Nobody Knows

by Vale, Lani Lynn

“I just got word from your parents. They’re coming for an extended visit and want to meet for dinner.” She paused. “Also, they’d like to stay with me.”

  My brows rose.

  “What did you say?”

  CHAPTER 5

  Look at you getting all drunk and shit.

  -Coffee Cup

  MALACHI

  Sierra,

  So get this. I had some time to talk to my grandmother on the phone today.

  While we’re chatting, she tells me that she has been so bored lately with nothing to do.

  I idly suggest that she take my dog, Maxie, for a walk every once in a while because he has to be going stir crazy.

  And you want to know what she said?

  That that would be impossible because she’s living with my parents in Florida, and my dog Maxie is back home with ‘people I trust.’

  I left Maxie with my parents. Which means that Maxie should’ve been in Florida with them—and my grandmother.

  Turns out, my parents fucking lied to me. They said that they would watch over my dog.

  What did they end up doing?

  They gave him to a fucking shelter. But, not to worry, it was a no-kill shelter and that he was just fine where he was at. He was probably adopted out by now and would be ‘a-okay’ when I decided to return. As if I’d just decided to be deployed all on my own.

  Then they’d told my grandmother—who would’ve bitched and complained about them leaving my dog—that I’d found a nice couple to watch my dog until I got home. So it’s literally taken me a year of being deployed in this sand hell hole to realize that my dog was taken to a shelter.

  They couldn’t even have the decency of remembering which fucking shelter.

  My grandmother is currently on the way home so that she can help find him.

  I am so fucking lost right now that I want to scream.

  Hope your week is going better than mine.

  Gabriel

  • • •

  “Tell them to go fuck themselves,” I suggested.

  “I did,” she said. “Those words exactly. And they thought I was joking. They called again an hour ago telling me that they were at the airport, and where was I at?”

  I frowned. “You told them that you no longer have your license, yes?”

  Grans was eighty-nine and seemed to be shrinking by the day. Though, that was likely just a figment of my imagination and not a reality.

  Regardless, last year when I’d gotten home from being a prisoner of war, she’d had a minor heart attack. Since then, she hadn’t driven at all.

  Some of that was my worry for her, and now I knew it was just her trying to make sure that I had a purpose in life—taking care of her.

  I knew that she could tell that I was lost, but since I was so much like her—we alphas didn’t admit when we weren’t handling shit well—she knew better than to ask or confront me.

  “They do,” she confirmed. “They didn’t come see you when you got home, and they didn’t come see me when they learned of my heart attack. As far as I’m concerned, they’re persona non grata.”

  I laughed and went to the fridge and grabbed a beer. “Do you want one?”

  She lifted up the beer that she’d stolen from my fridge and glanced inside the bottle. “I’ll take another one.”

  I twisted the tops off of both and tossed the lids in the trash before walking them both to where she was sitting on my front porch.

  “Anything interesting happening tonight?” I asked.

  Grans didn’t leave the front porch much. Whether it was my front porch or hers, that was her favorite place to be.

  According to her, if you didn’t know what was going on in your own front yard, how were you supposed to know what was going on in your own country.

  Grans was a veteran.

  She was a nurse in the Army during World War II, and went on to retire from there at the ripe old age of sixty-two.

  She had three kids, two of which had died. The only one left was my father, and she didn’t like him all that much anymore.

  She only had one grandchild—and that was me.

  Needless to say, we were so much alike it was kind of scary.

  “How’s your friend?” Grans asked.

  Grans was talking about Sierra.

  “My friend is well,” I said. “Her turkey basting efforts are bearing fruit.”

  Grans threw her head back and laughed.

  “I wish that I’d have had the technology to do it on my own. Then I wouldn’t have had to deal with your grandfather.” She snickered. “Good for her, doing it on her own.”

  “Her family doesn’t seem to think so,” I admitted what Sierra had told me via text over the last couple of days. “They think she either A, slept around after breaking up with her boyfriend and wound up pregnant, or B got pregnant by her ex and refuses to tell him.”

  “Why not just tell them the truth?” she wondered.

  “I think had they not jumped to conclusions and allowed her to explain, she might have,” I answered.

  “Still bound and determined not to meet her?” Grans asked slyly.

  There was an unspoken promise between Sierra and me.

  A line that neither one of us was willing to cross—and that was meeting.

  We both knew that the other was in or around Kilgore. We also knew what each other’s professions were. But neither one of us had flat out made the move to see exactly where the other was.

  Though we texted.

  A lot.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to meet her,” I admitted. “I would love to. I’m just… a loser. What if she doesn’t like me, Grans? I think that might possibly break my heart.”

  Grans let her hand drop and she lazily stroked it over Bobo’s head.

  I looked down at the dog that was supposed to be mine, but actually ended up being Grans’ dog.

