39. Kane #2
“Please let her be okay.” It wheezed out of me as I came skidding to a stop beside River’s bike and threw the car into park. I jumped out and flew around the front just as the door whipped open.
“Kane.” River’s midnight eyes were full of turmoil.
“The fuck happened?” I gritted as I stormed his way.
From thirty feet back, I watched his features twine with the disorder as he stood in the open doorway. “Someone tried to snatch her from the parking lot of Moonlit Ridge Grocers.”
Horror punched me square in the face.
A fist that nearly dropped me straight to my knees .
Every muscle in my body went weak for the flash of a second before it rebounded in a fit of fury.
Insides lighting with the instant need for retribution. To make someone bleed. To cut them wide open and watch their insides spill out.
It was those types of monsters that were the most depraved of society.
“Another guy saw the commotion from the other side of the parking lot and went to stop it,” he continued. “The piece of shit who was trying to get her threw her against your Rover before he disappeared into the woods. She hit her head pretty hard.”
Not slowing, I angled through, grating, “Where is she?”
“Serenity One.”
Serenity One.
Sovereign Sanctum’s room.
The room with all the high-end equipment that you’d never typically find in a regular doctor’s office. A place where we could bring the most fragile and broken when we couldn’t risk taking them to a public emergency room.
I busted through the door without pause, pulse stampeding through my veins as I pushed into the room, so overcome when I saw her sitting up on the side of the examination table that there were no reservations left.
Nothing stopping me from going directly to her and taking her gorgeous face in my hands.
Fire scorched through my body the second I did.
“Emery.” It rasped out of me.
A question.
A promise.
A million things in that one single word, which wasn’t all that surprising since she’d come to mean everything.
Tears blurred her eyes. “Kane.”
“I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry. Are you okay?” I searched her face.
She nodded in my hold. “I’m fine.”
“Are you in pain? ”
“My head hurts a little, but it’s nothing significant. I just?—”
“Who was this fucker?” It ripped out of me.
Terror swam in those toffee eyes.
“I don’t know. I didn’t see him.” Her words lurched and faltered. “He came from out of nowhere. I…I felt something. Something off. That same feeling I mentioned last night. I thought I was just being paranoid, Kane. I thought…”
Fear clogged her voice, hitching the words she couldn’t force off her tongue.
Rage burned me through.
A firestorm.
The cataclysmic type.
The kind that decimated everything in its wake.
“We’ll find him. I promise you, we’ll find him.” I pulled her against me, hugging her tight. Swore to God, those thin, slight arms that wrapped around my waist were the best thing that I’d ever felt.
“I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.” I murmured it at the top of her head.
The second I said it, she let the horror go, and she clung to me as she started to sob.
No doubt, the adrenaline and fear breaking loose of the dam once she knew she was safe.
“It’s okay, baby. Let it out. You’re safe. You’re safe.” The promises kept pouring out as I held her there, standing at the edge of that examination table while it felt like pieces of my life were falling away and others were coming together.
A knitting.
An intertwining.
The realization of what this meant.
Holding her like this wasn’t meant to be temporary.
And I knew, right then, that this was how I was supposed to hold her for the rest of my life.
“You’re safe,” I mumbled again.
Hot tears soaked the front of my shirt, and her hands were fisted in the back of it. She nodded against the hammering of my heart. “I fought him, Kane. I fought him with everything I had. I couldn’t let it happen again.”
Her words impaled me. A barrage of missile strikes. A surprise attack.
I couldn’t let it happen again.
Turbulence screamed through my senses, and I’d never wanted to go on a murder spree quite like I did right then. But I forced myself to remain right there.
Her rock as the confessions hiccupped out of her.
“But he was so strong. So strong. I don’t know what would have happened if that guy hadn’t seen it happening from across the lot. Where I would be right now. Oh, God, Kane.”
It was a whimper. Turmoil as she was wrought with whatever horrible memories had been imprinted on her spirit.
That pain I’d recognized in her the first night I’d met her.
Trauma and wounds.
“I would have found you, Emery. I would have hunted every inch of this world for you. Turned over every stone and sifted through every grain of sand. Would have gone to the ends of the earth and back a thousand times if that’s what it took.
I will destroy any monster who even thinks about doing you wrong. ”
Whoever this motherfucker was?
