“Sorry dude. How did your appointment go?”
Nash’s Uncle Phil had opened the shop years ago on Capitol Hill when it mainly catered to gangbangers and bikers, now with the influx of young urbanites and hipsters’ populating the area ‘The Marked’ was one of the busiest tattoo parlors in town. Nash and I met in fifth grade in art class and had been inseparable since, in fact it had been his plan since we were about twelve that we would eventually move to the city and work for Phil. We both had mad skills and the personality to make the shop bump with business so Phil had no qualms apprenticing us and putting us to work before we were both in our twenties. It was killer to have a friend in the same field; I had a plethora of ink on my skin that ranged from great to not so great that chronicled Nash getting better and better at his craft and he could state the exact same thing.
“Finished that back piece that I’ve been working on since July, it turned out better than I thought and the dude is talking about doing the front so I’ll take it because he’s a fat tipper.”
“Nice”, I was juggling the phone and the coffee and trying to open the door to the car when a female voice stopped me in my tracks.
“Hey,” I looked over my shoulder and the brunette was standing a car over with a smile on her face. “I really like your tattoos.”
I smiled back at her and jumped back narrowly missing spilling scalding coffee all down my crotch as Shaw shoved the door open from the inside.
“Thanks.” If we were closer to home and Shaw wasn’t already putting the car in reverse I probably would have taken a second to ask the girl for her number. Shaw shot me a look of contempt that I promptly ignored and went back to my conversation with Nash. “Rome is home, apparently he got in an accident and Shaw said he’s got a few weeks of R&R coming to him. I guess that’s why mom was blowing my phone up all week.”
“Kick ass. Ask him if he wants to roll with us for a few days, I miss that surly bastard.”
I sipped on the coffee and my head finally started to calm down. “That’s the plan. I’ll hit you up on my way home and let you know what the story is.”
I flicked my thumb across the screen to end the call and settled back into the seat. Shaw glowered at me and I swore her eyes glowed at me in her anger. Really I had never seen anything that green anywhere else in nature and when she was mad they were just otherworldly.
“Your mom called while you were busy flirting. She’s mad we’re late.”
I sucked on more of the black nectar of the Gods and started tapping out a beat on my knee with my free hand. I was always kind of a fidgety guy and the closer we got to my parent’s house the worse it usually got. Brunch was always stilted and forced, I couldn’t figure out why they insisted on going through with it every single week, couldn’t figure out why Shaw enabled the farce, but I went every week even when I knew nothing would ever change.
“She’s mad you’re late. We both know she could care less if I was there or not.” My fingers moved faster and faster as she wheeled the car into a gated community and past rows and rows of cookie cutter mini mansions that were built back into the mountains.
“That’s not true and you know it, Rule. I do not suffer through these car rides every weekend, subject myself to the delight of your morning after nastiness because your parents want me to have eggs and pancakes every Sunday. I do it because they want to see you, want to try and have a relationship with you no matter how many times you hurt them or push them away. I owe it to your parents and more importantly I owe it to Remy to try and make you act right even though lord knows that’s almost a full time job.”
I sucked in a breath as the blinding pain that always came when someone mentioned Remy’s name barreled through my chest. My fingers involuntarily opened and closed around the coffee cup and I whipped my head around to glare at her.
“Remy wouldn’t be all over my ass to try and be something to them I’m not. I was never good enough for them, and never will be. He understood that better than anyone and worked overtime to try and be everything to them I never could be.”
She sighed and pulled the car to a stop in the driveway behind my dad’s SUV. “The only difference between you and Remy was that he let people love him and you,” she yanked open the driver’s door and glared at me across the space that separated us. “You have always been determined to make everyone that cares about you prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt. You’ve never wanted to be easy to love Rule and you make damn sure that nobody can ever forget it.” She slammed the door with enough force that it rattled my back teeth and made my head start to throb again.
It had been three years. Three lonely, three empty, three sorrow filled years since the Archer brothers went from a trifecta to a duo. I was close to Rome, he was awesome and had always been my role model when it came to being a badass, but Remy was my other half, both figuratively and literally. He was my identical twin, the light to my dark, the easy to my hard, the joy to my angst, the perfect to my oh so totally fucked up and without him I was only half the person I would ever be. It had been three years since I had called him in the middle of the night to come pick me up from some lame ass party because I was too drunk to drive. It had been three years since he had left the apartment we shared to come get me with zero questions asked because that’s just what he did. It had been three years since he had lost control of his car on a rainy and slick I-25 and slammed into the back of a semi-truck going well over eighty. It had been three years since we had put my twin in the ground and my mother had looked at me with tears in her eyes and stated point blank, “It should have been you,” as they lowered Remy into the ground. It had been three years and his name alone was enough to drop me to my knees, especially coming from the one person in the world Remy had loved as much as he loved me.
