Stephanie Tyler - Unbreakable

He didn’t want to close his eyes because every time he did, he saw Avery. He realized he didn’t have any pictures of her, an old habit of never leaving a trail of people you loved for criminals to latch onto.

He’d never kept any of Josie either. But he had Josie’s tattoo on his arm, the same one he pressed herbs against now. An offering, a prayer, a call for protection he knew he didn’t deserve.

All the people you’ve helped in the meantime . . .

Didn’t matter, he told himself ruthlessly. He’d wiped karma out with a single bomb on a job the night Josie was killed and he’d pay for it forever. Just the way it was meant to be.

He’d tried to be a part of the tight family circle that Gunner couldn’t believe he was lucky enough to be a part of.

And you lied to them, time after time . As much as he told himself it was for their own protection, he knew that he’d been afraid they’d tell him to go to hell.

“What happened to you, son?” Mike asked, maybe two weeks later when Gunner was starting to get back on his feet.

Gunner looked him in the eye and started to make something up. Mike would believe it—and Gunner wished he could believe it too. Instead, he told the man, “I got out of something bad the only way I knew how.”

Mike nodded.

“I’ve got to get out of here. I won’t bring anything but trouble to you and your family.”

“I don’t believe that for a second,” Mike said.

Josie continued. “Besides, that’s what the ceremony was for. It cleared away the evil that surrounded you. Purified you.”

Josie said this as though everyone knew that.

“So what, I’m like new now?”

“In a way, yes.”

He’d gotten out of bed and nearly collapsed on her. She caught him, chided, “Come on, James.”

“How’d you know that?” Because if memory served, he’d been wearing cargo pants and nothing else, had no ID or money. Nothing else when Landon’s men dumped him from the car after beating him. Almost like a reverse gang ritual. He had no doubt they’d meant to kill him in one of the most painful ways possible.

“You told me,” Josie said simply.

She sat next to him on the bed and Mike asked, “Are they going to come looking for you?”

“Considering they dumped him in the middle of the swamp, I guess they figured local wildlife would take care of the body.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Two weeks.”

“And nobody’s come asking about me?”

“We’re pretty well insulated from strangers around here. Between the geography and the Cajuns, any outsider steps foot in this parish and it’s known before your shoe hits the dirt,” Mike said. “Which is how we found you.”

When Mike and Andy told her and Jem the story of finding Gunner barely alive in the bayou, Avery gritted her teeth together so hard her head ached.

“I don’t know how he was still alive,” Mike was saying. “He was . . . Jesus, I thought he was dead when the dog found him. Petey tried to drag him up the porch and then howled when he couldn’t.”

“Petey was a good judge of character,” Andy added. “He’d bitten over half the damned parish, but with Gunner, he wouldn’t leave his side, no matter how hard we tried to get him to leave the poor guy alone.”

Avery pulled the blanket farther around her shoulders and sipped at the strong coffee Mike had made. “Did he remember anything?”

“I think he remembered everything, but he didn’t tell us. Not then. Not until he’d realized he’d fallen in love with Josie. He came clean to us about his father and Landon then,” Mike said. “He’d been through hell. But he had a drive . . . after everything happened, we tried to convince him to go right into the military. I wish we’d convinced him.”

“He didn’t want to?” Avery asked.

“Partly. And Josie didn’t help. She wanted him here, with her. They were like two kids. I think it was the first time Gunner actually had a childhood.” Mike smiled as he remembered.

“They were good together,” Andy agreed, and then looked at Avery. “Sorry, hon—does this bother you?”

“No, it doesn’t. Anything that made Gunner happy . . .” She trailed off and Jem put a hand on her shoulder.

“We’ll get him back if I have to drag him by the hair,” he assured her.

She laughed a little, then pointed to Mike’s arm. “Did Gunner do any of those tattoos?”

He pointed to one. “This was one of his first. He learned from Josie.”

“I think I really would’ve liked Josie,” she said.

“You two are very different,” Andy told her. “But I think you would’ve been tight.”

That meant a lot to her. She felt as though she needed the dead woman’s blessing to move forward with Gunner.

“Gunner was a natural with the tattooing. He’s a great artist.” Mike pointed to the wall behind her. She turned to see a charcoal drawing of a young woman, hugging a dog and smiling.

Josie. So pretty. So young.

I knew he loved you because he drew you, Billie told her in so many words. And Avery would hold on to that with everything she had.

Josie was the first person Gunner had sketched since he’d moved to Powell’s island. He couldn’t have stopped himself if he’d tried, found himself scratching the pencil on paper, watching Josie playing with Petey. She hadn’t interrupted him, not until he put the paper down and stretched his cramped hands.

He’d drawn several versions of her, because he’d been rusty—and determined to get it right.

“It’s beautiful.”

“You’re beautiful. My art needs work. Been a while.”

“Why’s that?”

He didn’t tell her that killing people and art didn’t exactly go together. “I haven’t wanted to. Not until now.”

“I can’t really draw,” she admitted. “I can freehand things when I tattoo, but it’s basic stuff. Charms and things like that. But you’ve got talent.”

She’d known some traditional tattooing methods, using sticks and ink and man, were painful but beautiful, and she was also handy with the tattoo gun. Her mother had dated a tattoo artist when Josie was small and she’d taken to it easily.

The first several weeks when Gunner was hiding and healing, she’d noticed him doodling and drawing on any scrap of paper he was near. He hadn’t noticed—it was something he hadn’t done since his mother had died. Before that, his mother used to tease him that any available space would be filled with his drawings.

When she’d died, he’d opened one of her suitcases and found a large stack of his drawings, from some of his earliest doodles to some of the most recent. He’d lost that suitcase after moving to Powell’s. He had little doubt that Powell took one look at it, dismissed it as sentimental rubbish and burned it.

Thankfully, you couldn’t burn memories as easily.

Josie had let him give her a tattoo, the first one he’d ever done. He’d been nervous, hadn’t wanted to mar her beautiful skin. Hadn’t wanted to make a mistake. But the bold, funny, raunchy woman told him that mistakes were what made life interesting.

“We can fix anything, James,” she’d added.

He’d used the gun, not the sticks. It took him months before he was comfortable with that method, and it still wasn’t exactly his bag. He’d let the buzz of the needle mesmerize him. She’d insisted that he use it freehand, tattoo the first thing that came to his mind.

He’d drawn a butterfly.