Mess Me Up

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  Silence. Deathly so.

  I chanced a look at Rome and wished I hadn’t.

  Rome looked like I’d taken a bat to his stomach and beat him with it repeatedly.

  “And then there’s this last letter.” Chaz held it out to Rome.

  Rome looked at it like it was a ticking bomb, but ultimately reached out and took it with graceful swiftness.

  He didn’t hesitate to open it.

  His eyes quickly scanned the page, his shoulders drooping with each line he read.

  By the time he handed it over to me, I thought he was on the verge of tears.

  When I read the letter, I knew why.

  Dear Blitz’s New Owner,

  If you’re reading this, it means that the cancer won. I knew with this last round that I likely wasn’t going to make it. I’m not sure how I knew, it was just a gut feeling since the outlook on my recovery was fairly high.

  I’ll start with how I came to own Blitz.

  He was my grandfather’s tortoise, and the tortoise was handed down through each male generation in our family—or was supposed to be at least. I guess now that stops with me since I’m fifteen, and, well, I won’t be having any kids.

  Anyway, back on topic, my mom is a single parent. When I got Blitz, it was with the understanding that I would work to put food on the table for Blitz. However, now that I know that I’m not going to make it, I want to find him a proper home with a man who will enjoy seeing him as much as I did.

  I know Blitz isn’t the ideal pet, but I also realize that you’ve done your homework if you’re the person that Chaz has chosen, so I hope that you come to care for him like I do.

  He’s named after one of my grandpa’s favorite plays in football—which is also my favorite sport.

  If it’s at all possible, once you get Blitz at home and settled, would you take the time to send my mom an update on Blitz, tell her how he’s doing?

  I know she’ll appreciate it.

  I’ve listed her contact details on the back of this letter, as well as everything I know about Blitz and how he came to be.

  Take care of my heart, I’ve left it with you.

  Love,

  Sequin.

  I swallowed hard and refolded the letter precisely as it’d been folded before.

  “What do you think, Rome?” I asked softly.

  So softly that I didn’t think he’d heard me.

  He had.

  And when his eyes met mine, I knew that we’d be taking Blitz home.

  ***

  The tank was set up in the living room.

  We’d contemplated setting it up in Matias’ old room, but with the living room getting more traffic, we thought it’d be better for him to be out in the open where we could keep an eye on him.

  Rome had been very quiet since we’d put Blitz into his back seat. Not a word had been spoken since about a mile into our trip when he asked if I was hungry, and now the only time we’d spoken was when he asked where I thought the best place for him to go would be.

  Now the tank was set up, and Rome was sitting on the arm of the couch, staring at the tank.

  I kept looking at him with small glances here and there, wondering if he was about to blow up or kick me out of his house.

  He did neither.

  He sat there so long that I started to get uncomfortable standing, so I sat, too.

  In fact, it continued for over an hour, and I started to get really nervous.

  Then he just…broke.

  I heard the first sob leave his throat, and I rocketed up to my feet.

  I stared at Rome in horror.

  This big, huge man was crying like a child, and I’d done that to him.

  “Rome, God.” I hurried to him. “I’m so sorry!”

  I’d never meant to make him cry.

  In fact, if you’d asked me before this, I wasn’t sure that he could cry.

  I’d seen him do it once and only once, and that was on the day that Matias had passed away in his arms.

  All the other times that every single person was crying, he was dry-eyed.

  I never in a million years would’ve thought that I would’ve elicited this response out of him.

  “Rome.” I touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  Rome moved like a cobra, latching onto my arm before I could pull away and tugging me into his body.

  He held me tight like that, his head buried in my neck, as he cried.

  “I love you, Isadora,” he said between hitched breaths. “I don’t know what I did to deserve you in my life, but I’m thanking my lucky stars right now. I would’ve never had the courage to get that tortoise…but I’m happy that you did. You push me every day to be a man that Matias would be proud of, and I can never repay you. You’re making me remember my boy, and for that, I’ll always love you. You’ve brought me back from the brink, baby.”

  I felt things inside of me take off in a flourish of stars and sparks.

  “I love you, too, Rome Pierce,” I whispered into his hair. “And we’ve saved each other, baby. Don’t you forget it.”

  Rome looked up, his eyes were wet with his last tears, and I kissed them away.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  We hadn’t eaten at all today, and it was going on two in the afternoon.

  But before he could answer, his phone rang.

  Then my phone rang.

  Followed by a knock at the door.

  Rome frowned and got up to answer the door.

  I went for his phone since nobody but clients or my parents called mine.

  His phone flashed Bayou’s name across the screen, and I pressed answer just as Rome pulled open the door to his home and revealed Wade.

  “Shit’s gone down,” Wade said just as I answered, “Hello?”

  “Hey, honey,” Bayou murmured in his deep, Cajun drawl. “You okay?”

  I frowned as I looked at the door where Wade was pushing through without waiting for Rome to let him in. “I’m fine.”

  He heaved a sigh of relief. “Good.”

  “Why?” I questioned. “Is everything okay with you?”

