Vipers and Virtuosos (Monsters & Muses, #2)(103)

Mellie reaches up, eyes wide in shock and her breaths coming in sharp, hollow gasps; the knife she had when she walked in now juts out from the side of her throat, lodged all the way to the handle and coming out the other side.

As she collapses, my eyes find Riley crouched on her knees, the zip tie hanging from just one of her wrists now. Her pink hair is tinged with red, her face slightly swollen, and even though there’s a girl bleeding to death on top of me, she smiles.

“Rookie mistake, leaving a weapon unattended. Guess you should’ve spent less time being a bitchy psychopath, and more learning your surroundings.” Riley spits in Mellie’s direction, anger etched into her face. “Or your people.”

I slide out from beneath Mellie’s body as it goes limp, kicking the gun away and drawing Riley into my arms. My heart races, battering against my ribs, and I thread my dirty fingers through her hair, tilting my head to look down at her.

“Holy shit. What the actual fuck just happened?”

“I told you I had nothing to do with the rumors,” she says hoarsely, and I chuckle, stroking her cheek with my thumb. “And you were going to ruin my life because of them. A shame, really. Imagine what you’d have lost out on.”

Grinning, my mind not quite caught up with the severity or finality of the situation, I press my forehead into hers.

“I’d never have been able to go through with it,” I say. “Leaving you earlier was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Stupidest, too.”

“You came back, though.”

Huffing a laugh, I nod, cradling her head in my hands. “And I’m not leaving without you again.”





EPILOGUE





“You’re absolutely sure you want to do this?”

Turning my head, I glare at my brother as he sits on the plastic chair beside me, hands on his bouncing knees. His eyes dart around the room, coasting over every piece of artwork hanging on the walls, tension threading through his jaw.

“Boyd.” He glances at me, and I pinch his thigh. “Your nervous energy is contagious, and I’m gonna need you to stop.”

He groans, reaching up to pull at his dirty-blond hair. “God, you’re right. It’s just… tattoos are permanent, you know?”

I give him a flat look, cocking an eyebrow. “No shit? I thought you were just bad at showering.”

Rolling his eyes, he pushes to his feet and paces in front of me. I know the nerves have more to do with his evening plans than anything else, so I sit back and continue scrolling through my phone, refusing to let his anxiety bother me.

Not adopting other peoples’ thoughts and feelings is something I’ve been focusing a lot on at therapy lately, and while rewiring that part of my brain is still a massive work in progress, starting with Boyd has been monumental in helping us repair our relationship.

It’s by no means perfect, and after the attack in Lunar Cove last year, it almost fractured again when Boyd’s fears gave him another excuse to try and control me.

Mellie didn’t die that night, unfortunately, but she was charged with about a dozen different felonies while recovering in the hospital. She pleaded insanity, her lawyer citing parasocial relationships and their effect on the brain and wound up in a psychiatric hospital somewhere across the country.

Regardless, she won’t be hurting anyone else anytime soon, but it was hard for my brother to accept that I’d been accosted again, while he slept in the house right next door.

When I moved back to King’s Trace, taking up residence in the lakefront house Boyd bought me, I also started dragging him along to therapy. Both of us have a lifetime of issues to work through, and I refused to allow any sort of regression after having come so far.

I don’t want my intervention to be the sole credit for the reason he’s finally proposing to Fiona, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t secretly pat myself on the back for giving him the push to do it.

“She’s gonna say yes,” I tell him, crossing one leg over the other. “You’re spiraling for no reason.”

He stops pacing and sighs. “They wouldn’t call it spiraling if it made sense.”

The tattoo artist finally calls me to the back, and I tell Boyd he can go and that I’ll see him after his date to help celebrate. He pins me with a look that says I’d better be right, and then heads outside, disappearing down the street.

As I lie on the table in the back, letting the artist put the stencil on, I smile through my own nerves, memories of my first tattoo flashing across my mind the way they often do.

Aiden’s hands on my hip, his head between my legs, his scent on my skin. Things I’d never have imagined I’d experience in a million years, that now I can’t seem to live without.

Even now, I’m wearing a flannel of his that I stole from our closet while he’s been in New York, finalizing a project he’s been working on with his mom for the last few months.

When he “retired” at only twenty-five, he didn’t want to leave the music industry altogether; just wanted to recapture his passion for it and create on his own time. Maybe even navigate through his mental health issues through music in a way that didn’t drain him, he’d said.

In an attempt to slowly fix his relationship with his mother, he’d proposed starting a small joint label, and said that their primary goal would be finding and signing new, undiscovered talent.