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It was unfair and cruel, and I knew that. But putting him in the line of fire was worse. This wasn’t his fight. It was mine, and for once, I was determined to end it. I doubted anyone like Lachlan would come along again—no, I knew it. No one would hold a candle to him. But if, someday, I was ready to trust again, then at least my battles would have been fought and my demons contained. And I would have done it with my own strength without hurting anyone else in the process.
I wished I’d done it sooner. I wished I’d done it before falling into Lachlan’s arms. It was unfair, but maybe all of this had been the spur to my side I needed. Being with Lachlan and seeing the target sighted on the back of his head had woken me up. I had to deal with Jason. And I wasn’t going to let Lachlan’s family get hurt in the process.
Lachlan had said he’d had a prescription for me, but he couldn’t have known how true that was. He was epinephrine to my frozen heart. I was alive, now, and I wasn’t going to squander what he’d given me.
Twenty
Lachlan
Ilet her go. Of course, I did. Anything less than that and I would have been the worst kind of human being. But I did it wanting to shake Laurel’s five-foot-three frame until it rattled like a beat-up pickup truck. I tried to tell her with my glower every step of the way from my room to the front door what I thought about her calling a rideshare.I know what you’re doing. You’re running. You’re hiding. And it won’t work forever.
But that was the tricky part, and the part she leveraged against me. Laurel had been deeply hurt by something, and that trauma went so far down, she let it affect her mental health, her emotional wellbeing, and even her physical wellness. And that kind of hurt had to be respected and treated with patience. Laurel thought she was being clever by using it against me, but, as I had pointed out to her before, there was nothing sneaky about her.
She was going to try and hide, now. She was going to pretend nothing good had happened between us, so she didn’t have to take a leap of faith and trust someone with her wounds. But there was no way I was going to let that happen. I hadn’t let her waste away from an infection in the grocery store, and I wasn’t going to let her emotional infection eat her to nothing, either.
I watched her walk down the wood plank steps, her hand trailing on the black iron railing as a misty sunrise struggled to light her path through the forest cover. She hadn’t even looked back at me. Head down, fingers fiddling with the zipper of her hoodie, she had thanked the driver for being available so early, and then she’d gone.
And then I had to punch something.
My gym was in the lowest level of the house with a wall of windows that had been dug out of the hillside, overlooking the serene wildlife like the other floors did. Only, it was darker down there, and I could beat the shit out of a punching bag until sweat pooled at my feet and I hissed through my teeth at the bruising pain in my knuckles with every jab and hook.
I couldn’t decide if it had been fucking stupid of me to wait to show her about the threat from Dickface or if I should have done it sooner and maybe assuaged her fears about him. But then, maybe it would have made her nightmares worse.
Could it even get worse? I couldn’t imagine a nightmare getting worse than what I had seen. She’d been completely out of it, gasping for breath, shaking, sobbing—short of giving her an actual heart attack, I didn’t think I could have made that any more potent with an email.
I slammed my fist into the sand and leather. “I’m going to kill that fucker.”
“Kill whom?” a familiar voice asked.
Panting, I didn’t even bother to turn around, but I grabbed the chain on the punching bag and rested my head against the cool surface before looking over my shoulder. “Where the hell did you come from, Brady?”
Amos Brady finished coming down the concrete steps, his hands in the pockets of his brown leather and gray wool jacket. He looked like a modern version of Sherlock Holmes or something. Dark hair, dark eyes, freakishly tall and always brooding around like he had gothic secrets tucked away under the collar of his polo. And he rarely, if ever, cracked a smile.
He glanced around the gym with interest. “Nice setup.”
Brady was, if possible, more dedicated to working out than I was—if power lifting, hiking, and competitive swimming could count as “working out.” More like obsessive hobbies. Still out of breath, I unhooked the straps from my gloves. “Thank you? But seriously, how did you get in my house?”
“You left the door open.”
I had, actually. I hadn’t wanted to close it in case Laurel changed her mind. Stupid. I tossed my gloves into a bucket at my feet. “And the reason for the intrusion is…?”
“I don’t know. I had a reason, but now I’m thinking I might have stopped you from committing a homicide.”
“You gonna help me bury the body?” I asked with a humorless smirk.
“That depends on how effectively you covered your tracks,” Brady mused. He sat down on the edge of one of my flat benches, still looking around, but this time, like he might see a body. “I won’t even ask if they deserved it. If you’re feeling stabby, then they really crossed some lines.”
“Damn right they did,” I growled. Sniffing, I snatched up a towel and wiped away the sweat from my face. “I’m not going to kill anyone. I am going to mess them up, but I don’t need to go to jail to do that. What’s going on, Brady?”
“Got an email,” he said, and his eyes squinted, watching for my reaction. “And since it contained encrypted information from my personal devices, I thought an in-person chat would be more prudent.”
“Jesus Christ, thatfuckinggutter rat,” I growled.
“Language,” Brady muttered.
“Sorry.” I swiped a hand down my face. “Wait, so you drove two hours because you’re paranoid that our phones are tapped?”
He shrugged. “The drive is nice.” I quirked an eyebrow. “Alright,” he admitted, “work is rough. We just had to hire another patient coordinator. I needed some air.”
