Page 74

Duncan

I hadmo bandiain my arms, and my mouth fused to hers when her words took hold in my mind.

“What?” I asked, pulling back. What the fuck was she talking about? She didn’t have to look for me. She had me and she fucking walked away.

“It’s been you all along. You’re the one the universe chose for me.”

I stepped back. Something wasn’t right here. Maybe I was letting Sal get in my head again, but his warnings from when I first met Freyja returned.

“You aren’t making any sense, Freyja.”

“Lucille told me I would meet the man the universe had chosen for me at Mardi Gras. And you’re here.”

“Who the fuck is Lucille?”

She swallowed and bit her lip. The unease prickling at my skin grew.

“Lucille Ball. She speaks to me in my dreams.”

I took another step back. It would have made more sense if she’d said Lucille, the damn bat fromThe Walking Dead.At least then I would know she was fucking crazy.

But she said it with such pride. Such conviction that there was no doubt in my mind that she believed it.

She honestly believed that a dead actress from the fifties spoke to her in her dreams. When Sal heard this bullshit, I would never live it down.

“I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing here, Freyja.”

“It’s not a game, Duncan. Lucille told me.”

Playing along until I could get away, I asked, “Then why did you tell me there was someone else? Why walk away from me?”

“Because she didn’t tell me it was you,” she explained, as if that answered everything.

It didn’t answer shit. There were more questions running through my head than I could even voice. Like how the hell had I gotten it so fucking wrong?

“You really believe this shit?”

Freyja narrowed her eyes at me, and I watched as her face transformed into one of abject anger.

“You are Irish catholic, right?” she asked as she folded her arms over her chest.

I nodded, then looked around, noticing that others were listening.

“So, you believe a child was born to a woman who had never had sex? Then that child grew up never doing anything wrong. To then perform miracles, that if anyone else had performed, they would have been accused of being a witch. And that when they killed him on a stake for doing those magic miracles, everything you’ve done wrong in your life is absolved?”

She punched her finger into my chest with each point. And I would never admit it to her but when she said it like that it did seem ludicrous. But it was how I was raised.

“But Lucille Ball can’t speak to me in a dream? What makes the dead man you talk to more believable than the dead woman that talks to me? Would you prefer I said it was the Virgin Mary who told me? Would that make it believable? UGH, MEN!”

She threw her hands in the air and spun around, her dress flowing behind her as she stormed off and left me standing in a crowd of people, wondering what the hell just happened.

How did I go from being angry she was here to being angry that she left? I watched her stalk away and then suddenly stopped to speak to someone. I couldn’t tell who it was, but then she looked around his shoulder at me.

My feet started moving before my brain caught up to what I was seeing. Nolan Kelley turned and looked over his shoulder at me. His face paled in shock, and I knew what he was about to do.

Placing my finger and thumb between my lips, I whistled as loud as I could and hoped my men heard it over the music. Kelley reached for Freyja, and she slapped him across the face before stepping back away from him.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mac and Oscar converge toward Kelley. They would reach him before I did.