Chapter 15 #2
I turned the next corner just as Cove reached the exit of the aquarium wing.
He struck the frame hard with one hand, caught himself, and launched himself out into the hallway without looking back.
The careless force of the movement made my stomach twist, because Cove was not careless.
Cove was precise. Cove was attentive to thresholds, surfaces, glass, water, and the smallest shifts in animal behavior.
Panic had reduced him to a state of momentum, and every uncontrolled motion looked terribly foreign on him.
The atmosphere changed abruptly past the door, the cool, blue-lit hush of the aquarium giving way to the slightly warmer darkness of the rest of the house.
Cove ran toward the front entry.
I was not surprised, but still deeply, physically frustrated, not because he had chosen the obvious exit, but because his choice made sense, and I hated every circumstance that had made it so.
He had no phone. No car. No driver waiting.
He could not truly leave the property, not without reaching the road on foot, but panic did not require feasibility to become dangerous.
“Cove, don’t go out that door,” I said, though I doubted he heard me over the harsh sound of his breathing.
The door predictably slammed open as he reached it, and cold night air rushed in with the force of the sea behind it.
Cove ran outside without slowing, the night swallowing him up from view almost instantly.
“Fuck,” I breathed, and followed.
Outside, the property lights carved dim pathways across stone and low landscaping, but beyond them, the cliffside fell into darkness.
The ocean roared below with a violence that seemed to rise through the ground itself, waves striking rock hard enough to send spray lifting into the air.
The wind was sharp with salt, and strong enough to pull at my wet sleeves and shove strands of hair across my forehead.
Cove did not run toward the gate. I watched the angle of his body, the blind direction of his flight, the way he veered away from the drive and toward the outer viewing area, and everything inside me went cold.
No.
Not there.
“Cove!” I shouted, cursing as the wind tore his name apart.
He kept moving, not thinking, perhaps not even seeing clearly in the dark. He was fast because fear made him fast, but he was also unsteady, his steps broken by the uneven stone beneath him.
“The cliff is ahead,” I called, pushing more command into my voice than I wanted to use. “Stop!”
He glanced back, and if only for the fraction of a second, I was privy to the wet shine of his eyes, the panic blown open across his face, the terrible proof that he had heard me and understood only that I was closer than before.
Then he ran harder.
My chest tightened until breathing became difficult.
I accelerated, closing the distance by several yards before forcing myself to slow again when he staggered near the edge of the lit path. If I ran at him now, if I lunged, if he startled in the wrong direction, the drop would do what I never would.
The ground narrowed ahead. The safer walking path curved left toward the railed overlook, but Cove had missed it completely. He was headed toward the rougher edge beyond the terrace, where wind-cut stone met open air, and the cliff dropped sheer to the water below.
“Cove, please,” I said, the word coming out raw and frankly terrified. “Stop. The edge is close.”
And maybe it was the change in my voice, maybe it was the ground shifting beneath his feet, or maybe some part of him finally heard the ocean below rather than the blood rushing in his own ears, but he stopped.
His shoes scraped against stone near the outer edge, arms lifting as he tried to balance.
I saw the moment his body realized what his mind had not.
His shoulders locked. His breath caught.
The wind pushed at him, dragging his damp hair across his face, and he stood there with the drop before him and the house behind him, caught between the fall and me.
I stopped several yards away.
Every instinct I possessed screamed to close the distance.
I wanted to seize him, drag him back onto stable ground, put the house between him and the cliff, and never allow him within ten feet of an edge again. I wanted my hands on him, not in anger, not in punishment, but in the primitive certainty that if I was holding him, he could not fall.
He turned slowly, each crunch of the rocks as his feet shifted taking years off my life.
I went to take half a step closer just as he faced me, and his hands raised as though he could ward me off with empty palms.
“Don’t come any closer,” he said, voice shaking so badly it was almost unrecognizable.
“I won’t,” I promised. “I won’t move.”
“You killed him.”
The words came again, broken by wind and sobs, less accusation than disbelief, as though repetition might eventually make the sentence stop being true.
“Yes,” I said.
Cove made a sound that tore at me, one hand pressing against his mouth while the other stayed lifted toward me. His whole body trembled.
“Why?” he demanded. “Why would you—why would you do that?”
“The man in there meant nothing to me.”
Cove stared at me. Then something in his expression twisted, horrified in an entirely new way.
“That’s the problem,” he shouted, the words cracking as they left him. “That’s the fucking problem, Tobias!”
