Page 71 of Rune’s Solace

And I saw it happen around the table, the answer we’d all been so damn relieved to have opening back up and showing us the hole right through the middle of it.

“We keep Amy safe.” Devil’s eyes came to me and stayed. “Starting now. She doesn’t leave this compound. Not for school, not for air, not for anything. That’s done. And she’s never in a room without one of us in it, and at night — ” he stopped. Looked at me a half second longer. “At night she’s where she’s been. With Rune.”

“She know?” Chain asked. “Any of it? Who’s out there?”

“No,” I said. Too fast. Every eye came back to me. “No. She doesn’t — she knows there’s a man watching. She doesn’t know it’s — ” I couldn’t say it. Her father. I couldn’t get it out at that table. “She doesn’t know who.”

“She’s gotta be told somethin’,” Mystic said.

“I agree. She’s gotta be told she can’t leave and there’s a man out there wants to hurt her,” Devil said. “She doesn’t have to be handed every piece of it in one sitting.” He straightened. “Rune tells her what keeps her alive. The rest keeps.”

* * *

I didn’t go straight back to the cabin.

I stood out in the yard a while first, in the heat, and got my face right, because she’d read it the second she saw me, she reads everything, and I couldn’t walk in there with two months of the world ending on my face and a girl waiting in my cabin who trusted me all the way down.

Her father. The thing she goes screaming from in her sleep. Out there past the treeline right now, wanting her, working toward her. And me the only wall left between them.

I didn’t need God for the promise I made standing there, and I didn’t need pretty words for it either. Cal Rickard was never putting his hands on that girl again. Not while I had breath in me, and if he came through those gates, or came anywhere near her outside them, he was going to find out there were things I knew how to do that had nothing to do with what grew in my garden.

I let that settle.

Then I looked down the path toward the cabin where Amy was waiting for me, and that was the harder part, because Rickard wasn’t the only thing standing between us now.

I knew who her father was. I knew what he’d done. I knew enough of the thing she’d trusted Brenda to bury that if Amy ever found out how I got it, she’d have every right to look at me and see one more man who’d taken something that belonged to her without asking.

And I still wasn’t going to tell her.

Not that part.

I got my face right and started down the path, going home to tell the woman I loved that we’d found the man watching her, while keeping to myself the one thing that would tell her I knew exactly why, and I hated it.

I did it anyway.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I HAD EXACTLY one good day, and I want to remember it right, because I think it might be the last one of its kind I get for a while.

I woke up in his bed alone with the sun already high and a note on the pillow beside me in that blocky, careful handwriting of his: garden — coffee’s hot — didn’t want to wake you. I read it about nine times, which was embarrassing even with nobody there to catch me doing it, then read it once more before I got up because apparently this was who I was now. A woman who got stupid over those words and a dash from a biker who grew medicinal herbs and made coffee strong enough to strip paint.

I drank it anyway. Put on his shirt too, because mine was on the floor and his was right there and I wanted to, which was still a new enough reason for doing something that I noticed it. Then I stood barefoot in his doorway with both hands around the mug and watched him work the beds in the morning sun, sleeves shoved up, head bent, dirt already on his hands, and for once there wasn’t anything else in my head. No hallway. No wondering what we were. No replaying what he’d done or what I’d done or what any of it meant. I just stood there wearing his shirt and drinking his awful coffee while the man I loved worked in his garden, and I was happy.

I almost didn’t know what to do with it.

Sawyer had texted back under my thumbs-up. THAT’S MY GIRL. No details. I mean it. I have an imagination and I don’t need it weaponized against me. Eat something, drink water, and please know I am taking full credit for this.

Brenda caught me crossing the yard later that morning, and I knew from the first look at her face that she knew. Of course she knew. This was a motorcycle club compound, not witness protection, and I’d apparently walked out of Rune’s cabin wearing the emotional equivalent of a billboard.

I stiffened anyway. I waited for the worry, for are you sure, baby, for some gentle version of every warning she’d been trying not to give me since the day she realized where my eyes kept going, but Brenda only stood there looking at me until her eyes went shiny and her mouth did that tight thing it does when she’s trying to boss an emotion back where it belongs.

Then she reached up and tucked a piece of my ridiculous hair behind my ear. “Lord knows I tried to keep you clear of these fools,” she said, shaking her head.

I smiled. “You really did.”

“Did a damn fine job of it too, apparently.”

I laughed, and that nearly got her. Her mouth wobbled before she caught it, and when she looked at me again there wasn’t any warning in her face at all.