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“You feel better now, Momma?” he asked, voice quiet.
I had to breathe through a lot of pain at that moment. The pain at what had been done to my child, what I could never take back. The pain at thinking I was almost taken away from him.
But I wasn’t.
So I could breathe.
Because of the little hand on my cheek. Because of the man standing beside the bed, his large hand on Nathan’s small back. Because of all the people in the waiting room.
Because my nightmare had finally ended.
It was time for the dream to begin.
“Yeah, baby,” I whispered. “Momma feels so much better.”
They let me out of the hospital later the next day. I’d been unconscious for a few hours after they admitted me, and since Lance had already done the job of saving my life, I was physically okay, apart from being told to ‘take it easy,’ as if that were something possible in my chaotic life.
It started with all the people in the waiting room, all of whom refused to leave until they saw me. Lance was like a frickin’ prison guard, monitoring the number of people in the room at one time and barking at them when their ‘time was up.’
Though of course Rosie didn’t listen to that bark, merely grinned at him and blew him a kiss.
“You’re officially in the club now,” she said.
“What club?”
“The Greenstone Security Old Lady club. It’s practically required to like almost die or be kidnapped or whatever to get in. We’re very exclusive, you know.” She winked at me, her words light and teasing. But there was a darkness behind her eyes too. A pain.
Someone else breathing through it all.
She squeezed my hand, kissed my head and promised to be back once I was able to walk and drink.
Lucy and Polly were there too, Polly giving me a Rhodochrosite stone, for healing. I clutched the cool, smooth stone in my hands the entire way home.
Eliza and Karen didn’t listen to Lance’s commands either. Both were pale, shocked and tearful.
“I’m okay,” I told them.
Eliza raised her brow, but then she looked to where Nathan was dutifully reading his picture book, to Lance, standing in his badass stance right beside him, then back to me. “Yeah, you are,” she said.
Logan and Esther looked pale also. I knew their hatred for hospitals, the sterile smell and long hallways too much of a reminder of what they’d lost. But they came anyway. Because they were family.
So back at home, with my boys, the smaller one fast asleep in his bed, the bigger one I was using for a pillow.
A naked one.
Lance had just made slow, tender, beautiful love to me. Every touch, every kiss was worship. I was filled with reverence, covered in evidence that the world had not killed all his gentle.
We hadn’t spoken in a long time.
We didn’t need to.
“I didn’t kill him,” he said, breaking the silence.
I knew exactly who he was talking about, the man I hadn’t even mentioned since I’d woken up. Sure a lot of people would need to know immediately what happened to the ex-husband that kidnapped and tried to drown them. But I wasn’t a lot of people. Robert didn’t matter to me. Not in the moments I had with Lance, with my son, the rest of my friends and family. He didn’t get that. Didn’t get to pollute that.
“Why?” I asked, surprised at the sentence, surprised this was the first time I’d even thought about Robert breathing in the world at all. He had taken me in order to make sure I didn’t forget him, that he was the last thing I thought of before I took my last breath. He was wrong on that score. And after I took my first breath, it wasn’t him I thought of either.
Now I thought of him. Now, I was surprised he was still breathing.
I realized that I had expected Lance to kill him. Despite what he’d promised me in the Greenstone Security offices in another lifetime.
It didn’t bother me, that single broken promise. Because I knew that Lance would keep every other promise he’d made to me.
I understand Lance now. As much as anyone could understand a man like that. As much as a human could understand another human being. I knew that he needed to eliminate every threat to his sanity that he could eliminate. Nathan and I were his sanity now. I got that. Because he was part of mine. Part of Nathan’s. Lance had lost his whole family in the past. Due to factors he couldn’t control. Factors no human, no matter how badass, could control. Robert was a factor he could control. A threat he could control. He didn’t eliminate him before all this, because he was respecting my wishes. Respecting me. Nathan.
All that changed when Robert almost killed me. When Robert gave Lance a taste of the horror that no human being should have to go through once, let alone twice.
