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For the first time, I wasn’t afraid for myself.
I was afraid for Roman.
My stomach sickened as I watched him tackle my stalker to the ground, knowing that at any moment, he might get badly hurt. From the moment I met him, Roman had seemed invincible in just about every way. I’d built him up in my head as being infallible, a force that couldn’t be stopped. He could protect me from anything. Nothing could hurt me when he was around.
And now, as I looked out, I saw blood running down his face. I had no clue if my stalker had a knife or a gun or a goddamn syringe full of poison. The idea of something happening to Roman was so much worse than the idea of anything happening to me.
But I watched like I was a kid witnessing Superman at work. He subdued the guy handily, even after a struggle. And when the officers finally rolled up, sirens wailing with high beams on, my adrenaline finally crested.
They got him. They fucking had him, cuffed and walking away to the back of a cop car.
Roman got up from his place on the ground and talked with the officers for a few minutes, turning to glance at me every minute before he was able to walk back over to the house. The front door swung open and he found me, as still a statue.
In another moment, his arms were around me.
I wanted to move.
I wanted to cry and scream as loud as I possibly could. I wanted to tell Roman he was a fucking idiot for ever being willing to put himself in danger just for somebody like me. But I also wanted to tell him he was a god, an angel, someone who had quite literally saved my life.
He was all of those things. And I’d realized, all in one instant, that there was no one in the world I trusted more than Roman Bryant.
“They’ve got him,” Roman was saying, his deep, soothing voice right next to my ear. “He… he had a knife on him, another threatening letter, and apparently a lot of meth in his back pocket. They say there’s even worse in the car, which was also stolen a few months ago.”
“So that was a knife,” I said, finally able to form words. “A fucking knife? You—he could have hurt you—”
“He couldn’t have hurt me,” Roman said, his voice steady and sure. But I knew he was just trying to comfort me. “I’ve trained for scenarios like this my whole life.”
“He was that close to you,” I whispered.
“I don’t matter at all to him,” Roman said. “You’re the precious goods, after all.”
I leaned back, looking in Roman’s eyes, the only thing on the planet that could make me feel any sense of normalcy right now.
No, you are the precious goods, I thought silently.
“But the meth and the letter and the knife are good news for you, even if they were creepy as hell,” Roman said. “This guy is going to go away for a long time already, and they haven’t even checked his priors yet.”
“They’ve finally got him,” was all I could say.
“Mr. Castille,” Tim said as he came over to the front door, nodding at me. “Looks like we finally got the bastard.”
“I’m… I have no fucking clue how to thank you,” I said. “I barely even know how to speak right now, if I’m being honest.”
“And you don’t need to,” he said. “We’ll need to debrief you and you will need to come make a statement sometime in the next few days, but tonight, your main goal is to rest easy knowing he’s caught.”
I nodded as another officer came over and the two of them gave me a rundown of all the things Roman had let me know. As they spoke, more officers combed my front lawn with flashlights, searching and checking the whole perimeter of my property. I was numb and completely in shock, but somewhere deep down, I knew that all of this meant that finally, he wasn’t going to just get away with it. I’d expected a long, drawn-out process, with the police doing nothing as they’d always done for me in the past. But finally, for the first time, they had really cared. And they had reason to care.
Finally, after God knew how long, the officers started to file off and head out. Eventually it was just me and Roman left back at the house.
Roman turned to me, gave me a small smile, and shrugged his shoulders.
I let out a breathless laugh, the first sense of relief I’d gotten in days. One laugh bubbled up into more, and I started laughing like a dumb idiot. As I laughed, tears streamed down my face, and I had no idea if they were sad tears or happy tears or just pure fucking relief.