  “Your brother heard some shit in the yard today about something, and I wanted to make sure that you were okay. I’d intended to ask Rome, though, and not worry you at all,” he said hesitantly.

  I rolled my eyes.

  That was such a man thing to say.

  “What did my brother hear?” I asked carefully.

  Rome took the phone from me before Bayou could likely deny me, and I was left staring at Rome’s chest as he rumbled about a meeting in an hour.

  I leaned forward and let my forehead rest against his chest as I tried to think of what my brother could have possibly heard, in jail of all places, about me.

  I had nothing to do with that kind of stuff…did I?

  Apparently, I was wrong, and I did.

  ***

  I stared blankly at Wade and Bayou, who were seated directly across the table from me.

  “Senator Antilles is what?”

  “Dead,” Wade repeated again.

  It was his fourth time to say it, after all.

  My eyes traveled over Wade’s hard, unyielding face, to Rome’s, then to Bayou’s.

  “You’re not joking.” I paused. “Do they think I had something to do with it?”

  Wade shook his head. “It happened about an hour before I came over to your place,” he explained. “And I’ll have to say where I got the photos from now. With a murder investigation pending, I don’t have the right to withhold that kind of information.”

  I looked down at my hands. “Rodrigo will know that I was involved.”

  “Rodrigo is the number one suspect,” Wade explained. “He will likely be under close scrutiny until he can be exonerated. He won’t hurt you.”

  I closed my eyes. “So, they arrested Rodrigo yesterday, he was released on bail today, and Senator Antil
les dies within two hours of him being released?”

  Wade nodded.

  I felt a headache coming on.

  “Did you find out who the other man was?” I asked.

  Wade nodded. “An associate of Rodrigo’s at his law firm.”

  My belly roiled at that news.

  “They wouldn’t have known it was me at all if Senator Antilles hadn’t been killed,” I whispered, feeling a bad sense of foreboding coming on. “You know he’s going to kill me, right?”

  Rome threw his arm over my shoulder and pulled me in close. “Over my dead body.”

  That was what I was afraid of.

  Chapter 16

  I don’t need someone that sees the good in me. I need someone that sees the bad in me and doesn’t give a fuck.

  -Rome’s secret thoughts

  Rome

  “Yo,” I said to the guard in C unit. “Do you mind opening the gate? I want to go talk to someone.”

  The guard, Corry Orman, opened the gate and shrugged. “They’re in the yard.”

  The yard was the area outside where the inmates went twice a day to get in their daily exercise. There was weight equipment, basketball goals, and a small running track. Most of the inmates worked out, but there were some who sat on their fat asses and watched all the other inmates doing what they did.

  Slate, Izzy’s brother, was one of the inmates who worked out.

  He was benching three hundred and fifty pounds—who knows if he could handle more since that was the heaviest weight that the prison supplied for the inmates—when I walked up to him.

  Nobody was spotting him, which wasn’t surprising.

  He’d been a cop, and nobody in the prison system liked cops except for the guards, other ex-cops—which there weren’t many of—and loners that would like anyone as long as it helped protect them.

  He clocked me the minute I came up to him.

  Racking his weight, he sat up, shirtless with sweat running down his chest, and stared at me with Izzy’s dark eyes.

  “What?” he asked.

  I offered him my hand. “My name is Rome. I’m dating your sister.”

  Slate blinked, staring at me blankly. Then reached out and took my hand.

  We were drawing attention from the other inmates. It wasn’t every day that a guard offered his hand to an inmate.

  But these were special circumstances.

  “You’re dating my sister,” Slate said blankly. “Which one?”

  He knew exactly which one since he only had one sister.

  Bayou had informed me that he’d heard rumblings of mine and Izzy’s relationship in the yard—how the hell they knew this shit was beyond me—and that he wasn’t very happy about it.

  Mostly because he’d also heard that there’d been a murder and that Izzy was involved in it. I just so happened to get tight with her right around the same time.

  Since Slate had no other way to investigate the problem, he’d made assumptions that I was the reason his sister was involved in whatever she was involved in instead of her finding trouble on her own, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

  But, being the nice person that I was, I’d decided to come in early for my shift to inform her brother about what was going on.

  I snorted. “From what I understand, Izzy is the only one. Unless y’all are hiding one from her that she doesn’t know about.”

  Slate’s mouth kicked up at the corner.

  “Yeah.” He grinned then, but it quickly fell off his face. “Is my sister okay?”

  I thought about that, then decided to fully explain everything, starting with how we met.

  I ended it with how she’d found the photos in Senator Antilles’s house.

  By the time I was finished explaining, his fists were clenched on his knees, and he was staring at me furiously.

  “She was supposed to live with me after she was injured. She hated being back with our parents,” he murmured, sounding sick to his stomach. “My fiancée and I had a pool house, and we were going to put her out there. Right before my fiancée was murdered, and I went off the rails, I introduced her to Rodrigo. I’d met the motherfucker during an investigation and thought he and Izzy would hit it off. Then I went down for murder, and I found out that he’d started abusing my sister. It was the worst feeling in the world to know that I couldn’t do a goddamn thing about it. My world was imploding all around me, and I could only sit there and witness it.”

