1. Cali #2
I swore I never would. I stood in his office this afternoon—this literal afternoon! Hours ago! Barely!— and told this monster that I hoped I'd never see him again. I meant it, every word, I meant it with my whole chest.
So explain to me why I'm now here losing myself to absolute kibbles and bits in his arms, shuddering, horrified, nearly broken.
Easy answer:
Because he came.
Whatever else is true—and everything is true, all of it, the shells and the lies and the cage and the napkin that was supposed to make him disappear from my life forever—that thing on the floor was going to get to my children.
Before it could happen that way, Ronan came up my stairs and put himself between it and them and made it stop.
"They're okay?" I ask, or I try to. It comes out in stuttered pieces. "The kids. Are they—? Did she see—?"
"She didn't see anything." His hand is cupping the back of my head, huge and warm. "I promise you. She saw a big, loud noise and a silly man who dropped something. That's all. That's all she'll ever remember."
Over his shoulder, I can glimpse his men still working.
Fast, silent, practiced. Two of them have the intruder wrapped in a dark tarp and they're carrying him down the stairs like furniture, careful not to knock the pictures.
Another one is on his knees in the hallway with a rag and a spray bottle.
I watch him mop up the wall where the plaster cracked, and the floor below.
It's actually, clinically insane how good they are at this. How normal it is for them.
I search myself for the horror I ought to be feeling, but I can't find it.
Not yet. Maybe later. I bet it'll come for me at three in the morning for the rest of my life.
But right now, there's only the shaking, and the warm wall of Ronan, and the two closed doors with my sleeping children behind them, still sleeping, still safe.
Someone steps close. I feel Ronan tense, and then relax when he sees who it is.
"House is clear," a man who can only be Ronan's cousin Navi reports.
"That was the only one in here, and we've already gathered the rest who were posted up outside.
We've got the perimeter covered now, four on the street, two on the roof.
Nobody's getting within a block of this place tonight or any other night.
" He looks at me and smiles sympathetically. "You must be Calista."
I don't answer. I can't. I just keep my fists in Ronan's shirt.
"You got him good, by the way," Navi adds. "Stuck him like a Christmas ham. The knife's still—" He stops, takes in my pale face, and reconsiders. "Well, the details aren't important, I suppose. You did a good job, though."
Ronan pulls back just enough to look down at me.
His hands come up and frame my face, tilting it toward the hallway light, as he takes inventory of me—the split lip I can taste now, the cheek that's going to be a bruise by morning, the rug burns on my knees that are starting to sting through the shock.
His jaw grinds as he views the damage. His eyes go somewhere cold and terrible and far away, and I understand that the man he just was—the fast one, the one who folded a two-hundred-pound man like a coat—is right there under the surface, one breath away.
If the thing on the floor weren't already dead and gone, Ronan would do it again, slower and far more painfully.
"You did good," he whispers. "You did the right thing."
"I wasn't going to let him get to them," I insist, lower lip wobbling. "If he'd gotten past me… If he'd gone to them… to my… to my…"
Then, at last, the tears come. They rise up through and out of me, and I can only fold back into Ronan's embrace until they're finished with their course.
It's only his arms keeping me upright. Without him, I'd be back on the ground.
My legs are done, cooked, finished. But at least they held me up long enough to keep a killer off the top step.
I've never been more grateful for my body, not once in my whole life.
"I know," he says. He's rocking me a little, side to side. "I know, kotyonok. You did everything right. I'm here now. Nothing else gets past me. Nothing."
But even in the depths of my PTSD, I can't quite forget the rest of the day's events.
"You don't get to say that," I sob into his shirt. "You lied, you did all of this, you—" I hit him, once, weakly, my fist against his chest. "I told you I never wanted to see you again."
"I know."
"I meant it."
"I know you did." His arms don't loosen. "You can still mean it tomorrow. Mean it as much as you want. Tonight, just let me hold you."
And God help me. God help me and forgive me and my dead mother's mother forgive me.
I do.
I stand in the middle of the worst night of my life, in a hallway two men are quietly scrubbing clean of a killer's blood, four feet from where a stranger died trying to get to my children, helplessly shaking in the arms of the last man on earth I ever wanted to touch again.
Because he came.
Because the bedroom doors are still closed.
Because behind them, both of my children are still breathing, unbothered, like nothing in the world could ever reach them.
So, for tonight—for tonight, and only for tonight—that's the only piece of data that matters.