My heart soared.
Slowly he was coming back to me. This was how we always slept. Every tiny step he took from Shadow to Beckett was a sign of hope. I could beat his demons and I could do that because he was willing to let me try.
Bringing him back to my life, to the kids, to his brothers, to our baby was a fight I would not lose.
Bathed in the moonlight, I watched as his hands circled, swirled and caressed his child. His breathing steadying, his tearful exertion abating.
“Can you tell me where you’ve been?”
“No. Never.”
I had to accept that, but I wouldn’t let it eat him up inside, in secret.
“Can you promise me that if it gets too much in your head, that you’ll try talking to someone, anyone?”
The silence seemed to last forever until I realized I wasn’t going to get an answer. The breath I felt against the back of my neck, told me he was out cold, sleeping.
“Beckett?”
“Let him sleep, Lassie,” I heard from the doorway. Mac was still there and like me, he knew that the darkness still had the power to swallow him in his sleep. “I’ll be in the hallway.”
“He’ll be fine, he doesn’t dream when I’m with him.” Which made me wonder if he’d truly slept all the time we’d been apart.
Mac didn’t reply, but I knew he wouldn’t leave us.
I don’t know how long I’d been asleep for, but the sun was just dancing off the walls in his room when I pried my tired eyes open and I realized the bed beside me was empty.
“Beckett?” My voice reflected the panic I felt, I was alone again, and my heart seized out of fear that he’d gone, and I’d dreamed it all again. But then I panicked that he’d not had enough courage and faith in us to try.
“Shower.” Came the sleepy voice from the hallway.
Mac, God bless him, had stayed there all night.
I rolled over, unable to see his face, just the bottom of his work boots and muttered, “Thank you.” The two words that seemed inadequate, and didn’t convey nearly enough, but it was all I had.
Desperate to pee, I headed for the bathroom. Beckett was in the cubicle, his head bent forward, water beating down his neck and back, hands braced against the wall keeping him upright. I saw him move when he realized I was in the room, but he stayed put, giving me the privacy to see to my business. As I washed my hands, I heard him speak. “I can’t tell anyone all the details. But it gets too much, I’ll see someone for help.”
The relief at his words was instant, he was willing to try. He was working his way back into our lives.
“Could you pass me a razor?” I searched his sparse cupboard behind the sink and handed it to him. “Be out in a minute.”
I nodded and headed back to the room, sitting back on the bed to wait for him.
The shower faucet stopped, and I watched as a thinner, but just as defined, muscular, handsome man appeared before me. The wild hair was now gone, and the beard had also been dealt with.
God, he was so fucking handsome. I’d been starved of him for so long.
The Beckett Hope I’d fallen in love with, the man who called himself a Shadow, a brother of the Black Sentinels MC was back.
My smile was blinding, everything would be okay. He’d beaten his demons before, and these fresh ones we’d tackle together. As Beckett and Flick there were no demons evil enough or dark enough that we couldn’t beat them back into the shadows.
I waited until he got clean jeans and a t-shirt from his drawers, never taking my eyes from him, watching his transformation like a bug becoming the most beautiful of butterflies. Lastly, he reached for his cut, that was draped over the chair in his room.
My heart beat spiked. This was it. He was home.
Finally, he pushed his arms into it and shrugged it on his back, stopping he looked at me and I held his eyes in my spell. “Hi.”
“Hey, baby.” A ghost of a smile, somewhere between shyness and joy flashed across his face.
“I love you.”
“Love you more,” he whispered.
“Kiss me,” I breathed.
Beckett didn’t reply, he dropped to his haunches in front of me, placed one kiss on our baby before standing back up and latching his lips onto mine.
Everything was going to work out.
Whatever came at him, came at both of us.
Beckett might have been used to fighting his battles in the shadows, all alone, but from now on our strength was in numbers.
Him and me.
Our baby and the kids.
Us and the Black Sentinels.
1 year later
Shadow
“Okay, Beckett, let’s start with a grounding exercise.”
She always did this.
“Close your eyes and think about a bad time.”
I did as she asked, and my brain whirred through more memories than any one person should have. I felt my hands clench the arm the of chair, knowing she’d be watching my white knuckles, and I felt my upper lip bead with sweat. Like normal, it was just too fucking hard, so I stopped. My eyes sprang open and I breathed deeply, reminding myself that I wasn’t back there.
I was safe.
My family were safe.
“And this time, go back to a memory of happiness. Remembering that life is balance. With the bad comes the good.”
That was easy, although the fact that I had more good memories these days was down to two people. My sister, who brought Flick into my life, and Flick herself. Clearly the doc was right, I did get the good from the bad, my sister dying brought me and the love of my life together.
I thought back to the time I took us home to see her parents. I’d not been back from the last mission long, and I was keen to make amends with her parents for being away for most of her pregnancy. Turns out they understood, Flick had helped them see what I had to do was necessary for both the country—they were under the impression it was a military mission—and it was good for me to get closure. But the very best thing about that visit, was waiting until the sun had gone down, the moon was high in the sky and everyone was asleep, her folks, her gran and Ben and Lila. I woke her up in the dead of night, coaxed her out of bed and helped her down the stairs. She was seriously pregnant, and there was no way I was letting any harm come to her because I’d had a fucking insane idea.
