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I shake my head. “Nothing.”
The movement sends my long hair spilling over my shoulders and his gaze dips to my throat. I prepare myself for his disgust at the scars Rylan left me with, but what I’m not expecting is for pain to flash across his eyes. “Someone hurt you.”
I shift my hair back over my throat to conceal the scars. “That’s what life does. It hurts you.” Simon’s face flashes in my mind. “Whether or not you deserve it.”
When tears threaten, I turn my back. I manage one step.
“But it doesn’t have to.”
There are a million different reasons he’s wrong but before I can say even one, two familiar bearded figures emerge from where they must have been all this time, leaning against a wall further down the road. Their eyes glint at me in the darkness.
“Hey sweetheart,” one calls out.
I don’t say a word.
“Friends of yours?” Aden murmurs in a voice a lot less warm and friendly than before.
I peer over my shoulder. With his eyes narrowed, he stares the two men down. Suddenly he doesn’t look like the nice guy who stays friends with his exes and dodges fights with ease.
Now he looks like he wouldn’t think twice about taking these two men on.
“I’m from New Jersey. I can take care of myself.”
Simon’s words echo in my head, and as I absorb Aden’s focus on the two men, I know what will happen if I let it.
When I shift my focus back to the bearded men, one is reaching for something in his big leather pocket. Both are human, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous. That they can’t kill.
I take a step to the right. Just one. Enough that I’ve put my body in front of Aden’s. These men are trouble I’ve brought here, and the only one who should pay the price for what they do is me.
“No,” I say, my eyes locked on them. “They’re not.”
The man continues to reach for something in his pocket. I feel Aden moving closer, but before I can warn him away, a soft whoosh draws my attention to the right.
A couple step out of the grocery store with two plastic bags, and dart a glance at us before they turn left, murmuring to each other as they go.
But they’re not the only ones to emerge. The security guard must have a camera monitor in the store because he stops in the doorway, his gaze fixed on the bearded men and a cell phone raised to his mouth. When the bearded man lowers his hand again, I know whatever trouble was coming is over. At least for now.
I steal a peek at Aden and find him observing me.
It feels like he’s peering into my head. As if he can see this terror that I’m fighting to keep buried about what these men will do to me if I go with them.
He’s going to fight them.
I read the moment he decides in the second before he speaks. “I might need you to hold the bags.”
And there will be another dead body at my feet.
I swallow. “I can hold my bag, but not the limes. Unless we don’t have far to walk.”
Aden isn’t slow. He gets what I’m saying. As if he’s forgotten that the two men blocking one side of the sidewalk even exists, he holds my random assortment of groceries out to me, keeping the limes for himself.
I take it, and once I have, he turns around. “The Cerberus isn’t far.”
His footsteps are crisp as he leads the way down the road, away from the two men who don’t say a word, but who I still feel their predatory focus heating my back.
“What’s the Cerberus?” I ask.
Keeping my gaze in front of me isn’t easy when I remember one man was reaching for a weapon before the security guard stepped out. But with the feet or so of space Aden keeps between us, at least my only anxiety right now is coming from what might be happening behind me rather than beside me.
