The Way Home (Lights of Peril) Read online

  -ME-

  I’m staying with Mace. You can come by, she’s not here right now, and I have the boys.

  I’ve been messing about the house all morning, and I look slightly better than death warmed over, so I would rather he not see me like this. Before I can make my way to my room, I hear the knock.

  You’re kidding me? Was he in the damn driveway when he texted me? Fine. Whatever. I look like Medusa, but he’s seen me look worse, I’m sure.

  “Hi.” He looks tired, stressed, and I can smell whiskey on him. It’s only one o’clock in the afternoon and I can smell whiskey. This can’t be good.

  “Hello, Ace. You alright?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Sadey, I need to talk to you and I need you to listen. In about ten minutes, your life is going to change, radically. I need you to hear me out and remember that I love you. I would do anything for you. You believe that, right?”

  “Ace, please. You’re scaring me. What have you done?”

  “Sadey bug ... Just please, listen.”

  “Would you come in here? I’m thinking we probably don’t need to have this conversation on the porch.” He gives me a puzzled look and I can tell he’s reliving our sexcapade that happened not just a couple of weeks before.

  After he looks around outside the door, checking the perimeter of Shame’s house, he makes his way in and goes right to Shame’s reclining chair, as far away from me as he can get.

  I’m getting ready to find out what the hell is going on and it’s about damn time. No way can he be acting this insane only because he’s married. He takes a big breath and hits me with news that I never would have seen coming.

  “You already know why Hem gave himself to Warren. He did it for all of you, because Warren threatened to take everyone that Hem loved away from him and it wasn’t going to be humane or gentle. You knew all that, right?”

  I don’t like remembering this, but I need to stay calm and collected or Ace won’t let me have the truth. “Why are we re-living all of this? I can hardly think about, let alone talk, about it.”

  “Sadey, let me get this out. Before Warren met Hem that night, he set up a contract.”

  “Contract?”

  A person hires someone to finish a job for money. Bug, I’m talking about someone to hurt you, Mace, Shame, the babies ... everyone. Someone to ruin Hem’s life in the event that Warren died during his vengeance on Hem.”

  “I don’t understand, though. Why? Warren is dead, Hem is dead, and the purpose has been served. Are you telling me someone is still coming after me? Someone has been in my house, Ace. Someone also knocked on my door asking about me and where I was. They talked to Cherry. Scar face came by and accosted me, there at my house while Patrick slept not fifteen feet from the front door. Someone has been lurking around and leaving Shame on edge. Are you telling me that this someone is coming after my son?” I want to be sick. This news, it’s too much.

  “You need to talk to Shame.”

  “Shame isn’t here and he won’t talk me. Please, Ace, you have to tell me everything. I’m scared for Patrick and what about Ryder? Warren is dead… I don’t understand.” I feel my heart beating in my chest. I never, ever, would have thought that a stranger, out for hire, would want me and my family dead. What the hell is the point?

  “Look, I’ve told you enough. Hell, I’ve told you too much. There are things I haven’t, but that’s for Shame. He’s on his way back now. He has all the answers. When he gets back, Sade, you will have all of yours. I promise. Just know that I’m sorry, okay? I love you. I would have never hurt you on purpose. I swear it. You have to believe that.”

  “What are you talking about? Why would you hurt me? I don’t get it. Wait! Ace, is the contract person that scar-face man who came asking if I was Hem’s woman? The other one who was here, the man that Warren gave Mace to the night Mace was taken by Greyson.”

  “No, believe it or not. He’s actually helping find the person that’s doing this. That’s Risk. He hated Warren after Warren and Greyson killed Switch, then ran that club to the ground, serving their own purpose getting rid of Hem. Hood and Risk are tight, always were, until Hood left the gang after what Greyson did to Cherry. He couldn’t stomach it. He knew it was fucked.”

  “So, why was he here then? He wasn’t nice about it, he was scary.”

  “Sadey, please. Just wait a little longer. Your answers are coming, baby.”

