“En la casa,” the bartender told me with a sneer that I think he was trying to fashion into a grin.
On the house.
I raised my brow, not grinning, and slammed cash down on the bar. “Despite the fact that putting anything heavier than a couple of raindrops on the roof of this particular house would cause it to collapse, I pay for my own drinks,” I replied, evenly meeting his lecherous gaze. “Tends to help bartenders punching way above their weight from getting the wrong idea.”
I picked up the glass, letting the harsh liquid slide down my throat and soothe some of the burn that had been present for months, ever since I left.
Since I ran away.
From Amber.
From my family.
My girls.
Him.
But I wasn’t allowed to think of that. Those blue eyes, those sculpted muscles, or that kiss.
That fucking kiss.
No, I had to focus on the shield. That shiny, squeaky-clean piece of metal that was now tarnished and blood-splattered.
Because of me.
I blinked the blue eyes out of my mind and focused on the hardened, muddy brown, and mean ones of the bartender.
The gaze tried to tell me that he wasn’t used to rejection. I had to think the opposite was true. He had a moustache that only Tom Selleck could pull off, and it had pieces of his last meal trapped in the wispy stands. Broken capillaries on his cheeks gave away the fact that he sampled his wares more than a little. Prison tattoos snaked across the soft skin of his arms, exposed by a filthy wife beater, a hairy paunch sticking out from the space between it and his belt buckle.
I wasn’t exactly at my best, in ripped jeans and scuffed combat boots, my tight tank only slightly cleaner than his. I only had a swipe of mascara on my eyes, for business purposes more than anything else, and I’d grown out my chocolate curls to a length that cried out for multiple styling products. Which I didn’t have. They were all littered on my bathroom counter at home. Along with the broken pieces of the old me. My current makeup collection consisted of old mascara, a cracked lipstick and an empty tube of concealer.
The wardrobe situation was even more dire.
So un-Rosie-like.
Which was kind of the point.
But even with all that, I was nothing to sneeze at. I wasn’t afraid to admit that I had a bit of that natural beauty thing going on. On a good day, I had a lot of it going on.
That day, and the ones before, and most likely the ones proceeding it, couldn’t and wouldn’t be characterized as ‘good.’ Happiness made a woman glow with natural beauty; heartbreak and pain did something too. Magnified her beauty in a hard way that almost hurt to look at, but made her more endearing nonetheless.
I snatched the cold bottle of beer, my hands dampening from the condensation running down the chilled glass in the sticky room.
“The right idea,” I clarified, “would be to make sure you and your buddies figure something out.”
I glanced around the dirty and poorly lit room, a fan laboring at the ceiling to circulate the smell of hot body odor and cigarette smoke. Men and a handful of women were scattered around the tables, most lingering in the shadows. The men were more or less different versions of the bartender, some a little more attractive but with a meanness radiating around them that I recognized immediately.
That and the hard and cruel beauty of the women who were with them told me I was in the right place.
“That none of them think I’m looking to exchange free drinks for… anything,” I continued. “That’s if they actually like holding onto their manhood.” I winked at the scowling toad in front of me, whirling on my boot to find shadows of my own.
They’d come.
They always did.
And then my job began.
Chapter Two
Rosie
Age Seven
Death isn’t something kids understand. It’s some black cloud that drifts in and out of their lives, perhaps when some barely known great aunt gets swallowed up in its embrace. They witness it from afar, feel its chilly grip drifting past. But most children, the lucky ones, they forget that fleeting coldness and sense of terror; the cloud drifts away with the winds of youth brushing it quickly by, replacing it with whatever new toy was around, the best places to ride their bikes, the best way to escape the newest bully.
For most children.
I was not, nor had I ever been, a normal child.
Death wasn’t a disembodied cloud, drifting far above my innocent head. It didn’t just brush me and then move away. Death was always a thing, a personification that had always existed.
Like Santa Claus.
But instead of the red jolly man, the black and imposing thing did not come giving gifts. That menacing presence came and snatched things off me. Little pieces here and there, leaving empty spaces in the mosaic of my family.
Always violent. The endings of the men patched into the Sons of Templar were not anticlimactic, withering away in old age and senility.
No, it was always a rapid and violent end.
I was spared some of the violent endings.
Some were inevitable.
Like the time, right after my first day at school, when I’d been sitting on Dad’s workbench, swinging my boots, sucking on a lollipop and daydreaming of that boy I’d seen. Then my magical daydreams of princes and princesses and all those simple fantasies that can only be made in youth were snatched away with the screeching of tires and shouts and chaos.
There was always chaos.
“Rosie, baby, stay there and don’t move until I say,” Daddy shouted, dropping his tools with a clatter and sprinting toward where the black van had stopped. It was parked funny.
I wasn’t focused on how Evie would yell at the grown-ups for blocking the parking lot because there was more than that to focus on.
Red.
Blood.
It stained the cracked concrete of the parking lot.
I blinked, just in case I was seeing something that really wasn’t there. Like how I had been just seeing that boy smile at me and say hello and take me for a ride on his horse even though he’d never smiled or talked to me.
But it stayed.
And it got worse when I saw the blood was coming from Sonny.
He wasn’t moving.
He was staring at me.
But not in the way he did when he pulled a penny from my ear. There was no sparkle in his eyes. No twinkle. There wasn’t anything in them.
My lollipop tumbled to join Daddy’s discarded tools on the ground, where the blood would eventually creep up and swallow it away.
That was only the first, and most dramatic, time.
When I’d met the man called Death.
It didn’t happen often, but I saw him more than Santa Claus.
He had been taking pieces from the mosaic of my life, but I managed to glue what remained together, still smile and pretend to forget about the thing called Death.
That was until he grabbed me by the throat and smashed every piece of my mosaic apart.
It was when he took Daddy.
I didn’t see the glassy stare of Death replace the fond gray gaze of my father like I had with Sonny.
I wished I had.
It would’ve been bad. Horrifying. Terrifying.
But it wouldn’t have been—couldn’t have been—as bad as Evie walking woodenly toward me. Like a zombie. Like a stranger wearing her skin and impersonating her almost perfectly.