The Beginning of Connie and Isaac: Blue Butterfly Series (The Blue Butterfly Book 3) (24 page)

March 2013. Aged 22.

THE MIST APPEARED
to be crawling towards me. I didn’t move, refusing to let it push me away. I’d been pushed away too many times and I wouldn’t allow anyone or anything to do it again.

My heart ached as I stood under the cover of the trees, their heavily laden branches providing a secluded hideaway as I watched the small congregation gather by the graveside. A couple of people opened umbrellas when the rain began to fall heavier, immediately dampening down the curling fog.

I recognised most of them. I was surprised Tammy had come; she’d always bullied Mae at school. And Bonnie, another two-faced bitch my sister and I had avoided like the plague.

I swiped at the tears that flooded down my cheeks. A part of me had gone, evaporated from inside me. My soul felt incomplete, my heart had split down the middle.

I couldn’t decipher what the vicar was saying from so far away but I didn’t need his words. They wouldn’t comfort me, nor would they take away the ache or the guilt. Bonnie wailed when the vicar threw a lump of soil on top of Mae. What the fuck? Dramatic skank.

My eyes widened when a tall, dark-haired man stepped out from behind a woman with a large umbrella. I hadn’t noticed him before, and from the sheer size of him I wondered why. His long black coat was drenched, his dark brown hair slicked across his forehead as streams of rain ran down his face. I could see the drops dripping from his long eyelashes even from the distance between us.

He stood by the edge of the hole, looking down into it with a severe frown. He looked angry; angry at Mae for dying, possibly. I understood because I felt it too. The rage that had engulfed me when one of my contacts notified me of her death had been the most unreal feeling I had ever felt, even greater than the grief of losing my parents… or rather my mother.

I cocked my head in puzzlement when he dropped a single deep red rose onto her coffin. His fists clenched before he brought one up to his lips and kissed it then tossed something else into the grave.

Loud sobs filtered across the cemetery, the driving rain doing nothing to stop the weeping as people wandered off.

Waiting until everyone had left, I trudged across the muddy ground and stopped beside my sister’s final resting place.

“Hey,” I whispered as I brought my gaze down to the wooden box that held Mae. A deep tightening in my chest brought on a gasp of pain and I closed my eyes for a moment. The rain beat down on me, punishing me for the sins I had committed against my own flesh and blood. “I’m so sorry, Mae.”

The silence tore at me until the pain became too much and I stepped back to leave. A splash of white from the coffin caught my attention. It was obviously what the tall guy had thrown in. I squinted, trying to focus on what it was but I couldn’t make it out.

Pulling my phone from my inside pocket, I quickly snapped a shot of the object. Opening up the camera album, I swiped at the screen as the rain beaded, distorting the image before I zoomed in and stared in shock.

I stumbled backwards, losing my footing, my heart thudding loudly in my ears, and my arse landing in the mud when a two-year-old
us
stared back at me. However, this wasn’t one of us, this was the essence of Mae. It was a new photo, the clothes the child wore were modern. She was sitting on the bonnet of a car, smiling widely for the shot. Her long black hair was in pigtails, and her bright blue eyes - Mae’s eyes, my eyes - twinkled brightly. This year’s registration on the car confirmed my thoughts.

Holy fuck.

Mae had a family. I had a niece. And the guy who had dropped in the photo was obviously her husband.

My heart burst for her, my sorrow lifting before intensifying when the reality of what she had to leave behind consumed me. She had found the very thing she had always wanted. Relief coursed through me, any taste of happiness she could have lived before passing should be celebrated. I thought I had broken her when I… when I left. Thought I had given her more of a reason to want to leave this dismal place and join our parents. And the fact that she was now with
him
agonised me.

He shouldn’t be granted time with his daughter in the afterlife, he didn’t deserve that. The only hope I held onto was that the devil had claimed his rotten soul, and refused him sanctuary with my mother and sister.

I brushed my thumb over the happy picture, saving it to my phone as wallpaper and smiled. I wasn’t alone anymore. There wasn’t only me that remained of the Swift family.

I needed to find them, both her and Mae’s husband.

But it turned out that he wasn’t Mae’s husband. He wasn’t even her lover. It was over the following months that I found out exactly who Daniel Shepherd really was.

And exactly who I was.

November 2013.

BULLET CURLED UP
in my bed yet again and I sighed sadly and cuddled her to me. “You okay, sister?”

She remained silent but nodded. My heart went out to my best friend. She’d been in love with Panther for years and as much as I encouraged her to tell him, she refused. Isaac had thrown another famous Phantom party, and after battling with an excruciating headache all day, I was hiding away in my room. Although Isaac and I were married, we still had our own separate rooms where we could just relax and be ourselves. I loved Isaac, I did, but I was still very much isolated in my own life. We shared rings, we shared bodies and sometimes, occasionally, we shared thoughts but aside from that, we were still our own people. And it suited us both.

“Panther got a friend over for the night again?”