In our bare feet, we tiptoed through the dewy grass, until we were at the tree by the side of her house. The tree that all those years ago I got my first taste of her when I gave her her first real kiss. The tree I’d pushed her against and touched her tits. The tree where it all started.
“What are we doing out here?” she whispered as I took her hands. My eyes drawn to the sleep lazy smile on her face, her belly full with our baby stretching the seams on her nightie, and her tits, swollen—fucking amazing really, because she’d never had big tits—getting ready to feed the new life inside her. I shrugged off my cut and draped it around her shoulders. The gasp that came from her mouth told me she knew that was a big deal.
“Everything I’ve ever done has been planned and prepared to within an inch of success and failure, apart from the two times I’ve stood with you against this tree.” I stepped to her, my body touched hers and she leaned back against the bark. “The first time, all those years ago, you gave me your sass and your first real kiss.”
Flicks eyes dropped hazily with the memory and her bottom lip trembled.
“You bring out my need to be spontaneous, the need to just say fuck it and be Beckett Hope. I don’t have a ring. I don’t have anything but you and those kids in that house, my brothers and that baby in your belly. And fuck me, it’s enough. I have everything but one thing… a wife. With my cut on your back, I can promise you that every day I will turn myself inside out to be the man you deserve. I will work until my dying breath to be enough for you, to repay you for saving me.”
I watched as the tears fell down her cheeks, and she pulled the cut tighter across her body, even if it
did have no hope of coming close to closing fully. “You cold, baby?”
“No, I just want our baby to feel this. Wrapped up in all that’s you.”
My girl had a sassy mouth, with way too much attitude most of the time, but when it mattered, the simple words she said floored me. Barely able to get the words out, barely whispering, I pressed on, “Marry me?”
“In a heartbeat,” she whispered back.
“I can tell that was a good memory.”
With a smile I opened my eyes.
“Let’s begin, how are you today, Beckett?”
“Tired.” I was sat in a chair in an office that looked like a library. And if it wasn’t cliché enough, there was a standard floor lamp next to it, a table between us that was loaded with magazines, and not for the first time my mind wandered. Whoever cleaned this place, always put them back in the exact same, fanned layout.
“A baby will do that to you.” Maggie Shelby, my counselor smiled. “But I bet it’s the best kind of tired.”
She was right. Again.
Before, I barely slept because I couldn’t switch off and I didn’t know how to sleep; I just didn’t want to, sleep brought pain and memories. Now I didn’t want to miss a moment of my baby girl. If she did something and I missed it, it pissed me off, I wanted to scorch the earth and my reaction felt justified. It made Flick laugh.
“Anything you want to talk about this week?”
“Nope.”
Maggie smiled. “This is a great little earner for me, but I feel like a charlatan taking your money. I can never in good conscience ask you to be a reference client,” she laughed. “All the time you’ve been coming to these sessions and we don’t ever get to the root of your issues.”
I looked across the table at her. She was five years older than me, about twenty pounds overweight, with hair dyed in an effort to keep hold of her youth. Her eyes always begged me to give her something, but I could never tell this woman the real reason behind my sleepless nights. It would make that dyed hair fall out.
Flick and I had agreed we’d go with PTSD, which wasn’t a lie. I was an ex-serviceman still affected by the horrors of war; it just wasn’t the right version of the truth.
“Talking helps,” I confirmed.
“How are the family?” she asked, understanding that this wasn’t going to be the session where the dam broke free on my fucked-up brain.
“Lila and Ben are great, settling into life.”
“It’s good that they don’t feel left out with the baby, pushed aside.”
“Flick’s got a big heart, there than enough love to go around.”
“She’s not the only one, Beckett.” Maggie praised me in her own way, and I thought back to the first session when Flick had to trick me into coming here while Wolf barricaded the door from the other side until I agreed to just one hour. Maggie and I sat for the whole hour, looking at each other, and when the noise inside my head disappeared for just one hour, I thought, you know what, if it keeps my woman happy, I’ll go again next week.
It seemed that I wasn’t Maggie’s first rodeo with a PTSD suffering soldier.
“Why do you still come?”
I thought about that and I didn’t know. “Not sure, but until I have that answered, I’ll be here every week.”
“What’s new with baby Blaze?”
My face nearly split in two. No one questioned why we’d called our girl Blaze, but Flick and I named her after our fresh start. As Shadow retreated into the darkness, Blaze came into life, like a blaze of glory.
Blaze Hope was my new beginning, my second chance to get life right.
“She’s moving.”
“There’ll be no stopping her now.” Maggie’s smile and enthusiasm about my life and family was honest and authentic. “Well, our time is up, Beckett.”
“Same time next week,” I confirmed, with a wave over my shoulder as I walked out the door.
“Unless—”
“See you next week, Maggie.”
