Page 69 of Run From Me

“You just had to get a pet, didn’t you? Zeid and I will deal with him.”

His arm squeezed a little tighter around me, and damn it if my heart didn’t beat a little stronger and a little more sure that maybe I had something to live for.

Or at the very least, maybe I could live in this little dream a bit longer.

I ignored a lot of what was going on around us. Several more bikes showed, and it was starting to feel crowded in here. I could hear Cas and Xander talking. Zeid seemed to be coming and going, and Rylee, well she seemed just as happy to let Cas hold her as I did with Xander.

I caught her eye, and she smiled at me, and maybe it was a little conspiring, maybe it wasn’t. But I liked how right here, right now, my chest didn’t ache and my body didn’t feel exhausted. My mind was quiet even. The world wasn’t closing in around me.

But in came that same nagging thought. I had something to lose and that made my apartment seem more like the tomb I always imagined it to be. A tomb for my living body just waiting for the pain to stop.

“Cali? Tell us what happened. Aside from what we can see on the camera. Did they hurt you?”

I wrapped my arms around Xander’s waist and just held tighter.

“Cali, did they hurt you?” he repeated when I didn’t answer.

Hurt was subjective, wasn’t it?

“No, Xander. They didn’t hurt me.”

He pulled us aside, away from everyone, not that it mattered. There was a lot of chatter going on.

“Why are you wearing that string of a dress?” he asked.

“Ripple’s brother. He made me put it on. Ripple was in charge of whatever the Vipers supplied me. This dress was one of his few picks. His brother forced me to put it on.”

Xander stepped out of my arms, pulling them apart to let him pull away and I hated it. I hated that one negative word about some prick and he was walking away from me.

I shut in on myself, that is until he still held me and wasn’t letting go.

“Cali, did they touch you?”

I was confused at this point.

“Between the knife and picking out a dress? Yes. Did he watch me change? Well, he really tried, and I’m sure he saw some of it. But no. Out of respect for Ripple’s dibs, as they called it, no. No one touched me. Just let me go back to my life and you can move on to someone worthwhile.”

Only those words might have been wrong. Those black empty pupils seemed to consume his irises as everything darkened.

“You’re mine, Calliope. Stop acting like you aren’t good enough.”

TWENTY-ONE

xander

I’d nearly losther and keeping her at arm’s length hadn’t done shit to help me not care.

Fuck.

The Vipers needed to burn in hell and I was more than happy to send them all there on a burning pyre made for the entire lot of them.

I held her tighter.

“You’re mine,” I whispered again, trying to make her understand. I didn’t have any other words for how I felt. But she was mine and no one would ever touch her again.

She was safe. I was holding her. But she hadn’t been, and I hadn’t been able to stop it. I needed to find out what had happened. I had guys monitoring her place, but it only worked if she didn’t open the door. Fuck.

I ran through the conversation of the last few seconds. She thought it was me? Why did she think it was me?

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