  Ace stands up and walks to me, I’m still standing near the front door in shock. All this information that I’ve begged for hasn’t helped me piece anything together. I don’t get what I’m supposed to be waiting for.

  I feel Ace’s body close to mine. He’s warm to the touch and he’s shaking. The palm of his hand moves to my chin and his fingers brush my face as he moves my hair behind my ear, then runs his fingertips across my temple. This is how Ace always tries to calm me and I’m transported to when I was in the hospital. I’m not going to refuse him this, since it appears to be calming him as well.

  Not long after we get comfortable with each other again, I hear a car door outside. Mace is home. She won’t like that Ace is here and inside the house. Shame doesn’t mind Ace watching over us, but Ace being here and around the boys… this will piss him off. Ace needs to get packin’.

  In all my fear I had forgotten I locked the front door out of habit. I move my hands to the door handle and just before I open it, Ace stops me by grabbing my waist and pulling me to him. He says nothing more than, “Sade bug, I love you.”

  What the hell is wrong with him?

  I open the door and it definitely isn’t who I thought it was. It’s Shame, and God, he looks broken, devastated, and so sorry.

  Before I can ask what happened to him, he looks into my eyes and says to me, with a purpose I still don’t understand, “It’s alright now. You’re going to be alright, buddy. Just Hold … The ... Fuck … On.”

  Then it comes together for me; the person I’ve pleaded for, the voice I’ve yearned to hear in the quiet of the night, and the face I’ve only seen in my dreams for the last six months.

  “Sadey girl?”

  Oh my God.

  Point three seconds. That’s all it takes for me to push Shame out of my way and look beyond his rigid and haggard body, to my Hem.

  I’m so caught up in this moment, this moment I never could have imagined, that there is no hesitation to run to him, nearly knocking him off his feet from where he stands. I refuse to smile for fear the movement of my face might awaken me from a dream, but inside I’m bursting with life again. My arms are around his neck and he’s holding me so tightly to him I have to make a conscious effort to breathe. It’s too much to comprehend that this could even be real.

  I’m crying big, heavy tears into his chest. I’m pulling him to me and I can’t get him close enough. I can smell him. I remember the smell of his neck and I can hear his heart beating in my ear in familiar rhythm.

  God, if you’re listening to me and you’re watching this, please, I’m begging you to make this not a lie. Please, don’t have me believe he’s here, then take him away during the night like he has so many times before, making it so when I wake up, I’m alone.

  Hem is crying. I can feel him make sudden movements as I hold him. He’s sobbing in my hair, his deep, heavy breaths making it impossible to hide it. He’s running his hand over my head and neck, whispering to me like he always had, “My girl. My sweet, sweet, Sadey girl. I’ve missed you. I love you, I never thought…”

  He can’t say anymore, his tears and sobs having overtaken his ability to use his words. Once broken, the poet’s heart is left with no way to articulate thought.

  Shame is clearing his throat behind me and I can hear him shift back and forth on his feet. The rocks under his boots make biting noises as they grind under his weight. He’s fighting to stay strong and not break. He has to be as affected by this as I am.

  I don’t want to move out of these arms. These are the
only arms to have and hold me, and until this moment, I never realized exactly how close I was to truly losing my mind…, but with Hem’s presence, I’m calm. I’m not suffocating. I’m not hearing things that aren’t there. The darkness I’ve walked in, it’s been lifted and there is light ... and it is good. More than good, it is glorious. It dawns on me this moment that there is witness. If Shame sees Hem, this isn’t a lie. I’m alive and I’m awake. I never want to sleep again.

  Shame and Ace walk into the house and I hear Shame say to Hem, even though my back is to him, “Brother you need to hurry this along. Not good you sittin’ outside like this. Sure not good, you doin’ it with my girl in your arms.”

  Hem flinches, but doesn’t let me go. I heard the reference Shame made to Hem regarding me being his. I don’t understand it, but I heard it, nonetheless.

