The Way Home (Lights of Peril Book 2) (15 page)

Shame is clearing his throat behind me and I can hear him shift back and forth on his feet
. The rocks under his boots make biting noises as they grind under his weight. He’s fighting to stay strong and not break. He has to be as affected by this as I am.

I don’t want to move out of th
ese arms. These are the only arms to have and hold me, and until this moment, I never realized exactly how close I was to truly losing my mind…, but with Hem’s presence, I’m calm. I’m not suffocating. I’m not hearing things that aren’t there. The darkness I’ve walked in, it’s been lifted and there is light ... and it is good. More than good, it is glorious. It dawns on me this moment that there is witness. If Shame sees Hem, this isn’t a lie. I’m alive and I’m awake. I never want to sleep again.

Shame
and Ace walk into the house and I hear Shame say to Hem, even though my back is to him, “Brother you need to hurry this along. Not good you sittin’ outside like this. Sure not good, you doin’ it with my girl in your arms.”

Hem flinches, but doesn’t let me go.
I heard the reference Shame made to Hem regarding me being his. I don’t understand it, but I heard it, nonetheless.

With Shame’s words
I begin to digest what is in front of me. I want to refuse reality from coming in and ruining this, but Shame is upset… and he’s anxious. None of
this
spells ‘good.’

I take a moment to question how in the hell
Hem is really here, in front of me, living and breathing. I don’t understand it, and although I feel fortunate to even have this chance to hold him again, I’m overwhelmed with grief at the same time. Where in the hell did he come from? Furthermore, why did he ever
leave
?

''That is what we are supposed to do when we are at our best—make it all up—but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way.''

--Ernest Hemingway

Once Hem lets me go, I am able to get a better look at him.
He wipes my tears and attempts to clean my face, but I’m not interested in that, so I push his hand away. I want to look at him. His face is worn with worry, his clothes are tattered and torn, and he’s lost a bit of his build. It’s my Hem though,
my Hem is really here.

Once we make it into the house
, my mind catches up to my heart and my thoughts start to come together. “Hem?”

I can’t move.
Shame is standing next to him and he’s staring at me with a look of unease. Ace has moved to my side. I think he’s expecting me to faint from shock. I slowly start to realize that no-one here with me, not one person, looks at all shocked.

“Sugar, you don’t look good.
I want you to sit down.” His first formal words to me are that, and it pisses me the hell off.

I didn’t expect it, but I’m angry and confused
with the situation. I’m angry at not having any answers and confused by how I feel. Reality is hitting me and my mind is racing with thoughts of being abandoned.

How many emotions can a person
experience at once before they finally break?

“Sit down?
You want me to
sit down
? Are you kidding me?”

I look to our audience
, who stand around us like silent soldiers, waiting for the war to start. “Shame? Ace? You seem to be handling everything quite well. Why don’t you two need to ‘sit down’? Hem, you’re dead. You’re dead because I buried you. You’re dead because I’ve waited for you to come back to me and you didn’t. You’re also dead because
I finally let you go!
”

I
hit him with my words. At this point, I’m unsure what would be worse; living with the fact he’s here now, alive and uninjured, or waking from this sleep to find him still dead. I’m in a free-fall and I can’t stop everything from spinning.

I look
directly at Shame. He’s been my anchor through the loss of Hem. I need him to be my anchor in this moment and tell me the truth. “Shame, is he here? Is this happening?”

Before I can ask another question through my shock, I’m moved back
, gently clutched by my shoulders. Shame is pushing me away from the front door and into the house. His grip is taut. It’s telling me that I’m not looking steady.

“Come on
. Let’s go check on the kids.” Shame’s unsaid translation; you need a minute to grasp this and I’m giving you an out, so take it, woman.

“
Wait! What about Hem? What is happening?”

I’ve held it together long enough.
The last two minutes of my life has just flipped my entire world upside-down and I can’t understand anything in front of me.

“Shame, where’s Mace?
Oh God. Shame, someone has to talk to her, she can’t just walk in here with him sitting there in her living room.”

