Page 112 of Falling Too Late

I could see the words settle into her.

“Tell me about the tattoo on your back. Is it a scale?”

“It’s a justice scale.”

“With. . .two eyeballs on it?”

I sat up, and she yelped as I moved her easily off me. I turned my back to her.

“An eye for an eye.” I turned my head to watch herface. “I believe in an eye for an eye. Kevin took your childhood and part of your adulthood. So I took his life.”

The tattoo spanned across my back, with the scales hanging from each end and an eyeball on each side. It was my largest tattoo. I waited for her to say something. I expected her to tell me the same thing I knew Ma would have said.

An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.

Then the world would know not to fuck withmyWren.

“Sounds fair to me,” she whispered.

I shuddered when I felt her lips on my back. She kissed both sides of the scale, and then her lips pressed at the back of my neck. I pulled her back into my lap. She took my hands and ran her fingers over each digit. Each letter of her name.

“Why did you do this?”

“These hands will do anything for you.”

“Anything?” she asked.

She placed her palm against mine. Wren’s fingers were long but dainty, only reaching as far as the top crease of my own fingers. “Yes.”

Her fingers trailed up to the tops of my hands where I had two different styled birds on them.

“These are wrens?”

“They are.”

“Alex, you. . . You branded yourself with me and you didn’t even know if I would be here for you when you got out.” I could hear the hesitation in her voice.

“You have been ingrained in me since the day we met; I’m just showing the world who I belong to.” I moved my left leg out from under the blanket and twisted so she could see the side of my calf. The inked dandelions. She touched the tattoo tenderly, her eyes watering, and I reached up, catching her tears.

We spent the day in bed indulging in one another. She told me what it was like raising two puppies at the same time and how she had to spray things down with apple cider vinegar just to keep them from chewing on the legs of the furniture. She told meabout how she broke her ankle the first time she went up against Marshall at the gym. She told me about the sleepless nights, and how she started up charcoal drawings to keep herself occupied when she started having nightmares about forgetting my face.

“Are you going to go back and work for Dan?” she asked, her voice heavy with sleep.

“No. I have a job.” Ezekiel had some things lined up for me. When I was ready, he would put me to work, but for now, I wanted to eat, sleep, and breathe Wren for a while longer.

Wren was asleep in my arms by midafternoon. She slept on her side, hands tucked up underneath her chin. I traced the scar along her jaw from the time her mother backhanded her with her wedding ring. This was before her mother had pawned it off for money, I was told. The scar had faded as the years passed, but it was still there and a part of her.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to her. “I’m so sorry for thinking you were anything except the person I always knew you as.” Guilt flooded me. The things she went through without me. None of it was her fault, and I had every intention of dealing with Jon.

But the things I wanted to do to him would put me right back in jail and I couldn’t let that happen.

Not yet.

CHAPTER 41

ALEX

We pulledup to Dan’s construction yard Monday morning, finding a space to park in. Everything was soaked from the rain over the weekend. The building was painted new colors; they had new logos on the trucks. More employee parking. I still hadn’t fully wrapped my brain around the fact that everyone’s lives had continued without me.

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