34. Leonor

34

LEONOR

TWO AND A HALF MONTHS LATER

“ I just need to get some air.”

Lucky eyes me skeptically, his brow raised as he looks between me and the front of the hardware store but he doesn’t say anything.

He doesn’t have to.

The expression on Lucky’s face speaks volumes and while I understand where he’s coming from, I’d like to think he knows that I’m in an entirely different headspace than I was a few months ago.

I get it, I really do.

My beautiful giant struggled so much with what happened, with finding me the way he did twice in one lifetime. His feelings are beyond valid and it breaks my fucking heart but there’s a fine line we’ve been treading and one of us needs to step over it.

Because I meant every word I said the night I decided to stop living in fear and letting old ghosts or new demons dictate the way I live my life.

Does that mean I’m not scared, that I’m throwing caution to the wind and getting reckless? Absolutely not. Everything that happened, losing Pierre, it nearly broke me and I’m not going to forget that. I can’t. But I’m not going to let it rule every thought and action anymore.

Having my boys back, being with all four of them the way I am, playing music and making plans, it’s all too precious, too important and beautiful to allow that.

It’s been hard.

I still have trauma; my nightmares have increased and my anxiety has definitely gotten more difficult to manage but I’m working every goddamn day to get a handle on both.

Part of that has been reclaiming some level of normalcy while most aspects of my life are still flipped upside down.

Justine is still overseas, our building is still in shambles which means we’re still living in a hotel. My stalker has all but disappeared save for the odd rose or note, and while that’s been a nice reprieve, I know we haven’t heard the last of him. I’m assuming he needed a break after making such a scene at the Bissonnette property, it’s been crawling with cops day and night since they took Pierre and I from the cemetery so that fucker is probably keeping a low profile. I’m not working at the mansion anymore, though. I can’t stomach the idea, I can barely think of that property without getting physically ill and having some of the worst flashbacks I have ever had, but I also quit because the men in my life won’t let me get within 10,000 feet of the driveway.

That’s probably been the biggest thing, navigating the events a few months ago and how they impacted all of us with my boys this time around.

It’s been good for us, I know that.

We each handled it so differently, some better than others and while we’re still working on it because that shit doesn’t just go away, progress has been made.

Mostly .

“Lucky, my love,” I say as I reach up and loop my arms around his neck. “I love you so fucking much.”

“I know.” He eyes me again, even as I push up on my toes and kiss him. “I love you just as much, baby cakes.”

Hugging him hard, I smile as he wraps his arms around me, burying his face in my neck as he holds me tight.

Lucius has by far struggled the most with everything, harboring the most guilt and turning on himself because he feels like he didn’t do enough to keep me safe.

It kills me that he feels this way, it completely guts me.

I’m pretty sure it makes me a hypocrite for trying so hard to get him to stop feeling that way, though. That’s all he wanted from me for three fucking years and even when I let them back into my life, Lucky handled me with kid gloves until he couldn’t anymore. I truly am not worthy of Lucius’ friendship let alone his unconditional love and devotion, and I sure as hell don’t deserve the rest of my boys either. Not back then and most definitely not now but I’m trying. I’m trying so hard to be the person the four of them fell in love with, the woman who is deserving of everything they give her. I’m just doing a terrible job because I don’t know how to be a grownup adult human handling my shit in a healthy, nontoxic way.

But I do know that everything that’s happened couldn’t have been stopped.

If I’ve learned anything after thirty four years of bullshit it’s that the bullshit is going to happen no matter what else is going on. Everything that took place almost four years ago, what went down nearly six months ago, hell, the way I wandered through life before I met my soulmates, all of it was going to happen no matter what I did and it was never within anyone’s control.

All I can do is love my boys with everything I am, be the best daughter to Justine I can be, play fucking beautiful music, and refuse to let the bullshit and trauma keep me from doing any of that ever again.

And I need my beautiful friend, my gentle giant on the same page or this isn’t going to work.

Because the trauma isn’t going away.

My experiences, the shit I waded through every goddamn day, the various ways it fucked me up? None of that is going away but it’s up to me to decide how I allow it to affect my life moving forward. It doesn’t change the way it hurts or the impact it’s made on me, but I can change the end result.

And I’m fucking determined to do that.

Getting Lucky on board with it has been the challenging part but he’s coming around.

It helps to have the other guys in my corner on this, too. Not that we’re ganging up on Lucius or blowing off his feelings. Far from it actually because the things I’m doing to try to take my life back, he’s been an active participant in every step of the way.

Hence this impromptu trip into town he unknowingly coordinated.

