Epilogue

EPILOGUE

THUNDER

“Skye, come here. Where are your brothers?” I looked around but didn’t see them anywhere. I’m pretty sure I just saw the three of them with their heads together not more than five minutes ago, but by the time I made it downstairs, they were gone.

This is not a good thing for more reasons than one, and least of those is their age. They’re menaces to society. If they’re not being watched every second of every day, some shit will pop off. Not even when they’re sleeping, because they’ve known how to escape their cribs since they were nine months old.

I almost had a heart attack when I watched them on camera do that shit for the first time. Blaze and Storm would climb over their cribs, then pull the ottoman over to the little princess’s crib, and then the three of them would sneak out of the nursery in the middle of the night.

Have you ever seen three half-foot-tall beings crawling down the stairs backward on their bellies in the dead of night with only the moonlight coming through the windows for light? Yeah, that shit ain’t cute.

Their stop is always the kitchen, where they proceed to make themselves snacks or, more like, steal shit from the fridge or pantry that they were denied the day before. It’s like they have to prove a point but wait until we’re asleep to carry out their shit.

I thought when I put hot sauce on the leftover chicken, I told her she couldn’t have because she’d eaten more than enough for a two-year-old, that that would put an end to their nightly escapades. Guess who asks her mother for hot sauce each time she sits down to eat since then.

I learned early on not to trust my kid, and for a while there, I slept with one eye open. When she turned three and started talking like a damn adult, I was done. Her brothers act like damn sentinels where she’s concerned, and you could never catch her in shit because they lie to cover for her.

I don’t know what they did in the womb or what conspiracy they concocted, but I’m pretty sure that none of them are going to make it to eighteen without ending up on the evening news. For this reason, I was starting to panic when I couldn’t find them.

My wife was nowhere to be seen, and neither were the fifty nannies I hired to keep these fucks outta jail. Yes, I said jail because none of this lot is going to make it to that overpriced nursery school I paid out the ass to get them into in a few months. They’re fucking maniacs, and this one is the ringleader.

She scrunched up her shoulders and opened her hands with a shrug. “Don’t know daddy.” I picked her up and started walking around the garden, calling for her brothers. She grabbed my face and pulled it around so she could look into my eyes like she was trying to work a Jedi mind fuck on me or some shit.

“Daddy, I wanna ride horsey.” I almost gave in right away like I usually do, but this time, I was going to outsmart her. All I have to do is not look at her head-on. She has her mother’s face and my eyes; it fucks with me.

They get away with shit, especially this one, because I can’t chastise these little things with my woman’s face, and she claims it’s the eyes that do it to her. So, at the end of the day, no one is disciplining these criminals except Grandma because she’s the only one who puts fear in them.

It’s a different kind of fear from the ones I grew up with, though; they’re afraid she won’t sneak and give them shit they’re not supposed to have when their mother or I aren’t looking, so they try not to ruffle her feathers. She’s also the one they run to when they know I’m about to put my foot in their ass. And to think, I’m the one who insisted she move here.

“Fine, you wanna go riding? We’ll go as soon as we find your brothers.” She looked contemplative before she pushed to be let down and toddled her ass over to the gardener’s shed. Someone had put a piece of two-by-four outside the door to keep it closed for some reason.

She pushed it out of the way, and I almost expected her brothers to come running out. Then I realized there was no noise coming from inside, so I figured they must not be in there, but just in case, I opened the door to check.

One had a saw and was doing who knew what with it, and the other one put his hand behind his back. “Storm, what’re you holding there?” He lifted his hand to show me the hand file he was hiding. “Get out, both of you.”

The three of them exchanged a look which I did not trust but what can they do? I outweigh them by a lot. But that spooky shit they do, where it looks like they’re talking to each other without opening their mouths, puts me on edge.

“Come on, let’s go see what your mother and brother are doing.” I carried her while her two accomplices toddled along beside me, getting into every damn thing. The poor gardener is ready to quit every other day in the spring because my kids are always trying to color coordinate his shit, with my daughter leading the charge.

Their thing this year is birds, for some reason. Their aunt claims she wants to be a vet and has been reading things about animals to them when she Facetimes them at night from her off-campus condo, and all of a sudden, they’re experts.

My sister is still being a pain in the ass even though she’s a thousand miles away at school. Now, she goes through her niece and nephews to torment me. The triplets, Blaze, Storm, and Skye, just turned four. Their brother Raiden is barely eleven months younger and he’s a complete mama’s boy.

The little shit is always up under my wife, but at least he doesn’t give me any trouble. While his siblings are catching frogs to torture, he’s in the kitchen under his mother’s feet.

