Page 23 of Slaughter
The words hit me like a punch to the gut.
No. No, that can’t be right.But even as I tried to deny it, logic crept in. Cold and merciless and impossible to ignore. Julie was dead. She had been dead for weeks. She wasn’t coming back. She couldn’t come back. And yet...
“I know what I felt,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. “I know she was with me.”
Shadow stepped closer, his hand coming to rest on my shoulder. “You need more time, brother. That’s all. You’re grieving. You’re hurting. And your mind is trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense. But Julie’s gone. She’s not coming back.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to scream at him, to tell him he was wrong, that he didn’t understand. But the words wouldn’tcome. Because deep down, in the part of my brain that still functioned on logic and reason, I knew he was right.
My Julie was dead. She had died giving birth to Aurora. She was buried in Tennessee, six feet under the ground, her body cold and still and gone. But God help me, I could still feel her. I could still smell her. I could still taste her on my lips. And I didn’t know how to reconcile those two truths.
“I need to go,” I said abruptly, pulling away from Shadow’s hand. “I need to get out of here. Clear my head.”
“Slaughter—”
“I can’t stay here,” I said, my voice rough with emotion. “I can’t... I can’t think straight. I need the road. I need to ride.”
Shadow studied me for a long moment, his dark eyes searching my face. Then he nodded slowly.
“Alright,” he said. “But you call me if you need anything. You hear me? Anything.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
I turned and walked back toward the house, my mind already racing ahead to the next step.Pack my shit. Get on my bike. Ride until the noise in my head quiets down.
Ride until I can breathe again.
The road stretched out before me like a ribbon of black asphalt cutting through the heart of America. I had been riding for days. Maybe a week, maybe more. Time had lost all meaning somewhere around the Oklahoma-Arkansas border, and I had stopped caring about things like clocks and calendars and where I was supposed to be.
All that mattered was the road. The wind in my face. The roar of the engine beneath me. The endless miles that stretched out inevery direction, promising escape, promising peace, promisingsomethingthat I couldn’t quite name. But no matter how far I rode, no matter how fast I pushed the bike, I couldn’t outrun the memory of that night.
It played on a loop in my mind, vivid and relentless.
The moonlight on the water. The scent of jasmine in the air. The way she appeared out of the darkness like a dream made flesh.
Julie.
My Julie.
She had come to me that night. I was sure of it. She had let me hold her, touch her, love her the way I had loved her since we were kids. And she had given herself to me. Willingly, completely, the way she had the very first time we had been together.
I remembered that night like it was yesterday.
We’d been seventeen. High school sweethearts sneaking away from a bonfire party to find some privacy in the back of my truck. She had been nervous, her hands trembling as she unbuttoned her shirt. But she had looked at me with those big brown eyes and told me she loved me, that she wanted this, that she wantedme. And I had made love to her as gently as I knew how, whispering promises against her skin, telling her I would love her forever, that I would never let her go.
I had kept that promise. I loved her every day of our lives together. I married her. I built a life with her. I had given her everything I had to give. And then she’d died. And I had been left with nothing but memories and a daughter I couldn’t bear to look at.
But that night at the pond...
That night, she had come back to me. I could still feel the way her body had fit against mine, soft and warm and perfect. I couldstill taste her lips, still hear the way she gasped my name as I moved inside her.
It had been real.
It had to be real.
Because if it wasn’t, if it had all been some whiskey-soaked hallucination, some cruel trick of my grief-addled mind, then I was losing it. I was going insane. And I couldn’t afford to go insane. Not when I had a daughter waiting for me back in Tennessee. Not when I had a club that needed me, brothers who depended on me.
But God, I wanted to believe it had been real. I wanted to believe that Julie had found a way to come back to me, even if it was just for one night. That she had forgiven me for failing her, for letting her die, for abandoning our daughter. I wanted to believe that somewhere, somehow, she was still with me.
