Chapter Twenty-One

January

" A re you sure you're going to be okay here on your own?" Mariah asks for the fifteenth time since she picked me up an hour ago. She nibbles on her bottom lip, clearly reluctant to leave me by myself. Not that I can blame her after how she found me last week, but I'm fine.

Okay, maybe that's a stretch. I'm still working through a lot of things. The medication the psychiatrist put me on is helping. So is talking to her. But something inside of me is broken and probably always will be. My mom and brother were murdered, and I'm finally trying to deal with the aftermath instead of simply ignoring it like it never happened. PTSD is the official diagnosis.

Frankly, it feels more like torture to me.

I've been seeing the shrink for the last week. I spent the first three days as an inpatient at a rehab facility so she could monitor me around the clock. She was too polite to call it suicide watch, but we both know that's what it was. I don't want to die, though. Not anymore. I want to find a way to live with my demons.

Once Dr. Jenner realized that I genuinely meant that and wasn't just feeding her a line to get myself out of there, she let me leave. I've spent the last few days going to group therapy and individual sessions during the day and crashing with Mariah at night, but I can't hide out forever.

It's time to come home and start figuring out how to do things on my own.

My stomach churns at the thought of being alone, but I fight through it. I'm strong enough to do this. I've been doing it for years. It feels different this time, though.

Perhaps because it is.

I used to get through every day by burying what I felt and refusing to even acknowledge what happened to Titan and my mom. I told myself they died. That was it. They simply died. It wasn't traumatic or awful. They were just gone. I said it over and over and over again. Every damn time I woke up screaming, that's the line I fed myself.

I got through the days being angry with Cade for leaving me here alone. That anger, as fucked up as it is to admit it, pushed me through the hardest days. So long as I had him to be angry with, I didn't have to face anything else. I could just be pissed that he left. I could be pissed that he broke his promise. I could focus on that and nothing else.

But I can't do that anymore.

I can't keep pushing it down.

I can't keep lying to myself.

I can't ignore the pain and grief.

I can't pretend I'm mad at him or that any of this is his fault.

I miss him so fucking much it hurts. Every damn day, I miss him a little bit more.

I know he's been calling Mariah two or three times a day to check on me. I begged her not to tell him anything, and she's kept that promise—not because I don't want him to know. But because I need to be the one to tell him where I've been and why.

He asked me when he first got home if I wanted to die. If I was trying to get myself killed. The truth is…that's precisely what I was doing. I didn't care if Kaleo killed me. It didn't matter so long as he didn't take anything else from me.

Cade gave me his truth, every devastating word. Even when it broke him, he spoke it.

It's my turn to give him mine, the whole ugly thing.

"I'll be fine," I tell Mariah, who's still watching me with wide, worried eyes as a massive black truck starts up the street. "I'm just going to settle in and get ready to go back to work on Monday."

I've been off for the last week and a half. Since I've never missed a day of work in my life, they were more than understanding when I told them I was ill and needed to take some time off. I didn't explain exactly what was going on. But I'm ready to go back. I miss my kids.

I feel someone's eyes on me as the truck draws near and turn in that direction.

My eyes lock with Cade's through the windshield, and my breath catches in my throat. He's seated in the passenger side of the truck, his gaze riveted to me like he can't look away.

I can't either.

Even with shadows clinging to him and ghosts dimming the vivid blue-gray of his eyes, he's so fucking beautiful. I think he tried hard to make himself something ugly—to make himself the monster he thinks he is. He covered himself in ink and scars as if they'd hide the way he hates himself. But every broken piece of him is fucking perfect to me.

Just seeing him again makes the last week and a half of stress—all those worries and doubts about whether I'm strong enough to face this—lie quietly for a minute. For the first time in a week, I feel like I can think through them, breathe through them.

Somehow, just being this close to him makes me feel braver, stronger…better. That's the thing about the two of us. We were always stronger together. From the time I was four, he was my world, and I was his. Not even the hell we've been through has changed that. He's my armor, and I'm his purpose. We're endgame. We've always been endgame.

I lift my hand to wave, but he yanks his gaze away from me suddenly. As soon as those steely eyes aren't focused on me, a shiver rolls through me and I feel brittle once more. Sadness floats through me, welling up from within my soul.

Does he think I don't want anything to do with him? Has he decided he doesn't want anything to do with me?

There's so much unsaid between us, things I couldn't say last week. I wish I could have explained, could have told him that I was drowning, but in that moment, I didn't want to be saved.

Is it too late to say them now?

"He loves you," Mariah whispers as if reading my mind. She reaches out to squeeze my fingers.

I bob my head in the semblance of a nod, fighting the urge to cry. She's right. I know she is. But I think Cade and I both have things we need to work through…things we need to face before we stand a chance of making this thing between us work.

