Once inside, Colin pulled Maren into his arms.
“All this broken glass. You’re going to cut yourself,” she said.
“I don’t care.”
“Well, I do.” Not that it stopped her from laying her cheek against his chest, and she certainly didn’t step out of his arms.
Colin’s chest rumbled with deep laughter. “Of course you do. You’re you. You would rather be in pain than hurt anyone around you.”
“I wanted to hurt Lynn.”
“True. But you saved her instead.”
“And I wanted to kill Dekker.”
She felt Colin stiffen in her arms. “I wish you didn’t have to see me do that.”
Maren gazed into his eyes. “What I saw was a man fulfilling a promise to a little girl who adores him. Now, when do we go home?”
Colin had to look away. Maren felt his chest heave just once.
“Let’s get that glass out of your hair,” he told her when he could speak again.
The master bathwas bigger than she’d expected. Double sink, a mirror running the length of the vanity, a frosted window over the tub that let in diffused light. Colin opened drawers until he found what he wanted—a fine-tooth comb, still in its packaging, and a soft-bristled brush.
“Kneel on that, babe,” he said, nodding at the padded stool tucked under the vanity.
Maren pulled it to the sink and knelt on it. In the mirror she caught a glimpse of herself—pale, hollow-eyed, hair glinting in the overhead light in ways that had nothing to do with the sun—and looked away. She leaned forward over the basin. The porcelain was cool against her forearms.
“Don’t get cut,” she said.
“I won’t get cut,” he said softly, the barest of smiles in his voice.
She felt him section her hair with his fingers, working carefully from the crown.
“Shake your head.”
Maren shook her head gently and heard the faint, crystalline sound of glass hitting porcelain. Going section by section, unhurried, she shook her head until the ringing stopped. Then came the brush. Long strokes from the root down, slow and even, and Maren felt her shoulders drop on the first pass.
She hadn’t realized she was holding them up.
Colin worked methodically—the way he’d scanned the garage levels, the way he’d moved through the parked cars, the way he’d pressed the torn fabric into her hands and told herpress harder. The same man who had killed Karl Dekker in a parking garage was now counting brush strokes through her hair, making sure he missed nothing, checking to see that she was all right.
I love him. I love all of him.
The brush moved through her hair again and again. The rhythm of it settled into her like a warm blanket. She stopped listening for sirens. Stopped running the sequence in her head—gunshots, Lynn’s blood, Santiago Rivera—and just felt the pull of the bristles, even and sure, all the way to the ends.
Colin is taking care of you, she thought distantly.Let him.Maybe it was Mira’s voice, but she didn’t think so. Anything her sister had left to say to her was waiting in an envelope sitting on the bed.
Pretty soon she wasn’t thinking about anything except how good it felt.
When he was satisfied, Colin turned on the tap and guided her head under the stream, fingers moving through her hair one final time, slow and thorough. After a few minutes, he turned itoff and grabbed a towel. He used it to carefully squeeze out the water, then wrapped it around her head.
“Done,” he said.
Maren straightened and looked at herself in the mirror. Her face was still pale, and there was a smudge along her jaw she hadn’t noticed before. Colin wetted down a washcloth and wiped it away.
She caught his eyes in the mirror. He looked back at her steadily.
