Chapter 32 Hunter
From the second she runs, barbed wire snares my heart. Twining. Twisting. Bleeding me dry as I clean up her mess while my chest rips to shreds.
Oh, Little Rabbit. What have you done?
She’s lucky the bouncer didn’t see her. He did, however, demand to know why I locked the door back up after crashing through it. Luckily, he buys my excuse about “suspicious activity” the police need to handle and agrees to keep everyone out of the room.
A few well-timed calls and a bit of serendipity let me leave the club and the scene in someone else’s hands, feigning an emergency.
Only there’s nothing fake about it.
Cursing, I tap my foot impatiently against the cab floor. Bunny isn’t answering her phone, but a quick trace tells me she’s at home. She thinks I don’t have her location—but she’s insane if she thought I wouldn’t turn it on the second I found out she was pregnant.
Everything changes when you become a parent. People say fathers don’t truly become fathers until the baby is born, while a mother becomes a mother the moment she finds out she’s with child.
Me? I became a father the second I saw those two little pink lines.
And the thought of my child being withheld from me…
I try her phone again.
Please answer, Bunny.
An icy foreboding lances through my chest with each unanswered call. Brick by brick, my subconscious starts building a wall—a shield—to brace for the fallout of tonight.
She probably thinks I’m going to slap cuffs on her and read her Miranda rights. I almost laugh at how absurd that is. I would laugh if the threat of her leaving wasn’t hanging over me like a heavy cloud.
This isn’t how I wanted to catch her.
This isn’t how I wanted tonight to go.
If that damn bouncer hadn’t interrupted, she’d be laid out on her bed right now with my head between her thighs in reassurance.
I know I was harsh. Stressing her out is bad for the baby. I didn’t intend for things to get physical. But the rage at her putting herself in danger—putting Faline in danger—burned away all rational thought.
I don’t bother knocking when I arrive at her house.
Even worse—Yasha and Maru don’t greet me. That has my heart plummeting.
“Bunny?” I yell, panic spiking as I storm up the stairs—only pausing when a faint woof comes from the living room.
“What’s going on, boys?”
They’re curled in their giant donut bed like a yin-yang symbol. Maru barely twitches in acknowledgement, and Yasha’s tail lazily thumps against his brother’s head as I crouch down to pet them. “Where’s your mom?”
She wouldn’t have just left them.
I vaguely remember her saying she might knock them out with meds because of the fireworks—that explains their dazed behavior—but still. They’re her babies, just as much as Faline.
Rising, I take the stairs two at a time, calling her name once more, stopping short as I reach her room. My lungs burn, forgetting their job, as I freeze in the doorway.
Her room’s a disaster. Clothes thrown everywhere, the short neon-blue wig on the floor next to her stilettos, and there, in the middle of her bed, is her phone.
Frantic, I tear through her en suite. Hair and makeup products litter the vanity, lying in small puddles of water. Her staples are gone—her prenatals, the foil stickers she wears over her scar.
Desperation claws up the brick wall I’ve been building around my heart.
I call Dove as I fly back outside to hail another cab, anguish cinching my lungs until I can’t breathe. Over and over, I told her I wouldn’t survive it if she left again. We’ve come so far over these last few months.
How could she do this?
Maybe if you’d assured her you wouldn’t put her in prison, this night would have gone a lot differently.
Wrenley answers, somber and guarded. “Hunter.”
I rattle off Dove’s address to the driver before I’ve even shut the door, then bring the phone back to my ear. “Is she there?”
“No.” Simple. Straight to the point. Accompanied by a frustrated sigh.
“Let me speak to Dove.” My own annoyance sharpens my tone.
“You’re on your way here. You can talk face-to-face.” Even though his tone is naturally deep, it can’t hide Dove crying in the background.
“Wrenley, I swear to god—”
“Do you think I appreciate being dragged into this? The only thing I care about in this whole fucking world is currently beside herself because her best friend just decided to up and fuck off,” he snaps.
So Bunny did leave.
Steeling my anger, I deliver a parting shot. “I’m your best friend, Wrenley. And the only fucking thing I care about in this whole world just broke my heart. Again. Have a little fucking compassion.”
I hit the back of the seat.
“Hey, man! Watch it!” the driver shouts, glaring over his shoulder.
Flashing my badge, I glare back. He shuts up and spins back around rigidly. “Step on it, would you? I’m on official police business.”
“Where is she?”
Dove has calmed by the time I arrive, but tears instantly fill her big blue eyes at the sound of my voice. “I don’t know. She asked me to take care of the dogs and—”
“Don’t lie to me, Dove. Where. Did. She. Go?” I jab a finger toward her, stepping into her space before curling my hand into a fist and dropping it to my side. “If you don’t tell me, we’re going to have problems.”
All the sorrow vaporizes from Dove’s countenance, eaten up by flames of her fury. “Oh yeah? And what are you going to do, Hunter? You’re the one who drove her away!”
She takes a step toward me, all five feet of her puffed up like a rabid pomeranian, but I meet her anger with my size, though it seems to do nothing to deter her.
Wrenley steps between us, palm to my chest. “Back the fuck up, Hunt.”
Ignoring him, I glare over his shoulder at her. “Do you think I don’t know who the fuck you are? You two aren’t as good as you think. You know that? You’re fucking lucky I’ve saved your asses so many times. I’m the only reason the Doll and the Siren haven’t been put behind bars!”
Silence suffocates the air.
My best friend doesn’t so much as flinch as I tell him his fiancée is the serial killer he’s been obsessed with catching.
And that says everything.
Taking a step back, I search his face to find no trace of surprise.
