Pacifier

🥀Sam💔

She was screaming. One moment I had thought she'd been sleeping, lying with her head resting on her arm at the foot of my bed where we had fallen asleep with the television on, blocking my view of the screen with her silky black hair. The next she was screaming.

A raw, dry kind of screaming that shuddered me, startled me, had me shoot up sitting bolt up right above her. She was sitting up, pale white, eyes wide, hands clasped to her cheeks in the moment before the agony set in. She was straight and still for a second but in the next she was wavering, weak in the middle about to cave in.

Her voice piercing as clutched at herself, still staring eyes wide at the television.

"What is it what's the matter lass?" i asked, a stupid question because the answer was there on the screen right in front of me, a rolling news reel to break her heart, but i wasn't looking at the tv. I was looking at her. Frantic as my arms wrapped around her tiny body just in time for her body to go weak, her heavy against my chest as she broke down and the shivering started.

Frantic hypothermic shivering as she cried, no tears just noise, just exceptional pain. An agony which clenched in every single one of her muscles and left her paralysed and leaning on me.

I held her against me, arms wrapped around her, hands holding her head to my chest, my head bowed, i was breathing in the smell of her as my nose skimmed her hair and i tried as best I could to cocoon around her, shelter her from the horror she had seen on my TV.

She couldn't speak, paralysed and silenced by her grief. She couldn't take the pain, couldn't function, couldn't process it. But I could.

When i looked up, when I read the rolling headline, when I saw the blue lights flashing outside a familiar house, Dellas house, I realised. I saw the yellow tape and i understood.

They'd killed Nana Ru. They'd killed her grandma and left her body to be found who knows how long after the fact.

"Fuck," i breathed, unable to believe it though it should have been easy to believe, my heart sinking for the poor girl in my arms, "shit," i said, hating myself for having nothing better to say. "Darlin I am so sorry," I said, my words a mumbling comfort as my fingers stroked through her hair and my lips skimmed the strands loose and hanging by her ear. "I am so sorry sweetheart, I'm.." I was cut off by a sob, a loud, heart cracking in front of you kind of sob, all the pain in the world echoing in it.

I knew there was no soothing this, and if there was I wasn't the man to do it.

I'd been charged with keeping her safe, killing anyone who came near her, to stop her coming to any harm. But not this kind of harm.
God knew I wasn't the kind of man who could help the girl in her grief. I killed for a living, i caused this kind of pain. I didn't sooth it and I didn't know how.

But i wanted to, i desperately wanted to. It hurt my heart how deeply I felt the need to hush her crying, to offer her some kind of comfort no matter how pathetic it may be.

I felt pathetic in my clueless, because I was.

"Shhh," i cooed as I stroked her hair, watching the TV in the hopes that I might catch any important details, my mind already beginning to race with the knowledge that this twist of fate meant a new plan needed putting into action.

If the Reids had murdered Nana Ru then they really did intend as Van had feared when he had contacted me. They intended to wipe them out. The whole family even those who had left, even those who had tried their best to denounce the bottlemen.

If the Reids had murdered her grandma then that night, two nights ago now, when someone had broken into my house, they had been a Reid and they had been sent to kill Della.