49. Emery #2
“He killed him, Emery. He killed that bastard to protect this woman who couldn’t protect herself.”
Even though I’d almost anticipated it, a gasp raked up my throat. I’d known there was something about them, hadn’t I? A dusky, quiet menace that echoed around their spirits ?
Grief curled Kane’s brow, and his hand tremored where he settled it on my neck. “Are you still with me?”
It was a plea, his question begging me to understand.
I nodded as a tear slipped free.
Kane gathered the moisture with his thumb, and he tipped his head to the side, his expression turning to awe. “He brought her to us. Wanted us to help him give her a new life.”
A shiver ran through me when he shifted to expose the tattoo on the back of his hand. The two stacked Ss with the blade running from top to bottom with an eye in the middle.
The same one they all had.
He squeezed that hand into a fist. “Sovereign Sanctum. That was the day it was born.”
“Sovereign Sanctum?” It cracked with uncertainty.
Kane gave a tight nod. “It’s what we really do, Emery. It’s who we really are. We left the type of sin and corruption we’d been involved in and turned our brutality to this.”
His voice was a tolling of low thunder. “We get women and children out of whatever dire situations they’re in. Setting them up with new identities and lives…by any means necessary.”
Dark emphasis rode on the last.
I blinked, trying to process what he was saying. “You mean…you’re like…some special undercover cops?”
The second I asked it, I knew it was all wrong.
“No, Emery. There isn’t much of anything we do that’s legal.” He shook his head with the admission.
I tried to swallow around the stone that sat heavily at the base of my throat, my mind spinning through the things that he said.
What he admitted.
Raven’s statement from earlier traipsed through my mind. “But I will tell you that anything he does, he does it because he’s a good man.”
“You…kill people to get them away from their abusers?” God, it felt ridiculous coming off my tongue. Impossible. And yet it so profoundly rang with the truth.
“Only if we have to. Only if there’s not another way. ”
“And that’s what happened today? You got shot trying to help someone?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed violently when he swallowed. “Yeah. A woman and her little boy. We tried to get them out without him knowing, but he was watching and followed us. Ended in a gun fight.”
“Are they…” I rasped around the horror.
Relief filled Kane’s nod. “That’s what River was saying. They’re safe. With Theo and on their way here to Moonlit Ridge where they’ll stay at The Sanctuary. It’s what it’s really used for…hiding victims away until we get them on to their new lives.”
“This is…”
“More than you should have to bear, and I’m the bastard who is asking you to do it, anyway.
The bastard who can’t fucking stomach the idea of you walking away.
But if that’s what you need to do…to protect your beautiful heart…
then I will respect that. But I can’t take it back or stop it.
Not when these people need us. If my mother would have had someone like us. ..”
The last broke off, the man unable to speak.
Overcome with old grief.
My heart felt like it was being squeezed. Bled out and filled.
“Oh, Kane…”
I could see the thoughts play out in his mind. A spinning record he would never be able to stop. If only I could go back and save her…if I could help her the way I help these women and children.
My own thoughts raced through my mind, the tattoo on the inside of my wrist burning with its truth. Find me in the darkness, bring me to the light.
For three gutting days and nights, it had been the plea of my soul. For someone to find us. To bring us out of the torture that we’d been subjected to. And I could almost feel the relief I had when we were rescued. When I’d been brought into the light.
How could I ever, ever consider what he did wrong?
Kane’s frown was grim. “Know what you’re thinking, Em.
But you need to know how ugly this goes.
How dangerous it is. Everything I do is criminal.
From my bars that we use as a cover for the money laundering that we use to support ourselves and those we set up with new identities, all the way to the fact that we shot a man dead today, and I don’t have an ounce of regret in doing it. ”
My chin wobbled. “Because you’re a fighter, too.”
I was sure, right then, that he would always fight for me. For us.
And all the walls that I’d tried to keep erected were finally floored.
Demolished.
Ruined.
Because I could feel myself slip over the edge, right into that free fall that I’d been so terrified of.
Surrendering.
Surrendering.
Regret rippled across his face. “You really should run.”
“Is that what you want me to do?”
A big, big hand was back on my face, softly caressing as he murmured, “Think you know the only thing I want is for you to love me back.”
And that last barrier cracked wide open, and a rush of tears gushed down my face. “As if there was any chance of me not loving you?”
Emotion gripped him, and he pulled me in, his nose brushing mine. “What are you saying, Little Warrior? That you’re mine?”
“Kane Asher, I think I was yours the second you picked me up off the floor at Twisted Moon.”
“Fuck…Emery.” Gulping, he dropped his forehead to mine. “I love you. I love you with every breath that this body will give me. With every sunrise and every twilight and every fucking second in between. For every single one of my days.”
The only thing I could do was curl myself against him, my mouth buried in his neck when I fully, completely surrendered. “I love you. With all of me. With everything.”