Page 34 of Rune’s Solace

Nothing.

Bullshit.

Nobody comes apart like that over nothing. Not Amy. Girl could hear a bike backfire without blinking, stare down men twice her size if she had somebody else to protect, put herself between Brenda and a federal agent without taking half a second to think whether the man might hurt her.

Whatever she’d seen down that row had scared nineteen years off her in about half a second.

I’d watched it happen.

First the radiator. Now a face in a parking garage. Maybe they weren’t connected, but I didn’t believe that anymore. Didn’t know how they connected, didn’t know who she’d seen or why a clean hole in a Honda radiator had anything to do with somebody standing in the shadows of a parking garage, but something was moving around Amy. Something outside the threat we’d all been watching. Something she knew.

Something that knew her.

That was the part I couldn’t get past.

I’d spent days trying to make the radiator fit Drago and Zeynep and couldn’t do it because Amy didn’t belong anywhere in that story. Now she’d looked down a row of parked cars and seen somebody who scared the grown woman clean out of her, and I still didn’t have a name or a face or one damn useful thing I could put my hands on.

But I had enough.

Somebody had a thread on her.

And kneeling there on the concrete with the memory of her hand still hot against my chest brought back the beginning whether I wanted it to or not. Those first bad nights after Brenda brought her in, Amy behind a locked door scared to sleep because sleep was where he waited for her, me sitting on the other side with some tea she probably didn’t need because knowing somebody was there mattered more than whatever I’d put in the cup. Some nights she opened the door. Some nights she didn’t. Didn’t matter. I sat there anyway.

I used to be the man she let stay.

Then I decided I knew better.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I TOLD SIX different people it was nothing, and by the time I got to my own room I was almost starting to believe myself.

That’s the trick, I guess. Say something enough times and eventually it starts sounding like a fact. It was nothing. I said it to Brenda in the car with her hand on my knee until we got home. I said it to Fiona, who didn’t believe me but was nice enough not to say so. I said it to Lucy, who absolutely did say so, and then three different people between the clubhouse door and my room who’d apparently gotten the memo that I’d lost my mind in a parking garage. By number six, nothing was starting to sound pretty convincing.

I didn’t say it to Rune. I hadn’t said one word to Rune since the floor of that garage, since I’d pulled my hand off his chest and gotten away from him as fast as my legs would work, because there were some things I could lie about and some things were harder when the person had been right there watching. He’d stayed back on the ride home. Gave me every inch of room I wanted without making me ask.

I got through dinner. Helped Josie clean up because my hands needed something to do besides shake. I went to my room at ten like a normal person, brushed my teeth like a normal person, put on pajamas, plugged in my phone and did all the stupid little things normal people do before bed when they definitely didn’t see their father standing in a parking garage that afternoon. Then I got under the covers, turned off the lamp, and told the ceiling one more time that it was nothing.

It was a face in a shadow. That was all. Some man standing by a pillar in a parking garage, and I’d barely even seen him. The thing with Tom had already happened, everybody was upset, my heart was going too fast before I ever turned around, and then I saw a jaw I knew. Maybe shoulders I knew. Maybe the way he held his head.

Or maybe I didn’t.

That was possible.

People look like other people all the time. There were probably ten men in Charleston who looked enough like my father to scare me if I caught them wrong in the shadows. A hundred, maybe. And my brain knew his face better than it knew almost anything. Of course it could find him where he wasn’t.

It was nothing.

Twenty minutes later I was asleep, and the nothing came for me.

* * *

The dream is always the same, and I don’t go over it in the daytime. I’ve learned not to.

It’s always the hallway. It’s always the sound of him before the sight of him, that particular weight on that particular board, and in the dream I’m small again and the door doesn’t lock and my body won’t do anything but the one thing it learned, shut up, pretend, go away inside myself until it’s over. I never fight, in the dream. Not once, in nineteen years of it. That’s the part that makes me hate myself when I wake up, and I know it isn’t fair, I know all the things people say about freezing, know your body does what it has to do when it thinks there’s no way out, and I know I was a kid.

Knowing has never once helped me at three in the morning.

Tonight it was worse, because tonight he had the garage in it. Tonight the hallway ran out onto concrete and pillars and my own car, and he was standing at the end of it in the shadow, and he saw me. He knew me. And his face started doing the thing his face does right before —