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“Look, man, I was—” Tim started with his hands held up.
“Leave.” The word dripped a venom Violet hadn’t known Mikel capable of and carried a weight that shook her.
“All right, damn. You’re welcome.” Tim looked as confused as she was as he headed back to the motorcycle Violet now noticed propped up by the road.
“Mikel, what the—?”
“Violet.” Red came into view, wide eyed and frantic, having apparently gotten out of Mikel’s truck. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” The relative truth of the words shocked her. Aside from a dull headache and the cold numbness of shock in her fingertips and her feet, she felt surprisingly recovered.
“You would have died,” Mikel bit out. Red turned pale.
“If Tim hadn’t have found me—”
“No,” Mikel growled, then she was in his arms, looking at Red over his shoulder and slowly remembering to hold him back, while she wondered what the fuck was going on. “You would have died,” he said again, quieter, sounding so absolutely devastated that Violet’s attention snapped back to solely him.
“I’m fine; I’m right here.”
He released her, shook his head. “I felt it.” He tapped his chest, and Violet didn’t follow.
“I have to tell you something,” a teary-eyed Red said as a fire truck pulled into the street, all lights and no sirens, and Violet was officially lost.
Mikel’s face turned hard, resigned for a moment, then soft again when he looked at her.
“Let Red take you to the—”
“No, I’m fine,” she insisted. “I just need some water and maybe a jacket.”
The firefighters’ voices volleyed back and forth while they rolled out the hoses and rushed toward the smoking end of the shop. Violet couldn’t see any fire, but she was glad they were here.
Mikel sighed and rubbed his jaw, slung his coat around her shoulders, then turned to Red. “Will you take her inside while I handle this?”
Her friend rushed to comply. As soon as Mikel had her on her feet, Red wrapped Violet’s arm over her shoulders and led her into the living room. The front door closed behind them, and Violet noticed tears on her cheeks.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” she asked, catching Red’s hand after she’d set her on the sofa and turned to go to the kitchen.
“Please don’t hate me,” Red begged before pulling away.
Violet’s mind reeled, stuttered, and struggled to catch up with whatever insane twist she’d missed that had made Mikel so cruel to the man who’d helped her and now had her best friend in tears.
“Here,” Red said when she came back, looking more composed but just barely. “Put this on your head, and here’s water and a blanket. I turned off the oven, but I think whatever you were making is toast.”
Violet took the ice pad as instructed and let herself be tucked in with a blanket over her legs. “Red, what’s going on?”
Red sagged on the sofa next to her. “I don’t want to go over it twice. Can we wait for Mikel, but promise me you won’t hate me, Violet, please?”
“Of course, I won’t.” It was easy to agree, and Violet had the sinking feeling that maybe Red forgot to shut something off or did something with the forge or had somehow inadvertently caused the accident.
She had herself practically convinced that must be what had happened by the time Mikel walked through the front door, face drawn and hard.
He stopped by the arm of the sofa and kissed her hair. Violet leaned into him for a second, swallowing at the tension growing thicker and thicker since his arrival in the room.
“Okay, one of you tell me what’s going on,” she demanded.
Mikel dropped down into the recliner across from the sofa and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. He looked from her to Red, then blinked, and shook his head.
“I put something in your drinks,” Red blurted out, and Violet had to play the words back twice to make sure she had heard them right.