She turned into me, burying her face into my chest as she broke out into a sob. “I want to stab her,” she growled.

“Who?”

“Whoever the skank is in his fucking bed.”

“Bullet just tell him, for Christ’s sake. You never know…”

“No!” She shook her head firmly. “I have to work with him, Shadow. If he knows how I feel about him it will compromise all our…”

“I have to go away for a while,” I cut in. I’d been dreading telling her and for some strange reason I found blurting it out in the middle of her sentence easier to do.

Her eyes lifted to me as she pulled back so she could see the whole of my face. “Is this to do with Annie?”

She shifted away from me and I sat up, opening the drawer beside my bed to pull out the bottle of vodka. Bullet grabbed the two glasses I kept on the dresser for our nightly moans and encouraged me to fill them to the brim before we both rested back against the wall. “Annie has been marked.”

“What the fuck?” Bullet gasped, choking down a mouthful of Grey Goose.

“Her and…
daddy
.” The way I spat ‘daddy’ made Bullet smirk.

“I take it you and the notorious Mr Shepherd are going to have some fun.”

The chuckle that broke from me was as cold as my feelings towards Mae’s torturer. “Oh, I plan on having lots of fun with him. But first I have to get Annie to feel safe with me. Isaac has already prepared her a family for when it’s over.”

Bullet sighed and looked at me curiously. “And Isaac’s okay with this?”

“With what?”

“With you being so close to the target. I’m surprised he’s sanctioned your involvement to be honest.”

When she noticed me tense, she narrowed her eyes and tipped her head. “He has sanctioned your involvement?”

“Of course he has,” I said carefully.

But my best friend knew me better than anyone and she growled. “For fuck’s sake, Shadow. What the hell are you doing?”

“He has!” I defended but then sighed. “He’s planning on moving my niece abroad, Bullet. She’s my niece. The only family we have is each other. I can’t allow that. She’s my sister’s baby, my flesh and blood.”

“Shadow…”

“No! I’m going in there and I’m going to end that bastard, and if needs be I will go into hiding with Annie. She’s mine, Bullet and even Isaac won’t take her from me.”

“Oh, my friend.” Bullet sighed as she gripped my hand tightly. “She’s not Isabella…”

“Fuck you!” I spat out, glaring at her as I scurried off the bed. “Fuck you! Don’t you think I don’t know that? I do! I know that, but she is Mae’s and I will sign myself over to the devil to love that little girl!”

She stared after me, shouting my name as I slammed my own room door behind me and tore through the Phantom mansion. I knew she wasn’t Isabella. Annie was Mae’s daughter, I wasn’t deluded. Yet, I was her auntie and that bastard who she lived with didn’t deserve her. He deserved to feel the edge of my blade across his throat, and by fucking God was he going to feel it.

The hatred of what he did to Mae consumed me yet again, and I palmed the wall in attempt to control my raging breaths. My belly curdled with fury, my mouth watering as I pictured what I was going to do to Daniel Shepherd. Rage engulfed me, my heart beating furiously as I struggled to contain my emotions.

I needed Isaac, he was the only person who could ground me, who could snap me out of my shit and make me understand what was real and what hope could bring me.

His quarters, or rather our marital suite, was quiet when I quietly slipped inside. Curling my lip at the thought of him entertaining, or in simple terms ‘fucking’ someone, I blew out a breath and hesitantly popped my head around his bedroom door. Frowning to myself when I found it empty, I pouted. I needed his arms around me. I needed his soft words in my ear to stop the ache that was constant inside me, to put it to rest just for ten minutes.

A noise in the bathroom halted me just as I was about to leave. Cautiously opening the door and hoping he wasn’t having a number two, I stepped inside.

Now, before I go on, I need you to understand mine and Isaac’s relationship. We loved each other, there was no doubt about that. Yet we were both very sexual creatures. Sex, to both of us, wasn’t sentimental or intimate, it was a way of releasing stress and receiving pleasure. As much as a massage, an expensive bottle of wine or a luxurious hot bath can to you be pleasurable, fucking to us was very much on the same level. Our bodies weren’t our souls and our hearts weren’t connected to our genitals. Love was very much emotions and feelings, whereas sex was purely physical, it was quite simple to us. We were created to procreate, it was only religion that brought marriage into the equation and as such, to Isaac and me anyway, sex and love were on completely different parallels. We weren’t jealous, in fact we often told each other about other partners as we lay wrapped in each other’s arms at night. It not only widened our own minds but it gave us new things to explore. However, what we never shared with others was our mouths or our hearts. My lips and my heart belonged to Isaac and vice versa. Those things were personal, something that connected us to our innermost feelings. A kiss, for example, wasn’t pleasurable in the way fucking can be. We didn’t kiss to orgasm, we kissed because we needed that closeness to the other person. To share breaths is to share hearts and if my heart only beat for Isaac, then my breath should only be shared with him. I hope all that makes sense and you can gain a little more understanding to how we both were before I tell you the next part of our tale.