  The idea of losing Izzy was something that made my breath stall in my chest. The idea of knowing that someone I loved was being abused, and I could do nothing to stop it was a special kind of torture. The idea of that person being Izzy set something inside of me on fire.

  I’d had to control myself when it came to her ex, Rodrigo.

  But the more that I learned about him, the more that I realized what an asshole he really was. I mean taking advantage of a woman who’d lost her child was bad enough, but abusing her on top of that? Yeah, that didn’t sit well with me.

  I clenched my own fists.

  “You and she make a good pair then, both of you knowing what it feels like to lose a child,” he murmured into my darkness.

  I blinked, seeing him staring at me with his own demons in his eyes.

  “Take care of her,” he ordered. “I don’t want to have to break out of this prison, it might make your friend the Warden look bad, but I’d do it to protect my sister.”

  I found myself grinning.

  “You think you could?” I questioned curiously.

  He nodded. “I know I could.”

  My lips twitched. “You ride?”

  His head tilted. “Motorcycles?”

  I nodded.

  “I had one before I moved into my new home.” He gestured to the world around him. “But I told Izzy to sell it to help pay for my mortgage.”

  Now was not the time to tell him that he most likely still owned that bike.

  But, I couldn’t let him think that his sister had not been struggling to make sure he had a life to return to when he got out.

  “Uhh, about that.”

  Chapter 17

  I’m a fucker upper. I fuck things up. That’s what I do.

  -Izzy to Rome

  Izzy

  Today was visitation day with Slate, and I couldn’t wait to go talk to him.

  I had so much I wanted to tell him, and it was like a bubbling pot inside my chest.

  My happiness about where I found myself was palpable.

  I’d even ran by my Abuela’s house and gotten a few of Slate’s favorite cookies.

  The guard usually allowed Slate to sit in the very corner, away from the farthest guard, meaning I might get a chance to slip him the cookies.

  If I did get the chance, then I’d give them to him.

  Usually they didn’t care. Most of the time it was the inmates around him that I had to be careful of since you weren’t allowed to give any prisoners food and drink.

  But, like I said, Slate was loved by the guards, and if I didn’t get a chance to give them to him during the visitation, then I’d slip the cookies to the guard, and they’d find a way to get it to him.

  Against the rules, but what-the-fuck-ever.

  “Good morning, ma’am,” the guard, Cosby Johnson, said. “How are you?”

  I grinned. “I’m great, Cosby. How’s the new baby?”

  Cosby grinned. “Little rascal is a whole forty-five pounds. When I got that Golden Retriever for my wife, I had no clue that he was going to grow so fast.”

  I snorted. “Goldens don’t get that big. But they do grow fast from what I understand.”

  Cosby skipped over the box of cookies, did a cursory glance in my purse, and then handed it back to me.

  I wasn’t sure why they even bothered at this point. I could’ve hidden any number of things in there, and he wouldn’t have found them.

  Again, that likely had a lot to do with
my brother.

  “Have a nice chat,” he said, waving me through the line.

  I smiled at him and moved out of the way for the next person to be checked—which was a lot more thoroughly than I had been—and headed for my usual seat.

  Once everyone was checked in, they’d bring the inmates in.

  Until then, I busied myself on my phone, studying up on my driving laws.

  Today I was getting a driving lesson.

  I wanted to make sure I was prepared.

  I was nervous as hell and, honestly, questioning whether or not this was the best idea.

  Maybe I was just not meant to drive. Maybe, if I drove, I’d have an accident and die.

  I was so focused on my thoughts that I hadn’t been paying attention to the inmates coming into the room until Slate dropped down in front of me, scaring the absolute crap out of me.

  “Boo!”

  Slate’s grinning face had me reeling.

  I screeched, then reached forward and punched him in the arm.

  “Slate, you bastard. You know I don’t like that!” I growled.

  Slate’s grin was unrepentant.

  “The last time you freaked out over nothing, you were pregnant,” he teased.

  He looked immediately sorry that he’d brought it up.

  I narrowed my eyes. “Shut up. And I’m not mad. You’re allowed to mention her.”

  His lips twitched. “Sit down and stop making a scene. You know how I hate the attention.”

  I rolled my eyes and started with my first bit of good news.

  “He’s going to teach me to drive.” I smiled. “And then, once I’m good at it, I’m going to go take the test.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “So... I heard that you’ve been paying my mortgage,” he drawled.

  I blinked innocently. “Isn’t that what I was supposed to do?”

  His eyes narrowed. “What you were supposed to do was sell my Harley, and then use that money to pay off my mortgage each month. I’ve heard that you’ve been paying my mortgage out of your own pocket.”

  I opened my mouth and closed it, suspicion filtering through my mind.

  “How do you know that?” I hedged.

  There was no use in lying. Slate always could tell when I was and didn’t hold any punches when he knew it.