And I do want to make it work. That hasn't changed, not once since I was a little girl. I've loved him through every important moment of my life. I'll keep on loving him through the rest of them.

But I need to focus on fixing me right now, so maybe it's a good thing he's keeping his distance. Maybe.

It still sucks, though.

"Are you sure you-?"

"Yes," I say before she can ask for the sixteenth time if I'm sure I'll be okay here. Even if it hurts, I will be okay. I know that now.

Eventually, Mariah caves and leaves me to my own devices, promising to call me later. I stand where I am, watching out of the corner of my eye when Cade hops out of his friend's truck and jogs up the steps toward Ma Lucia's house— his house. He keeps his head down, not looking in my direction.

Once he gets inside and the door closes behind him, I turn to look at the truck still idling on the curb. I frown when I notice the driver. He's big, like giant big, with dark hair and incredible hazel eyes. He's watching me, his eyes narrowed like he's deep in thought.

I've seen him around here before. He's been driving through the area for the last few years, keeping an eye on things, but I don't know who he is. A cop, I think. He certainly has that badass vibe to him like Cade does…like they're both more than capable of handling business.

Did Cade send him around to keep an eye on me?

The giant cop tips his head up in a nod, his lips curving up in an amused smile when my eyes narrow on him. I'm not even sure why I'm glaring at him. It's not like I don't appreciate him watching out for me or whatever he's been doing for longer than I honestly remember, but it would have been nice to know he was doing it.

He lifts two fingers in a wave and then pulls away.

I grab my overnight bag off the ground and head inside. The alarm beeps when I get inside and I have to drop my bag to disarm it. Cade never gave me the code, but he gave it to Mariah the night he sent her over here to check on me. I think it's supposed to be a random number—2793—but there's nothing random in what Cade does, so I'm sure it has some significance I don't yet understand.

Once the alarm is disarmed and the front door locked, I glance around the house. Everything is exactly where I left it…exactly where it's been for most of my life. Aside from replacing the television when it went out and the sofa when a piece of wire started poking through and jabbing me when I sat down, I've changed nothing.

Pictures of me, my mom, and Titan are scattered around shelves and hanging on the walls. Seeing them always makes my heart ache, but they also made me feel close to Titan and mom over the years…made me feel less alone.

I miss them so much.

Tears well in my eyes as my gaze tracks slowly over each photograph. A few tears slip down my cheeks, but I don't try to fight them off. I didn't cry for years. Even when we buried them, I didn't cry. I refused to let myself feel anything because I knew I wouldn't make it through the day if I acknowledged the abyss of grief waiting to swallow me whole. I've cried a lot since Cade came back into my life. Seeing him ripped off the blinders, allowing that grief and pain to start slipping out between cracks in the walls I erected.

For once, I don't mind them. They don't make me feel weak. They make me feel human.

"I saw Cade the day before yesterday," I tell Dr. Jenner early on Friday morning, curling my feet up underneath me in the oversized armchair in her office. The room seems less like a doctor's office and more like someone's living room. The walls are a dark wood. She doesn't have a desk, but sits in a turquoise armchair that matches mine. A white rug rests on the hardwood floor, giving the place a soft, welcoming feel. The only art on the wall is a colorful abstract painting of a black tree on a vivid backdrop. It's gorgeous.

"How did that go?" Dr. Jenner asks. Like me, she's got her feet curled up in the chair beneath her, her skirt tucked primly around her legs. With her grayish-black hair up in a ponytail and a pair of chunky glasses on her face, she reminds me more of a soccer mom than a psychiatrist. Her smile is kind and inviting, the crow's feet around her eyes making it apparent that she smiles a lot.

I genuinely like her. She's not judgmental and doesn't make me feel like crap no matter what awful thoughts and feelings I confess to her. She just listens quietly, letting me purge myself of all the painful things that have been brewing for far too long.

"I'm not sure," I confess, rubbing a finger across the soft fabric of the chair. "We were both getting home at the same time. He didn't say anything to me. He seemed tired, like he hasn't been sleeping."

"Have you been sleeping?"

"A little. Better since I got home." I thought being home would be harder, but it's honestly been more comforting than anything. "I like knowing he's close to me," I whisper. "Even if he's next door, I like knowing he's there."

"He hasn't been there in a long time."

I nod.

"You said he's a DEA agent. That must be tough for him."

"I think so. Tougher than he likes to admit." I bite my lip and glance up at her to find her watching me, her expression open. "He does it to punish himself for what happened to Titan and my mom."

"Maybe," she agrees and then cocks her head to the side. "Do you think it's possible he does it for another reason too?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, from what you've told me about him, he sounds like someone who cares a lot about what happens to people. He's been taking care of others his entire life. Do you think it's possible that his job isn't solely about punishing himself, but about protecting people too? He lost someone important to him. I just wonder if part of the reason he does what he does is to keep anyone else from going through the same thing."

