Arranged love

GRAVE

THE RINGING OF my phone has me opening my eyes to a dark room. I fall out of her bed and hit the floor with a thud, then moan at the pain that shoots up my side. It rings again, and I see it lighting up on the floor at the end of the bed. Crawling to it, I answer. “Hello?”

“Where the fuck are you?” my brother demands.

I had messaged the group text earlier, but I never checked my phone again after that. I was too busy with Lucy to fucking care what they wanted. “What time is it?” I ask roughly. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. Feels like sandpaper.

“Are you high? Of course, you are,” he growls, answering his own question. “Are you at Kingdom?”

“No.” I run a hand through my hair, finding my way back into the bed. Lying down, I reach over to my right in the darkness to feel Lucy lying next to me, naked and sound asleep. “What … What do you want?” I clear my throat. Fuck, I need a drink to wash down this taste.

He sighs heavily, his anger fading, and my body stiffens. “We’ve been trying to reach you. I got a call last night …” He trails off, and my grip on the phone tightens. “It’s Dad, he’s …”

I lie silently in the darkness, completely and utterly still, waiting for him to say the words that I already know are coming.

“I’m sorry, Kyle.” He uses my real name, and my heart begins to pound in my chest. He never calls me that. I’m Grave. I’ve always been known as Grave, even to him. “Dad passed last night. He was found dead in his condo. They’re saying it was …”

I hang up.

The motherfucker is dead.

I saw him at our friend Luca’s engagement party, but I avoided him. I haven’t spoken to him in over six months. Before that, it had been at least three. He called to tell me that he was disappointed in the life I chose. That he didn’t approve of the drugs and women. As if I should settle down and get married-give him grandbabies.

I snort at that thought.

He never wanted to claim me as his. He referred to me as my mother’s child. Dillan was his favorite. He taught him everything he knows. Wanted to make a man out of him and groomed him for the family business. It never fucking mattered that Dillan and I do the same thing for a living. My brother may not do drugs, but he has his addictions. And my father knew them well. He just shared the same ones, so to him, they were a perfect father and son duo.

I get out of bed and use my phone as a light to make it out of her room, down the hall, and to her kitchen. The light streaming in from her floor-to-ceiling windows allows me to see better than the one on my phone. Grabbing a bottle of Jack, I remove the lid and then toss it back, trying to drown out any memory I have of him. He doesn’t deserve my time.

“Grave?” Lucy calls out. Standing in the center of the kitchen, she’s leaning up against her island. “Grave, what’s wrong?” She walks over to me and flips on the light.

Her blond hair is wild, and she blinks several times, her eyes trying to focus on me.

My body shakes, and I take another gulp, the drink burning my chest. When her eyes finally find mine, she looks from my face to the bottle. She reaches out for me, placing her hands on my chest, but I push her away. “Not now,” I mutter.

“What happened?” she asks, fear lacing her words.

My phone rings in my hand and Bones lights up the screen. I silence it and then turn it off before tossing the fucker on the counter. I walk back to her bedroom, shove open the French doors to her bathroom, then slam them shut behind me. Placing my hands on her white marble counter, I bow my head, trying to ignore the fucking hole in my chest that’s growing by the second.

It’s gonna be okay. I can turn it off like I did all those years ago after I lost the only woman I’ve ever loved. I’ll never forget what that fucker told me when we lost our mother. The only parent who loved me for me.

Seventeen years old

I stand at the front of the church. My brother stands next to me. He stares down at our mother, not a single tear in his eyes. His face a blank canvas. He’s like our father. Tears run down my cheeks, and my shoulders shake. I’m having trouble breathing, and my chest aches.

“Mr. Reed, we’re about to open the doors to friends and family who want to pay their respects before the service,” the woman says to my father.

He comes to stand on the other side of me and nods his head.

I can’t look away from our mother. She doesn’t look like herself. Her skin is yellow, and her face appears swollen. They didn’t do her makeup how she wore it. Her hair is teased at the top and fanned around her face. She never wore it like that, though. It was always curled.

My brother waits another beat and then turns and walks away, heading back down the aisle. Probably to go find his fuck outside to suck his dick in a back room somewhere. The only thing he allows himself to feel is her. Anything else is just background noise.

Placing my hands on the wooden casket, I clench the satin lining that covers the sides. I go to lean forward to kiss her cheek, but a firm grip on my shoulder yanks me back, and I’m spun around. My father leans down to put his face in front of mine. Blue eyes glaring at me. “Pull yourself together!” he growls before roughly wiping my face of my tears. They just fall faster. “Death is a part of life. And you’re making a spectacle of your mother’s funeral. Turn it off.”

“Dad …” I sniff.Copyright Nôv/el/Dra/ma.Org.

“You’re seventeen. Not five! Turn it fucking off, Kyle! It’s just an emotion. You have control of your mind to overcome something so insignificant,” he finishes and then straightens. He doesn’t even look back at my mother as he grabs my arm and drags me to our seats in the front row.

I lift my head to look at myself in the bathroom mirror. “I will feel nothing for you,” I say to myself. A sick part of me hopes he can fucking hear me as he burns in hell. All he cared about was Kingdom. His precious fucking club that was there for him day in and day out. It gave him life. Money. Women.

I yank open the doors to find Lucy standing naked at the end of her bed with my phone in her hand. She can turn it back on if she chooses, but she doesn’t know the code, so she can’t unlock it. I grab her arm and push her onto the mattress.

“Grave, what are you …?”

Gripping the back of her neck with my hand, I shove her face into the bed. “You.”

Her body relaxes, and she gives in to what is about to come. I never did get the concept of feeling no emotions like my brother did. He was already pretty dead inside, but after Mom passed, he was a walking, talking zombie. I thought it was a shame, but my father praised him for it.