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Her fist clenched around the bit of metal held out in our direction, face breaking as her gaze darted between us.
Behind her, the woman from the van ran down the road, shouting for help, but I could barely hear her over the thump of my own heartbeat. Didn’t give a fuck about anything or anyone else in this moment excepther.
Ghost’s grip on the bit of sharp metal faltered. “But…”
Her lower lip trembled, her watery gaze searching the air behind us as though there was something missing.
“If you’re real, then…”
Her face broke and a heavy sob racked her body. She dropped her makeshift weapon, and I rushed her, pulling her into my chest, holding her tighter than I’d ever held anything in my miserable life. She shattered against me, her entire body shaking, making my darkness whisper sweet nothings in my ear about all the things we’d do to make sure thisneverhappened again.
I pressed my lips to the top of her head, cradling her skull to keep her tight against me, tucked into the crook of my neck. Her scent, tainted by smoke and earth filled me. The feel of her, cold and small, made my primal instinct recoil when Grey tried to move closer, snatching her away from him. Keeping her close.
“I’m sorry,” she croaked between sobs. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
The black thing in my chest splintered.
This time when Grey came close, I let him touch her, but I didn’t let go. I wasn’t sure if I could. Not yet.
He brushed the hair away from her cheeks. “Hey,” he crooned in that way only Grey could. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay, you’re safe. We’ve got you. We’ve got you.”
She pulled away from his touch, shaking her head against me. “No,” she sniffed. “It’s not okay. It’s never going to be okay again.”
“Shhh,” I whispered against the top of her head. “It will,” I promised her.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “It’s all my fault.”
Grey took her chin, forcing her to look at him from the cocoon of my embrace. “Hey,” he said, sharp. “None of this is your fault, you hear me?”
“It’s ours,” I growled, feeling the guilt of it like water in my lungs, suffocating. “We should’ve never let him get his hands on you. We should’ve found you faster.We should’ve saved you.”
“But youdidsave me. You were all there with me. Helping me escape.”
Grey frowned, his brows drawing down in confusion. “AJ, you aren’t making sense. You saved yourself.”
She shook her head again. “Not fast enough. Becca…and Corvus,” her voice broke on his name. “I wasn’t fast enough to save them.”
Shit.
I released my hold on her to hold her at arm’s length, needing her to see the truth in my eyes.
Her body shook with another sob, and I thumbed a tear away from her eye. “Corvus is alive, Ghost.”
She stilled, the fevered hope in her eyes spurring a fresh wave of tears.
“So is Becca,” Grey added, and her lips parted in mute shock.
“Corv was hurt bad from the fall,” Grey explained. “He’s in the hospital, but they’re hopeful he’ll make a full recovery. And Becca… she’s…”
“She’s going to be fine,” I lied, unable to tarnish the emotion I could see in her eyes.
She swallowed, her fingernails digging into my forearms where they held her, like she couldn’t let go of me yet, either. “Take me to them?”
“Shit, AJ,” Grey rasped, and I realized how he was looking at her.Whathe was looking at.
My pulse quickened to new, impossible heights at the shade of the skin showing through a tear in the shirt she wore.
I clutched a strip of it and ripped it off, revealing her naked body and a sweep of bruises all across her lower abdomen. She tried to cover the injury with an arm burned from wrist to elbow, a raw mess of deformed skin colored in shades I recognized from my own victims. The kind of burns that usually preceded a long suffering death.