He continues to just push me down the hall and
I struggle against his hold to get another look at Hem, who is still standing in the doorway looking at me as I lose my shit. He only stares in silence. Ace’s head is hanging down and I’m realizing that he has been a large part of this.

“Keep walking, Sadey
, one foot in front of the other. Keep your shit together so I can explain some of this to you before you have time to process with emotion and freak the fuck out trying to process all these emotions.” He’s so calm. Apparently he’s had a while to come to terms with this development that is so sudden to me

“Mace knows too, doesn’t she?
That’s why she’s not here.”

He doesn’t respond to me as he moves me
further down the hall and into my room. Patrick is sleeping in his crib next to my bed. I go to him, touch his face and I openly burst into sobs. I drop to my knees and let emotions take me over the edge I had been balancing on the last seven months.

“Sadey, s
weetheart, you’re alright.” Shame has his hand on my back and is trying to coax me through this. “Mace knows. She saw Hem this morning. We got back and…”

“Back?
Back from where? You went to get him, didn’t you? He’s been in California this whole time and you knew. Ace knew, you knew, Hem knew. Oh my God, Hood knew. I heard Hood and Gunner. Even Gunner knew what was happening.”

Shame nods, telling me that my observations are correc
t and that I’m the last to know the breaking truth. Of course I am, I’m just the
widow
of the said dead man.

“Honey, this is going to hurt you.
I need you to look at me and tell me you can handle this.”

“No, Shame.
I cannot ‘handle this’. You can talk and I will attempt to listen, but I am in no means ‘
handling this
.’”

Both his hands move to my face,
wiping my cheeks and nose clean. I feel his hands and arms shaking and it doesn’t help my nerves. My stomach is turning and I can’t register what he’s telling me as I lean into my bedroom trash can and expel all the contents within my stomach.

“Fuck
! Knew this was going to be hard on you, buddy. There was no good way to tell you, so we decided after we found him to just bring him here so you could see him with your own eyes.”

“
We? Who the fuck is ‘we’, Shame? Do you know what that man means to me? Oh God, Shame, he’s everything to me. I want to go out there. I want to keep seeing him while my eyes are open. If this isn’t a dream, then you have to let me do that.”

“I can’t.
You’re going to listen. You need to hear this. This doesn’t mean that everything is simply ‘okay’ again. Hem being alive, it has caused some unfortunate complications.”

“
No, I can’t do this without him, please. I won’t hear what you’re saying until I see him. Please, Shame, for me. I need to
see
him now.”

Shame is pissed, albeit he has a right to be, but this is something that I can only go through
with
Hem. I can’t get up on my own, Shame is helping me to my feet and is accepting that I need to see Hem while he talks to me.

We make our
way back out to Shame’s living room; Hem is sitting on the couch with this head hung and his elbows are on his knees with this hands in his hair, studying his boots, and even though he hears Shame and I come into the room, he remains still.

“Where’s Ace?”
I want to know where my ‘friend’ went.

I haven’t had time to process much
, but I realize now that even though Ace knew about all of this, it never stopped him from trying to make me his, again and again, body and soul. I reach the outer realms of lividity and have nowhere to aim or target.

“Gone
, back to California with that fuckin’ witch of his.” That’s all Hem says. He never chances a look at me, still contemplating the floor.

“Well
, shit! I didn’t get to kiss him goodbye.”

Wow!
Where the hell did that come from? I’m pissed, but that was wrong. Shame tenses and glares at me like I’ve lost my ever-lovin’ mind. He’s right…someone better talk my ass down. This is fucked up. Where the hell is Mace?

“Sadey, sit.
Sit with me.”

Shame has positioned himself on the recliner where
Ace had found himself not just fifteen minutes before my life detonated after lighting the fuse, then stepping back to watch it explode.

I walk to Shame and
, as I do, I hear a gruff sound from Hem. I don’t look at him. I just go to Shame and sit beside him, nestled to this side of the chair.

As Shame starts to talk
, Hem still says nothing. I can hear Shame in my ear, but my eyes won’t leave my husband. My husband; the one I buried.

“I know you’re shocked,
pissed, upset, and confused, so I’m going to tell you what I know. Hem knows more than anyone, but I want to stay here awhile and get some shit out. Then I can go, if you want, and leave you two to talk, okay?”

