Page 77 of Lost in the Moonlight

“What was that noise?” she asked, confusion blending with a hint of fear.

“Get back!” I roared.

A third crash had the pane shattering completely. The glass tumbled to the doormat.

Willow cried out and instinctively crouched at the base of the stairs. I hurried over, grabbed her hand, and dragged her toward the study at the back of the house.

Once we were inside, she started to stand back up, and I pushed her toward the floor.

“Stay down!”

I stormed to the windows and drew the blinds before grabbing my laptop and joining her by the door. The cameras showed a masked man in all black dropping something on myfront stoop. Even with the mask, he kept his face turned away just as he had when leaving the note at Willow’s.

As we watched, he turned and headed down the street. Outside my window, I swore I heard whistling. That serial-killer tune Poco was fond of, but it could easily have been all in my head.

My body shook with fury at the utter calmness of the man, the hubris to just assume he could do this and walk away.

Screw Hardy.

I flung the laptop and ran for the front door as Willow called my name in alarm.

I was out and down the sidewalk before I’d really considered what I was going to do.

“Come back and take a shot at me personally!” I snarled into the dark.

No one was there. No sounds.

No bodies.

“You won’t get away with this!” I hollered.

“Lincoln!” Willow’s voice was terrified, and I whirled around to see her haloed in the doorway. An easy target.

“Get back inside!” I thundered, heading her way.

As I went to step inside, I saw the note he’d left on the mat. The paper was old and torn. The ink spread through it like blood through veins.

I barely registered the words,Next time it won’t be rocks,before I was forcing her inside and slamming the door behind us. I locked it, even though it felt useless with the missing pane, and shifted to take her in. Her eyes were wide and terrified, but anger had begun to make an appearance as well. Good. It would keep her from crumbling.

Suddenly, she shoved me in the shoulder with a strength that had me stumbling back into the wood frame.

“What were you thinking?!” she cried. “You could have been hurt. Shot. Oh my God. Oh my God.” She was shaking, her entire being trembling. She sank onto the bottom step, dropping her face into her hands. “What wasIthinking? Bringing you into this?”

I closed the distance, squatting before her and running my palm over her silken strands. “Shh. It wasn’t a gun, Sweetness. Just rocks. Just a coward taking a potshot.”

Her head jerked up, sadness and fury there. “You didn’t know that, Lincoln! You could have been hurt. I saw what happened to my dad… I saw his body jerk with every single bullet…” Her entire body trembled.

I wrapped my arms around her, pulling her into my chest. She buried her face in my neck as her body shuddered. “Shh. Shh. It’s okay.”

After the shaking slowed, I grabbed her hand and dragged her up the stairs, saying, “I need to call Hardy.”

She was with me physically, but I could also feel her pulling away from me emotionally, erecting barriers she’d believe were for my own damn good. So she wouldn’t be responsible for something happening to me. I understood that desire. It was the reason there was no way I’d let her walk out that door alone with someone after her.

I’d just found my jeans and recovered my phone from the pocket when she gasped, “You’re bleeding!”

I looked down in surprise, searching for some unseen wound before finding the cut on my foot that had left a trail behind us. “The glass. I must have cut it on the glass. It’s nothing.”

I hit Hardy’s number while Willow stared down at the blood for a long time before her eyes landed on the note I still had grasped in my free hand. She closed the distance, yanked it from me, and read. Her face paled impossibly more.

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