Skeletons of Us (Unquiet Mind Book 2) (43 page)

It was the beeping that brought me out again. That incessant beeping that echoed through my mind and jerked me out of the darkness. It was like an alarm clock that you couldn’t snooze. 

I was angry at it at first. That darkness had been so comforting and alluring. But then I managed to wade through the fog that had held my mind hostage for who knew how long. 

It was his voice that wrenched me out of it. 

“You remember when you told me that you wanted roots? Wanted them curling around your feet, giving you somewhere to belong?” There was a pause and pressure at my hand. Blessedly, I could feel my body once more. I didn’t feel incorporeal, like I could float out of it at any minute. I could feel the bed underneath me and the weight on blankets atop of me.  

“Well, I’ve got construction workers on the site day and night, building our house, freckles. Our roots. Where we’ll grow old. Where our children will grow up. Where I’ll love you every minute of forever. Every second.” Another pause, long enough for me to wade up through the fog. “All you need to do for me, baby, is wake up. Jesus, I’ll do anything. Just wake up for me, Lexie, so we can start our forever.” 

It was the desperation in his voice, the love, that wrenched away the last of the film separating me from reality, from Killian. 

My eyelids were heavy at first, like they were weighed down with the world’s thickest false eyelashes. I was determined, so I got them open. The world was blurry at first, but then it didn’t matter. I didn’t want to see the world. I just wanted to see two ice blue eyes. 

They flickered in shock at first. Then flooded with so much relief it seeped from him into me. 

“Hey,” I croaked, my voice dry and scratchy.  

Killian squeezed my hand, the only thing that told me he hadn’t turned to stone.

A single tear ran down his cheek, one that sank into me somewhere deep, the only outward sign of the utter despair that had been etched into his face a lifetime ago when I sang that song to him. When I sang him good-bye.

“Hey,” he ground out, his voice gravel.

His eyes hungrily drank in my gaze, not leaving it, not even blinking. I did the same, though I glanced over his body. He was wearing all black, a familiar Killian uniform with his cut over top. A healthy growth of stubble hid his jaw from me, a hint at how much time had passed, considering he had been clean shaven the last time I saw him. The buzz cut that he’d had when I first saw him in that hospital was growing out. Shiny ink was beginning to muss delightfully on his head. When I made it back to his eyes, I understood that they hadn’t left mine the entire time I’d been taking him in. They were bloodshot and red, like he hadn’t slept in a week. But they were also alight with something. The darkness that hadn’t been there days ago scared me, because it showed me just how close he’d come to embracing that darkness. Becoming it.

But something chased it away.

Hope.

He seemed to shake himself out of his trance once I met his eyes once more. He pushed out of his chair savagely, and in a move that juxtaposed that, he leaned over me and brushed my hair from my face in a featherlight touch. His gaze roved over my face and his hand followed them, as if to make sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him. He cupped my cheek gently, like a child might encircle a baby bird in their hands, and then he leaned in to press his lips to mine. It was over before I could fully appreciate the glorious feeling of his mouth on mine. He pressed his forehead to mine.

“Freckles,” he whispered, his voice choked.

The tone gave me the strength to lift my arm, even though it seemed to be full of lead. It took much longer than it should have, and the movement erupted a twinge of pain in my stomach, but I ignored that. My hand cupped Killian’s stubbled cheek and he leaned into it in a gesture that shocked my already rapid heartbeat. It was something so small yet so profound. Killian, the boy who had always protected me, comforted me, and the man who had turned stoic, melted into my hand as if all of his considerable strength had left him.

Though since he was an alpha male with a reputation to protect, that vulnerability didn’t last nearly long enough, and he covered my hand with his.

“Never fuckin’ do that to me again, freckles,” he rasped. “Never let me face the prospect of a world without you in it.”

He didn’t give me time to say anything.

“You’re marrying me,” he continued, his voice harder now. “As soon as you’re well enough, you’re becoming mine.”

I smiled at him, the elation of the moment strange with the shadow of previous despair. “I’ve always been yours,” I whispered.

Killian jerked, as if my words had a physical impact. “Always,” he promised.

“New rule. No one is allowed to get shot. Too many people are getting fucking shot. It is not okay,” Sam declared while pacing the room. He stopped to glare at me. “Especially not you.” He pointed at me, regarding me from my upright position in my hospital bed. “I’ve already got some bulletproof vests on their way.”

I raised my brows. “You do not.”

Noah glanced up from the book he was reading in the armchair beside me, where he’d pretty much set up camp the moment I woke up. The entire band had made my private hospital room their headquarters. And Killian was here twenty-four hours a day. And Mom and Zane, with the kids, had been glued to my bedside since Killian was able to drag himself away and let people know I was back in the land of the living.

Literally. I had died. Twice. Once, from what I could gather, in Killian’s arms. The other in a hospital operating room. This was not told to me by Killian himself. He refused to even speak of it. Sam had told me with a grim face, demons of his own dancing behind his eyes.

“Jesus, Lex,” he’d said, running his hands through his hair. “Never seen a more fuckin’ horrific thing in my entire life. Killian holding you, trying to stop the bleeding, tryin’ to give you fuckin’ CPR at the same time.” He paused to shudder. “If there was ever a man close enough to taste hell without actually dying, it was him in that moment and in the days after, while the doctors told us you wouldn’t make it through the night.”

I’d flinched at this, at the shadows behind Sam’s face as he recounted this.