“I—”
“He was a person,” Cove cried. “He was a person, and you’re talking about him like he was—like he was trash you had to take out. Did you even know his name?”
No, I didn’t.
Instead, I said, “He was a threat.”
“To whom?”
“To my home,” I said. “To my privacy.”
“To your privacy?” he repeated, voice rising into something almost hysterical. “You killed someone because he was inconvenient?”
He was sobbing now, not loudly, not dramatically, but in a way that seemed to shake through him from the inside. Tears caught the light on his face before the wind tore them away. He looked cold. He looked terrified.
He looked pained.
I took one careful step forward, but his body jerked in response, and I stopped immediately.
“Cove,” I said, softening my voice with effort. “You need to move left.”
“No.”
“The ground behind you is unstable.”
“No.”
“I am not asking you to come to me,” I assured, though every word scraped through me because I wanted exactly that. “I am asking you to move away from the edge.”
His eyes darted toward the darkness behind him, then back to me, wild and wet and disbelieving.
“I—I don’t trust you.”
“I know,” I said, the truth of it killing me.
His mouth trembled. “I trusted you.”
I took another small step while he was speaking, slow enough that the movement could be mistaken for shifting my weight.
“I know,” I repeated.
“You made me feel safe here.”
“You are safe here.”
“You don’t get to say that.” His voice broke entirely then, grief and anger tangling until the words came out ragged. “You don’t get to say that when there’s a fucking—a fucking dead person in there!”
I moved another fraction closer.
The house lights caught in his eyes. His attention stayed fixed on my face, which was good and bad at once. Good, because he was not looking down. Bad, because he could see every movement I made if I misjudged the timing.
“I understand what you saw.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I understand why you’re afraid.”
“No, you don’t,” he said again, louder now, shaking his head as more tears spilled down his face. “Because if you understood, you wouldn’t be acting like this is something you can explain.”
I continued forward, one small step at a time, using the sound of the waves to hide the soft placement of my shoes on stone.
“I can explain what matters.”
“What matters?” he echoed. “What matters is that you killed someone!”
“What matters to me is that I will not kill you.”
His face crumpled. “Oh, my God.”
“I would never hurt you.”
“You chased me!”
“Because you ran toward the cliff.”
“Only because you murdered someone!”
“I know,” I said sadly, because denial was useless and honesty was the last damaged tool left to me. “And because I murdered someone, I cannot allow you to leave tonight.”
I saw it happen as his fear, already high, sharpened into something brighter and even more dangerous.
“W-what?” he stuttered.
I cursed myself silently.
Too much.
Too soon.
But there was no gentle way to tell him the truth, and no time to build a softer path toward it.
“You are frightened,” I said. “You are in shock, and you have no phone, no transportation, and no clear understanding of what would happen if you tried to involve anyone else.”
“What would happen?” he whispered.
I did not answer quickly enough.
Cove took a step back.
“Don’t!” I snapped.
His heel slid on loose gravel near the edge, and his balance vanished. His arms flew outward, reaching for me.
The world contracted into a single point.
I lunged.
There was no calculation then. No restraint, no careful strategy, no measured distance. Only the edge, the fall, and Cove’s body tipping backward into certain death.
My hand closed tightly around his wrist.
He cried out, and I used the sound to pull, catching him around the waist with my other arm as his weight lurched toward the drop. His body slammed into mine, all sharp elbows and shaking breath, and I twisted us away from the cliff, my knees striking stone painfully.
The pain was irrelevant.
Cove was against me.
Alive.
I wrapped both arms around him and hauled him back another few feet before he began fighting.
“No—no, let go.” His voice was broken, panicked, muffled against my chest as he shoved at me with both hands. “Let go of me!”
“I have you,” I said, though the words came out rough and unsteady.
“Let go!”
“Never.”
He struggled harder, and each attempt to wrench himself away only tightened my hold. His heart hammered against me while his breath came in shallow, fractured bursts. He was cold from the wind, trembling so violently that I could feel it through both our clothes.
I pressed one hand to the back of his head before I could stop myself, holding him there, anchoring him against me, taking a breath in to inhale his scent just to prove to myself without a shadow of a doubt that I had him.
“You almost fell,” I murmured, squeezing him impossibly closer.
His hands fisted in my shirt, not holding on, not exactly, but caught there as if even his panic needed something to grip.
“Please let me go,” he whispered, choking the words out through his cries. “Please. I won’t tell anyone. I don’t…” He took a ragged breath. “I don’t want to die.”