10. Avery #2
There it is: protection. The word Declan wraps around whatever he wants until saying no sounds like asking to be harmed.
I watch Trigger shift his boots in the gravel and remember him outside the safehouse while Declan insisted Sasha could never touch my real life.
Men stood guard that morning too. None of them guarded me from him.
“The last man who hid another life from me does not get to hide men around my house and call it love,” I say. “Which contact do you have at Dr. Evans’s office?”
Declan takes a half second too long. The pause is small, but I lived with him too long to miss the place where a lie tries to fit. “Declan.”
“Molly Hart works scheduling. Her brother owes the club. I told her to call if you came in again or if anyone asked for your records. She hasn’t called me.
I don’t know your next appointment. I don’t have a chart, result, or billing record.
” The denials crowd together faster than the confession, and he stops before claiming the favor was harmless.
“You asked a woman at my doctor’s office to watch for me.” I look at the pharmacy bag inside my car and remember every stranger who handled my name after Declan made my medical care part of his affair.
“Yes.” Declan gives me the whole ugly word and nothing to soften it. The honesty doesn’t undo the fact that Molly is there because he put her there.
“What else?” I put my hand against the car roof when nausea returns, refusing to let either man turn the movement into a reason to end the questions.
“Cal at the electric co-op confirmed service started in your name. He gave me the road, not the house number. Trigger got the number when he followed you. Burke and Ellis have been parked two roads out since last night. They were told not to approach unless Trigger called.” Declan slows for a turn, and his voice clears enough that no engine can hide how carefully he built the watch.
The car wash roof throws his voice back at me from Trigger’s phone.
Every answer gives him another practical detail about my life: the clinic where I took off my clothes, the electric bill I opened because the house was mine, the road I drove after making Declan confess what he did to my body.
He took each piece of my new life and turned it into a route back to himself.
“Cancel all of it,” I say.
“I’m coming to you.” Declan ends the sentence like an order already in motion, and the years when that certainty made me feel protected become one more thing I cannot trust.
“I didn’t agree to that. Cancel it now.” I press the phone against the car hood before anger makes me throw it, keeping him on speaker where Trigger has to hear the line he crossed.
“I’ll cancel it in front of you.” Declan disconnects before I can refuse. Even now, he needs to control where this conversation happens.
The line goes dead before I can tell him not to come.
Trigger reaches for the phone. I place it on the hood beside the tracker instead, then call Gage myself.
He answers with Cruz already beside him, both men furious for different reasons.
Cruz tells Trigger not to move, orders Burke and Ellis off the north road, and says no one knew Declan had ordered his own men to watch me.
He doesn’t waste time asking me to believe him.
He asks what I want documented, and I tell him everything.
Declan’s truck hits the lot less than ten minutes later.
He brakes behind the sedan, leaves the driver’s door open, and crosses the gravel in jeans and a black sweatshirt without his cut.
The sight of him takes my anger somewhere more humiliating.
Yesterday those hands lay beside a typed list of every time he fucked Sasha.
Today one of them reaches for the tracker as though removing it from me now could change who put it there.
I throw it at his chest. He catches it against his sweatshirt and looks down at the black box in his hand. “You do not put things on my car. You do not pay men to stand near my house. You do not ask women at my doctor’s office to report when I walk through the door.”
“I know.” Declan looks from the tracker to my face as if saying it now should matter.
“No, you know I caught you.” I step between him and my car when his eyes move toward it.
The old part of me notices he hasn’t shaved, that he has lost enough weight for the sweatshirt to hang wrong.
I hate that I notice him at all while his tracker is still warm from my car.
“How long would you have done this if I hadn’t seen Trigger? ”
His fingers close around the tracker. “Until Sasha was found.”
“Then you don’t know.” I fold my arms over my coat so I won’t reach for the car door and put something solid between us.
“I knew you would hate me for it. I did it anyway because not knowing where you were scared me more.” He looks at Trigger. “Give me your keys and leave.”