I mentioned that we were getting low on mouthwash and bleach, Pete mumbled about how he was starving—he’s not—because we don’t have any food—we do—and all of the sudden Lucius was pushing all of us into the elevator.

Going everywhere as a unit wasn’t exactly my plan but it happened today and while Mark is a few doors down putting in another grocery order, and Pete and Norm are across the street getting more bedding and stuff to make my gentle giant feel more at home in the hotel, Lucky and I have been waiting patiently at the hardware store to order another pallet of the bleach he likes. All totally normal things we used to do that I absolutely took for granted before and appreciate so much more now.

Even if I’m practically crawling out of my skin just to get out of this super crowded store.

They’re slammed today for whatever reason, and I’ve been struggling to stay inside because of it. I’m trying but I’m about one more elbow to the ribs away from going ape shit. Which might be amplified right now all considering, but is also normal because I’ve never enjoyed shopping or crowds.

“I need some air, Lucky.” I softly toy with the short hair at the nape of his neck. “If someone else bumps into me I’m going to snap.”

He lifts his head and looks around, those stormy eyes scanning the throngs of people looking at tools and industrial cleaning supplies before they connect with mine. “Leonor, I don’t?—”

“There’s an AirTag in my boot.”

His full lips immediately tip up into a small smile, his beautiful scar tugging ever so slightly. “That was a great idea.”

I nod and smile back.

It really was, it was Mark’s way of pacifying Lucky’s justified need to mother and smother me while allowing me to move a little more freely if I was inclined to do so.

Which I am right now and having a way for Lucky to not only track me but essentially set off an alarm in order to find me has helped immensely. It’s how we got this far today and I know as soon as the package from Apple arrives, Lucius will have an AirTag in every single pair of shoes I own as well as attached to my backpack, wallet and keys, and anything else I might walk away from him with.

It’s been a nice addition to the increase in his therapy so we’ve seen some real progress with this man, just not enough for me to stop worrying so much about him.

Or for him to stop worrying so much about me.

All valid but we drive each other nuts on a good day so you throw that in and who knows what could happen.

“I need to go outside for a minute, maybe pace the sidewalk out front, breathe some air and not be touched by anyone I’m not head over heels for.”

With a sigh, Lucky holds me tighter and presses his forehead to mine. “I’m sorry I’ve been so unbearable, cakes.”

“You haven’t.” I move my hands to his cheeks and make sure he’s looking me in the eye. “You haven’t been. Your feelings are valid, all except the guilt, and I understand why you’ve been extra cautious. I’m not going anywhere crazy, my love, just outside for a few minutes so I don’t go postal in one of your favorite places.”

“I get it.” Lucky cracks another smile before leaning down to kiss me. “Postal Leo is scary as fuck.”

“Damn straight.”

“I really am sorry, baby cakes.”

I hug my sweet giant again, squeezing him as hard as I can. “You don’t have to be, not for loving me the way you do. Because that’s what this is.”

“I know,” he says with a nod. “I’m really fucking proud of you, though. Even if it doesn’t seem like I’ve noticed how hard you’re working on dealing with all of this.”

Titling my head back, I look up into those gunmetal gray eyes and grin as I drop my hands to his ass and grab a healthy handful. “This helps.” I smile wide as Lucky chuckles. “Twenty minutes, right outside. Then you can show me how proud of me you are when we get back to the hotel.”

With one more hard and sweet kiss, I leave one of my amazing men to wait in line while I walk outside to finally breathe.

Mikey’s Muse.

My eyes trace the big red letters monogrammed on the glass door, following each sharp line until my stare wanders to the window on the left. Posters for local shows and the festival coming up, flyers and signs for private instrument sales or lessons. There are a few want ads, people looking for lead guitarists or vocalists and even if I haven’t had the balls to even think about this place in almost four years, that makes me smile.

The boys had something similar in this very window ages ago and I’ll never forget watching them take it down after I joined the band.

My gaze slides back to the door, landing on the sign flipped to say they’re open and for some reason, I’m compelled to go inside.

I’m not sure what it is, why the urge to walk into what I’ve considered the gates of hell is so strong but it is, and I swear it’s almost like I have an overwhelming urge to make sure Hastings isn’t sitting behind the counter.

He’s dead and gone, he’s never coming back, but I never got any closure with that and at the very least, knowing that sick bastard isn’t lurking in this music store waiting for me to come in and buy something might be a way of getting it.

Gripping the handle tightly, I will my hand to stop shaking before I pull the door open, instantly stepping back in time to when this was a staple of my day to day.

Everything looks the same; pianos and guitars to the right, classical instruments to the left. The amps and soundboards, the mics and turntables are in the middle with the drums and bigger instruments all the way at the back. The register is still against the wall to the left, the counter absolutely covered in band and brand logos and sitting on a stool behind it is a guy who makes this feel even more like a blast from the past.

