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She sighs again, and takes another sip of her drink. I’ve lost count of how many she’s had, but judging by the resigned look on her face, it’s just enough to get her to open up.
“No. In all honesty I didn’t.” She shakes her head. “It’s so weird to hear you calling him Saint. It has to be ironic. I feel so stupid for the way I reacted when we saw him, but it was just such a shock you know? Like, he was the last person I expected to see in some – frankly dodgy looking – random biker bar.”
“He’s a friend of your parents?”
She nods. “Well, he was. He was my dad’s best friend since primary school. They grew up together, did everything together. Mum used to say they were pretty much thick as thieves, and even during my childhood I remember them being that way. When I was younger,Saintwas like a fun uncle, a big brother and a best friend to me. He was always around, practically lived with us at one point, and I worshipped him. My parents were highschool sweethearts and they had me ridiculously young. Mum gave birth to me only ten days after her fifteenth birthday,” she explains with a grimace. “Dad was sixteen, but against all odds they stuck together and made it. Mum always said it was down to Saint helping and supporting them, but she’d never tell me what she meant by that.”
A sad look flits across her face and she takes another drink to wash it away.
“It was only when I got older that it developed into a schoolgirl crush.”
A wistful smile flits across her face but quickly morphs into a pained grimace. “He disappeared, like vanished into thin air, a few weeks before my sixteenth birthday. I was devastated. He’d always been there, and then suddenly he was gone. It was heartbreaking. I convinced myself he was going to turn up on my birthday, just show up at my party with a gift and act like nothing had ever happened…but he didn’t.” She sniffs and wipes her eyes but I can tell from the tense set of her shoulders that she’s yet to drop the worst of it.
“I’d barely gotten over it, and then my parents died two weeks after my birthday and sent me into a severe downward spiral. We didn’t have any other family and in the short space of a few weeks, everyone I ever loved was gone.”
Fuck.
I scoot along the sofa and chuck my arm around her shoulders, awkwardly pulling her into me for a hug.
“I’m okay. Two years of therapy helped. I did some stupid shit and went off the rails for a bit that first year they were gone, but I got myself straight in the end.”
“Lou…that’s…fuck.”
“Right?” She grins at me but it’s an empty, automatic, awkward response. “To walk into that bar and see him, to hear them calling himSaint…to see there was absolutely nothing wrong with him to keep him away from me for all that time…I wanted to kill him, Odi. How dare he be living this totally different life, absolutely fine, and not evenknowthat Mum and Dad are gone?”
I expect her to break down but when she lifts her head, her eyes are blazing with fierce determination.
“I’ll speak to Kaiden and make sure he’s not at the wedding.”
“Absolutely not. Fuck him. It’s time he answered my questions anyway.”
I squeeze her hand. “Okay babe, if you’re sure. But if he so much as looks at you sideways, I’ll knee him in the balls and have him thrown out, okay?”
She laughs. “Deal. But you’ll have to join the ball-kneeing queue.”
My mum usedto keep a notepad and pen by her bedside, so that when she woke up with ideas in the night she could write them down, release them from her brain and stop stressing. It guaranteed she would fall right back to sleep and could deal with whatever in the morning, without worrying about forgetting and thus keeping herself up in a sleepless stress cycle. Or so she claimed.
When I wake suddenly in the middle of the night, I don’t know what wakes me, but this is the first thought, the firstmemorythat I have.
I miss my mum.
There’s a noise from downstairs, and something about it sends my senses into hyper-alert mode. The hair on the back of my neck is on end and my pulse is a little too fast.
The clock, says it’s three in the morning. It was gone midnight when Lou left, and she texted around one to say she was home safe. I promised not to watch any more episodes without her, so I went to bed, even though the boys weren’t home yet. I wasn’t about to wait up for them like some nagging housewife.
I try to tell myself that there’s nothing to be scared of. Axel is as much of a security freak as he is a control freak. They’d never leave home alone if this place wasn’t secure.
Still though, I sit up in bed and strain my ears to listen for any other strange sounds. I flick on the light to hear better. Yes, it makes no sense, but the lack of shadows allows the fear humming in my ears to recede a little, so I can focus more.
My knife glints on the table beside my phone ,and I snatch it up on impulse. It’s stupid. This place is safer than Fort Knox, but the knife in my hand makes me feel braver.
Another bang, a scrape and a scuffle, has me shaking my head and climbing out of bed. My heart is thundering but I’m probably being ridiculous.
Clearly, there’s not going to be an intruder. It’s probably just the three of them, too drunk to make it up the stairs without help, so I’d better go and investigate. At the last second, I grab my phone from its wireless charger on my bedside, just in case there’s any drunken Axel hilarity I can tease him with when he’s sober.
I don’t call out to them though. Just in case. If thereisan intruder I’m not about to alert them to my presence, and if it’s just the guys, drunk, I stand a better chance of catching them on camera if I’m quiet.
I creep along the corridor to the top of the stairs, moving as silently as I can. On the landing, I note the light on in Axel’s study, and it definitely wasn’t when I came to bed.
