AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But just like when I went to touch Hannah, my hands go right through them.
They all start laughing, and the sound is grating and cruel. For a split second, the alley blurs and almost looks like the house they kept us in. Lorenzo’s face shifts between being his own and being Julian’s. Hannah is both young and grown up, but always bleeding.
It’s so fucking much.
It’s overwhelming, and my heart feels like it’s going to beat out of my chest. The cruel laughter gets louder and louder, and when I look down at Hannah, her mouth is moving, but I don’t have a hope of understanding what she’s saying. I can’t hear her over the laughter and the heavy thud of my own heart.
I put my hands over my ears, feeling so fucking helpless. Hannah is dying, and there’s nothing I can do. I can’t touch the men who hurt her. I can’t do anything.
I can never fucking doanything.
My eyes snap open, a strangled sound getting caught in my throat.
I’m in my bedroom, lying on my back in bed. My body is drenched in sweat, and my cheeks hurt from how hard I’ve been clenching my jaw. Just like in the dream, my heart is pounding so hard that my chest aches, and I can hear the sound in my own head, drowning out almost everything else.
Immediately, strong arms tighten around me. There’s a second where I feel like I should fight against the hold before I realize that I know those arms.
They’re strong, thick, and covered in tattoos. They definitely belong to Knox.
When I turn my head to the right, there he is, curled up in bed facing me. He’s not asleep, and he quirks a little smile at me when I look at him.
I can’t return it just yet, but the relief that floods me is like a balm after the horror of that nightmare.
Someone shifts on my other side, and I know it’s Priest, still in the bed where he was when I fell asleep.
Gage and Ash are in the room too, Ash sitting cross legged on the floor, fiddling with something in his lap, and Gage in the desk chair, looking at something on his phone.
Even the dog is there, curled up at the foot of the bed with his head resting on my ankle. That can’t be comfortable, but Jack Sparrow looks like he’s happy to just be there with all of us.
It hits me all over again that I’m not alone. Not with this or with anything else, and gradually that starts to calm me down. My heart rate slows, and some of the tension starts to bleed out of my body.
Gage catches my eye, looking up from whatever he was reading.
“Are you okay?” he asks, his voice pitched low to be soft and soothing or whatever. It actually does help.
He doesn’t press me for information or ask what I was dreaming about, and I like that. No one in this room is a stranger to nightmares. Probably not even Dog, who lived his life in an alley by a dumpster before he attached himself to me and became my unofficially adopted pet.
“Yes,” I tell Gage. “I’m okay.”
My voice comes out raspy and hoarse, and my answer probably isn’t even a little bit convincing, but I don’t want to get into it. I don’t want to try to describe the shit I saw in my dream, because then I’ll have to relive it all over again.
I just want to put it behind me, so I take a deep breath and try to let it all go.
“What time is it?” I ask. The light from the windows is all golden, but it doesn’t feel like I was out for that long. Probably because nightmares aren’t fucking restful at all.
“After four,” Gage replies. “You were out for most of the day.”
“Fuck.” I reach up and rub at my face. “I didn’t mean to sleep that long.”
“You needed it,” Priest says. He’s close enough that his lips tickle the skin of my neck, and he slides one hand down my side.
“I know, but we have shit to do,” I tell him. “I’m not going to fuck over Julian in my sleep.”
Knox snorts at that. “That’s what you have us for, little fox. We did research while you were knocked out.”
“We?” Ash asks, looking up at him with a raised eyebrow. “Is that your new nickname for me?”
Knox rolls his eyes. “Fine. Gage and Ash did research. I sharpened my knives. You know, just in case.”