As I climbed on my bike outside, I felt a little lighter, it wasn’t much, but the fog was slowly lifting. Little by little. It started the minute I’d told that useless cunt of a handler from the agency that I’d deposited factual evidence with fifty different people for safe keeping and if anyone looked at me sideways, even breathed near my family and I gave the codeword, then everything would be out in the open. I’d told Flick that the hiding place in the fake socket from a year and a half ago was still in effect, and if I disappeared, she was to go there, and start of the chain of events on the instructions.
The handler knew that it could and would bring war upon our country, bring the fucking government and CIA down.
No one would risk that just to keep one man in the game.
Ever.
People in the government were clever, but none of them wanted to think, breathe or say the word impeachment, and that’s what would happen, right up to the sitting leader of the free world.
Ben was throwing a ball in the yard when I rolled up on the drive on my Harley, while Flick and Lila were sat on a blanket trying to pen a moving Blaze to a confined four-foot-square area, trying to keep my little princess out of harm’s way while she was tempted by a bouncing ball was a full-time job.
“Look! There’s Daddy!” Flick finally released her, but my girl had already locked onto me, the bike, and the sound of the Harley pipes and was busy ramping up her freedom.
Pregnancy and motherhood had only enhanced Flick’s beauty. If I could keep her constantly pregnant, I would have done. I’d missed most of Blaze’s bump journey and was busy working on knocking her up again.
Her eyes shone and she smiled brightly when I scooped up our girl. This was another reason I didn’t mind the counseling; it gave her some hope that I hadn’t given up the fight to stay in the light. I wasn’t prepared to succumb to the me of the past. “Okay?”
“Maggie says hello.”
That answer was enough for her, as I got down on the floor beside her and lay my head on her lap as I popped Blaze on my chest. Lila started to blow raspberries on her pudgy feet before grabbing a jump rope and heading in her brother’s direction. Give it five minutes and he’d be bumping his gums about her being a nuisance.
I felt Flick’s fingernails score my scalp. “Your hair’s longer than normal.”
“I’ll see to that.” And I would. “Ever wonder why I shave it?” I surprised myself by giving her an opening to ask.
She stilled; she knew what I was offering. “Yeah, you had such a full head of hair as a hot teenager, but it’s whatever you’re comfortable with.”
I jiggled Blaze up and down. “To stand out. Be unique, noticeable.”
Flick stayed silent waiting, wondering if I was going to expand. If I did, she always just listened, if I didn’t, she understood. That was the other thing about my time with Maggie, it wasn’t that she just helped lift the fog, she was also prizing open the lid, so I could share with my woman. Make it possible to open up, give her more of me.
“I’d spent so long being the gray man, blending in, being a nobody, unnoticeable. Being truly forgettable was the deadliest disguise.
“I get it.”
“This way I have an identity. I don’t look in the mirror and see someone who can slot back into that life easily. I see me. I’m not him. I’m not them and they’re not me.”
“I don’t care, baby,” she whispered. “I love you however you come.”
Blaze climbed off me and I let her, I’d rescue her before she got too close to Lila and Ben, but we both knew what she was after. That damn unicorn that was still glued to Lila’s side.
“Wanna get married yet?”
I’d already asked her, but not actually nailed her down to a date. It was another one of her sassy games, she loved riling me up and I asked her every day.
“One day,” she breathed. The same answer she gave me every day. “Did she help you?”
I wanted to say yes, but I just hummed with indifferen
ce. “Shadow isn’t dead yet.”
Her fingers drifted down my cheek, taking the stubble on my chin. “Not all shadows are bad,” she mumbled.
“What?”
“You see them as something bad, but they’re not. A shadow overcasts the sun on a scorching day and brings relief, it creates unique beauty. Look, now, our baby is sat in the shadow of the sun and that shadow is protecting her. Sometimes the shadow comes from a place of love, warmth, and protection.”
I looked at our girl, moving her chubby arms, her own reflection causing her to laugh and giggle.
“One day, you’ll see yourself differently. Your brothers see your shadow differently; they don’t see it for the evil you always associate it with. They see it as a part of you. The shadow has protected them, saved the women they love.”
“I suppose.” I conceded, feeling strange, unsettled… different.
“Only you can choose which shadow is in play from one moment to the next. Don’t fight too hard to kill him off, he’s a part of you and I love every deep, complex part of you.”
I could feel my throat thickening, my breathing not so natural anymore.
“Beckett, you don’t have to love the dark part, but you either need to accept him and live with it or let it go and move on. We’re at peace with it, it’s time you were too.”
With a lump in my throat, I swallowed. “Is it that simple?”
“If you want it to be. Your suffering gives you pain, but it gives the rest of us perspective. Because of that perspective you can guide the kids. Because of that, you can protect the kids. So, just flip the script.”
“Flip the script?”
“Look at Shadow through a different lens.”
For the next ten minutes I stayed silent, I watched Ben keep Blaze safe as the cat from next door wandered close. That cat was a bitch, just like its owner, but both Lila and Blaze were still obsessed with her.
“Can we have a kitten?” Lila shouted.
“No, a dog,” Ben replied quickly.
Flick (The Black Sentinels MC Book 4) Page 23
