Page 96 of Defended By Love

“What?” Reinhold asks.

I nod at Grant and everyone, except Beth, goes flying backwards about ten feet, landing straight on their asses.

“What the hell happened?” mutters one of the muscles.

“My future husband is wicked strong,” I brag.

“I’ll say,” Beth says, ogling him more than slightly. “No wonder you never wanted to come out with us.”

I shoot her a wink and wrap my arms around Grant. In a flash, we’re shooting into the sky, flying far away from the evil that oozes out of this place.

It should be a triumphant moment, but it’s not.

Beside the place where all the villains slowly rise, the crews work on removing debris as the dogs bark on. Even from way up here, I see the flash of colour when a chunk of concrete is moved.

It’s my umbrella.

“We’ll do better tomorrow,” Grant promises before flying away.

I don’t answer him. I just hide my face into his chest and promise the same.

Tomorrow I’ll do better.

If it ever comes.

Chapter 41

The glass is barely out of the window and the sinking elevator feeling has scarcely faded from of my belly when I’m jumping into Grant’s arms and ordering him to fly down to the service entrance in the alley.

Not that I need to.

We discussed the plan to save the girl to exhaustion yesterday/today. Truthfully, it’s not even much of a plan. It’s just fly down, open the door and hopefully save her right away. All the discussion part came from the possibility that she ventured further into the building. I made him memorize the schematic layout of the first floor of the tower. Probably overkill. I don’t care. We’re saving her today and every day afterwards.

Grant throws open the door with such force that the nearby exterminating equipment falls—blocking the path in. It’s not at all a problem for Grant, he simply wills it away. For a young woman, scared and not at her most healthy, there’s no way she’d be able to move it by herself.

When the building starts to shake, it must fall over and block her in. She probably ended every day trying, and failing, to claw her way out.

“The door was unlocked. I swear!” the girl yells, shielding her face as the doorway clears.

“We’re here to save you!” Grant says in his Garnet Defender voice.

What a showman.

“Save me? From what?” the girl asks, effectively healing my heart.

While, absolutely, it’s terrible that she’s died again and again because of me, that wasn’t my deepest fear. My deepest fear was that she was also part of the time loop and relived it over and over again. I worried that, for some reason, she was unable to get out even before the tower began to collapse and she had to live in that fear of knowing she was about to die continually—that her loop consisted of dying and waiting to die.

“You—you just have to trust us,” I say desperately. “Something bad is about to happen.”

The girl eyes us over. My heart is pulled tight in my chest. If we have to, we will of course pull her out against her will. It just seems like a poor way to start my ‘doing everything right day’.

“You look different,” the girl says, eyeing me over.

“I am.”

The girl considers my answer for a second, and then nods. She walks with us into the rain, distrustful and hesitant, but she walks with us. We’re barely out into the alley when the building gives its first groan of discontent.

“What the—” She loses her words as the tower’s groans build higher and higher. Its roar pierced by the sounds of breaking glass and objects falling out of windows.

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