Page 35 of Shadow Dance

I don’t feel great about bringing Maeve to the scene of a fucking shootout, but we can’t kick it in the neighbor’s driveway all day.Switching into drive, I edge onto the road and proceed back to Callum’s gate, which is still wide open.

As usual, I help Maeve carry her groceries inside. The house is quiet, which isn’t what I’d expect after the scene I just witnessed. Maeve’s quiet, too, withdrawn into herself. Reminds me of the way she used to be. It’s hard to watch. I’m about to ask if she’s okay when I catch myself.This isn’t why you’re here. You’re not her fucking friend or her therapist, no matter what you told her.

Walking through the living room, I peek through the French doors where I see Callum, Mac, and Griffin smoking by the pool like everything’s cool. I open the door slowly, looking over the three of them. No one seems to be injured.

“You good?” I ask.

“Had to set some folks straight, you know how it is,” Callum says, eyes on his lap where he’s rolling a baseball bat of a joint. His gun’s on the table, next to the bag of weed he’s pulling from. “No one’s pulling up to my house making demands, know what I mean?”

“Mm.” I don’t, not specifically, but I will once I go over the video footage later.

“Maeve okay?” he asks, glancing up at me with what looks like a hint of remorse.

“I guess. She doesn’t really know what’s going on,” I say. “I wouldn’t have brought her back if I’d known you were having trouble up here.”

“They were supposed to be long gone, man,” he says with a sigh, sitting back. “Everything was copacetic, and then the next thing I know they’re knocking at the door again.”

“Is that who messed up the gate?” I ask.

“The gate’s messed up?” Cursing, Callum grabs his phone and jabs at it until he’s pulled up the gate’s camera feed. “Well, fuck.”

Chapter 10

Maeve

Idon’t know what happened today, but Callum’s acting weirder than usual. They all are.

I keep thinking about earlier, when I woke up to Jaime reversing like a maniac down the narrow hill that leads to our house. Something was obviously going on, but when he refused to answer me, I just stopped asking. His silence reminded me that at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many heart-to-hearts we have.

This situation is what it is. And I don’t want it anymore.

“I miss my family.”

Callum glares at his phone before resuming his typing. I stare at him for a good minute, wondering if he’s ignoring me or if he just didn’t hear me.

“Callum.”

“Call ‘em then,” he says.

“Imissthem. I miss Boston. I want to go home.”

Sighing, he tosses his phone aside and looks at me. The deep, dark eyes that I once loved now look like a stranger’s, all pupil and no iris.

“What?” I ask eventually. He’s staring at me with this weird, helpless expression, likehe feels bad but there’s nothing he can do.

“You know what, baby.”

I remember when he first started calling me baby. I loved it. We’dlock ourselves in his car or his bedroom, fooling around between the sheets. He’d come, whisperingbaby, and beg me to come.Baby baby baby.I’ve heard him sigh it, groan it, scream it, and whine it over the years, and I’ve come to hate it. It’s a played-out substitute for my real name and I’m over it.

Over him, maybe.

“This is home,” he says.

It doesn’t feel like it, I want to say, but I don’t.

Because something is different with him. Something’s changed. I don’t know if he remembers the night he told me I’d regret it if I went home to Boston, but I do. It planted a seed of doubt in my mind that I haven’t been able to uproot or justify the way I usually do.

There’s an element of danger now. I knew that Callum had a darkness in him, but I was never afraid of him because that darkness never touched me. But now I’m afraid that it might, and I don’t want to provoke him.

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