Page 197 of Beautiful Scars

Chapter 20

EPILOGUE - MEISIE

“Something’s wrong.” Kill looks down at his phone. “Meisie, something’s wrong.”

“Yeah, we’re stopped at a green light and you’re texting and driving,” I mutter.

It speaks volumes that he doesn’t even look at me, or threaten to punish my snarkiness. The car behind us honks, but Kill dials and puts his phone to his ear without bothering to look in the rearview mirror.

“Sarah?” he says. “Why aren’t you answering your phone?”

I snatch it from his fingers, hearing the tail end of a blustery, “...tried to get her in the bath.”

“Hey, it’s me,” I tell her. “Just ignore Kill, please. And turn your phone off.”

“Really?” Sarah puffs into the phone. “Are you sure?”

“That, or just leave the call connected on speaker the rest of the night,” I tell her sourly, lifting an eyebrow at Kill.

He narrows his eyes at me. The person behind us jams down his horn, and Kill’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. I reach over and run my fingers over his white knuckles. “Let’s go,” I mouth to him, and then, to Sarah, say, “You’ll be fine, we’ll be fine, Maddie will be fine.”

I hang up. Kill pulls away from the intersection as the light turns amber, leaving the car behind him stopped at the red light. It’s no wonder the guy gives us the finger out his car window.

“Maddie’s in good hands,” I tell Kill. “She has Sarah and Derek looking after her. I can’t think of anyone better.”

Sarah doesn’t live in that same house anymore, of course. She moved in with Derek a few days after Cole was committed. It was supposed to be temporary—Kill told her to find a new place, but she just didn’t have the capacity to go out house hunting. Derek offered for her to stay in his two-bedroom apartment until she got herself sorted out and...well, I guess the place didn’t have the best heating, because they must have ended up keeping each other warm one night and figured out they liked each other enough to try dating.

Which suits us perfectly fine. Derek and Sarah are a babysitting power couple.

“We could have ordered in,” Kill mutters. “Lorenzo would have had it delivered to our door, piping hot.”

“I can’t keep staring at the same four walls for the rest of my life.” I squeeze his thigh. “Then you might as well just go back to tying me up in the dungeon.”

He lets out a huff of a laugh and claps his hand over mine. “It’s just...”

“It’s the first time we’ve been out since—” I cut off hurriedly, but the damage has been done.

When I glance up at Kill, his green eyes are shadowy and grim.

This is the first time we’ve been out just the two of us since Cole was institutionalized, and that was six months ago. We go out as a family, of course. He still goes to work in the nightclub, obviously. But since we got Maddie full time three months ago he has new locks on the doors, gates that even a tank couldn’t pull down, CCTV covering every square inch of the house. He was talking about getting a dog last week.

Because every day Cole is still alive, there’s a risk he could get out and go straight for Kill’s weakness. And Kill doesn’t do risks—he only works in black and white.

But it’s not just the thought of him escaping that eats him up. It took me a while, but I realized he’s grieving. Cole might be alive but to Cillian he’s dead. I thought his feelings about losing his brother were something that would fade away over time, like a bad sunburn. At first it hurts like hell, but eventually all you’re left with are some aged marks and a few new freckles.

But with Kill, it comes and goes. Some days it’s as if Cole’s still there in the house. Others as if he’s been gone for years. And it happens at the strangest times. Sometimes we’d be having dinner, not talking because the spaghetti really isthatgood… and he’d get a look in his eye like he was a thousand miles away.

Glazed. A little hollow. Only almost here.

I recognize that look because I’ve felt it on my own face countless times whenever I’d think about Madison.

Strangely, Cillian was my salvation when it came to Maddie, and Maddie is his salvation when it comes to Cole.

Whenever he gets that faraway look in his eyes, like the past is a mirror that’s close enough to touch, Maddie runs over and climbs up him like the monkey bars he installed in our garden. And he’d always snap back to the present with a bark of a laugh and a sudden gleam in his eyes, and wrestle her until she shrieked with joy.

It’s hard to be almost here when you’re permanently wrapped around someone’s little finger.

“We should have brought her with.”