Chapter 35
CHAPTER 35
DAMIEN
K ellen’s clothes fit perfectly, down to his boots. But I didn’t put on his jacket. That I returned to its rightful owner, draping it over Clo’s beautiful, naked body before I tiptoed out the door.
I took a candle to light my way through the house. None of it felt familiar—antique furniture, old paintings, old lamps—but I’d found it in the dark. I’d led us straight there from the lake, and that fact left a sinking feeling in my gut.
Closing the back door as quietly as I could, considering the rotten, creaking doorframe holding it up, I stood on the patio and stared at the looming building to my right.
The entire sky was blanketed with clouds that seemed to glow from within. I couldn’t see the moon illuminating them, but I knew it was there, just like I couldn’t see what was inside the barn, but I knew it wasn’t fucking stables and hay.
I knew.
With every step I took through the overgrown weeds, the scent of blood and sawdust grew stronger in my mind. By the time my fingers wrapped around the door handle, bile was searing the back of my throat. And when I finally pulled the heavy wooden slab open and stepped inside, I did it with my eyes closed and my heart slamming into my ribs.
I didn’t need to see to know what I’d stepped into. Every detail of that woodshop was tattooed on my soul. I could picture every tool in the tool chest, the make and model of every gun I had stashed in those cabinets. I could picture the exact size, shape, color, and wood grain of the workbench directly across from me. And I could see the patch of concrete, covered in blood, where I’d held my wife’s dying body before I followed her into the dark.
I didn’t want to open my eyes. I wanted to turn around and go back into the house and hold my girl, who was very much still alive, until I could convince myself that it had all been a near-death hallucination again.
But it was too late.
You couldn’t unknow something.
And I knew, before I even cracked my eyelids and focused on the massive rust-colored stain in the center of the floor, that my worst fucking nightmare had already come true.
I’d failed her.
I’d failed her, and I’d found her, and I hadn’t learned a fucking thing.
Because I still couldn’t walk away.
Being with me put a target on her back that I was too selfish to remove.
But the thing about targets was, the farther away they were, the harder they were to hit.
So, I would do what Kellen should have done a long time ago. I would get my girl out of the fucking country, put an ocean between us and Alexi, and start a new life as far away from the Bratva as fucking possible.
I would never be able to forget what I’d done.
But I’d spend the rest of my life making sure that Clo never had to remember.