Page 194 of Murder

“You’re really fucked, you know that?” Dove asks me a second later. He’s using his gentle voice, which alone is scary.

“I know,” I rasp.

“What you gonna do, Bear?”

My eyes blur. I exhale roughly. Inhale. “What can I do?” I manage in a steady-ish voice.

I can’t be honest with her—ever.

“I can’t leave her, Dove. I…can’t.”

“You love her.”

“She’s everything.” Tears drizzle down my cheeks. I don’t bother to wipe them.

“Maybe you could…swear or something. Swear that to the G. Maybe all of us could meet with him or something. Get him settled down. I don’t know. We could fly up for dinner. I’ll be thinking on this, Bear. We’ve got you covered. You can never tell her. That’s the only caveat. You give her everything else, man. Do what you have to do so you’ll be fucking happy. Breck would want that.”

Do what I have to do, but lie. And keep Gwenna in constant intermittent danger. Whenever G starts feeling nervous, or if Blue moves up the ranks and into politics just like his fucking family, I’d be putting her at risk. I would be at risk, and so if she loves me like I love her—and she does; my God, I don’t know why, but she loves me—then I would put her heart at risk.

“Thanks, man.” I get off the phone with Dove, and he says he’ll keep me posted.

I can’t do this. That’s my conscience talking. My heart.

Leave her.

Keep her safe, dumb fuck. She’ll find somebody else.

I pick her up from Helga’s. No one’s on my tail. No one’s on her. Gwenna is quiet as we Christmas shop. She’s soft and warm and quiet, her hand tight in mine. She tells me she loves me more than usual as we buy gifts for all her family. The plan is to spend Christmas at her Mom’s, and then fly out to California to see Kellan and Cleo sometime after.

But I’m not surprised when we get to her house, and she starts on lasagna, and says, “Bear?”

“Yeah?” I kiss her forehead, smiling gently down on her.

“I need to tell you something.”

My gut clenches. “Okay, Pig.”

“I think I want to go to Colorado after Christmas. Maybe you can go to California without me and we could meet up after.”

“Breckenridge?” I ask her.

Her face pales a little. “I do it every year,” she tells me, setting the lid back on the pot.

“You don’t want me with you?”

“Oh, no.” She looks up, her eyes wide and round and…wanting. “That’s not it. I just—”

“You think I’d leave you on your own?”

I wrap my arms around her from behind and press her up against me. “Pig. We’ll go there first and California later. It doesn’t matter. Kellan doesn’t care.”

She nods, turning to me. “Barrett—thank you.”

She looks troubled, though. Through dinner, too, and after, when we take a bath together. She seems unhappy. Distracted.

On Christmas Eve, as we sleep underneath the glow nights in her bedroom with our gifts piled on the couch, the refrigerator stuffed full of food for tomorrow, I learn why.

She talks during a dream, and I hear names I know.

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