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Alley’s voice, the other guys, and the sound of sirens broke through the thoughts spinning through my mind and I finally pulled myself away, picking up my precious boy and cradling him in my arms as he cried.
When I stood, I looked over at the group surrounding Lyric who was sitting on the ground, blood seeping from his leg. Guilt slammed into me as I watched Braxton strip off the sweatshirt he had on over his tee and press it tightly to his leg. Alley was squatted down next to his head talking to him and I was wondering where the heck the ambulance was, panic gripping me.
“This is all my fault,” I said out loud, my body trembling.
“Baby, this isn’t your fault. You can’t blame yourself,” Kace tried to say in a soothing voice.
As the words left his mouth, Gyth picked up a brick with a white piece of paper attached to it. When it had been thrown with all the shooting going on I didn’t know, but the security cameras should have picked up something. Then Gyth read it out loud.
“Till death do us part. You can’t get away. Next time it will be me coming for you.”
Kace hissed, his body vibrating with anger, but when I looked at him he also didn’t look too happy that Gyth had read that out loud. It was sweet that he wanted to shield me, but I needed to know everything so I could be prepared.
On me.
“See, my ex-husband will stop at nothing until I’m dead,” I cried out. I heard Alley suck in a breath.
Everyone stopped, all their eyes coming to mine. Fury boiled from every man in the room and Alley was no different. I was sure she was picturing taking her bat to someone's head right now.
“Honey, we will stop him,” Kace said in a confident voice. But Thad thought he was unstoppable and I worried that was true.
Shaking like a leaf, my words came out shaky.
“It won’t be that easy.”
“Why do you say that?” The question had come from Lyric. Even hurt I could see his gaze taking in everything, his mind going over the event and what had happened, and now his curious gaze looked at me waiting for an answer. It was ingrained in him. It was his job.
This is the last piece of information I hadn’t told Kace and I hoped he wouldn’t be mad at me. But it wasn’t him I looked at right then, it was Lyric. He had asked the question and I wanted to see his face when I gave him the answer. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for but I had a feeling the moment would change a lot between us.
“Because my husband is a cop.”
* * *
Sympathy and understanding.
That was what I had seen flash through Lyric’s eyes when I told him and everyone else that my ex was a cop. I’d thought maybe I would be able to trust him after all.
The police rushed in, along with the paramedics and everything was chaos all over again. I looked down at my baby who had finally stopped crying and brushed a hand over his fragile head.
“What if—” I started to say out loud and couldn’t finish as my voice broke and a sob slipped free.
“Don’t go there, baby. You both are okay and I’m going to keep it that way.” Kace wrapped his arms around the two of us, pulling us close as my frame shook and I cried, my body coming down from all the adrenaline.
It felt so good in his embrace and I knew I had been so very wrong.
Pulling back from him, I looked up into his intoxicating brown eyes. “I’m sorry I am such a mess and I don’t know if you would even want to because you are probably mad at me for not telling you that Thad was a cop, but I don’t want to be alone tonight at my place or any night after that either.”
“Baby, I’m not—” Before he could say anything else, a commotion had us both turning toward the sound of one very pissed off Landon, who was approaching his wife, their baby girl in his arms.
How he’d got there so fast, I wasn’t sure.
“I’m going to kill whoever did this,” he said, pulling Alley into his embrace.
Landon was a pretty easy-going guy most of the time and I had never seen him on fire like he was right then, but I knew what his wife meant to him and how he’d recently gotten her back. He was probably going out of his mind thinking to himself that if he lost her he wouldn’t survive.
I thought the same thing as I covered my son with my body. And again when I thought of Kace or the others running out into the fray of it all going down. What if Kace had been out here like Lyric but gotten killed?
At that thought, my legs almost buckled.
