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Herspringtimeeyeswere doused with an untimely winter’s chill.
They were wide as snowflakes and every bit as chilling with the color drained right out of them. In fact, all but her wild red hair was a sickening pale that stretched out from her eyes and shook my bone-tired nerves into alert.
Something was seriously wrong.
She was braced up against the wall, strands of vibrant red cracking along her porcelain face where her hair fell from her bun. She looked like she was about to run, but not in the way I’d seen before.
This was different.
Her body shook in tremors as I closed the door behind me, but her chest hadn’t risen or fallen with the tells of breathing once since I walked in. My nerves soared the pulse in my neck to a violent hum as I discerned that something from the time I’d left to now had made Scarlett stop breathing how she did when she was mid-panic.
As I took another step in the room, my gaze dropped right down to why.
Black shoes stuck out of the open bathroom, laying toes up and unmoving. My gut rolled as dread swallowed it up in one numbing gulp. Nervous sweat showed up beneath my hairline seconds later.
Hot. Everything was suddenly too warm from the air sticking to my skin to the skin itself that felt like a blanketed furnace. The sudden swell of heat cooked my brain and burnt all thoughts up to a charred crisp as I got closer to the still black shoes attached to still long legs.
I sliced all focus to Scarlett as I neared in slow steps, searching out a narrative in her eyes to tell me what had happened in the nine minutes I was gone.
Nine minutes. That was all. Scarlett looked so damn upset when I left that I made sure to be quick for her.
Now I needed the woman who claimed to not care enough to ever lie to tell me the truth right fucking now.
An authentic sheen glossed a wet shield over her eyes as she stumbled back and away to the farthest wall. She hit the corner of it so hard, I flinched and reached a stabilizing hand out to her. She dropped further into the corner, like a wounded doe collapsing back into its cage.
What the hell...
Fear stretched her eyes so wide, white rimmed a circle around her green irises, and finally, heavy breaths had found her lungs again.
In two seconds, she’d gone from not breathing at all to full on hyperventilating.
“He... he—” Choppy breaths hacked her words into segments of confusion. “I-I tried to…”
She wasn’t making any sense as she gasped for air, her big eyes wet with unshed tears. Every muscle in my body screamed to help her, to go to her, but my half-fried brain pulled rank first, drawing me to the open bathroom...
And my gaze right down to the motionless man on the floor with blood pooling around his head.
Derek’s blond hair was matted and discolored with his own blood, and his head was laying at a crooked angle up against the side of the bathtub. I bent down slowly, pressing my fingers to the inside of his wrist and waited.
Nothing.
A steady breath streamed through my nose as I stood. Derek’s arm dropped back down to the tile with a slapping thud. The woman behind me whimpered.
Scarlett Avery actually whimpered.
“He came at me...” she said through a strangled whisper. I turned on flat feet to her, weighted gravity pulling the muscles in my face down as we locked eyes.
“I-J...I just kicked him.” I watched her struggle for breath, pressing her knuckles to her sternum as she fought for air to speak with. She rasped her fist to her chest, as if trying to beat the air back in.
“He grabbed me and…” Again, she gasped once, twice, sucking down cuts of air as her eyes flared. “…and I kicked him.”
Her fist flashed open to a flat hand on her chest, pushing all five of her fingers into her skin as oxygen mocked her frantic lungs. Every one of her intakes was shallower than the last, and I stood there as her eyebrows slanted in, crushing devastation between them.
“He said that... that—” She struggled to hold onto her breath. The longer she wrestled for air and the right words, the sadder her eyes became. She dropped them to the side, staring off into nothing as she rasped and her voice cracked. “He…”
She never was able to finish her sentence.
But I was near fucking positive I knew what she meant.
