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He’s fought it for so long. He’s run from it. Numbed it. Written about it. Talked about it.
Almost died from it.
And now… for the first time… he lets himself feel it.
The anger. The rage. Tears drip from my chin because I know his madness. I know his hell. I’ve felt it, too. I wanted to kill too.
TJ. Derek. Gentry.
“Fuck them!” The chair crashes into the glass again, and his shouts break my heart, clenching my teeth to his agony. “They didn’t.” Because he’s roaring from his, he’s in this pain, smashing the chair again into the glass. “Fucking break!” All his might. All his muscles. All his fury. “Me!”
It explodes to his violence. The chair lands on the patio outside over an ocean of glass, and Redix crashes to his knees on the edge of his house, of his sanity.
I fall with him. Wrapping my hands around his neck, I hang on through my sobs, and he won’t hold me back. He’s still lost. He’s still trying to come back.
“I love you” is all I can swear into his flesh. His sweaty neck smells like the blood soaking his shirt, and “I love you” is all I feel, all I can say.
The last time he was this far gone, his limp body was in my arms. He was breaths away from dying and never again. I’ll never stop fighting for him.
I turn his chin, searching his eyes. “I love you.” I try reaching him again. “It’s me, Candy Cade. I’m right here. They didn’t break us. No one can.”
He blinks, gazing at me until something shifts behind his eyes, his soul forever changed.
“I get it,” he mutters. “I understand.”
He presses his forehead to mine, and it’s true. Love is stronger than violence. Not even death can take it away. Not from us.
His hand, dripping with blood, reaches for mine. “I love you, Cade.”
“Hey, come on.” Penny startles me. Her hand lands on my shoulder, and I see the medics behind him. “Let them help.”
His gunshot wound. They need to stop the bleeding. It’s getting bad.
I let go of him and stand up. I clear a path for the medics to kneel beside him, silently dressing his wound to prepare him for transport.
“They got this.” Penny keeps pulling me away from him.
I resist. “I’m not leaving him.” I’ll ride in the ambulance with him. I’ll hold his other hand in the emergency room. I’ll keep talking to him and holding him and never leave his side again.
He understands. He forgives me. He almost killed Derek, and now he knows how the madness takes you. How you’ll do anything for someone you love. How our love belongs to us, but the anger belongs to the ones who hurt us.
How we can let it go now and go back to the love.
“I need you to come with me.” Penny sounds funny. That darts my eyes her way, and I see her phone, not her radio in her hand. “I got a call,” she says.
Her pull, she’s guiding me toward the front door, and the look in her eyes. It’s scaring me.
“What’s going on?” I ask her.
I don’t want this answer.
“Cade, it’s your mom,” she says.
And I lose the next month of my life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
If I could write my ending, I’d want it to be like the one my mama had.