  With Shame’s words I begin to digest what is in front of me. I want to refuse reality from coming in and ruining this, but Shame is upset… and he’s anxious. None of this spells ‘good.’

  I take a moment to question how in the hell Hem is really here, in front of me, living and breathing. I don’t understand it, and although I feel fortunate to even have this chance to hold him again, I’m overwhelmed with grief at the same time. Where in the hell did he come from? Furthermore, why did he ever leave?

  Chapter Thirteen

  ''That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best—make it all up—but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.''

  --Ernest Hemingway

  Once Hem lets me go, I am able to get a better look at him. He wipes my tears and attempts to clean my face, but I’m not interested in that, so I push his hand away. I want to look at him. His face is worn with worry, his clothes are tattered and torn, and he’s lost a bit of his build. It’s my Hem though, my Hem is really here.

  Once we make it into the house, my mind catches up to my heart and my thoughts start to come together. “Hem?”

  I can’t move. Shame is standing next to him and he’s staring at me with a look of unease. Ace has moved to my side. I think he’s expecting me to faint from shock. I slowly start to realize that no-one here with me, not one person, looks at all shocked.

  “Sugar, you don’t look good. I want you to sit down.” His first formal words to me are that, and it pisses me the hell off.

  I didn’t expect it, but I’m angry and confused with the situation. I’m angry at not having any answers and confused by how I feel. Reality is hitting me and my mind is racing with thoughts of being abandoned.

  How many emotions can a person experience at once before they finally break?

  “Sit down? You want me to sit down? Are you kidding me?”

  I look to our audience, who stand around us like silent soldiers, waiting for the war to start. “Shame? Ace? You seem to be handling everything quite well. Why don’t you two need to ‘sit down’? Hem, you’re dead. You’re dead because I buried you. You’re dead because I’ve waited for you to come back to me and you didn’t. You’re also dead because I finally let you go!”

  I hit him with my words. At this point, I’m unsure what would be worse; living with the fact he’s here now, alive and uninjured, or waking from this sleep to find him still dead. I’m in a free-fall and I can’t stop everything from spinning.

  I look directly at Shame. He’s been my anchor through the loss of Hem. I need him to be my anchor in this moment and tell me the truth. “Shame, is he here? Is this happening?”

  Before I can ask another question through my shock, I’m moved back, gently clutched by my shoulders. Shame is pushing me away from the front door and into the house. His grip is taut. It’s telling me that I’m not looking steady.

  “Come on. Let’s go check on the kids.” Shame’s unsaid translation; you need a minute to grasp this and I’m giving you an out, so take it, woman.

  “Wait! What about Hem? What is happening?”

  I’ve held it together long enough. The last two minutes of my life has just flipped my entire world upside-down and I can’t understand anything in front of me.

  “Shame, where’s Mace? Oh God. Shame, someone has to talk to her, she can’t just walk in here with him sitting there in her living room.”

  He continues to just push me down the hall and I struggle against his hold to get another look at Hem, who is still standing in the doorway looking at me as I lose my shit. He only stares in silence. Ace’s head is hanging down and I’m realizing that he has been a large part of this.

  “Keep walking, Sadey, one foot in front of the other. Keep your shit together so I can explain some of this to you before you have time to process with emotion and freak the fuck out trying to process all these emotions.” He’s so calm. Apparently he’s had a while to come to terms with this development that is so sudden to me

  “Mace knows too, doesn’t she? That’s why she’s not here.”

  He doesn’t respond to me as he moves me further down the hall and into my room. Patrick is sleeping in his crib next to my bed. I go to him, touch his face and I openly burst into sobs. I drop to my knees and let emotions take me over the edge I had been balancing on the last seven months.

  “Sadey, sweetheart, you’re alright.” Shame has his hand on my back and is trying to coax me through this. “Mace knows. She saw Hem this morning. We got back and…”

  “Back? Back from where? You went to get him, didn’t you? He’s been in California this whole time and you knew. Ace knew, you knew, Hem knew. Oh my God, Hood knew. I heard Hood and Gunner. Even Gunner knew what was happening.”

