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“I told you they were coming for me,” she mumbles hoarsely. An acrid smile tugs at her lips as she repeats, “I told you.”
“Not anymore,” I state, and before she can fight me on it, I pull her onto my lap with a clenched grit of my pained groan. Noticing the bullet wound on her thigh, I pull at the leggings, making the hole bigger so I can make sure it’s not a problem. It seems like a clean in and out, and the blood is already starting to clot and dry around it. “Nobody’s going to hurt you again.”
“Promise?”
My throat instantly swells at her question. It should be an easy reply, yet it feels loaded. It takes everything in me to smile back and answer, “Promise.”
The instant the word is out, my insides twist in protest. It’s a lot harder to shuffle out of the car with my body working against me. It’s not even my wound that causes it; it’s all over one word.
I’m only promising to keep her safe. Somehow it feels wrong to make her a promise that I could barely keep to Georgina and that I’ve failed to keep to her again.
When I try to hand her off to the medic, Lucy clings tighter to me. “Don’t leave me. Please?”
“You need to go to the hospital, and I have to…I have to go—”
“I’m scared, Freddie,” she sobs into my chest, and the bastard that I am, I’m still looking around for someone that could take my place. Anyone that she could cling to instead because I need to lay eyes on my swan.
I know Georgina’s safe. She’s the safest she can be. There’s only one way in or out of the crypt, and once the vault door is closed, only one of us can open it. It’s the safest place in this fucking city.
“Don’t leave me.”
“Okay,” I give in because I owe her this much.
After everything I failed to do, I can give her this one thing.
Chapter 7
GEORGINA
The light is beginning to hurt my eyes. It’s not particularly bright, at least not enough to take away some of the eeriness of my surroundings. The vaulted ceilings are stacked on short pillars that have the most closed-in feeling I’ve ever had in a place like this. Even in smaller chapels, there’s always levity to the place. Not here though. The grey stone is worn, smoothed over by years and years of existence. Even the tombs are crumbling at the edges.
Dragging in a cool breath, I shiver as the cold seeps deeper into my bones. I’m rattling in my own skin, and it’s not just the temperature in here that’s doing it.
Where is he? Why is he taking so long?
I’m pacing around in circles that will wake the dead beneath my feet any moment now when the heavy doors at the end of the long tunnel open, and before I can stop myself, I’m running, faster than I ever have, and it seems like it takes me forever to get to the three steps leading out of here. I’m running like the wind, my lungs barely able to take the hammering of my heart, my vision blurring.
He’s here.
He’s really come for me.
I’m so delirious with relief and to be finally seeing him again that I trip up the steps. I’m caught before I go tits over arse, and all I can do is hug him, so hard that my arms threaten to pop from their sockets.
“George…”
I freeze at the sound of Casper’s voice. My heart spirals, tumbling from rib to rib as it falls to my feet, and I finally notice that the brawn wrapped around me is all wrong. Slowly the scent of spearmint and tobacco fills my lungs, and as I try to pull back to make sure that my senses aren’t tricking me, he holds me tighter to him.
“It’s okay, Georgie,” Casper tells me, releasing his hold a tad.
I manage to squirm free and take a good look at him. Around him. I’m looking and I’m looking. Still, I’m not finding. My sight is coming up as empty as my arms.
Where is he? Where’s my Freddie?
Stepping around Casper, I take stock of every other body around us.
Where is he?
I keep silently asking as though that’s going to get me an answer. With every echo of the question, my chest gapes wider. While I’m trying to push through all the fear, I continue searching.