Astonishment spikes through my anger. “You knew. Didn’t you? You knew and you never said anything.”
Wrenley shakes his head, calm and level-headed amidst the rolling waves of mine and Dove’s rage.
“I could say the same. You clearly thought she was good enough for me to be with, Hunter. And you knew about Bunny, yet you still pursued her. I knew you weren’t trying to catch them.
Not really. They were getting rid of the bad guys.
But I’ve suspected it was more than that for a while now.
You’re too smart not to have pieced it together. ”
“I had an inkling you knew too,” Dove admits softly, stepping up behind him. “I just never said anything to Bunny about it.”
“Why?” I scoff. “If you thought I knew, why not face me?”
“Because when it became obvious you were protecting her, I knew as long as she was safe, so was I.” Dove narrows her cerulean gaze, lashes still wet from her tears. “So why did she feel the need to run, Hunter? What happened tonight?”
All my turmoil slams back into my chest like a gunshot. I may as well be suffering from a wound just as fatal. “I fucked everything up.”
“What did you do?” Dove’s face twists into something unrecognizable. A ruthless, caramelized version of herself that has to be cracked to get to the sweet filling beneath.
“I was angry! I am angry!” My voice carries through their condo.
Fang, her Chinese Crested, jumps off the couch and growls at me.
“I thought when she found out she was pregnant she’d be done.
That she wouldn’t possibly put our baby in danger.
I kept a close eye on her, monitored her house and her phone, and I was content she was staying out of trouble until her latest victim called my line at the department, saying he thought he’d been in contact with the Shadow Siren. ”
Dove’s eyes widen as the color drains from her face. Wrenley curses quietly, rubbing her back as she crumbles. “He was going to be her last one. She’d already put in so much work…”
“It doesn’t fucking matter.” I fix her with a pointed look. “We were free. It was over. And she had to go and fuck it all up.”
I don’t mention that I didn’t make things better. I didn’t have to yell through the door. I could have picked the lock or gotten keys from security. But I wanted to scare her. To give her time to run.
“I tried going with her. I—”
“Should have stopped her!”
“Hunter, I’m not telling you again—this isn’t Dove’s fault,” Wrenley warns, tension thickening around us.
“It might as well be!” My rationality shatters. “She could have talked her out of it!”
“You know as well as I do that once Bunny gets something in her mind, there’s no talking her out of it!” Dove screams back, voice cracking.
“I know she’ll contact you if she asked you to keep the dogs—which won’t be happening. I will take them. Find her, Dove. Or there will be consequences.”
A growl rumbles from Wrenley. “Do not fucking threaten my fiancée.”
We square off as he shoves her behind him. “Then tell her to find out where the fuck the mother of my child went.”
Dove speaks around him. “Hunter, I know you’re hurting. I know you’re angry—with her, with me, with the situation. Believe me, I’m upset too, but—”
“Do you know what happened last time she left?” I cut her off.
Pain breaks down the wall I’ve tried so hard to erect in the past hour. All my fears manifest into shallow breaths as tears prick my eyes, and my hopeless distress clogs my throat and strangles my words.
“She was pregnant with her husband’s child, and she had an abortion. And all I can think about is if she’d rather try to get rid of our baby than put her through what she thinks is coming.”
My knees buckle. Wrenley catches me. I don’t care that I’m a grown man sobbing in the middle of what looks like Barbie’s playhouse. I let it all out, trembling as Dove falls to her knees to hold me too.
“I fucked it all up, Dove. I was so angry with her. I let her think I’d turn her in. I let her think—”
“Shh. Shh.” Dove combs her fingers through my hair. “It’s too late for that, Hunter. She’s too far along. And Bunny wouldn’t do that. She loves Faline. And she loves you. All we can do is wait for her to come home.”
“If I—”
“No,” she cuts me off gently. “This is what she does, right? She runs. But she always comes back. We’re her home, Hunter.
When she returns, we have to remind her of that.
And trust me,” she pulls back to look at me, “I’m so angry with her.
But, for as strong as she pretends to be, Bunny is sensitive.
So when she reaches out, and she will, because I can’t see her just up and leaving the boys for that long without a word, we have to tamp down our anger and surround her with support. ”
“And we’re here to support you, too,” Wrenley adds quietly. “I’d be at a loss as well.”
Pushing back from them, I swing my legs around, propping my arms on my knees, rubbing my face. I don’t understand how life went from perfect to ruin in twenty-four hours.
Fuck, Little Rabbit. I’m so sorry. I never meant for you to run again.
The thought of her out there, scared and alone, consumes me. The loss of her and Faline feels like someone swung a wrecking ball into my chest.
“Didn’t you install a security camera by her door?” Dove asks, pulling me from my miserable cloud of self-pity.
A renewed sense of hope bursts through me. I don’t know why I didn’t think to check the cameras—the one outside and the ones inside. Yanking my phone from my pocket, I pull up the security app… only to find the last video from the outside camera was yesterday afternoon.
“What the hell…”
Confusion coils in my gut as I play it. A lone figure walks up to Bunny’s house.
Why wasn’t I notified? The app never went off.
“What is it?” Wrenley asks, leaning in with Dove to look over my shoulder.
Little by little, the man comes into focus, eyes locked on the camera.
“Who is that?” Dove questions.
Every synapse in my body fires off in shocked disbelief as he leans into the lens—grinning.
I’d know that face anywhere. The first time I saw it, I wanted to break his nose. That smarmy smile. That cocksure vibe as he announced he was Bunny’s husband.
And I remember how Bunny reduced it to a mound of meat and bone and sinew.
Nathaniel.