Page 94 of Shadow Dance

“Yes,” I whisper. “Did he survive?”

Mom frowns, shaking her head. “We don’t know, honey.”

“He was going to get me out. We were supposed to leave the very next day, and then everything fell apart.” I squeeze my eyes shut, but the images only come harder and faster.

Mom squeezes my hand again. “He told you he was a cop?”

“Right at the very end, before everything went down.”

“God, I’m so glad he was there,” she says, trying not to cry.

“Me too.” I sniffle, wiping my nose. “We got really close. He was all I had. I need to know if he’s okay.”

“We’ll see what we can do, okay?” she promises, handing me a tissue.

“I’ll make a few calls,” Lucky adds. “There’s a lot of secrecy when it comes to that, for obvious reasons, but given our situation I think we can find out.”

“I … I shot Callum,” I whisper, shaking. Every time I think about that moment, it tears into me like a fresh wound. “I thought he was going to kill me.”

“I’m sorry you had to do that, honey.” Dad sighs, tears in his eyes as his hand lands feather-soft on my shoulder. “But you did what you had to do.”

Lucky rubs a hand over his face, then leans down to brush a kiss over my forehead. He looks like he’s been awake for days, because he probably has. “I’m gonna send Tristan up. We’ve been taking turns, waiting for you to wake up, so he’s gonna want to see you.”

Unfortunately,the cops descend before I get a chance to reunite with Tristan. Well, just one cop—a detective, by the looks of it. He seems veryLaw and Order.

“Hi, Ms. Kelly. I’m Detective Scott. You okay to talk?” he asks, seeming genuinely concerned. He’s got reddish hair and patient eyes, his gentle demeanor at odds with how huge he is.

“I guess.” I shrug a little. I feel better now that I’ve seen Lucky andmy parents, and the latest dose of meds has taken most of my pain away. “I don’t have much of a choice, do I?”

“We need to talk at some point, but you always have a choice when.” A shadow of a smile crosses his face, and he takes a seat beside my bed. “May I?”

“Sure.”

“So. You want to tell me what happened?”

“A lot of stuff happened.” I shut my eyes, trying to regain my composure. I can’t stop thinking about the second I took Callum’s life. The love was gone, for sure, but I’m not a murderer. I’m the girl that saves spiders from being crushed underfoot, who opens windows to release moths. When I was a kid, I brought an injured squirrel to the vet only to be told it was going to die anyway, and then I cried on the way home, feeling sorry for it.

The look on Callum’s face when he realized what I’d done will haunt me for the rest of my life.

“Ms. Kelly?”

“Maeve is fine.”

“Any information you can provide will be helpful, Maeve,” he says.

“I don’t know what to say. I suspected that Callum was dealing, but he never told me anything. Honestly, I thought he was at his uncle’s club most of the time.” A lie, obviously. I knew Callum was deep in the drug game. But his choices were never my choices, and I’m not getting mixed up in the dumb shit he did.

Besides, I don’t snitch. If they want info on Callum’s enterprises, they can dig up themselves.

Detective Scott nods. “Dario De Leon.”

“Yes.”

“What about when he traveled?—”

“When you said you had questions, I thought you meant about the other night,” I say, tired of the conversation already.

“All right, tell me about the other night,” he says.

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