Remy was everything I wasn’t, clean cut, well dressed, interested in education and building a secure future and the only person on the planet that was good enough and classy enough to match all the magnificence that he possessed it was Shaw Landon. The two of them had been inseparable since the first time he brought her home when she was thirteen and trying to escape the fortress of the Landon compound. He insisted they were just friends, that he loved Shaw like a sister, that he just wanted to protect her from her awful, sterile family but the way he was with her was full of reverence and care. I knew he loved her and since Remy could do no wrong Shaw had quickly become an honorary member of my family and as much as it galled me she was the only one that really, truly understood the depth of my pain when it came to losing him.
I had to take a few extra minutes to get my feet back under me so I sucked back the rest of the coffee and shoved open the door. I wasn’t surprised to see a tall figure coming around the SUV as I labored out of the sports car. My brother was an inch or so taller than me and built more along the lines of a warrior. His dark brown hair was buzzed in a typical military cut and his pale blue eyes, the same exact icy shade as mine looked tired as he forced a smile at me. I let out a whistle because his left arm was in a cast and sling, he had a walking boot on one foot and there was a nasty line of black stiches running through one of his eyebrows and across the top of his forehead. The weed whacker that had attacked my hair had clearly gotten a good shot at my big bro too.
“Looking good solider.”
He pulled me to him in a one armed hug and I winced for him when I felt the taped up side of his body clearly indicating some busted or bruised ribs. “I look about as good as I feel. You look like a clown getting out of that car.”
“I look like a clown no matter what when I’m around that girl.” He barked out a laugh and rubbed a rough hand through my spiky hair.
“You and Shaw are still acting like mortal enemies?”
“More like uneasy acquaintances, she’s just as prissy and judgmental as always. Why didn’t you call or email me that you were hurt? I had to hear it from her on the way over.”
He swore as we started to slowly start and make our way into the house. It upset me to see how deliberate he was moving and I wondered if there was more serious damage done than the visible marks I could see.
“I was unconscious after the Hummer flipped. We went over an IED and it was bad. I was in the hospital for a week with a scrambled noggin and when I woke up they had to do surgery on my shoulder so I was drugged up. I called mom and figured she would let you know what the deal was, but I heard that as usual you were unavailable when she called.”
I shrugged a shoulder and reached out a hand to steady him as he faltered a little on the stairs to the front door. “I’m busy.”
“You’re stubborn.”
“Not too stubborn, I’m here aren’t I and I didn’t even know you were home until like fifteen minutes ago.”
“The only reason you’re here is because that little girl in there is bound and determined to keep this family together regardless if we’re her own or not. You go in there and play nice otherwise I’ll kick your ass broken arm and all.”
I muttered a few choice words and followed my battered sibling into the house. Sundays really were just my least favorite day.
Chapter 2
Shaw
I closed the bathroom door with a soft click and turned the lock. I collapsed against the skin and ran shaking hands over my face. It was getting harder and harder each and every Sunday to be Rule’s chaperone to these family gatherings, I already felt like I was getting an ulcer and if I had to walk in on him and one of his disgusting bar bimbos again I wasn’t sure I was going to make it out of his apartment without committing homicide. I turned around to splash some cold water on my face and lifted the heavy fall of blond hair off my neck. I needed to pull it together because the last thing I wanted was for Margot or Dale to notice something was off and even drugged up and in pain Rome was one of the most observant people I had ever met. He didn’t miss a thing when it came to either of his younger brothers and me by association since I was technically lumped into the category of surrogate little sister.
It was getting harder and harder to spend time around Rule and not just because looking at him reminded me of everything that I no longer had which was the problem Margot and Dale struggled with, not that the insensitive ass had any empathy for his parents. My struggle came with the fact that Rule was complicated, he was brash, mouthy, careless, thoughtless, and often cranky and generally and insufferable pain in the ass but when he chose to be he was also charming and funny, artistically brilliant and more often than not the most interesting person in the room and I had been head over heels in love with both sides of him since I was thirteen years old. Of course I had loved Remy, loved him like a brother, like the best friend and consummate protector he had been but I loved Rule like it was my mission in life, like it was inevitable and no matter how many times I was shown what an awful idea it was, what a bad match we were, what a callous asshole he could be, I couldn’t shake it so each and every time I had to have the fact that he didn’t even think of me as more than a car pool driver shoved in my face it tore a little bit more of my battered heart apart.