He’s big, probably six one or two, wide as hell and very pretty while he flips through a music catalog. He has tattoos up and down both arms, a few more creeping up his throat and neck, and when he glances up to give me a quick welcome to Mikey’s I catch a glimpse of the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen.

I nod to him as I start wandering through the store, the nostalgia I’m flooded with over seeing someone like that sitting behind the counter at Mikey’s, it’s unreal.

I used to come through that door almost every day to see Lucky, who was a big, beautiful tattooed man behind that same counter.

I’d bring him beignets and we’d browse catalogs for the equipment we needed. Sometimes I’d come in here and sit and play a piano until he closed the shop. I bought my first guitar here, hell, I bought most of my instruments here, and Mikey’s was somewhere the five of us spent hundreds of hours even after we started getting noticed.

Smiling to myself I mindlessly grab a neon green ukulele and start strumming a few notes, weaving through the stringed instruments before I get to the woodwinds.

Mikey’s Wall of Fame.

My smile grows as I stop in front of it, my eyes immediately catching on another memory.

Every musician who’s ever made it big and happened to grace the doors signs the wall. There’s autographs from legends to locals, people as notorious as Stevie Nicks and Tom Petty to the NOLA born and bred The Four Horsemen of Doom and Death Shroud.

And on the far right edge, right in my line of sight, is the black outline of a raven with the names of five kids scribbled inside it.

I run my finger over the faded sharpie, tracing Mark’s chicken scratch and Pete’s LaGrave because that’s all he ever signs. Lucky’s five leaf clover—because, lucky— with his initials inside, Norman’s gigantic N s in his first and last name before I stop at mine.

My signature is like everything I do; it starts out legible and clear, the direction perfectly straight. Then about halfway through it turns into a hurried and jumbled mess and by the time you get to the end, it’s nearly unrecognizable.

That was all so long ago, almost twelve years if I remember correctly.

Lucky drove us down here before the ink had dried on our very first contract and made sure we signed the wall. Mikey even took a picture of the five of us with our signatures then framed one for each of us that we hung up in our houses with any other big moments captured on film.

I follow the outline of the raven, thinking back to that day and how excited we were, how our lives were about to change in so many more ways than we could have imagined.

It’s strange really, walking through that door and expecting to have a meltdown or panic attack, maybe walk into the waiting arms of a ghost who I refuse to let haunt me anymore. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting but I do feel more at ease than I figured I’d be, and I can tell some kind of weight was lifted off my shoulders, even if it was small.

“I don’t see any cases for this,” I say as I set the ukulele on the counter. “Do you have something in the back, maybe?”

The dude behind the register shrugs and keeps flipping through the magazine. “Shoulda been out there.”

Oh good, he’s a rude fuck.

“They weren’t.”

“Shoulda been.”

With my blood pressure slowly starting to rise, I refrain from smacking this dude upside the head and say as politely as possible, “Unless I went fucking blind the second I walked through the door, I didn’t see any cases for any of the stringed instruments over there and?—”

“Look lady,” he grunts as he sets the catalog down on the counter and slowly lifts his head. “I… Leo?”

“Keyton?”

“Holy shit,” the frontman for one of the bands we came up with says with a chuckle as he crosses his arms against his chest.

He doesn’t do more than that, though.

No hug or high five, no fist bump or slap on the back.

Not that I want anyone to have that kind of reaction to seeing me for the first time in years, I don’t want anyone inside my bubble unless I invite them in, but that’s also not how this man rolls.

Key was never like that, primarily because he was a pretty big dick with an uncomfortable darkness sitting in those green eyes the entire time we knew him, but he never was to any of us and his shithead attitude became endearing after a while.

Seeing him sitting here behind the counter at Mikey’s is kind of weird, though.

“Dad finally retired,” Keyton says as if reading my mind. “After all the shit with Hastings.”

Shockingly, I don’t flinch at that.

His delivery was blunt but that’s normal for him, it was probably a lot tamer than what actually went through his head, and I already sort of knew things changed at Mikey’s because one of its employees tried to murder me.

“Probably for the best. I imagine it wasn’t all good publicity.”

Key shakes his head. “We closed for a while, more or less out of respect but it didn’t last. Not unless we wanted the fucking thing to tank.”

“You just made sure Jake Tennison didn’t walk his happy ass through the doors when they reopened.”

“Exactly.”

I arch a brow as he starts ringing me up. “How did you end up here, though? I thought?—”

“Long story,” Keyton grunts.

