Page 18 of Love the Way You Lion
“Itried, baby. I tried so fucking hard to help her get through this.”
She leans into my shoulder and sobs as my heart breaks again. We’re curled up in my wife’s favorite place to shut the world out: the closet. After we arrived at our home, I convinced her to sleep for two hours because the dark circles under her eyes were making her look like I had made her up for a zombie movie.
When she woke, I had planned to take her to hunt so she could refill her stores, but her phone rang. I cursed myself for leaving it where she could see who was calling because she felt duty-bound to answer Lily.
I won’t lie; I feel duty bound to kill the daisy and the fucking gnarly gnome.
Daisy thought she was doing the right thing by calling my wife. I know she felt as a leader that the minx had to know about things that affect the entire community. But as a friend, she should have known that my wife was in no place to deal with the full content ofthat conversation. So she repeated it all, and I could see the life drain out of my brave kitty’s face as she listened. It was like all the color in the world faded. I guess the gloomy weather that’s been hanging around since the writer kicked it doesn’t help that feeling because it’s been stormy, gray, and listless for days now.
My wife spoke with Lily for about thirty minutes and didn’t give her even a hint of the emotions I could feel swirling around our home like a maelstrom, and hung up with the calm of a pro. Then she stood up, walked over to the closet, and shut the door without a sound. I followed her and she broke down in a crumpled heap of tears and pain, shaking as she described the conversation. She hasn’t moved from that spot in five hours, nor has she stopped crying or repeating that blasted ‘ego feed’ line.
If there’s something in this world I could murder an entire population for and not care if they locked me up for the rest of all time in the Company cells,thatis one thing I’d do it for.
It devastated my poor wife. She’s broken and hell knows they abused her before she came to me, but now she’s lost three mates and maybe a fourth to this nightmare. I don’t know how she’s still functioning. I’ve seen what happens to clones that lose their mates in the field. Talia saved one for my brother.
Statistically, he’s not a blip on the radar compared to the number of agents deactivated when they lost their marbles.
I did everything a dutiful husbandshoulddo. I let her stay alone and deal with the loss of her mate. I let her decide when she’d had enough on her terms—albeit, accidentally, but it counts, right? I sat here and let her snot the grief from her loss—now that she can even attempt to deal with her own loss—and her betrayal all over me without so much as a whimper. But whether or not she likes it, I want answers.
I should be clear—I want them from the stumpy little nit that hasn’t told anyonewhythat knob was out in the rainy darkness. She also hasn’t explained how he went off the road and couldn’t get clear with clone reflexes and healing. No one has offered a reason we didn’t send him to the nearby Company triage center where the docs deal with shit like this all time and clones come at the better end. They sent him across a portal and risked his life by losing precious time.
Why?
Only the gnome saw the body. They said it was mangled from the wreck and surgery. He was cremated immediately. No one saw the remains of the car. Now she wants to fucking resurrect him with magick or voodoo or some shit, and it makes me wonder if they pulled the old switcheroo because I don’t know a legend in the Universe that resurrects beings from ashes. He’s not a goddamned phoenix.
I think they kept the body because she had this in mind. Either that, or he was never dead. Maybe he’s in hiding? I’ve put a Company team on it. Mikhail agreed that it’s too dangerous to have rogue elements performing dangerous ceremonies that we do not know about. Luckily, the git knew better than to cough and mention my wife or I would have used his guts for violin strings. My wee princess might be a virtuoso.
A father’s gotta plan, yeah?
I don’t trust the whole thing, haven’t from the beginning, and I’ll be damned if I will let my wife get dragged through the muck over and over by that scheming little goblin and her minions. What I’m looking at now is heartbreaking, and while she should be sad, it shouldn’t feel like the light in her soul is flickering to the nubs.
Closing my eyes, I contact Talia, knowing she’s with the long hair again. The two of them have been tight as cuffs on a terrorist, andit makes me happy to see their love growing despite this sadness. She lets me know that he’s doing better. She says he doesn’t talk about it much, needs a comforting touch or things I need not know about, but the melancholy seems to have faded much faster than she expected. Something about the way he’s handling it is tripping her wires—she thinks he was letting go long before the writer went splat, but he doesn’t talk about them with her.
Leaning on her is the best thing for both of them.
My primary says the rest of the looky-loo mourners have stopped coming to the house to find my wife. That’s good, because dragging her through their contrived grief until it rips off her Band-Aid is not part of my plan for the next few weeks. I would ask Lily to help her steer them away, but after today, I’ll be lucky if I don’t rip her head off. I’m not saying that she didn’t do my wife a solid by smacking the livingshitout of the gnome—Christ, do I envy herthatjoy—but she should have never shared the full details of that conversation.
Not now, never.
Sighing, I look down. Here she is, the mighty Queen of the Resistance, curled up in my lap. Tears streak her face and she’s a mess of tangles and snotty clothes. Her heart is breaking and I feel it as if it’s a visible object ripping into pieces in front of me.
“Why, love? Why would she hurt you like that?”
“I couldn’t go on the journey with her. I told her it was bullshit and evil and bad and I wouldn’t do it.”
“Good on you, love. You know enough about this stuff to have an informed opinion and she should listen, not destroy you over it.”
“She’s been destroying me for days. I see that now. She’s been breaking me down like a hostage. I couldn’t sleep because I won’t sleep in their room but only a lumpy couch; I couldn’t hunt, so myenergy intake was low; I couldn’t grieve because she needed me to be strong. She wanted me physically, emotionally, and spiritually weak, so I’d agree to this madness.”
I blink. I’ve not heard my wife talk about her mate in this way before, but she seems more familiar with the way someone would break down a detainee than I’m comfortable with. She hasn’t taken a single Company class yet. How does she know this?
“If she didn’t let you grieve, how did she get to your heart, my love?” I’m asking out of curiosity because I have to give Mikhail another briefing on her skill set if she knows how to Psy-Ops a subject in the field.
A shudder ripples through her and she doesn’t lift her head, unable to look at me. ~I wasn’t there. He would have never been driving to the portal to go visit people on the other side if I’d been around for him to spend time with. My neglect put him on the road. ~
I nearly explode. It takes everything in me to stay still and calm and harness my rage. This is horseshit. No one will admit he didn’tneedto see anyone at that hour or in that kind of weather. That snotty little midget is using her primary’s death to torture my wife because of me. I’ll rip her stubbly little limbs out of her sockets and pick my teeth with her bones. I’ll?—
“I think—I think it wouldn’t matter if I helped her or not; she’d still be mad. I can’t control rain or the roads or whatever. I don’t know why, but nothing I do is ever enough and I know she hurts. I hurt, too, but I can’t keep letting her beat me down and...”
