Page 138 of Fall Into Me

“You okay?” I asked, hugging him back.

“Glad you aren’t dead in a ditch somewhere.” And then after another second, he added, “Would’ve been lost without your sad boy smolder.”

“You should write for Hallmark,” I mumbled.

Ash pulled away with a laugh that shook his shoulders, giving me a shove to the chest before climbing back into his car.

“Whose car is this?” I asked, nodding toward the unfamiliar vehicle.

“Sammy’s,” he said with a shrug, like it wasn’t a big deal.

Well, that was new.

A second before he pulled away from the curb, he tossed my phone out the window, fully charged. The last time I’d seen it, it had been dead and slid into the pocket of one of the detectives.

“Keys are in the truck,” he called, and then he was gone.

Without the rumble of his car interrupting the silence, I was left standing in the middle of the street, my breath coming in visible puffs against the October night air, but I wasn’t cold.

My heart was thrumming. Pushing blood around my body so fast that it made my face tingle, and then I was standing on the sidewalk outside of Cali’s house—ourhouse.

She was there, wrapped in a blanket, her head resting against the banister. Her chest rose and fell in steady, even breaths.

I saw the peek of a bandage on the side of her neck. The side of her face that was shrouded in the light of the moon looked bruised, the darkest shadows pooling around her eye and jaw with a little bandage just beneath her eyebrow.

I couldn’t see them, but I knew there were more from whatever happened in the seconds, minutes, hours after he’d called me. When I could hear her struggling on the other end, and I felt a crack boom through my sanity.

Picturing her on the other end, an onslaught of images had raced through my head, replacing my mother’s face with Cali’s. Replacing my father with Declan. The only difference was I hadn’t been silently sitting in the corner, terrified. I had been fighting against it with everything I had. When I promised him, calmly and without a hint of hesitation. that he was going to die. That if someone didn’t get to him before me, I’d make sure that his last breaths were painful, pathetic things. That there would be nothing left of him in the end and no one would ever remember him.

No, I wasn’t a violent man. But for Cali, I would become a savage.

I would do whatever it took to keep her safe. To keep her happy. To keep herwhole.

My boots were silent on the pathway that led to the house. She didn’t stir when I dropped to my knees in front of her. When my hands reached for her, but instead of making contact like I’d been desperate to, they hovered. Shaking in the air between us because I didn’t know if Icouldtouch her.

I didn’t know what happened, where she’d been hurt,howshe’d been hurt.

How she’d react.

My eyes darted over her blanket-shrouded body so fast it made me dizzy. When I finally dragged them back to her face, I found her hazel eyes open and fixed on me. The golden flecks in them caught the moonlight, reflecting it back like the stars of all the wishes she’d captured.

“Hey, baby.” My voice was a pained croak between us. It held the way I’d fallen short in doing enough to keep her safe. I knew that what happened wasn’t my fault. Iknewthat.

It didn’t stop me from wishing I’d been here. Done more.

In an instant, Cali launched herself off the porch steps, her arms wrapping around me, legs around my waist, head tucked into the crook of my neck.

Her blanket fell to the ground when I stood up, carrying us up the stairs. Shifting her weight to one arm, I punched in the four-digit code to the new alarm system.

“H-how do you know the code?” she asked between shuddering sobs.

“I picked it.”

I closed the door behind us and started heading for our bedroom when I stopped.

“Seven six seven three?” She pulled back, hair sticking to the tracks her tears had made down her flushed cheeks.

I swallowed thickly, reaching up to tentatively move a strand caught in her eyelashes. “Rose,” I rasped.

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