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I’m not even sure she’s going to want to stay after what has transpired, but that’s a talk for another day. Right now, all I want to do is get her to safety.
“Smoke, Steel, & Whiskey is closed for tonight,” I say, adjusting the sign out front. “My guys will be here soon to clean up the mess and make sure nobody comes wandering back in, but I need to take you somewhere safer.”
Oakley raises her eyebrows. “I’m fine to run the bar tonight.”
I laugh. “No way in hell I’m letting you do that. We don’t know if those fuckers are going to come back.”
“Not without Stone,” she says.
“They’re unpredictable. That’s the problem. We can’t wait here and find out, so I’m taking you to my house and you’ll be staying there from now on.”
She squints her eyes at me and the sides of her mouth curl up. “Do I get a key?”
I shrug. “If you want one.”
She rushes toward me and pulls me into a hug, pressing her face into my sweaty shirt, causing me to stumble back. “Woah, don’t hurt yourself,” I say.
She laughs, looking up at me and propping her chin up on my chest. “Nothing can hurt me when I have my protector with me.”
“Me?” I ask, surprised she would even consider me good protection after what happened.
She nods. “You saved my life.”
I don’t feel like much of a savior, but I suppose it’s true that I prevented her from getting killed. I wouldn’t have had to if I didn’t put her in danger in the first place, though, so I’m not sure I feel too great about it.
But I won’t press the topic too hard. If she wants to believe I’m her hero, who am I to deny her that belief? It certainly doesn’t hurt my chances of convincing her to stay.
I smile down at Oakley feeling the warmth from her body fill me with hope. “Let’s get going, shall we?”
“Wait a second, I have to get something from the office first,” she says, pulling away.
“You sure you want to go in there?” I ask, thinking how Stone’s blood has probably soaked into a wide spread of carpet by now.
“I need my bear. You can come.” She takes my hand, leading me down the hall, over the body with half a face, and into the office.
She lets go of my hands as we step inside, running up to the bookshelf and taking down the teddy bear I gave her. She hugs it, rocking back and forth like it’s a real, living thing.
She’s adorable.
But my smile of appreciation turns into a frown as she comes back toward me. I look past her at the wall near the bookshelf, noticing something there I had never seen before.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, looking over her shoulder.
“The wall,” I reply, stepping around her. “There’s something there.”
31
Oakley
Ihave no clue what Savva is talking about until I turn around and see it myself. In the chaos, we both missed it, but now that the room has settled again, it’s obvious that there’s something wrong with the wall where the bookshelf is.
It’s… broken.
Savva puts his hand on the flimsy plywood, pushing it until it cracks off and falls into a room that was previously hidden from view. The wall was hollow, and someone must’ve run into it in the mad scramble to escape, revealing a secret room.
“Angus, what were you up to?” Savva mutters, pulling out his phone and using the flashlight feature to illuminate the hidden space.
I stand behind him, afraid that like in the movies, the place might be boobytrapped. My fingers find the edges of his shirt, and I walk with him into the secret room. Perhaps it’s just a relic of a renovation, but something tells me that Angus wouldn’t bother putting a wall here unless he was using it to hide something.