"I've never thought about it that way," I admit, frowning. "I think you're right though. He says he isn't a hero, that he's a monster, but I think he became a cop to help people. After Titan and my mom…after they were murdered…" Saying that out loud still hurts. "He was so angry. The cops kept coming to ask him questions instead of looking for the guys who killed our family. He said they were too scared of life in the hood to spend any time in it."

"You said our family."

"Huh?"

"When you were talking about Titan and your mom, you said our family, not your family," she says like she's making an observation instead of asking a question.

"They're Cade's family, too," I answer anyway because it's true. Cade has always been part of our family. He was never just the boy next door to any of us. Titan was like a brother to him, and my mom adored him. He was as much one of us as me or Titan or my mom.

Dr. Jenner smiles at me and nods her head approvingly. "Do you think the police were too scared of the hood to do their jobs?"

I snort at the way she says hood like it's foreign to her. She doesn't like the connotations associated with the word, doesn't like the way it divides people. But that's exactly what life is like where I live.

We're seen as less than our neighbors in better communities. We're the people the rest of the world would like to forget—the ones treated more like a shameful secret than like people with hopes and dreams and feelings.

Most cops don't know what to do about gangs or MCs. People like that scare the crap out of most cops. So when they move into neighborhoods like ours, those of us who live there pay the price.

We don't matter. We never did. We're what people call an acceptable loss to most of society.

"Yeah," I say softly. "I think they were afraid. Titan was a mixed kid from the wrong side of the city. No one really cared what happened to him. They didn't want to get their hands dirty looking."

"You resent that."

"Hell yes, I resent it. My brother was an amazing person. He was funny and kind and so protective. He got mixed up with Kaleo to help me, not because he was a bad person. I hate that all they saw when they looked at him was another drug dealer. That's not who he was."

Even after Cade left, that's all LAPD saw. When they came around to ask me questions, it was clear they didn't want to be there and didn't much care about my mom or Titan. As far as they were concerned, he was part of the problem in neighborhoods like ours, and that was that. How could they seek justice when they thought it'd already been served?

Eventually, I got fed up the same way Cade did and told them not to come back anymore unless they were coming to tell me they knew who killed my family. They stopped coming after that.

About a year later, Detective Whitten came by campus to tell me that he believed the men who killed Titan and my mom were dead, and that they were closing the case. I'd already put the pieces together long before that and figured out Cade had found the Diablos responsible and killed them before disappearing.

"Cops are human too," Dr. Jenner reminds me. "They make mistakes and have fears just like the rest of us. It's entirely possible they were afraid to look too hard into what happened. But isn't it also possible they were doing the best they could with what they had?"

"Maybe," I say with a shrug, not convinced. Maybe they were doing the best they could. Maybe they just didn't care. At the end of the day, the results were the same. Cade took care of the problem when they couldn't or wouldn't. He's been taking care of problems every day since.

In my eyes, he will always be a hero. Maybe that's wrong. Maybe I shouldn't put him on a pedestal when he murdered three people. I don't know. But he will always be the one who cared enough about Titan to do something when no one else would. To me, that matters.

If killing them makes him a monster, then I guess I'm a monster too because I'm glad he did it. I just wish he'd taken Curtis Kaleo with them.

"It kills me that he blames himself for what happened when all he was trying to do was protect me, just like Titan was." I've thought about that a lot—about the fact that, had things gone differently, it might have been Cade who died that night.

I'm sure sometimes he wishes it had been him. That kills me too. I wish we could all go back and do it over. I'd be stronger, fight harder to defend myself. I'd have listened to Cade when he told me that he didn't want me being friends with Tony. Maybe changing that one decision would have put us all on a different path…one that didn't end with my mom and Titan dying in the street.

Maybe Cade would have made the same career choice. I don't know. What I do know is that I'm proud of him, and I'm so thankful he wasn't taken from me that night, too. He's still here. He's still alive. I wish like hell Titan and my mom were with us, too.

"I have homework for you this weekend," Dr. Jenner announces a few minutes later. "You told me about the necklace your brother gave you for your birthday before he died. I want you to take it out of the box in your closet. You don't have to open it. You don't have to wear it. Just take it out of the box."

"Why?"

"Because you need to face the things that scare you," she says frankly. "And seeing that necklace scares the shit out of you."

She's not wrong about that. I hid it in my closet the day after my birthday because I couldn't look at it without hurting. And then I couldn't look at it because I felt guilty.

"You need to remember that Titan didn't do what he did because of you, January. He did what he did because he loved you. You were his little sister. Your happiness meant the world to him. You can't blame yourself for him wanting to give you the world when you would have done the same thing for him."

