Page 16 of Cursed by Death (Ruby Jane #1)

I didn’t fuck around when it came to setting up arrangements for Thomas.

The thought of his dead body being shoved in one of those little body lockers in the morgue didn’t sit well with me and I hated that for him.

I skipped having some kind of church services or anything at the funeral home.

Instead I was having a priest come to speak at the cemetery. And I was having him buried near my grandmother. It’s where my mother should have been buried too. Instead I had no idea where her body had been laid to rest. The only person who did know was a man I never planned on speaking to because he was as good as dead to me.

I texted the Detective the details because I figured if he found out after the fact he would probably be pissed. And because he was my only friend.

And there was that forehead kiss I absolutely was not thinking about. It had nothing to do with that.

Nope.

Nada.

Shit.

And then I did an absolutely insane thing that I hoped I didn’t end up regretting later.

I found the phone number for the garage the shifters owned. And then I called it. After saving it in my contacts first because fuck it.

Rally wasn’t there and when I told them who I was and asked to leave him a message the person on the phone got really weird and started calling me Princess.

I had immediate regret.

Still, I gave him all the information about Thomas’s burial and he promised to pass it on to his Prince as soon as he got off the phone with me. And then he told me how sorry he was for my loss and asked me if there was anything I needed.

Seriously, the wolf shifters, at least the ones at the garage, were starting to grow on me.

I hoped Rally didn’t get mad at me for calling the garage and leaving a message there for him. I had no other way of getting a hold of him though. Next time I saw him I would have to remember to ask him for his cellphone number. And the phone number to his house.

Good grief.

Rally wouldn’t think that was cringe at all. He’d probably love it.

It took me an absurdly long time to pick out an outfit to wear to the cemetery. I knew it didn’t really matter what I wore because Thomas was dead but it was important to me. I felt like it was a way of showing how much I respected and loved the man that he was.

I picked out a simple, long sleeved black dress. It was a turtleneck, because cleavage at a time like this would be gross. And the skirt hit just below the knees. I paired it with black stilettos. They had a very high heel that I could probably stake a vampire with if need be.

I’ll admit, I picked the dress not just because it would look good but because I could wear my wrist sheaths with my knives and then have another strapped to the inside of my thigh. I wasn’t about to go anywhere unarmed any time soon. Or likely ever again.

I decided to drive my grandmother’s Bentley. It matched my outfit and had been just sitting in the garage for forever. Thomas drove it on occasion to have it serviced but otherwise it just sat there.

Having three vehicles was going to be too much for just me but until I figured out what to do with them I was going to switch up which one I was driving.

I was half an hour early to the cemetery but I didn’t care. There were flowers covering the casket and a row of white chairs in front of it.

I had told the funeral home I only needed one chair but the man must have thought I was joking. Or maybe just that one chair was too sad, even for a funeral.

I picked the chair right in the middle, front and center, and parked my ass in it. And then, with my big sunglasses on, I sat there staring at Thomas’s flower covered coffin and I waited for the priest who the funeral home had hooked me up with to arrive.

He showed up fifteen minutes early, greeted me, and stood next to the casket looking through his bible. I wondered if I told him who’s spawn I was if he’d throw his bible at me and run for the hills.

It wasn’t as amusing as I thought it’d be. It was another thing that was just sad.

Detective Rowans sat down on my left five minutes later and he wasn’t alone. The police officer and the other detective who had shown up at my house looking for him sat down in the two chairs beside him.

I didn’t question why he’d brought them. I trusted the man and at the moment I could use all the friends I could get.

Rally sat down on my right not five minutes later and he wasn’t alone either. The man he’d talked to at the underground sat beside him and Hunter from the garage sat in another chair.

I felt their presence behind me so I looked back over my shoulder. There were so many shifters standing behind us that I couldn’t count them all if I tried. And I didn’t try.

“What—”

“I’m a Prince and you are my mate,” Rally said simply. “My people look after their own.”

I turned back around in my seat and stared straight ahead at the coffin. Silent tears fell down my cheeks and I let them.

“Thank you,” I said to both men on either side of me. “I thought I was going to have to do this by myself and I am more grateful than you know that because of you I don’t have to.”

I knew the men and women behind me heard every choked-out word but I didn’t care. I didn’t know them but I was grateful for their presence as well and they might as well know it. I wasn’t embarrassed at my show of emotions and I wouldn’t allow myself to be.

The Detective picked up my hand, laced his fingers through mine, and placed them on his thigh. His very firm thigh.