  Shame nods, telling me that my observations are correct and that I’m the last to know the breaking truth. Of course I am, I’m just the widow of the said dead man.

  “Honey, this is going to hurt you. I need you to look at me and tell me you can handle this.”

  “No, Shame. I cannot ‘handle this’. You can talk and I will attempt to listen, but I am in no means ‘handling this.’”

  Both his hands move to my face, wiping my cheeks and nose clean. I feel his hands and arms shaking and it doesn’t help my nerves. My stomach is turning and I can’t register what he’s telling me as I lean into my bedroom trash can and expel all the contents within my stomach.

  “Fuck! Knew this was going to be hard on you, buddy. There was no good way to tell you, so we decided after we found him to just bring him here so you could see him with your own eyes.”

  “We? Who the fuck is ‘we’, Shame? Do you know what that man means to me? Oh God, Shame, he’s everything to me. I want to go out there. I want to keep seeing him while my eyes are open. If this isn’t a dream, then you have to let me do that.”

  “I can’t. You’re going to listen. You need to hear this. This doesn’t mean that everything is simply ‘okay’ again. Hem being alive, it has caused some unfortunate complications.”

  “No, I can’t do this without him, please. I won’t hear what you’re saying until I see him. Please, Shame, for me. I need to see him now.”

  Shame is pissed, albeit he has a right to be, but this is something that I can only go through with Hem. I can’t get up on my own, Shame is helping me to my feet and is accepting that I need to see Hem while he talks to me.

  We make our way back out to Shame’s living room; Hem is sitting on the couch with this head hung and his elbows are on his knees with this hands in his hair, studying his boots, and even though he hears Shame and I come into the room, he remains still.

  “Where’s Ace?” I want to know where my ‘friend’ went.

  I haven’t had time to process much, but I realize now that even though Ace knew about all of this, it never stopped him from trying to make me his, again and again, body and soul. I reach the outer realms of lividity and have nowhere to aim or target.

  “Gone, back to California with that fuckin’ witch of his.” That’s all Hem says. He never chances a look at me, still contemplating the floor.

  “Well, shit! I didn’t get to kiss him goodbye.�
��

  Wow! Where the hell did that come from? I’m pissed, but that was wrong. Shame tenses and glares at me like I’ve lost my ever-lovin’ mind. He’s right…someone better talk my ass down. This is fucked up. Where the hell is Mace?

  “Sadey, sit. Sit with me.”

  Shame has positioned himself on the recliner where Ace had found himself not just fifteen minutes before my life detonated after lighting the fuse, then stepping back to watch it explode.

  I walk to Shame and, as I do, I hear a gruff sound from Hem. I don’t look at him. I just go to Shame and sit beside him, nestled to this side of the chair.

  As Shame starts to talk, Hem still says nothing. I can hear Shame in my ear, but my eyes won’t leave my husband. My husband; the one I buried.

  “I know you’re shocked, pissed, upset, and confused, so I’m going to tell you what I know. Hem knows more than anyone, but I want to stay here awhile and get some shit out. Then I can go, if you want, and leave you two to talk, okay?”

  Still not taking my eyes from a very shattered looking Hem, I just nod. I can feel Shame beside me, pulling me closer. He’s trying to get me to focus on his words.

  “Hood found Hem that night, you knew this. Before I got there, Warren had already beaten Hem. It wasn’t good, sweetie. He was taking his time on Hem, thinking he had time to punish him in spades. He had years of anger to work out on him. Hood had told me Hem was already dead once I finally got there. I never questioned how Hood had known what was going down that night. I just wanted to kill Warren thinking he had killed my best friend. I assumed I just got there too late. Turns out that Risk had heard the entire phone conversation between Hem and Warren the day before. They interceded only after Hem had already been there awhile.”