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Alex grinned at Connor, who gave him a tired smile. “Good to see you breathing, Lennox.”
“You saved my life, Connor.” Oliver’s voice was winded, and I glanced over to see his face, familiar and so very child-like in that moment, open and still so very afraid. “I’ll uh, I’ll start locking the door in the mornings.”
“I’m just glad you’re okay,” I shook my head at my brother, reaching out to pull him in for a one-armed hug and squeezing him relentlessly. “Now you just have to tell Rose.”
“She’s gonna kill me herself,” Oliver let out a breath, rubbing a hand over his face as he stood. “I’ll never hear the end of it.”
Alex put his camera down and leaned around me, squinting into the pouring rain outside the door. “Looks like the cops got the guy.”
I whirled around from where I sat on the floor, just in time to see an officer with the mugger in handcuffs. I didn’t want to look at what was happening outside, and I looked back at Connor, rubbing at the ache in my elbow.
Connor’s eyebrows pulled together as Alex took his camera to the door to get more shots and Oliver sat back against the counter, his gaze distant. “Did I do that? When I pushed you?”
“It’s not a big deal,” I shrugged, wincing at the pain that the motion sent radiating down my arm. “You were saving me.”
“Come here,” Connor pulled me over, pressing a kiss to my forehead and holding me close. “I’m sorry that I scared you. I’m sorry, Sadie, but I didn’t want you to lose your brother.”
“I didn’t want to lose you either,” I cried, my breath catching on a sob. “I heard the gun go off and I couldn’t breathe. Those minutes when I thought you were dead felt like years—an eternity. I don’t want to have this fight again with you, Connor. I don’t want to be scared of what might happen every moment of my life. Stop risking your life, please.”
Connor touched two of his fingers under my chin and turned my face, pointing at a space on the wall just above the chalkboard menu. There was a notch busted into the wooden wall, torn and cracked. It was very clearly a bullet hole and I let out a breath. The bullet had never even gotten close to him. He must have shoved the gun at the last moment, turning it to let it hit the wall behind him.
I threw myself onto him, squeezing my arms around his neck until he let out an amused breath. We stood up together and I couldn’t even fathom how we had been in two attacks in the last 48 hours, in both of which Connor Lennox had been in danger of losing his life.
“I don’t think he wanted to shoot me at all,” Connor whispered consolingly, wrapping an arm around me. “Now, let’s go get that arm looked at.”
I could see the ambulance lights outside, where Oliver and Alex were already standing beyond the door. The rain still poured like the wrath of some vengeful god, splashing over the streets and collecting in the gutters of the city. Thunder rattled the windows of Harlow’s Coffee and I suddenly felt an awful awareness begin to take shape in my mind. The mugger. How could find us at two different places, at two different times? How had he known?
“He said that he had to.” My voice was quiet as we stood outside under the awning of the shop, waiting for the paramedics to hustle over to us. I could see the onlookers on the street and then the mugger, staring back at us as he was driven away in the patrol car, wrapped in handcuffs. Connor’s arm was still around me, but I felt cold, frigid under my skin and down to my marrow.
“What?” Connor asked over the tumble over rain over the sidewalk beside us. “What did you say, Sadie?”
I swallowed, pushing away from him gently. “The mugger said he had to. What exactly did that mean do you think?”
“I don’t know, none of it made sense to me,” Connor shrugged, staring at the ambulance as they were bandaging my brother’s shoulder where he had hit the glass display case when the gun went off. “He was hard to understand, it seemed like maybe he was on something.”
“Of course you would say that,” I snapped, making sure that we weren’t touching at all.
It was all starting to make sense and I felt as if I might throw up, right there on the street. Who would benefit the most from scaring me? Who had the most to gain from Oliver’s fear? From Oliver’s death?
Anger seemed to burn me from the inside out, turning my love for Connor into smoldering ashes in the wake of my heart-wrenching realization. Elias Lennox had set up the whole thing. Connor’s father often tried to terrorize and intimidate those who were deemed lesser than him. First, at the train station—I wondered if that little stunt was meant to let me know that I would never be safe with Connor, or maybe it was just so that the mugger could go back to Elias and let him know that I had been terrified. Next, Elias sent that same man to my brother’s shop, knowing that he left the door unlocked in the mornings. Only, who could have told him that? I could only think of one person and my head ached with the thought of it. It couldn’t be true, but nothing else made sense. How would the man find us and how would he connect us to the shop in the first place?
