Page 78 of Cognac Secrets

Sometimes, things were just meant to go down the way they were meant to go down – but I’d run so fast and so hard and had worked so incredibly hard to heal and build this little life of mine that I loved so much with good friends and good food, with laughter and light, and dancing and all the things that made me feel alive and free and all of those things would be pried out of my cold, dead, bloody knuckled hands because I wouldn’t go down easily.

To that end, I stood my ground and started that fight now by telling Bennieeverythingthat he wanted to know and answering every question diligently between customers.

“Let me take you by your place so you can feed and love on the cats and then let me take you to mine, tonight,” he said around lunch time after typing in the last of his notes.

When he’d handed me back my phone it’d been with some kind of tracker app installed, open, and waiting for my information to start a new account – which I’d done.

I actually quite liked the idea of Bennie knowing where I was at all times, and he said that it went both ways but to not ask questions if he ever shut off his phone or the app had him sitting in the same place at home or the club for hours.

“I don’t want to know,” I said softly. “I already know all I need to know.”

He smiled at me then.

“Good girl,” he said hooking a hand behind my neck and pulling my forehead to his lips across the counter.

“God, why does that warm me all the way to my toes?” I asked.

“Because it should?” he asked and I snorted and laughed.

“Now about tonight…”

“Say less,” I told him. “You know when I get off.”

He smiled and it held that edge of dark humor.

“Oh, I know exactly when you get off. Your face doesn’t hide a thing from me.”

I felt myself blush to the roots of my hair and I smacked him lightly on the arm.

“Shut up!” I cried and he laughed too and it was strangely… normal in a world that felt crazy and abnormal. Like it’d broken and the pieces fit perfectly but for some reason someone had glued them back together not completely lined up. Like everything was just horribly askew to where it was uncomfortable to look at and to feel. To run your fingertips over the rim of the world and feel that jagged bump where nothing lined up right anymore.

It felt like these moments of joy that we found and poured into the cup that was our world were short-lived due to the imperfect repair. That we poured them in and slowly watched in horror as the waterline dipped and the cup drained, all for that misaligned crack, that missing piece… the one in the shape of Louie but also in my missing childhood that should have been but wasn’t.

Grief was a funny thing.

CHAPTERTWENTY-THREE

Bennie…

As the secretary of the Voodoo Bastards MC, it fell to me to deal with the funeral arrangements for Louie. I’d spent the early morning as soon as places opened up on the phone coordinating and getting things as handled as I could. One of the funeral homes of the city was to pick him up when his body was released.

He didn’t have family. He didn’t have next of kin. So, it fell to me to make all the decisions.

New Orleans didn’t have cemeteries in the traditional sense of the word. The water table was too high to bury folks in the ground. First good rain and the coffins would come bobbing up to the surface from the trapped air inside and the Parishes would have a hell of a time figuring out who went where to get ‘em back to what was supposed to be their eternal resting place.

What NOLA and the surrounding areadidhave going for it was the unrelenting southern heat, which made the traditional oven tombs of the city the answer.

You opened one of them bitches up, put a body in, sealed it, and by a year later the poor fucker would just be a pile of bones. Someone else in the family died, you opened her back up, took a long stick with a board across it, and just shoved the prior occupant’s bones to the open slot in the back. Bones would fall through into the pile on down in the space underneath, and bam! Tomb was ready for its next occupant.

The thing about the cities of the dead around here, was most if not all of them were spoken for. You had to beoldNOLA family or rich as fuck to have a new one built to be able to utilize one, and so for the city’s poor and indigent that left only one real option… cremation.

Honestly, that suited all of us remaining brothers just fine. We would much rather have Louie home and at the club with us, than anywhere else… and so the arrangements had been made. Our brother would be cremated, his remains given back to LaCroix who was the official signer off on all this and the official man to pay for all the expenses – likewise on paper.

Cremation was the cheapest option, but by no means was itcheap. Death never was, honestly.

Hex had offered to do everything, but I’d shook my head. I’d seen Louie out. I would take care of him after death. It felt like the absolute least I could do for failing to keep him alive.

Yeah, I knew there wasn’t much hope of that, his main arteries in his neck had been severed and there really wasn’t no coming back from having your blood supply to your brain interrupted so spectacularly. Even if we had staunched the bleeding and he’d gotten to a hospital, brain death is a thing and probably would have been in Louie’s case.

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