The Five

by Lily White

“Do you think I could be the type of girl you would want?” The question should have launched me from the couch, should have pressed my back against the opposite wall, should have sent me scrambling for the door. Too deep. I was in way too fucking deep.

“We shouldn’t be doing this.” Mouth against my ear. “I shouldn’t have done a lot of things.” Pure wickedness, that sound. Breathless, husky, raw.

“It’s me, isn’t it? Because of everything I’ve done? There’s no walking back from my choices, is there? While that should have been true, while her lifestyle should have bothered me, that wasn’t the problem forefront in my mind. “I’m interviewing you as a subject in a murder investigation. We can’t have sexual relations.” Opening my eyes, I found her staring at me, confusion furrowing her brow. “Even if I was a victim?” “Even then. Especially then. I refuse to victimize you further.” A shy smile. “I don’t know what you consider victimizing a person, but that’s not what we just did. At least, not the way I see it. I like you.”

“You said we couldn’t do what we were doing because I’m a victim. But doesn’t that victimize me further? Isn’t it just another road block preventing me from moving on?” A deep sigh blew over my lips. “I’d be taking advantage of you if I’d allowed that to go further.” Her lips curled at the corners. “Nobody has taken advantage of me, Dr. Redding. I can promise you that.”

Why do the good people always die young? I didn’t understand why this world seemed to punish the shining lights while allowing the shadows to linger eternally. I wondered if perhaps the soul of the good burned as brightly as stars, the world unable to contain such fire, so it devised different ways to extinguish them.

“Are you suggesting she has a secret admirer who’s killing the people who hurt her?” It was a flicker of a thought, there and then gone again. An impossibility. Or was it? Rowan had killed David for touching her, had promised to kill all of them for having hurt her. Was it possible? “Let me ask you this: I know Rowan’s remains were cremated and scattered in a communal grave, but what was the state of his body following the car accident that killed him? Was he identifiable?” Grenshaw stilled, his eyes holding mine while his thoughts worked quickly to catch what I was implying. “You don’t think the kid staged his own death-“ “Anything’s possible.”

“So, we’re left with a girl who potentially knows something about a murderer still on the loose and we have no way of keeping an eye on her while a strange man stalks her house. Excellent.”

“I’ll love you forever, Rainey. Protect you. Take care of you. There’s nowhere you can go where I won’t find you. Rowan and Rainey, forever.” “Promise?” “Promise.” People shouldn’t make promises they can’t keep.

“How am I supposed to do that if people like you won’t give me the chance?” “It’s not that I don’t want to-“ Fuck! If I could just close this damn case, I would show her exactly how much I wanted her. Ever since meeting her, she’s been the only thing on my mind. Rainey had pushed me beyond professional boundaries in my mind and she wasn’t helping the matter by looking at me with longing now. Lips curled at the corners, she blinked her eyes. “So, what you’re saying is that you would like to know somebody like me?” Know? I’d like to toss her on that counter and strip her damn clothes off, but that would make me as bad as all the other men who’d seen her as nothing more than a body to fuck.

“You’re killing me. You know that?” She grinned against my mouth. “Shut up and do what you’ve been wanting to do for days now.”

Pursuant to my professional license, typing this report and submitting it as a documented analytical opinion with subjective influence was criminal. But I would do it regardless...for her.

Did I love her? No. Could I? That’s what I wanted to discover.

From the minute we’re born, we’re told that taking another life is wrong, we’re told we’re sick if we enjoy it. I’m not sure if enjoy is the word I would use to describe how I felt, but I didn’t regret their deaths either. Every single one of them had to die if starting over could ever be an option.

Love does that to you, doesn’t it? I’d been driven mad by circumstance, beaten down by heartache, and reborn when every person who’d ever hurt me was stabbed or shot, burned or bludgeoned, their bodies and ashes delivered to the ground.

The lies I had to tell in order to walk away from those murders without revealing the truth of my involvement.

He wasn’t the man for me. I wasn’t the girl for him. And if he kept pushing to change the way things had to be, it would end in heartache, pain and blood.

“I promised you I’d find you, Rainey. Promised you I’d take care of you. That I’d protect you. That I’d love you more than you could love yourself.” My head shook, disbelief assaulting me because there was no way in hell this could be happening. I refused to accept it. Refused to believe that - Oh, God, is it possible? “Rowan and Rainey forever. I wasn’t lying when I told you that.” Five promises.

I thought of all the tragic love stories in the world where one person is gone while the other dies slowly. Your heart can beat on. Your lungs will continue to inflate, but when the person you love the most is gone, the truth is that you die right there beside them.

“I’m taking my time, Rainey. Do you know how long I’ve waited to come back to you? Do you have any fucking idea how hard it has been to stay away?”

If it took being crazy to love him, then I hoped to God I would never regain sanity again.

