✓ WICKED VOWS| JAKE (Book II )

47-My Last Breath Is Yours For The Take

Jake's pov

I should have gone after her, she is hellfire and holy water.

Why do I feel like my soul is bleeding as it runs silently and slowly, ready to swallow me whole? She held a gun on my fucking ribs, and I was ready for every bullet that comes out of it, the truth is she could shoot me and slit my throat, and even with my last breath coming out of me, I'd apologize for bleeding on her clothes.

I needed distraction; I needed something to drag me away from the chasm about to swallow me up. I walked over to the window to clear my head, and then the view outside—well, it more than deepened the sense of dread already fallen over me.

It was one and thirty minutes in the afternoon when the silence between us persisted, hugely relieving and tormenting for me. I was not up to talking, to playing through everything as if it were all right when it was anything but. My thoughts returned to Ana, the wreck our relationship had become, the mess I'd made of everything.

"Flowers," Harry said suddenly, breaking the silence. His voice was raspier than ever, a product of the disease that had stolen his lungs, but there was a softness to it, reverential almost. "I used to keep a garden, you know. Back before all this." He gestured vaguely to his chest, his breath hitching a little at the motion.

I nodded, more out of habit than real interest, my mind still far away, lost in the echo of Ana's words.

Harry continued, his voice steady despite the difficulty breathing. "I loved those flowers. They were like a part of me, something that needed care, and attention. You had to understand them, you know? Each one needed something different—a different kind of soil, a different amount of water, light. You couldn't just treat them all the same and expect them to thrive."

I listened, but my mind strayed back to the image of Ana's cold gaze. She had looked at me as though I was some stranger whom she couldn't trust. The memory of it was a wound that bled profusely.

Harry's voice pulled me back, if only slightly. "My wife used to love those flowers too. She'd sit out there with me for hours, tending to them. She had a touch, a way of making them bloom no matter what. She could get them to grow even in the most inhospitable circumstances. But there was something she knew and I didn't, Jake: that flowers are like human beings; they need more than just the necessities to survive. They need care. They need to be understood.

His eyes never left mine, but I kept my gaze on the floor, my words caught in my throat. I didn't want to have this conversation. I didn't want to hear how his wife had known how to make things grow, to nurture life when all I seemed capable of doing was destroying it.

But Harry, in his way, seemed to know I wasn't going to answer. He rocked back a little in his chair, his breathing slightly asthmatic, and went on, almost as if he were talking to himself. "She will bloom."

"Who?"

"The flower."

Will she?

His words cut through the fog of my thoughts, striking something deep inside. I knew he was right. I'd known it for a long, long time. Yet knowing and doing are two different things. And in the latter, I had failed, time after time. But my flower has bloody thorns with petals of sins. This flower od mine, loved to sin because it was her salvation.

I sat in silence, my mind playing back the scene over and over with Ana, each time more acute. I had let things go too far; I had pushed her away where I should have been pulling her close, showing her she did matter, and that I cared. Instead, I buried myself in the lies of control, thinking I could do everything alone.