Page 538 of Rage

“If it means I made it through this one, then yeah.”

He goes quiet. I can’t blame him. We’re all crime kids—we learned how to calculate odds before we learned long division, and it’s easy to see the odds aren’t in our favor tonight.

The chattering howls of coyotes in the distance have a shiver running down my spine, but I opt to keep my boobs out for the time being. Just in case theyarehis last pair.

The dress was strangling them, anyway.

“Can I ask a question?” Liam asks, his voice quiet and deep, a comfort that I wish I had more time to enjoy.

“Shoot.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“Flash Xander? Because he needs something to fight for, even if this situation is hopeless.”

“Not that. Not now. Why’d you try to drown yourself when you were a little kid?”

“Oh. That.” I scoot forward, resting my chin on my knees, the silk pooling around my waist, the dress fluid against my skin now that I’ve lost the annoying fluff. “I wasn’t trying to drown myself.”

“What else could it have been?”

“Honestly?”

“Please. It’s bugged me for years.”

I sigh. “I just really missed being hugged. And the bottom of the pool was as close as I could get.”

The silence lets murmured conversation from the other side of the graveyard reach my ears, something about one voice tickling my memory, but not enough for me to place it.

Liam’s thumb brushes the inside of my wrist, and the gentleness has tears pooling in my eyes. I blink them away, staring over the canyon between this mountain and the next.

“I should have given you a real hug that night. Not that half-assed thing I did.”

“It was more than I’d had in forever. It helped enough for me to make it through the worst of the grief.”

“Still. Maybe if I’d given you a real hug, you wouldn’t have been such a creeper, Rodriguez.”

“Creeper? Me? How so?”

“You thought you were so good at hiding from us, but Xander always picked you out. He teased me for years about your little girl crush on me.”

Thank god it’s night, or I’d be roughly the same color as the dress I’m not really wearing right now. “I refuse to believe that either of you ever saw me. Otherwise, I will have to go back in time and remove myself from literally years of my memories.”

He laughs, and because it’s Liam, I know it’s earned. “It was kind of cute, at least when Xander wasn’t giving me shit about it.”

“You’re not helping.”

“I’m just saying, in the interest of honesty, before we meet our maker, that you were a cute little creeper.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“But Cece?”

“Yeah?” I glance down at him.

“From where I’m lying, you grew up into one hell of a beautiful woman.”

Chapter Five

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