"Okay," I whisper, licking my dry lips.

For once, the little voice that usually whispers that it was my fault is silent.

"You can do this," I coach myself, staring at the box in the back corner of my closet like it might bite me. I've avoided it all weekend, but my time is up. It's Sunday night and I have to follow through on this. I promised Dr. Jenner that I would take it out of the box. That's all I have to do. Take the box down from the closet and pull out the little jewelry box.

Five minutes later, I'm still standing there, staring at the box like it's full of spiders.

I can't do it alone. I'm not ready to do it alone. But maybe…maybe….

Before I can convince myself not to do it, I pace across my bedroom and pick up my cellphone. My hands shake as I dial. My heart pounds so hard it seems louder than the ringing of the phone.

"Baby girl?" Cade says on the second ring. "What's wrong? Are you okay?"

He sounds like he was sleeping, but the second I hear that deep voice, a wave of calm washes through me. My body responds. My core clenches at the sleepy, sexy sound of his voice. The tension in my muscles eases.

"I woke you up," I whisper.

"Don't give a fuck," he mumbles and shuffles around like he's sitting up. "What's wrong, little monster?"

"Nothing…I…" I'm not even sure where to begin. Maybe I shouldn't have called him, but I feel stronger when he's near and I really needed to hear his voice. "I just need you to talk to me for a little while, okay?"

"You sure you're okay?" Worry laces his voice, making it clear he doesn't believe me.

"I'm working on it," I admit instead of lying to him. "I'm…I'm seeing someone."

A pained sound comes down the line, an agonized growl that breaks my heart in half.

"A therapist," I hurry to add, hating that he thinks I meant another guy. "I'm seeing a therapist. Trying to work through some of my issues." Before I lose the nerve, I hurry back to the closet and yank the box down. Juggling the phone between my ear and my shoulder, I fish around for a second before my hand closes over the little square jewelry box.

"That's good," Cade rasps. "I'm so fucking sorry, baby girl. There are so many things I wish I could do differently. If I could bring them back for you, I would. I'd take their place in a second to give you back your family."

"They're your family too," I whisper, holding the box tightly in my hand as my chest aches. He sounds so broken, so lost. "I don't want you to take their place, Cade. I never wanted that. I would never want that. I'm…I'm glad I didn't lose you too."

"January," he groans.

"I don't blame you," I whisper, thrusting the larger box back inside the closet before making my way over to the bed. I tug open the drawer on my nightstand, determined to put the necklace inside…but I don't. Instead, I sit on the bed and cross my legs before placing it in front of me. The box still looks brand new.

"Titan made his own choices, Cade. You weren't responsible for them and I don't blame you for what happened. I was hurting the day I told you it was your fault, but I didn't mean it. I wish…I wish you would have told me the truth back then. I wish you hadn't carried that weight by yourself for so long. There's a lot of stuff I wish for, but I don't wish you were dead instead of Titan."

"Fuck," Cade says, exhaling a shuddering breath.

I pull the top off the box. The little pendant is nestled inside, still as brand new as the box. It hasn't dulled or faded at all over the years. Tears spring to my eyes at the sight, but I smile too. My brother was a lot of things. Maybe I'll never fully understand what happened or why, but the one thing that never changed was how much he wanted to see me happy. How much he loved me. And how much he loved Cade.

"I miss you," I whisper, not sure if I'm talking to Titan or to Cade. Both, I think.

Cade groans wordlessly. "I miss you too, baby girl. So goddamn much, but I've been trying to be good and give you space. I'm about to lose my fucking mind trying, but I am trying." He exhales another breath. "Now that I've had you in my arms again, I don't know how the fuck I'm supposed to sleep without you in them."

"I don't want space."

"Yeah?" His voice drops low, half hopeful question, half male growl.

"There's a lot you don't know. A lot I want to tell you," I whisper, running my finger over the engraving on the pendant in my hands.

"You can tell me anything, January."

"I know. It's just...It's overwhelming, you know?"

"Yeah, I get that."

I exhale a breath. "Cade, I've been–"

A floorboard creaks in the living room.

"Cade!" I laugh, happiness bubbling up from my soul. He's always been fast as hell, but that was insanely fast. "Did you seriously just run over here?"

"What?"

"I just told you that I don't want space, and now you're in my living room," I say, laughing again. "You could have walked."

"January, fuck, baby girl. I'm not in your house." The terror in his voice is overwhelming. It sends my heart slamming against my ribcage as fear shoots through me.

"Cade," I whimper, suddenly terrified.

Another floorboard creaks, closer than before.

"Hide, baby girl," he orders, and I can hear him moving.

"Please hurry," I beg him, jumping up from the bed and rushing toward the closet with Titan's pendant still clutched in my hand.

"I love you. I'm coming for you," Cade promises me. "Hide."