Page 90 of Haunt Me

I don’t know if he’ll survive tonight.

I don’t know if the people who love him will find him in time.

All I know is somewhere out there, a clock is running that I can’t stop, on a man I can’t save, held onto by a thread that’s never asked less of me than it’s asking tonight.

So I hold it anyway.

I don’t look away.

Samuel

When I come to again, there’s a phone pressed against my ear.

“Say something,” Cullen says, crouched beside me again. “So he knows you’re still breathing.”

My jaw barely works. It’s swollen enough that forming words costs more than it should.

“Knox,” I manage, voice wrecked, barely recognizable as my own.

“Wolf?” His voice cracks through the line. “Wolf, where⁠—”

Cullen pulls the phone back before I can answer.

“That’s enough proof of life for tonight.” His voice shifts, all business now, the crouch replaced by the easy stance of a man laying out terms he’s already decided aren’t up for negotiation. “You already know what I want.”

I can’t hear Knox’s answer, just a sound, tight and furious, through the speaker.

“Blackwater’s territory. The Route 6 corridor, the warehouses you’ve been running weapons through for the last two years. Sign it over, and your VP walks out of here breathing.” A pause. “Fight me on this, and I start sending pieces of him back one at a time.”

Whatever Knox replies makes Cullen smile, slow and satisfied.

“You have forty-eight hours,” he says. “Clock starts now.”

He ends the call and crouches in front of me again, studying my face.

“Knox is going to try something stupid,” Cullen says, eerily satisfied. “Men like him do. Loyalty makes for bad negotiators.”

“He won’t give you the corridor.”

“No.” Cullen straightens, nodding to someone behind me. “I don’t think he will either. Which is a shame for you.”

The next hit doesn’t come from a boot. It’s a fist this time, precise, controlled, the kind that knows exactly how much a body can take before it stops being useful.

I black out somewhere between the second and third hit.

When the darkness takes me this time, I instinctively reach out for her, searching for the shape of her kneeling in the same spot, her hand hovering the same careful inch from my face. But she’s not there.

“Raven,” I say into the black, or at least I think I do.

Nothing answers. Just the word itself, thin and useless, thrown back at me out of the dark, like the only thing this place is capable of giving me is the sound of my own voice.

I try again anyway. There’s a stubborn, bleeding part of me that doesn’t know how to stop reaching for her, even now, even here.

“Raven.”

Nothing.

“Raven, please. Come back.”