  I’d gotten Bobo a few months ago from a man out of Souls Chapel. The dog had been vital in saving one of my buddy’s off the SWAT team’s wife, Dillan. When we’d learned that Bobo didn’t have a home and was about to be put down because of his distrust of human beings, I’d stepped in and offered to take him myself.

  Only, it hadn’t been me that Bobo had come out of the shell for. It’d been Gran.

  It’d only been in the last month that we’d decided that Bobo was no longer my dog, but Grans’ dog.

  Now he lived with her, and I think he preferred it that way.

  I reached my hand out and tried to pet Bobo, but he bared his teeth at me in a silent snarl.

  Grans laughed and instead of touching the dog, I wrapped my arm around her frail frame and got an actual growl this time.

  Bobo didn’t like when I loved on Grans.

  Grans laughed, just as she always did when we played this game.

  “I can’t wait for your parents to come to the door,” she teased. “Bobo is going to hate them on sight.”

  I agreed wholeheartedly.

  “Take a photo.” I paused. “Even better, take a video.”

  She gave me a pat on the thigh and stood up. “Take me home so I don’t have to walk?”

  Despite being eighty-nine years old, Grans was still very active in life.

  She walked to my house from hers every once in a while, when the weather was nice, and sometimes she’d walk back. Other times she would have me drive her, like now, when it was too close to being dark out.

  The funny thing was, I’d grown up in a house that was literally a mile and a half away by road from the duplexes dubbed as ‘Cop Row’ where I now lived. And if you took to the woods like Grans did to get here, it was only half a mile, and you had to cross a creek to get there.

  Though, when I realized that no matter how much talking I did until I was blue in the face to get her to stop jumping over the creek, I knew that the only solution was to build her a way to get over it via bridge.

  Secretly, I thought that she kind of disliked having to use the bridge, but she
knew that I worried about her, so she did it anyway.

  Grans was the most in-shape eighty-nine-year-old you would ever meet.

  She had abs.

  She had guns.

  And she could do more push-ups than half the men on the Kilgore Police Department.

  When she was feeling frisky, she’d even challenge people to push-up contests just to see them lose.

  “Of course,” I said easily. “Let me get my bag inside then we can go.”

  She waited for me to do what I’d told her I needed to do, then held my hand as we descended the porch steps faster than I took them normally.

  I rolled my eyes and led her to my truck, which was no lowrider.

  But, like the thirty-year-old she acted like, she had no problem hefting herself into the passenger seat and closing the door.

  I opened the back door for Bobo, and he jumped in with barely a growl aimed my way.

  Grans and Bobo deserved each other, that was for sure.

  The ride to my grans was short, and by the time I was pulling into the driveway, she hadn’t even finished telling me about a story she was recounting that had happened at the Dollar Store in town when we’d arrived.

  My eyes, however, caught on something that shouldn’t have been at her place.

  A person.

  Two people, actually.

  “Who is that?” I asked, letting off the accelerator as my eyes caught on something in Grans’ yard that wasn’t normally there.

  “That’s my new renter,” she said. “I rented her the front half of the house since I don’t use it.”

  I frowned hard. “You rented someone the main part of the house?”

  “Well you sure the fuck didn’t want it,” she countered. “I tried to offer it to you.”

  She had.

  And I hadn’t wanted to live there because it brought back old memories—the times before I was broken—and I didn’t like thinking of how my life used to be.

  Not to mention, those times weren’t the greatest in the grand scheme of things.

  My parents had never been the nicest of people, and only after I’d become aware of them giving Maxie to an animal shelter did I finally allow myself to admit that my parents were self-serving douchebags that didn’t think of anybody but themselves.

  The only time they thought about other people was when they ran out of money and needed to come suck up to Grans to get some more.

  Which was likely the case this time and them coming home.

  That was usually how it went.

  “I don’t want to live somewhere that I lived with my parents,” I admitted. “It reminds me of how I was before…”

  She stayed silent as we processed those words.

  I didn’t often talk about my life before.

  It was easier to think about it not at all because it usually led to thinking about what happened after I moved out, and things usually spiraled from there.

  “Have you talked to anybody about it lately?” she asked softly.

  There was a moment of silence as I wondered how much I wanted to tell her, then I decided to hell with it.

  If I couldn’t talk to my grans, who could I talk to?

  Sierra.

  A secret voice inside my head always told me that I could trust her.

  The only problem was, I wasn’t sure that she wanted to hear all the fucked-up things that were rattling around in my head thanks to being held prisoner for such a long time.

  “I talked to Luca about it,” I admitted. “But since he doesn’t remember shit, it’s hard for him to commiserate.”

  “Luca’s lucky,” she stated. “You, not so much.”

  Luca was lucky he didn’t remember.

  Even if he had to relearn everyone he held dear in his life, even me.

  Not remembering would be a blessing right about now.

  Maybe then I could get some fucking sleep, and the demons wouldn’t plague me.

  My eyes once again strayed to the mirror as I watched the woman pull my grans’ lawnmower over to talk to another woman that was standing on the edge of the lawn.