That’s where I thought they were now, but I looked over towards the gazebo and saw her in there in that hammock that I forbid her from getting in. She was pushing the baby’s rocker swing with her foot, had a book to her nose, and a plate of something or other on her pregnant stomach.

The kids ran over to her, and I almost had a heart attack when they pulled on the death trap she was lying in. “Where’s your dad?” She tried sneaking out of the hammock while she looked around to see where I was.

“You got caught again.” She almost jumped out of her skin when my voice came from the opposite side of where she was looking. That guilty, impish smile always gets me in the gut. I leaned over and fought my kids to get close to their mother so I could put my hand on their two brothers.

I know that they’re boys because, like with Raiden, I haven’t been sick one day. Their mother, on the other hand, was sick for both his pregnancy and now the twins. As bad as that shit was, it was worst watching her go through it knowing what it felt like.

But she likes having babies, and I like putting them in her, so what’re you gonna do? I know she’s going for another girl because I heard her complaining that her house is overrun by males, but I’ve been conspiring with the Doc to see how I can go about killing off my female sperm.

She laughed and called me an idiot, but I’d pay any amount of money not to have another daughter. The nightmares I have about my kid can’t be sustained. I know if I have another one like her, it’ll shorten my lifespan.

It’s not that she’s a bad kid. It’s just that she has this way about her, this attitude that seems way beyond her years. She doesn’t argue like her brothers, and she walks away if she doesn’t like what you’re saying.

If either of us tried to discipline her, she’d lecture us to death while explaining in her way just why she wasn’t the one in the wrong. She’s got my fucking sons trained to do her bidding and hide up her shit.

She rolls her eyes at me when I piss her off and freezes me out until I’m willing to give her whatever the hell it is that she wants. Can you imagine if there was another one like her? I’d walk into the Rockies and never come back.

* * *

AMANDA

* * *

Oh dammit.I thought for sure I’d hear him coming and get out of the hammock before he caught me. Now, I’ll have to sit through one of his lectures because, apparently, when I’m pregnant, the only thing I’m allowed to do without him is breathe.

No amount of assurance from me, our family, friends, or even the doctor can get him to see the light. Quite frankly, I think my first pregnancy was the easiest because he was too sick in the mornings to ride my butt.

And the books, he reads everything he can get his hands on, still stuck in the eighteen hundreds, mind you and tries implementing that mess today. My doctor calls me to complain about him or warn me about what new craziness he’s up to, just to give you an idea.

I try telling him with all these kids, I’m damn near an expert, but he claims I only had three pregnancies and given birth twice, so no, I am in no way the expert that I think I am.

As you can see, the arguments we have are a breath of fresh air compared to what my old life was like before. Some days, I look around at my life and wonder how this fairytale came to be.

I’m human, I know my faults and that I’m not perfect, so how am I deserving of all this love and security? These are the questions I find myself asking whenever things are going too well.

I’m not the kind of woman whose husband buys her a vineyard as a push present. With our fourth child, who was born less than a year later because someone couldn’t wait for the all-clear to get freaky, it was diamonds. I’m a baker; where am I wearing diamonds?

When I posed this question to my sisters and sister-in-law, they all looked at me like I was some form of alien life. I didn’t know then that my husband just wanted me to have the things he thinks I deserve, whether I would get any use out of them or not.

When I brought it up, he said he realized that I’ve always had to be the practical, level-headed one in my past relationship. The one who took care of everyone else while neglecting myself. I can only surmise that he heard all this from my sister, who sees nothing wrong with bashing a dead man, namely my ex.

I don’t know how someone can remain salty about a person who has been dead all these years, but just the mere mention of Dan, which doesn’t happen too often, and she can go on forever. I think she’s still a bit traumatized from the whole situation while I have moved on and don’t ever look back.

I don’t hate Dan. I don’t think I ever did, to be honest, but maybe that’s because I was too close to the situation, or maybe it’s just that I knew him as someone else before all that mess with Diedre happened.

Speaking of which, for a while there, she’d been all over the news for trying to break out of prison and was now in solitary confinement, last I heard. I’m not sure why she was trying to get out, but Thunder swears she was coming after us and talked to someone or the other, and now her life behind bars is even more restricted. I didn’t even know that was possible, and he didn’t say anything to me about it. I heard it from Cody, who is my head of security.

I live a life so far removed from my previous reality that some days, it feels like a dream. But none of the material things can compare to the love I feel from my husband and kids.

My days are filled with laughter, sex, and just mind-blowing goodness to the point that the darkness of the past no longer has any effect on me. I haven’t seen anyone from my past in years and haven’t kept up with their lives.

