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Looking between Carina and him, registering the tears falling down her cheeks, respect grows for him. She’s safer with him than with me. I’m the threat, I realize.
“On that, we can agree. And I don’t know if I...” I swallow as Gage turns his head unnaturally, penetrating eyes boring into me. “I don’t know if I took advantage of her.”
Gage takes a moment to look back at Carina.
“Please, don’t,” she pleads.
Her begging for my life confounds me. In her shoes, I don’t know that I’d do the same. Both of them are better than me.
When he removes his gun from my head, placing it behind his back in his waistband, a wave of emotions I’m not ready to unpack overtakes me, and I close my eyes.
I open my eyes and meet Carina’s. “Just go,” she says.
As I make my way outside, moving down the street to where I’d told my driver to wait, I stop and look up at the stars.
Something coils through me as I realize I might deserve what he was about to do. The flashbacks have me so fucked up, too. So fucked up that I was ready to let him do it.
Fuck, I’ve got to sort this out.
CHAPTERTWENTY-FOUR
Carina
Gage and I look at one another for a long moment before he treks towards me. None of his anguish has left his eyes, and his hand still holds a gun. I don’t back up, though. Even with his admission, even with all he’d done, I’d been relieved to see him burst into the house. Grateful he was still watching me. Still looking out for me.
Some sick, twisted side of me hated myself for telling him to give me time.
“What are you doing, little one? Why was he here?” he asks, his voice taking on a softer tone than when he’d spoken to Emery.
“I woke up from an awful nightmare, and he’d called a bunch of times. I just thought... I just want to know, you know? I want to know the truth, and I want this to be over.”
“And? What did he say?” He messes with the gun before setting it down on the end table near the couch. He towers over me, and I crane my head back to look up at him.
He’s got a thick jacket on, and who could blame him? It’s barely twenty degrees outside. He has his hood drawn over his brown hair, giving him an edge I find so damned attractive.
“He said he wants to find out, too. He questioned Conner, but Conner wouldn’t give him shit. He said he doesn’t know if it was either of them. He has no memories after hitting me.”
“Odd, that.”
I sigh. “Well, he said he was drunk and high. Judging on the fact that two people died that night from said drugs, he’s lucky to be alive.”
Gage rolls his eyes and mutters something about luck running out as I fight the urge to press into him and let him hold me. Let him chase the worries and the nightmares away. Because he dwells in the shadows, he isn’t afraid of them. And they know it.
My mind keeps reminding me that he set the fire. He nearly killed me, too.
As if he’s inside my brain, he stills, looking down at me with a nervous energy skittering off him. “What was your dream about?”
I bite my lip.
“Carina,” he says, voice breaking at the end.
I close my eyes. “There was smoke. It was a memory, and I was inside the house when there was smoke, and flames. But I felt so sluggish, like I couldn’t think, couldn’t move right...”
“Getting knocked out will do that to a person,” Gage adds.
I shake my head. “No, my memory of Conner taking me out of the house was always clear, it’s as if it transformed. Changed. I don’t understand it. How did I see it so clearly both times, but both times I’ve seen it, it’s different?”
Realization seems to dawn on him, but he remains silent.