And since he doesn’t elaborate, I’ll take that as a sign that he doesn’t want to talk about it.

Key Tennison and I went to the same art school, and he started The Four Horsemen of Doom around the same time I joined The Ravens. We even got signed to Vintage within a year of each other and co-headlined our first major tour. They were on the same track we were, actually, so I’m assuming something big happened for Key to be sitting here now.

“Pop got sick.” He reads my mind again. “Dad took over when he passed, then the shit with Hastings. Didn’t want to let the store go to hell.”

I nod and give him a small smile. “Sorry to hear that, Mikey was a great guy.” The Mikey, who opened this store back in the fifties when Key’s dad was a baby and I’m sure if he hadn’t gotten sick, he’d be the one ringing me up instead of his shithead grandson who seems miserable doing it.

“He was an ornery fuck but yeah, I guess he was.” Key gives me my change and receipt before he comes around the counter. “Chino and I fell out.”

Ah.

That was my other question.

Looks like The Horsemen didn’t have the same staying power this store does.

“I’ll go grab you a case.”

Watching Keyton lumber his way through the instruments toward the back room has me shaking my head.

He’s way more ornery than Mikey ever was but I’m sure some of that is due to the way things have seemingly gone for him the last few years.

Maybe if we do get a label up and running we could get Keyton back into the scene. Shithead or not, he’s fucking talented as hell and his pipes are better than any of ours. Depending on who you ask, anyway.

Taking in all the ways this place hasn’t changed, I can’t help but grin when I hear the opening bass line of Yahtzee, Motherfucker! start filtering through the speakers.

That was our first hit single, the second song we released from our first album, The Tomb You Crave.

Then I start to giggle when I think about how unrelated that title really is.

Mark wrote that song about his high school girlfriend who cheated on him, broke his fucking heart into a million pieces and didn’t show any remorse. It’s emotional and deep, it’s angry as fuck, and it has nothing to do with Yahtzee.

That was the name of Granny Vee’s chihuahua who regularly peed on Mark’s clothes and shit in his tuba case back in the day. Yahtzee, you motherfucker was something he shouted thousands of times and that dog was still alive when I met the boys, still ruining everything that belonged to Markus, and somehow that wound up the title of our biggest song to date. We even put a picture of Yahtzee in the album sleeve after it went platinum.

“You still with the guys?” Key asks as he comes out of the back holding a case and something else.

I nod. “They’re down the street.” Probably losing their minds because I’ve been gone longer than twenty minutes and am not pacing in front of the hardware store like I said I’d be.

“Wasn’t sure. Saw your name in the news again but nothing about the band. Except how Luck was the one?—”

“Leonor Allan!”

My shoulders scrunch all the way to my ears as we both slowly turn to see the man himself march through the doors and plow through the recording equipment, nearly taking out two mixing boards as the boys chase after him.

“I swear to God you’re trying to give me a fucking heart attack,” Lucky growls seconds before he picks me up and throws me over his shoulder. “We’re getting the hell out of here and when we do, I’m tying your ass down somewhere and not letting you up until I buy a goddamn leash. Did you already… Keyton?”

I roll my eyes that are level with his ass as my boyfriends all exchange holy shits and how the fuck are yous with Key, the blood rushing to my head while I dangle from Lucky like a rag doll.

“Put her down, baby,” Pete says as his boots come into my line of sight. “Don’t need her passing out.”

With a sigh, Lucius does what Pete says and as soon as I’m upright, Key sticks out his hand. The one holding a picture frame.

“Pop took this down after shit hit the fan.” God, he has no tact . I do appreciate his honesty, though. “Thought it wasn’t right to leave it up for people to gawk at.”

Grinning like an idiot, I wipe off the layer of dust as the boys crowd around me to get a look at what I’m holding; the photo of the five of us with Mikey on Lucky’s very last day as employee here, decked out in the stupid khakis and polo he had to wear with the store’s logo on it.

We look so young, so happy , and we look pretty fucking untouchable.

It’s crazy to think those five fresh faced idiots are us. We might not be wiser but we’ve definitely aged, and holding this photo in my hands has that fact glaring up at me.

I don’t know what I thought would happen when I walked in here but it wasn’t anything that’s taken place.

Getting hit with so much fucking nostalgia, seeing Keyton and hearing about some of what I missed while I was buried in my pit. Buying a goddamn ukulele.

Hastings isn’t here, he’s never coming back, and whether he’s been reincarnated or not, I know what I need to do to keep these feelings alive.

It’s time to make some beautiful fucking music with my boys and not a goddamn thing is going to stop me.

But first things first, we’re getting fucking promo photos because I have a very loud personal statement to make.