However, I did hear from Dan’s sisters after his funeral, which I did not attend. We’d been close once when Dan and I were younger, but their family had some kind of falling out, which I never knew the reason for, and the girls all basically went their separate ways.

I didn’t go to the funeral, but I guess they heard I’d had the triplets and reached out with congratulations. They first went through my parents, who asked if it was okay to give them my new number, which I okayed, and that’s when I learned what was going on with Cecile.

Her husband had divorced her and had married his longtime mistress as soon as the divorce was final, something his children supported, which I found odd until they explained that she had been his high school sweetheart and the woman he was meant to marry before their mother told a lie that tore his life apart.

My only conclusion after hearing the things they had to say and comparing it to my own dealings with Cecile over the years is that she hates women. I knew she loved Dan or had some kind of twisted obsession with him, as her daughters claim, but I didn’t know the extent of her horrendous actions.

Nevertheless, though we keep in touch here and there, they are not part of my life. I choose to leave it all behind and look forward to the bright future I see with my husband and the family we’ve built.

Evelyn and Millie and their husbands and Millie’s kids, as well as Henry and his family, have become part of that family as well, and we’re at each other’s places at least once a week. The bakery has now become three, and our online sales are outpacing everything else because my husband has talked my grandmother into making cakes and other pastries with his added product, which seems to be a big hit.

My eighty-year-old grandmother provides most of the marijuana-laced sweets for half of the damn country online. I always know when the two of them have been testing a new recipe because she gets the giggles, and he just sits there looking at her admiringly and encouraging her in her mess.

That’s why I thought I could get away with lying in the hammock when I was forbidden from getting in it again by him because this morning, the two of them were experimenting with my lemon meringue cupcakes made with weed-infused something or another, and it had knocked him on his butt.

I got the kids out of the house to give their nannies a break because I know there’s only so much a body can take, and even though they assure me they can handle it, I can’t imagine finding reptiles in your bed on any given day is a good thing.

My daughter, I am sure, is the one responsible, but her brothers would go to their deaths keeping their mouths closed, and that little miss always looks the picture of innocence when confronted, to the point where her victims end up defending her.

I think they do it because they know that her father would lose his mind if they said anything against her; something I told him would come back to bite him in the ass when she’s older because he spoils her too much.

Everyone spoils her. She’s the only girl in a sea of boys, and even her older cousins protect her from everything. I was worried there for a while that the boys would feel left out, though everyone loves and adores them as well, but when it comes to their sister, they’re the worst.

So now, it’s a matter of them against everyone else. I thought their younger brother might be left out since he’s so different from them, but even as kids, they know to include him, though more often than not, he prefers to stay with me instead of digging up worms and who knows what else in the garden.

The parrot Joy had bought and trained could be heard calling from his home in the aviary on the other side of the garden, and I bit back my laughter at the look on my husband’s face. He always looks murderous when the poor bird starts mocking him with the sounds of thunder whenever he gets upset about something. I think it’s cute.

“Okay, you caught me.” I popped another grape in my mouth and kept reading my book to downplay the fact that I knew I was in for it. “Why don’t you take Raiden inside? My foot is getting tired.”

As distractions went, it wasn’t the best, but I knew if I told him something was wrong with me, no matter how small, it would take his mind off of everything else. He helped me out of the hammock, then lifted the baby from the swing, and the six of us headed into the house, the kids laughing and playing around the two of us as my husband held our youngest in one arm while protecting me from who knows what with the other.

* * *

This is my favorite time.When it’s late at night, and the house is still, sitting out on the roof balcony on my favorite lounger with my husband behind me, holding my pregnant tummy as we look at the stars.

Tonight though, we were revisiting a memory from our past as I rode him in the moonlight. No matter how often we make love, and it’s a lot, especially in my last trimester when my hormones seem to go haywire, I still get butterflies.

The look in his eyes when we’re joined together like this always makes me feel like the most desirable woman in the world. That look and the way he shows his love for me are the only guarantees I need that he would never betray me.

I haven’t had that fear, not once, with him, which is funny because he’s more of a catch than my ex ever was, not to mention I see the way women throw themselves at him whether I’m there or not, and the way he gets absolutely furious when they do.

All in all, my life has made a complete one-eighty in ways that I could never have imagined. Instead of the cold dead womb, Cecile accused me of having, I’m now the mother of four with two more on the way and many more to come if I have anything to say about it.

Thunder claims that the twins are the last, but he said that after Raiden was born, and here we are. I’m addicted to carrying his babies because of the way he spoils me when I’m with child. It’s the kind of high that even the product that made him a billionaire would never reach.

Now I looked down at him as he cupped the sides of my pregnant belly with his hands, a smile on his face as he surged up into me. I’m so happy he found me.