Page 45 of See Through

No answer.

“Aubs?”

“Where could she have gone in twenty seconds?” Cooper whispers, and I hear Maven smack him. “Ow!”

“Aubrey?” My voice gets more and more panicked the longer we’re on different sides of this door. “Baby, please. Are you okay?”

No sounds or voices come from the room.

“If you can hear me and you’re in front of the door, move out of the way for me,” I say to her as something bangs against it, and the three of us jump back.

“What the hell?” Maven shouts.

“Stand back,” I tell them as I raise my leg and kick against the door. In one fell swoop, it bursts open, and I can only hope Aubrey isn’t in front of it. I spot her on the other side of the room, and I run to her.

“Aubrey? Baby?” I caress her face. She has three long scratches down one of her arms, and she’s still breathing, but her breaths are shallow. “Wake up for me.”

She groans a little bit as she starts moving in my arms, sweat dripping down her face. Her hair is all messed up in the back too. I don’t know what to do, but before anything else happens, we have to get out of this house. This investigation is officially over.

“Grab the equipment. We’re getting out of here.”

“On it,” Cooper says as he heads for the stuff I left in here. I can barely think about anything but Aubrey as I scoop her up and carry her out as fast as I can.

I feel Maven behind me as I step onto the driveway. I set her in my truck bed and head for the water bottle she always has with her. I dunk my hand in, pressing my cold palm to her forehead as she starts to stir, her eyes fluttering before she locks on me.

“Dean,” she whispers. “Where are we?”

“Outside in my truck,” I say as Coop and Maven start packing up the equipment. “I-I thought you were⁠—”

“Takes a lot more than being dragged across a room to kill me.”

“What?”

She giggles, coughing as she does. I hand her a fresh water bottle, since I stuck my hand in her other one. “I’ll show you when we review the footage.”

“I’m not leaving you alone ever again after this, I hope you know that.”

“If you thought he was clingy before, wait until you see the footage of him kicking that door down to get to you,” Cooper jokes—at the most inappropriate time, might I add. “He’s going to be even worse after tonight.”

“Shut it,” I snap at him. I know he’s pulling my chain, but tonight was a lot, and my heart isn’t going to stop banging against my chest for a few days—hell, a few weeks.

I thought I lost her. I thought she was gone the moment I saw her in the corner of that room.

“I’m okay with that.” She grabs my hand. “Thanks for coming along, you two.”

“I love you, but I’m never doing this again. Once was enough for me,” Maven sighs. “This shit you guys do is dangerous.”

“Never again are we mixing work with our personal life.”

“That’s a good plan, baby,” I say, still holding her as if she’ll disappear beneath me any second. “Maybe we’ll take a break for a few weeks and take a vacation.”

“It would be a well-deserved vacation,” Maven agrees.

“I want to go somewhere with a beach,” she mumbles, and just as we all start to laugh, the sound of glass breaking turns all our heads back to the house. Just as I think tonight couldn’t get any weirder, smoke billows from the broken windows—it looks like a fire is starting to spread through Aubrey’s old house.

Cooper is already on the phone, telling dispatchers on the other end about what’s going on, and all Aubrey is doing in my arms is laughing—from fear, adrenaline, or something else, I can’t really tell.

“This has been the weirdest investigation ever,” she giggles like a maniac.