Page 71 of Love After Darkness

Pretty damn large.

“I’m proud of you for this. For taking a huge leap of faith and standing up against the only life you knew. The man you always thought saved you.”

She jerks at the sound of my voice, her attention out the window on the blur of passing pedestrians. “Don’t be proud,” she says quietly.

“Why not?”

“I’ve done nothing to deserve it. Not yet, anyway. I’m hoping to change things with this. Maybe then I’ll stop hating myself so much.”

I hide my wince from her. I understand the feeling of hatred and shame going hand in hand when you look at the person reflected in the mirror. Except from my point of view, Aria deserves none of the dark emotions she turns inward. Not a single one.

“I’d say you’ve already done plenty. Even taking the step to decide you want to go against your boss is…a big one.”

“Did I have a choice?” she wants to know. “When it really comes down to it, it’s not a question of what kind of man he is, but what kind of woman I am.” She stops. Swallows, her throat working. “What kind of person I want to be.”

It’s a tough conversation to have with yourself, and one I understand. I’ve looked in the mirror, stared at the ceiling, closed my eyes, and had the same thoughts countless times. Not just in the past two years, either, but before. So long ago, the internal rhetoric might as well be part of my genetic makeup.

Who is Devan Bishop?

What kind of person does he want to be?

They’re questions for another day and another me, one who has mounted the highest peak of his career and taken down the big bad. One who wants the woman on the seat beside him with every fiber of his being, obsessed with the one woman who is no good for his health simply because of his obsession.

Well, not simply.

It’s never simple.

We pull into a parking lot, privately owned and charging more than twenty bucks for an hour of privilege, and Aria drags a twenty from her bra and hands it off to the attendant. His eyes go fish bulgy as she struts away, and I bend down close to hiss against her ear.

“So you don’t have a penny, but you have a twenty? How long have you been hiding the big bucks from me?”

“Since Bill slipped it to me along with three of its friends and told me not to get into trouble,” she whispers back.

“Impossible for you not to get in trouble. He’s only just met you.” I have to hurry to catch up with her even though my legs are longer. And how she balances on those toothpicks she calls shoes, I’ll never know. They still don’t give her enough height to come to the bottom of my chin, and I wonder if her feet hurt or if they’ve gone numb. “Hey, slow it down.”

She glares at me over her shoulder. “What?”

“We have to look like we’re pedestrians, Aria, and not draw too much attention to ourselves. This isn’t the time to go in there and try to swoop everybody under your wings.” I glance around toward the observation point we’d decided on ahead of time, where Naomi is hopefully already settled and ready for backup in case things go to shit.

Which they invariably do.

We never make it to the event.

The actual homeless shelter, the banners proclaiming the name of the event and goal of the people gathered, lay a block ahead.

I expect the first shot, somewhere deep in my gut, where my instincts lay waiting to be considered. I shove Aria against the side of the building and shield her body with mine, melting around her as the first bullet buries itself in the mortar of the brick above our heads.

She screams, hastily swallowing the sound, and in the pause between shots, I push her to run down the block.

“We’re out in the open!”

“I fucking know!” I yell back.

The rest of the people on the street duck, scream, run for the hills, and generally erupt into a mass of chaos. The shooter is smart, though. Smart enough not to point and aim directly at the group. A shitty cop would send Aria in that direction to lessen the risk of her getting hurt while endangering everything else.

I haven’t lost all of my goodness yet.

I push Aria around the corner and into a slender space between two alleys leading away from Feed the Streets, with the narrow opening protected in part by a large square dumpster.

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