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My brows rose, and Hunt from his perch at my desk behind us started to chuckle.
“I think I like you, girl,” Hunt said.
Six winked.
“Anyway, the funeral is at seven tomorrow night. The only people that’ll be there are immediate family. And guess who that is?” she teased.
I brushed a lock of her hair behind her ear and went back to my sandwich.
“Who?” Hunt asked when I didn’t ask.
“Me,” Six answered. “I’m the only family he had left.”
“Meaning you’re alone,” Hunt said softly.
“Meaning that I’m all alone.”
I pulled her face close to mine by placing my hand at the back of her neck. “You’re not alone anymore, remember? You’re marrying me. That makes me your family.”
She snorted. “Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Didn’t you ever hear that being engaged usually comes with a ring for the woman?”
I winked at her. “It’s getting sized. I had no clue you had such small fingers until I tried to slip it onto your ring finger this morning while you were sleeping.”
Her brows rose. “Really?”
I shrugged. “Really.”
• • •
The next night, I knew that she wasn’t in a good place.
As we walked into the funeral home where her father’s cremated ashes resided, I had to practically hold her hand tight to keep her from bolting in the other direction.
When we finally got to the room that he was being held in, I could tell that she was ready to bolt, even if she had to take my arm with her.
“It’ll be okay,” I promised.
She looked at me.
“My father’s a really bad person,” she said. “I’m disgusted that I didn’t realize how bad until you came around.”
“It’ll be okay,” I said. “He was a very good actor, and he’d been putting on a show with you for a very long time.”
She sighed, long and exaggerated. “I know. It doesn’t make hearing it any better, though.”
We walked silently after that, making our way through the very quiet funeral home toward the back room where the officiant was waiting.
Upon seeing us, he stood up from the pew and walked toward us.
Holding out his hand first to me, then to Six, he gestured toward a seat at the front of the room.
And together we sat through the funeral of a man that didn’t deserve the kind words but got them anyway.
When we stood up forty-five minutes later after listening to the bullshit the officiant spewed about Ivan being a ‘kind man’ it was to turn around and find the men that I’d recently sprung from prison sitting in the back row.
All of them looked…
“Scary,” Six whispered from my side.
I grinned down at her.
“I was going to say intimidating,” I mused, throwing my arm around her shoulder.
She leaned into me as we walked to the back of the chapel and stopped next to their spot.
“Y’all want to go grab some food?” Six asked. “Celebrate a man’s death.”
It was Trick who answered.
“Hell, yeah.” He got up. “Lead the way. I don’t know this town all that well.”
And so Six did.
EPILOGUE
Tomorrow is not promised. Be a ho today.
-Six to Lynn
SIX
Eight years later
“On a scale of one to ten, how mad do you think Daddy will be?” Adele, our seven-year-old, asked.
I looked over at my daughter and grinned.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Umm,” she hesitated. “I think I better just talk to him.”
Grinning at my mischievous daughter’s words, I gestured toward Lynn’s office.
Eight years ago, when Lynn and I decided to start our life together, I had no freakin’ idea what that would mean for us.
I had no clue that Adele would surprise us months after our marriage was official. And I say official because neither one of us wanted anything big.
We’d had eighteen people attend our wedding, six of those being the men that had recently found their way into our lives after exiting prison.
Two of those, Laric and Bruno, had stood up with Lynn. And Wyett had stood up with me.
Then there’d been the random men here and there.
A scary man named Silas Mackenzie that Adele just loved every time he came around. A couple of FBI agents that showed up in the middle of the night to talk about things that I wasn’t privy to once every couple of months.
“Who the fuck was it that thought it would be a good idea to leave their bike in the driveway?” I heard someone ask.
Bruno came into the room then, carrying a mangled looking bike. One that had obviously been run over.
I turned to survey my girl. “Was that what you wanted to talk to your daddy about?”
“So I might or might not have run over it with the tractor.” She paused.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “What were you doing on the tractor?”
I knew it was a bad decision to allow her to learn how to drive that. But Lynn had insisted that it was a great thing for her to learn.