“Never seen anything like it. Though, I’ll admit, I wasn’t in the best state either.” His eyes went faraway. “It was like a black cloud settled over this entire hospital. Your mom, Zane, even the kids, they looked like someone took away the sun. That’s what it was like.” He squeezed my hand. “You’re the glue, babe, that holds our entire fucked-up family together. We fell apart without our glue.”

I was more than aware of how my three-day coma had affected everyone around me. I saw it behind the fake smiles that my mom had given me, after she’d sobbed at my side for ten solid minutes. I saw it in the way Zane held his body, the way the boys and Mom were never out of his touching distance. The way his eyes roved over me with the same demons that danced in Killian’s eyes. Emma had stood at my door just staring at me for five straight minutes, frozen in place like she didn’t know what to do. Wyatt stood behind her, his hand lightly on her hips, a mask of something over his own face. I didn’t have time to inspect that, because Emma had found her feet, shoved Killian out of the way, and all but collapsed at my beside talking about how she’d release my no-makeup selfies to the media if I ever did that to her again.

Duke, who had only recently been let out of hospital himself, set up camp with the boys until I woke up and was still a regular visitor. He somehow blamed himself for my situation, no matter that he was freakin’ recovering from stab wounds at the time of my attack. Alpha males took so much on their impressively muscled shoulders. Must be why they were so toned.

I knew the media were camped outside the hospital. The same with hundreds of fans. Fans who had apparently held a candlelit vigil until I’d woken up.

It was all too much, the idea that so many people had been affected by this. By the actions of one man.

Killian was silent through most of this. He’d stayed by my side throughout all of the tearful reunions and all the doctors fawning over me using words like “miracle.” Every second, he was there. He held me in his arms when the nurses had stopped trying to enforce trivial things like visiting hours. I slept in the safety of his embrace, which chased away the worst of my nightmares. And when I jerked awake, escaping the hell in my head, Killian was there, awake and murmuring to me, kissing my forehead and reassuring me that he’d never let anything happen to me.

It worried me, his worry. He still didn’t look like he slept, and even though there was light in his eyes, there was a hardness that hadn’t been there before.

“It was the silence, freckles. The silence in your chest. I still hear it. It’ll just take a while for me to understand that I’ll never hear that silence again,” he murmured, his head against my chest.

Still, I worried. Even more so now, one week into my hospital stay when I was well enough to hobble around and shower myself. Though I was well enough, it didn’t mean that Killian didn’t make sure the job was done himself.

No funny business. Nothing but chaste kisses. The romance was kind of dead since my petite body seemed to be little more than bones and I had a nasty gunshot wound marring my stomach, one that took all the blood from Killian’s face every time his eyes touched it.

Now I was well enough, Killian seemed to find it okay to leave me for short periods of time. Very short. The first time he’d left me for little more than an hour, and when he got back, he had immediately surged into the room and kissed me, his hand on my chest. Then he’d reached into his pocket and slipped a vintage, gold, oval-cut diamond on my finger.

No words or anything.

And I had nothing for him when I marveled on how perfect it was. How natural it felt on my finger. How it seemed that my hand had been empty before that, waiting for this to be on it.

A tear trailed down my face looking at it. Then another. I regarded him through blurry eyes.

“I love you, Killian,” I whispered.

He grasped my chin. “Till my last breath, freckles.”

This latest outing was the longest, and something about his face had haunted me when he said good-bye, not saying where he was going, only it was signaled by Zane entering the room. After Zane had kissed my head and squeezed my hand, he’d taken Killian to the corner of the room and murmured something that made Killian’s body turn to granite and his eyes to shutter. Then he and Zane had left.

Now I was trying not to worry and be entertained by Sam’s outrageous statements.

“He’s not lying,” Noah said, putting his book in his lap. “He went and ordered fifty of them.”

“Fifty?” I repeated.

Wyatt nodded with a grin.

“Sammy, I don’t think I’ll need fifty. Actually, I don’t think I’ll even need one. I’m not planning on getting shot again.”

He scowled at me. “Well, you weren’t
plannin
g on getting shot the first time, I’m sure. But look.” He threw his arms out at me.

I sat up and tried to hide the grimace of pain that was a reflex as the movement twinged my stomach. I wasn’t successful as Wyatt’s grin quickly left his face to be replaced by a stormy darkness.

“Guys, I’m not going to get shot again, I promise.”

“You can’t promise that,” Sam said, coming to my bedside. “So I’m going to demand that you wear the vests.”

“Would kind of mess with my tour wardrobe,” I countered.

Sam’s face was aghast. “Tour wardrobe? There will be no tour. We’re retiring. This business has too many crazy stalkers.”

“One crazy stalker,” I corrected.

“One too many.”

I reached to squeeze Sam’s hand. “You like me sane?”

He screwed up his face. “Is that how you consider yourself?”

I grinned. “Because if you suggest that I don’t have the band, don’t have music in my life, you’re suggesting to take away my sanity. We’re not retiring.”

Sam gave me a long look. “Fine,” he relented, “but Killian’s our full-time security and I’m keeping my gun.”

“No you’re not,” Wyatt, Noah, and I all said in unison.

Sam and Noah had somehow got a hold of guns to aid Killian in my rescue. They hadn’t even hesitated to come in to save me without knowing what awaited them in that stadium. It warmed and chilled my heart.

The police were obviously called but had been unable to find Eddie, which I couldn’t help them with considering I’d died and everything. Sam, Noah, and Killian all said he’d run off, which I didn’t believe for a second. Yet another thing no one would speak about.

I had a chilly idea of Eddie’s fate, one that told me he’d never be running anywhere. Nor would he be breathing.