Page 132 of Fall Into Me

With a final nod back, Ash turned and walked away.

I stood in the doorway, watching as he strode down my gravel drive and disappeared out of sight.

The moment he was gone, the silence pressed in.

I looked around the house—the house that had always felt full of life, even when it was falling apart—and hated how empty it felt now.

I’d never been here, not once, without someone else under the same roof. The weight of that reality was suffocating.

When I looked around, I wasn’t plagued with the ghost of Declan’s presence. The horror of seeing Jerry unresponsive inthe entry room. Of the glimpse I saw of Declan’s unmoving form in my living room, of the blood that had ruined the carpet.

I saw Fane and Jerry sleeping on the couch. I saw Fane in the kitchen, and me on the counter. I saw the two of us carrying out all the bedding with Jerry trotting behind us, laughing until I cried at our horse of a dog trying to make a nest in the pillows and blankets while Fane was still trying to set it all up, and the moment he got so frustrated, he flipped him off with the most aggressive silent middle finger I’d ever seen.

I walked to the basket of blankets next to the couch and grabbed one, wrapping it around my shoulders before heading back out the door, and sank down onto the front steps.

The house wasn’t a home without them in it.

So, I kept my eyes fixed on the bend in the street and waited for Fane to come back to me.

* * *

A poke on my shoulder startled me awake. I didn’t even realize I drifted off, but the man who I looked up at wasn’t Fane.

“Ash?” My voice was groggy as I rubbed my eyes, wincing at the sharp pull of the stitches near my collarbone. The motion sent a throb radiating through the bruises on my face—the patchwork of reds and purples Declan had left behind.

“Cali.” The tone of his voice made my spine snap straight, and I could feel the blood drain from my face.

“What is it?” I asked, but I knew.I knew.

He stared at me for a while. He shook his head, barely perceptible, like he was trying to resist the truth of his own words. Words he spoke anyway.

“We can’t find Fane.”

38

Fane

After

I knew there were people on the other side of the glass, watching me as I sat in the interrogation room where they’d led me before removing the handcuffs.

The sort of violence my father had lived by wasn’t something I ever cared for. It had surrounded me growing up and seeped into the walls of my childhood until it became the background hum of my existence. I couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment I decided I wanted nothing to do with it—maybe because it wasn’t a decision at all. It was just always there, this quiet, constant vow.

The reality was, I didn’t need to lay a finger on someone to make myself heard. I didn’t need blood on my knuckles to get the results I wanted. Ironically, my penchant for silence had turned into the very thing that made people pay attention when I eventually did.

There was only ever one time I released the hold I had on that part of me, and that was the same night my dad left and didn’t come back.

After that, I’d come close just once.

That time had been tonight—or maybe last night now—just before I entered Darling. I was ten minutes out from seeing the sign that was welcoming me back to the only place I’d ever really want to be. The place that heldeverythingthat was important to me. Another seven minutes or so, and I would have been home.

That thought made me desperate. It made me fucking murderous.

Instead, I was pulled over, arrested on-site for the murder of someone whose name didn’t ring a single bell, and then brought here.

It was in that moment when they pulled me from my truck that the pulsing need to turn all my fury and pain and fucking unhinged fear onto them beckoned me like nothing else ever had.

But I knew better. That had never been who I was.

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