Page 60 of Chaos

The headstamps match.

E & H 9MM 2036.

13 |Poison in your own backyard

FRANKIE

IWAKE UP FACE DOWN ON THE BEDfrom a sleep so deep it feels like my whole soul turned off.

Drool pools, sticky and thick, to my cheek and I wipe at it with my sleeve as I sit up, disoriented, my head pounding.

The suite is empty, the sky outside bold and wintry bright.

Yorke got shot.

Mitsy was there, touching him like she owned him.

I look down at my hands. I scrubbed them but some of it still sits under my fingernails.

He barely winced as Sheila stitched him up, but refused to let me go, just sat there, shirtless, in one of the chairs around the small table in the sitting room, his injured arm resting on the table, his other hand curled around my hip bone.

When I tried to move, he rested his heavy head against my sternum. “It was a weird night, Frankie,” he whispered, his breath hot on my skin. “Please stay.”

Sheila sent me a quelling glance and put me to work using gauze to blot at blood.

And later, after the boys and the dog went back to bed and it was just us. He pulled me in against his good side, my head settling into the nook of his shoulder.“Mmmmmad.”

And then he was out.

I’m mad.

I get it, even random and without explanation.

He’s mad at me.

I probably would be too if I were him.

Maybe if I’d made a different choice in the woods, everything would be different. But different can be better as much as it can be worse.

I lie in the bed now, in the quiet of the morning, wrap my hand around my necklace, so very glad to have it back around my neck, the sharp end of the archer or maybe the scorpion pinches into my palm, and it clears my head.

Someone turned a strobe light onto my life—the best it has to offer, interspersed with the worst—starving in a cellar, warm in a pool house, Shasta blind, Yorke plowing into me from behind, covered in blood, pregnant.

Maybe.

My head is aching.

A mug of now-cold coffee is waiting on the side table for me, along with a bag of trail mix, and a note with my name on top of it. Yorke’s handwriting spelling out my name.FRANKIE.

Auden’s at school. Beast is roaming. Shane’s with me in the armory or the war room.

I saw Sheila. She expects you for a check up on the concussion and infection.

Love

I press my hand against my belly.

Time to find out if you’re real.

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