Rally placed his hand on my thigh closest to him and he squeezed gently. I knew he felt the strap of the sheath wrapped around my thigh but he didn’t move his hand away and for once he kept his mouth shut.

I nodded for the priest to begin and he didn’t delay. He was looking at everyone with wide eyes and I suspected he knew Rally’s people weren’t human. They gave off a vibe.

I gave him props for sticking it out and not bailing. It was probably only because the police were here.

He talked and read from the Bible but I didn’t hear a single fucking word out of his mouth.

And that was because of the two people who stood off in the distance on the other side of Thomas’s coffin.

Roan and Bane.

It was safe to say they hadn’t been invited. So, I had no idea what the fuck they were doing here.

I knew when Rally noticed them because his hand on my thigh spasmed.

I knew when the Detective noticed them because his fingers gave mine a little squeeze.

As for me?

Well, I was absolutely furious. They had absolutely no right to be here and I wasn’t about to allow them to ruin this.

So, I gave the Detectives fingers a squeeze back and I placed my hand over top of Rally’s on my thigh. I focused on the priest and I tried my best to ignore them entirely.

When the priest was done he came over to me and I stood up to shake his hand and thank him. Rally and Detective Rowans stood with me.

The priest shook the Detective’s hand and thanked him for coming. He looked at Rally nervously but otherwise ignored him.

It pissed me off.

“What, no handshake for a shifter Prince?” I asked snidely. I couldn’t seem to help myself.

You could hear a pin drop in the cemetery because I had every single person’s attention now.

The priest flushed but it was Rally, who had been snubbed, that tried to save him. “Little avenging angel, it doesn’t matter to me. I don’t—”

“It matters to me,” I said, cutting him off. “You shook my hand just fine and nothing bad happened to you. And my father’s a demon.”

The priest gasped and took a step back, stumbling away from me.

Yeah, I guessed the demon trumped the shifter in the eyes of the Lord's Shepherds. Or whatever the fuck it was that he called himself.

“Alright, boys,” Detective Rowans said, stepping in between me and the priest, blocking him from my view. “How about you walk the good priest here to his car and then get out of here yourselves. Ruby and I thank you for being here.”

It was probably for the best because I didn’t need to be taking my aggression out on the man. It wasn’t very nice of me, especially after he just did Thomas’s funeral service for me.

I wasn’t going to thank him though.

We were all quiet as we watched the officer and the detective walk the priest to his car.

“I’d clap,” the man next to Rally said. “But the hunters are approaching.”

I had a feeling I was about to lose my goddamn mind.

“Hello, Ruby Jane,” Roan said in a voice far deeper than the one I remembered him having.

It made sense because he was very much a man now. They both were.

“Roan,” I responded in a cold voice.

Bane turned to his brother and grinned. “You owe me a hundred bucks, brother.” he looked back at me and his grin turned to a wide smile. “You always were the only one who could tell us apart. Roan bet me that you wouldn’t be able to tell us apart after all this time but I knew better. Thanks for proving me right, beautiful.”

He winked at me and I wanted nothing more than to throat punch him.

After all this time he didn’t get to show up here and pretend like we were old friends. Last week I would have accepted him with open arms. But that was last week and things were clearly different now.

“We need to talk,” Roan said, ignoring his brother and everything he’d just said. “Perhaps you could get rid of the shifters so that we can have that conversation.”

“You’ll not be speaking with her privately,” Rally growled as he sneered at Roan. “If it were up to me you wouldn't be speaking to her at all but I know my mate well enough now to know there’s no stopping her from doing what she wants. But she won’t be doing it alone.”

The happy go lucky look fell away from Bane’s face and he glared at Rally. “She’s not your fucking mate, shifter.”

“You have no idea what I am,” I snapped back at him before Rally could respond.

“Umm, my Prince,” a very hesitant female voice called out from behind us, snagging my attention. What kind of crazy person waded into this shitty conversation was the kind of person that made me very curious.

“Yes, Ginger?”

I turned to see a very meek, small woman with brown hair stepped forward and apart from the rest of the crowd. She looked nervous as all hell and almost like she wished she could disappear into the crowd.

“I have to get back to my son. You were my ride here. I’m sorry to interrupt this… conversation.”

“Do you not drive or something?” I very rudely asked her. I wasn’t trying to be rude, I was just nosy.

I watched her throat bob as she swallowed and looked at me nervously. “I can drive, ma’am. I just don’t have a car anymore.”

I turned fully towards her. “First, I’m not ma’am, I’m just Ruby. And, second, you said anymore. What happened to your car?”