“After everything she did to push you away, you kill for her? Without even knowing whether she loved you back or not?” Smiling Rowan scratched his chin. “I knew she loved me. Rainey was simply caught up in too much stuff. But it’s not about how much she loved me that mattered. It’s about how much I loved her. How much she didn’t love herself. I loved her enough for the both of us. And that love was enough for me to move Heaven and Earth to save Rainey from herself. If you’ve ever felt that way about another person, you would understand.”

“Are you saying Rainey killed all four of those people?” “No. She doesn’t have the strength.” Another shrug. “But it’s like I said. A man will do anything for the woman he loves. She says jump and you better believe I’ll ask how high just to see her smile.”

Finally crossing the room, she sat on Rowan’s lap, reached to pull the ball cap from his head and kissed his forehead with such tenderness it would have been sweet if they weren’t homicidal psychopaths.

“I promise to respect my body.” Rainey’s husky voice was barely a whisper, her eyes for one man alone. “I promise to love him until the day I die. I promise to believe I’m worth more than what I’ve let people do to me. I promise to never let another man touch me. And of course, Rowan and Rainey forever.”

“Understandable. Unfortunately, I had a moment of weakness as well. After hitting you, I couldn’t exactly leave you there for Rainey to clean up. And here we are. I let you go now and you run to the police to tell them I’m alive and have killed a lot of people. That brings Rainey down along with me, and I will kill again if it means she walks free. I made a promise. I will protect her. I’m sure you can respect that.”

To love another person is to slip beneath their skin. If they hurt, so do you. If someone attacks them, you’ve been attacked as well. If they are drowning, your head is being dragged under water right beside them. And if they die, you might as well start digging your own grave because a part of you belongs to the ground. That is what love is. That is how I loved Rainey.

Talk about torture, loving that woman up close is hard enough, but to be away from her is the true test of how much you can handle. To miss a smile, to not hear her laughter, to be absent when all I wanted was to be up close? Hell. That was a feat of absolute willpower to stay at a distance. But I did it...for her.

Rainey could say she was loved. It just took a while for her to know it.

Rainey had a lot of problems, but the monster she’d created wasn’t one of them. I would love her. I would take care of her. I would protect her and I would always find her. Forever doesn’t mean until the end of our lives, it means until the end of eternity.

Angel. Michael. Preston. Megan. None of them were good enough for Rainey. Not for my girl. Not for me.

I don’t know about this... Just shut the fuck up and go along with it... Nope. Not my girl. She wouldn’t be going along with shit.

“Hey, Mike.” He turned at the sound of my voice, eyes wide, refusing to believe what he was seeing. “Rowan?” Lips tipping into a grin, I answered. “It’s good to see you again. But too bad you’re fucking with the wrong girl.” There was no time for him to scream before the bat caught him in the head. Blood splattered the walls, his body dropping before I gave him a few more whacks to remember me by. Not that he would remember much. With his head cracked open, grey matter had spilled onto the floor. I think I could have left it at that, could have walked away, but then I heard a familiar voice on the stairs behind me, turned to watch Angel running back upstairs. “Fuck...” It wasn’t my intent to take them out, too, but a man in love is a feral creature, driven by a sultry grin, made hard by a tempting body, gone mad to know there were people still breathing who could threaten the woman that was his.

Men. How many times did I have to tell them to listen with their ears instead of thinking with their dicks?

“All around the...” Damn it. I always forgot that first part. I stepped around the bed, lifted the bar above my head. “The monkey chased the weasel...” Preston wasn’t a good enough sport to sing along. Just kept screaming and crying, as if that would do much good. “The monkey thought it was all in good fun...” Canting my head, I grinned. “Come on Preston, you know the last part.” The bat swung down against his head. Pop! Poor Preston. He was a really shitty weasel.

Every breath she took was mine. Every beat of her heart a pulse in my chest. Every thought in that beautiful head, a whisper against my ears.

Not all love stories begin with hearts and flowers. Mine didn’t. Instead, mine started on a day when I’d been driven into the heart of another run down town, a new start, a new day that would end with ruined lives. My love story began with a fifteen year old boy who’d looked across a chain link fence to see a girl sitting on her porch. The boy had waved, had smiled before stretching his long legs to walk on over, and introduce himself as the man I could never live without. It was my fault for not believing him. I wonder how many lives could have been saved if I’d only looked up into those big blue eyes and trusted they belonged to my savior.

“I should raise Michael from the dead just to kill him all over again. Nobody touches my girl and gets away with it.”

“So, you’re Graham Pike now. What’s my name going to be?” With his hand brushing down my hair, he laughed. “Whatever you want it to be. It’ll be a hell of a lot better than Rainey Summer Day.” I grinned, the emotions hitting me all at once, a force so strong, I couldn’t blink my eyes fast enough to keep the tears from falling. “I love you, Rowan.” “Hey,” he caught my face again, tilting it higher so he could search my eyes. “I’m tired of the crying.” With the pad of his thumb, he wiped a tear away. “You’re better than that.” Laughter shook my shoulders and I pressed my chest against his. “That’s what you always say.” God, that smile. It always blinded me. “You should have listened to me the first time.”