  I couldn’t get a good look at the second woman, but the first?

  Holy shit.

  She had long, brown hair that was in a high ponytail on top of her head. Her body was fucking beautiful, and she was showing quite a bit of it off.

  She was wearing a pair of cutoff jean shorts, a black halter style bikini top, and cowboy boots.

  I almost wanted to turn the light bar on in the back of my truck so that I could get a better look at her.

  It was getting too dark to make out anything other than a few of her features.

  But what I saw, I liked.

  “Thanks for the ride.” Grans paused as she went to open her door. “You don’t see another dog out here, right?”

  I looked around and shook my head. “No. Why?”

  “Because the renter has a dog. I don’t want any fights between Bobo and her dog,” she said.

  I frowned hard. “Why did you allow someone to rent from you that has a dog?”

  This was sounding weirder and weirder. First, that she had a renter anyway—she’d been saying for years that she didn’t plan on ever renting the front half of the house out to anybody anytime soon. Then she’d gone and rented it to someone that had a dog when she knew that her dog didn’t get along with other dogs?

  “I just have a feeling about her.” She shrugged. “I’ll see you tomorrow, boy. Take care of yourself.” She paused halfway out of the truck and turned to look at me. “Talk to your friend. I know that you want to.”

  I rolled my eyes but she was correct. I did want to.

  The problem was that I didn’t think that Sierra, my pen pal from when I was younger, needed to hear about all the fucked-up shit in my brain.

  “I’ll talk to someone if I think I need to,” I said as I gestured to the door. “Get in there before Bobo beats you back.”

  Bobo had jumped over my grandmother’s lap and out of the truck before either of us could stop him.

  “You think I could beat him back?” she asked curiously.

  I rolled my eyes. “No. Because the dog is seventy-something years younger than you, has four legs, and can practically see in the dark. You, on the other hand, can’t. You’d wind up breaking your hip, and then I’d have to put you in an old folks’ home, and then where would you be?”

  She shuddered. “Your parents would probably think it was time to try to start hounding me for my money, thinking I was about to die.”

  “Love you, Grans,” I said. “Sleep well.”

  She turned to me and narrowed her eyes. “I love you, too, kid. Even when you piss me off.”

  I laughed. “Whatever. You know that I’m perfect.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I caught you pissing on my azaleas last week.”

  “I was watering them.” I grinned, unrepentant.

  “You were pissing on them,” she countered. “And next time I catch you doing that, I’ll do the same damn thing to your bushes. Only I’m a whole lot less circumspect. I imagine I’ll get arrested by one of your buddies for public indecency, then how embarrassed would you be?”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re evil,” I said.

  “I’m real,” she countered again as she slid all the way down onto the ground. “And if you happen to see my new renter, be nice to her. She seems like she’s in a really bad place right now. Plus, she’s in the medical field. If I happen to have a heart attack in the middle of the night while I’m watching my porn, there’s a very good possibility that she could help hold me to this world for long enough for the ambulance to get here.”

  I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. “You did not just say that.”

  “I did.” She cackled as she shut the door.

  I could hear her all the way up to her damn front porch.

  The shit.

  Backing out of the driveway once she was inside, for the first time in days
, my heart felt a little bit lighter.

  My grandmother was a fuckin’ miracle worker.

  That smile fell off my face as I drove past the woman on the lawnmower.

  At least there was that, though. She mowed the lawn and I didn’t have to. That would save me about two hours every fuckin’ week.

  But there was something about her—even though I could barely see her thanks to the ever-darkening night—that had me intrigued.

  Something magnetic.

  It wasn’t until I was all the way to the end of the driveway and heading back home that I realized I never even once glanced at the woman that was standing by her side.

  CHAPTER 6

  From the bottom of my heart, I seriously don’t give AF.

  -ballcap

  SIERRA

  Sierra,

  I killed someone today.

  Well, that someone happened to have a bomb strapped to his chest and he was headed toward a crowded area with kids, but still. I killed someone.

  I feel like an asshole.

  Even worse, I think he was just a kid.

  I refused to look too closely.

  I can now officially add ‘murderer’ to my resume.

  Do you think that’s something that you’re allowed to have on there?

  Gabriel

  • • •

  “Who the hell was that?” Hastings asked as she watched the large, lifted green truck pass by with such a slow acceleration that he might as well have just walked past my house.

  “That?” I shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “He just gave you the longest, most intense look I’ve ever seen. And I didn’t even see his face because of the window tint.” She grinned.

  Hastings was a romance novelist. She saw things that weren’t there.

  “Maybe it’s because I was mowing the lawn in a bikini,” I said. “In the dark.”

  She looked at my attire.

  “Why are you mowing your lawn in a bikini?” she wondered.

  I grimaced and looked down at it.

  “Well,” I said. “It was about eighty degrees when I started. Fucking November weather is fucking crazy. Plus, tight stuff on my body makes me want to vomit right now.”

  This whole being pregnant thing was super, duper weird.