“Baby,” Rally said gently. “Her husband was in a car accident just over a month ago. A drunk driver hit him head on and he died instantly. They have a six-month-old son. I’m hoping we get a trade-in in the garage soon so she can have something to drive.”

“I’m so sorry about your husband,” I told her in a heartfelt voice. I hoped she heard the honesty in it. “Thank you for coming to Thomas’s funeral today. I…”

Holy shit.

It was fate and definitely meant to be.

“I think I can actually help you out with your car problem though. I was just thinking before coming here that I need to get rid of at least one of my cars. I have three of them and I really only need one. I was thinking the BMW but maybe the Jeep will be better for you with your baby and all. It’s only a couple of years old and I bought it brand new. I think she’s only got less than fifty thousand miles on her.”

Her cheeks blazed bright red. “Thank you, Ruby, but I can’t afford something like that.

I frowned at her. “I don’t want money for it. They’re just going to sit there. You can just have it.”

If possible, her cheeks got even redder. “I don’t need your charity.”

“Ginger,” Rally said quietly in a voice full of warning. He was ready to defend me. Even against one of his own people who was a brand-new mother and a grieving widow.

Blind loyalty was a beautiful thing I did not think I had yet earned or deserved from this man. But I would. I absolutely would earn it. And I would give it back to him just the same. Always. Because this very morning he had earned mine.

“It’s not charity,” I told her, completely unaffected by her reaction. “Rally told me that you all came here today because I’m his mate and his people look after their own. Well, up until last week the only person I had in the whole world was an old man who was my dead grandmother’s attorney. And he was all the family I had and my only friend to speak of.”

I gestured behind me to where his casket currently sat. “He came into my life on my eighteenth birthday when the foster care system spit me out into the streets. I told Thomas to go to hell when he found me to tell me that she was dead and she’d left me with everything that she’d had. And what she had was a lot. I didn’t want anything from some rich old bitch who’d let me get abused and live in hell in foster care simply because she didn’t like my dad or the fact that I shared a last name with him. Granted I don’t like the man either so I can kind of get it but I was just a child.”

Rally shifted closer to me so that he could wrap his arm around my waist and pull me into his body. All of the shifters were watching me with rapt attention and extreme fascination.

I blamed the twins' sudden reappearance for my current very public trauma dump and spectacle.

“So, you see, Ginger, I grew up in foster care with absolutely nothing. The only reason I have money or extra cars to give away is because it was all that old bitch had to give me. Because when she was alive she didn’t know how to love me so she left me with her fortune. I’m smart enough to know that’s not what love is. And I’m smart enough to know what’s really important in life.”

The Detective grabbed my hand and, once again, laced our fingers together. “She tried to give me a car just earlier this week,” he told the watching crowd in a voice full of humor.

“I’m smart enough to know that what’s really important in life isn’t materialistic things but it’s the people you love and care about. It’s showing up at a funeral for the friend of a woman you don’t even know because she means something to Rally and you give a shit about him. And it’s doing that while you’re grieving your own husband and having to leave your six-month-old baby to do it. That tells me everything I need to know about you. So, please, don’t stand there and tell me that this is charity because that’s the farthest thing from the truth that there is.”

“Okay,” Ginger whispered as she wiped the tears away from her cheeks with shaking hands. “I’ll take the Jeep because I’d be a moron not to but I have to tell you this might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

I smiled softly at her, so happy she’d said yes. “Then I gotta tell you that you being here today just might be one of the nicest things anyone’s ever done for me before. So, thank you for that, Ginger.”

“Can I hug you?” she whispered in a voice thick with her tears and raw emotions.

Rally let me go and the Detective dropped my hand. I held my arms out to her. “Of course. Just don’t freak out if you feel my knives under the dress.”

Both Rally and the Detective laughed. They knew I wasn’t joking.

Ginger was full on crying when she got to me and I wrapped my arms around her, holding her tightly to me.

I looked over her shoulder at Rally who was watching me with something bright and beautiful blazing in his eyes. I didn’t even bother attempting to decipher the emotions behind that look because it scared the absolute shit out of me.

“Send them all home,” I told him authoritatively. “They’re not here to hurt me. I don’t trust them but I know they’d never hurt me. And you need to trust me on that. Your people came here to support you and attend a funeral. They did that and it was much appreciated. But they don’t need to be here for the drama with the hunters. It’s safer for them if they go.”

His eyes got even brighter as he ran the backs of his knuckles across my cheekbone. “I want you to know that I am so unbelievably proud right now to call you my mate. You looked after my people like any good leader would. You’re absolute perfection, Ruby Jane.”

Now it was me who was blushing and very uncomfortable.