Still not taking my eyes from a very
shattered looking Hem, I just nod. I can feel Shame beside me, pulling me closer. He’s trying to get me to focus on his words.

“Hood found Hem that night, you knew this.
Before I got there, Warren had already beaten Hem. It wasn’t good, sweetie. He was taking his time on Hem, thinking he had time to punish him in spades. He had years of anger to work out on him. Hood had told me Hem was already dead once I finally got there. I never questioned how Hood had known what was going down that night. I just wanted to kill Warren thinking he had killed my best friend. I assumed I just got there too late. Turns out that Risk had heard the entire phone conversation between Hem and Warren the day before. They interceded only after Hem had already been there awhile.”

Hem is
still sitting motionless not ten feet from where I sit with Shame. He won’t raise his head to make eye contact, but I’m still staring at him, waiting for him to vanish. I’m staring so hard I can make out segments of grey hair at his temple and crown, which oddly, I never noticed until now.

“Gunner, Honor, and Raider let me finish Warren
off. They knew I needed that. Hood told them all that Hem was dead and Raider saw Hem lying on that concrete floor, beaten and bloodied. There was never a reason to question it. Are you following me, Sadey? Are you listening? He was
never dead
.”

I nod again so he knows
he can continue.

He sighs and holds me closer to him.
“After I was finished with Warren, Hood told us to go ahead and go. He knew the Angel members lingering around and insisted that we were without blame and that no retribution would be headed our way. They all knew what Warren had allowed to happen to Cherry, Mace, and now Hem. This wasn’t about any club rivalry war. This was family and it was personal. So, we all headed out and trusted Hood would handle the mess we left behind. Here’s where it gets cloudy, so I need you to listen to me without getting upset again.”

Finally, I take my eyes off Hem, who still hasn’t looked at me
, remaining still in thought. When my eyes reach Shame’s, I see relief that I’m still with him. He bends down into me and kisses my temple and whispers softly, “I’m proud of you, buddy. You’re strong. You’ve got this.”

He
guides my head onto his chest, holding me like father would hold an injured child. He sighs heavily and continues. “What we didn’t know, what was kept from all of us, was that before Warren went after Hem, he hired someone to maim and torture everyone Hem loved in the event that Hem lived and he died that night. He even put the contract out on Mace, the only person in his life he considered his. Hem knew all of this and that’s why he went there in surrender, without fuckin’ backup.” Shame snarls in Hem’s direction with the last sentence.

“
After Hem was seen for his injuries in town by that crazy fuckin’ doctor we pay to keep his mouth shut, Hood contacted Ace in California. He wanted a place for Hem to go and lay low until he figured out who had been hired and if there was any threat still waiting around here. It wasn’t ideal, as you can imagine, but Hem didn’t have any choice but to go. Warren dead, – contractor for hire in play.”

Ace
had already gotten me to this part of the story. I’ve had a few minutes to process that. “So you’re telling me that even though Warren is dead, they are still coming for me and my son?”

“Our son.”
Hem raises his head for the first time since he let me go and looks directly at me. “I want to meet our son. Where is he?”

He wants to meet our son.
My dead and buried husband wants to me our son. How quaint.

I’m about to drive a nail into his heart and I know it hurts, but I can’t stop.
“Are you staying? Cause if you’re not staying I would just rather not. If you’re going to pretend to play dead again, let’s pass on the ‘daddy cares’ play. He’s used to you being a ghost. He’s just a little boy.”

“Sadey girl
, please…”

Hell no
!

“I don’t want to hear your voice right now.
I want to hear more of this story. You went to Ace, to California, never contacting me. You let me grieve for you, Hem, for
seven fucking months
. So, please let Shame finish this happy fairytale type story.”

Hem glares at me
. He’s pissed. It is the first real emotion, other than relief, he’s shown me since he walked out of the graveyard yesterday and into this house today.

Shame is quiet.
He’s letting me have my say with Hem. I’m sure he’s just as pissed, but mostly he’s probably more thankful of what he found in California. “Don’t make this harder, Sadey. This is a shit situation already. Don’t make it any harder.”