He was dead.
So fucking dead, he might as well have been counting his last breaths.
Charleigh was suddenly standing at our side, her expression cautious as she set her hand on my arm. “I just want to take her vitals one more time before we release her, but otherwise, everything looks good. Dr. Reynolds did a scan before you got here just to make sure she was fine, and it’s clear.”
The tiniest bit of relief hit me, but it was still affliction that I was feeling as I peeled myself back from Emery, not wanting to be away from her for a second.
I forced myself to keep moving until I backed into the opposite wall .
Eyes pinned on her the whole time.
This woman who had come into my life and rearranged everything.
My purpose and goals. Kindled the kind of love I never thought I’d feel.
River’s low-slung voice hit me from the side as he angled his head toward the door. “Need to talk to you.”
Reluctance filled me, and I took another glance at Emery. She wore the smallest smile on her face, nodding slowly as Charleigh gave her instructions.
“She’s in good hands,” River said.
I knew she couldn’t be in better, so I finally gave with a nod and followed him out into the vacant hall where the rest of the staff wasn’t allowed.
Still, he looked each direction to ensure we were alone, his words hushed as he began to speak. “Sheriff showed up at the scene and was able to get a statement from the man who witnessed part of what happened.”
We’d just brought Moonlit Ridge’s Sheriff in on what we did. Putting him through a bunch of tests to see where he might stand.
If he stood for the straight line of the law or if he stood for what might have to be done to set something right, legal or not.
Turned out, he was all about helping people, no matter the cost.
He wanted to know as little as possible, but he’d stand by us, whatever that looked like.
“Cash got a call from him, and he let me know the report had come through, which was also how Charleigh was able to get Emery here rather than her being taken to the emergency room.”
My heart locked in a fist. “And did the guy who saw it get a look at this motherfucker?”
The single shake of River’s head was sharp. “Piece of shit had gone stealth. Dressed in black with a cap pulled down low on his head. Didn’t leave a fuckin’ trace behind him before he disappeared into the woods.”
“Fuck.” It was a growl that ripped out of me, and I leaned against the wall and scrubbed my palms over my face, trying to keep my cool when it felt like I was being burned in hell.
“Who is this asshole? Some random in our town trying to nab one of our innocents?”
Nausea spun my stomach into disorder.
Knew the way these deviants worked. They watched for the opportune time when a girl was alone, and they stole her right off the street without warning.
River’s expression turned grim. “Doesn’t sit right to me. We’re too fucking remote and, not that it doesn’t happen, Emery is a little old for the typical trafficking demographic.”
“So, what? This was some random assault? Some backwoods miscreant looking for easy prey?”
He looked me square in the face. “Or she was targeted.”
My pulse careened. “You think it’s someone after us? Someone who knows?”
An old vendetta that someone had come to avenge?
“Don’t know that, but I do know she told Charleigh that she’d felt like she was being watched for a while now but had chalked it up to being paranoid.”
“Yeah, she told me the same thing last night.”
Uncertainty billowed through me, and I blew out a jagged sigh, wanting to race out and end someone without having the first clue who it was.
I couldn’t let it happen again.
That statement was eating me alive, and I squeezed my hands into fists and pressed them into my eyes like it could stop the assault of images that tried to invade. Mind conjuring the most horrid, disgusting things.
Had dedicated my life to ending it.
To never letting it happen on my watch.
Not ever again.
And here I was, feeling like I was getting sucked back into the most brutal time of my life. When I’d realized I’d come up on a dead end and there’d been no moving forward on the direction I was going .
“But she wrote it off as a grief reaction over her sister,” I continued on a sigh.
“She in trouble?”
Felt like I had a ball of barbed wire at the base of my throat. “Seems so.”
I looked at River. “How the fuck do you do it?”
“What’s that?”
“Love someone this fucking much?”
Because I knew it then, and maybe I’d known it all along.
I loved her.
I loved her more than anything I’d ever loved in my life.
Emery and my little Angel Face.
“Ah, brother, it’s the most terrifying thing you’ll ever feel, and the best gift you’ll be given. And once you feel it, there is no going back. That’s it. It’s over for you.”
Sounded about right because I was done for.
On my knees.
These two girls my everything.