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I shake my head. “He didn’t do it.”
I don’t know what they’ll do to me, but I can’t let them hurt me.
“He did, though, and you saw it because you were with him. You were both in Paris the night of the murder. You saw him murder that officer, didn’t you?”
When I don’t respond, the man growls at her. “Cut her.”
Her eyes, wide and terrified, plead for forgiveness as she obeys him. I scream out loud as the knife cuts me. I’m trying to move away from the knife when I have an idea.
I sit up and turn to her. “No!” I scream. “I won’t!”
“Hurt her!”
With a cry, she slices at me with the knife. I yank out of her way just in time and throw my hands in front of my face. The knife slices through rope, nicking me but freeing my hands.
The door to the room bursts open. I see Thayer in a pool of light, his weapons drawn.
“Thayer!”
“One down,” he says placidly, a look of tranquility on his face as he points his gun at the man. “One to go.”
The man’s eyes go wide as he puts his hands up. Thayer doesn’t shoot to kill, though. With a look of pure malice, he shoots the man’s kneecap and makes him fall to the floor.
The woman screams and lunges for Thayer, but I grab her by the hair and yank her back. She falls to the floor. I kneel on her back and keep her down. I push the same knife she used on me against her neck.
“Go ahead. Try me.”
Thayer yells over his shoulder, “Get her out of here for questioning.”
Lyam enters and takes the redhead bodily out of the room. “Naughty girl,” he chides, clearly enjoying himself. “You’re in big, big trouble for this.”
Thayer grabs the man by the neck.
“Apologize to her.”
The man glares at me. Thayer grits his teeth and backhands him so hard he falls to the floor and screams.
“I said, apologize,” he repeats as he makes the man face me again.
“I’m sorry,” the man says. My stomach turns at the sight of his teeth, reddened with blood.
“Good. Savannah, you have a choice,” Thayer says to me. “You can step outside with Fabien and Nicolette. They’re waiting for you. Or you can stay here with me while I get rid of the last threat against you.”
The man’s eyes go wide, and he begins to shake.
Back in the alley, which seems so long ago now, I saw the look of terror on his captive’s face. He would have killed me and forced Thayer to serve time for a murder he didn’t commit.
I cross my arms over my chest. I’m not leaving Thayer’s side again.
Not ever again.
“I’ll stay.”
TWENTY-THREE
Savannah
I could have left. I could have chosen ignorance. I could have decided to turn a blind eye.
But I couldn’t.
I love Thayer, and that means loving every facet of him – even the unapologetically violent part of him that lives by a moral code so foreign to me it’s almost written in a foreign language.
I had to witness him see this through.
I had to watch him take the life of the man who would have tortured and killed me.
Loving him doesn’t mean turning my back on who he is, but accepting all of him.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to erase the image of what I heard and saw tonight. His cold, calculated voice and vicious, merciless actions.
I don’t know if I want to.
I’ve made the decision to stay. I’ve made the decision to love him.
And that means, I’ve made the decision to accept the code he lives by. I don’t want to shield my eyes from the fierce, sometimes cruel, reality of who he is.
If I love him, then I love all of him.
When we’re done – when my wounds are doctored and he calls in his cleanup crew to dispose of the last vestiges of violent and certain justice –
We go home.
Back to the Gerard family home.
When we arrive, bloodied and bruised, our clothing torn and ragged, his mother doesn’t even blink. “I’ll put you in the guest suite on the second floor,” she says pragmatically. “Do you need a doctor?”
Her inkling that we’re a couple might have something to do with the fact that he’s carrying me, and my arms are strewn around his neck.
Thayer shakes his head. “We’ve seen a doctor already. Everything else we need is in the suite.”
Not surprisingly, Thayer growled and cursed at the knife wound, insisting I get it cleaned up and bandaged.
I wonder what he has in that suite…
She nods. “Are you officially here?” Avril Gerard asks Thayer tentatively.
He gives her a wry smile. “I didn’t escape jail. I was released. I won’t be going back. So yes, I’m officially here and you don’t have to cover for me.”
