-headed man who likes gardening. Everything about you is attractive to me. You’re my lil’ spooky ginger boy, and I love the shit out of you.”
“Don’t act like you don’t fucking love it. You love that someone might see. You get off on the fear, Ryan. Now, let’s skip the part where you pretend you don’t want this before I hunt that cunt down and rip his goddamn intestines out in the parking lot.”
I watched my own cheeks flush red as I made eye contact with myself. I hated that I blushed so much. I hated that I was ginger. It had just been one more thing for people to make fun of me for…
I could hear the voices of customers shopping from far away. They were several aisles away, but still, I tensed. They could find us here. We would be so fucked if they found us!
It was more than just the way he was making my body feel. I felt loved. I felt safe. I felt, for the first time in my life, that maybe, just maybe, I was enough.
You’re beautiful. You’re amazing. You’re so strong and passionate. You’re everything I strive to be.
“I’m proud of you for restraining yourself, angel,” I murmured, and he smiled against me, kissing me back. “Thanks, baby. It was hard, but making you watch yourself come was better than killing that fuck would ever be.”
“This world is shit enough without you thinking you’re anything less than perfect, just the way you are.”
Seeing Naomi’s stupid fucking gnome buckled in the back seat of that mangled G-Wagon made me feel things I hadn’t felt in a long time. Not since Gavin died. I was not leaving here without her. I would raze the entire planet before I left her to die here.
I’d already been to hell and back. Nothing scared me anymore, least of all the devil and his band of hired men. I’m coming, Naomi.
‘I know that look,’ Gavin said somberly. ‘That’s his ‘You better not get killed, look.’
I was about to storm the gates of fucking hell to save the man I loved.
That’s never going to happen, sweet girl. No one’s selling you. No one’s taking you from me. He’s dead. I’ll kill them all, beautiful. No one will ever fucking touch you again. You’re safe now.
Almost casually, my little, innocent ginger snap fired a shot. Holy shit, that was hot… Why was that so hot?!
Fuck me sideways. I was going to marry the shit out of this man.
“You saved me, baby. In every possible sense, you saved me.”
“But you taught me that even the devil is just an angel that fell to the ground.” Tears were streaming down both his cheeks as he fought to get his words out. “You picked me back up and reminded me how to fly, baby.”
