Page 50 of Shadow's Edge

If she woke up.

I clenched my fists.

Duke, Jagger, and I had been sitting in silence, waiting, watching her the whole time.

She hadtwitched a few times since they’d stopped the drugs, murmured somethingindistinct, buther eyes never opened. Thescans showedno brain trauma, but my gut twisted withwhat-ifs. What if she didn’t wake up? What if she came backdifferent? What if she didn’t come backat all?

I was about to get up—about tofind the doctor and shake some goddamn answers out of him—when I heard it. Arattle of breath, followed by agroan.

I turnedfast and held my breath when I saw that her eyes were open. Not only that, but they were focused onme.

I want to say I held it together. That I stayed the man I prided myself on being—the man who didn’t take shit, who didn’t hesitate toput a bullet between the eyes of the ones who deserved it. But I didn’t.

My legs gave out, and before I knew it, I was on the floor—a fucking mess. Curled up, shaking, sobbing like a damn fool, but none of it mattered. Not the way I looked, not the way my body betrayed me, not for one goddamn second. Because my baby was awake. She was alive. And she was looking right at me.

JAGGER

Seeing her pass out after turning toward us was something I would never forget. It hadn’t been dramatic—no gasp, no frantic moments of realization. She had simply looked in our direction, her eyes rolling back before she gave in to what she’d been fighting since she’d been injured. She stayed that way through every test, through the hospital transfer, through every update from the doctors.

I had braced myself for the worst. Hearing the extent of her injuries wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it wasn’t great either. The internal bleeding had been stabilized, but I had seena man bleed out a week after an injury like that. The doctors had been wrong before, so I wasn’t taking any fucking chances.

Preacher had stayed behind while Duke and I grabbed something to eat, but when we returned, something had changed. The man who had looked broken for so long, who had carried the weight of the past like a chain around his neck, now had a fire burning in his eyes.

Preacher was a complicated man—fiercely loyal, level-headed, calculated—but he was also a slow burner. I had watched him shake hands with men he later slit the throats of, had seen him joke with a trafficker, light his cigarette for him, and then snap his neck the second the guy looked away. And now, that same fire, that same cold, calculated rage, burned behind his eyes. If Jill hadn’t already been dead, I would have been counting the minutes until she was.

Duke had told me what was in the letter, and at first, I hadn’t understood—how could something so sloppily written, so obviously manipulative, have hit its mark? But then I thought about it. About Kyle at seventeen. A girl who had been abused for years, who had just found her mother’s body blown apart in front of her. That conniving bitch had known exactly what she was doing. And she had won.

For a while.

Because now Kyle was awake, and we weren’t done yet.

It wasa couple hours since Kyle had opened her eyes, and although she was awake, she hadn’t spoken yet.

I finally asked the one question I had been avoiding—the one I had been too damn scared to say out loud because the answer could be worse than anything I had ever faced before. Duke and I had been sitting outside, cradling cups of that vile sludge they called coffee, both of us lost in our own heads, when the words finally slipped out of my mouth.

"What if she doesn’t forgive me?"

Duke didn’t respond right away. He just stirred his coffee in slow, deliberate circles, staring at it like the answer might be at the bottom of the cup. For so long, he didn’t say a thing, and I started to think that was my answer right there—silence.

Then, he sighed heavily and leaned back, the cheap plastic chair beneath him groaning under his weight. "Kyle came to me years ago," he said, his voice low and raw. "She had no one, and fuck me…" He dragged a hand down his face, exhaustion carved into every deep line. "She was broken, Jagger."

I swallowed, waiting.

"I knew, deep down, she knew the letter was bullshit. But how do you make sense of everything—every fucked-up thing you’ve ever been through—when the last image you have of your mother is her brains splattered on the wall?"

His voice was rough, carrying the weight of years spent trying to help her heal. The last few days had aged him more than I had ever seen before, and if that wasn’t proof of how much Kyle meant to him, I didn’t know what was. She would never understand how special she was, how much she meant to the people who had fought beside her, protected her, bled for her.

"She needed time," Duke continued. "And once she makes sense of it, she’ll move forward." He shook his head, exhaling. "She’scomplex as hell, Jagger. You know she’s never let anyone in, feelings give her the willies.”

We both chuckled at that. That was an understatement.

“But she let you in. She let me in. And she was starting to let Preacher in.”

I nodded slowly, holding on to his words like a lifeline, because that was all I could do—hope he was right. I had never been a religious man. A guy like me, who had done the things I had done, would be a fucking hypocrite if he was.

But if I had ever been the kind of man who prayed, I would have been praying right then.

When we got back to Kyle’s hospital room, Data was already there. He stood by the bed, fists clenched, his entire body vibrating with restless energy. I had never seen him pissed before, at least not like this.

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