Chapter 18
CHARLIE
This woman was going to kill him.
Or he was in serious trouble of becoming Icarus.
If it meant he could kiss her like that again, though, he was almost willing to let it happen.
He had no idea what had come over him. Well, actually, that wasn’t entirely true. Hearing those words, that challenge she’d issued him, blind desire took hold.
Don’t be such a fucking gentleman about it.
Goosebumps raced down his arms and through to his nerve endings at the memory. If he’d continued the way he wanted to, he certainly wouldn’t have been one.
His movements felt almost robotic as he made his way up the stairs, forcing himself to place one foot in front of the other just to keep himself from turning around.
Every inch of his skin cried out from where he’d touched her, begging him to run back into her arms. Burning with a need that would likely take him hours to settle down.
He had a long series of ice cold showers in his future at this rate.
A sudden, shrill scream shattered Charlie’s train of thought. It was so loud and piercing that he almost tripped over himself at the way his body instantly froze.
But it hadn’t been just a scream.
Someone had screamed his name.
The flicker of recognition instantly turned his blood ice cold in his veins, piercing him straight to his core.
Sam.
Charlie flew back down the stairs, barreling around each landing as he took two, three stairs at a time. Blood roared in his ears, every ounce of energy he had propelling him forward and his mind singular on whatever caused her to scream like that.
It took him mere seconds to get back down to her floor, but it felt like a lifetime as he quickly rounded the corner to her apartment, nearly running straight into her as he did.
But upon seeing him, Sam reached out and latched onto him, burying her face into his chest as if her life depended on it.
A grunt racked out of his chest from the shock of her fierce embrace.
If she had put any force behind it, it might’ve knocked the wind out of him.
Despite Sam’s tall stature, she felt fragile as his arms instinctively went around her.
“Charlie,” she whimpered, the sound almost completely muffled against his chest. “I’m-I’m sorry…” Her arms were tight, clinging to him as her body trembled against his.
White hot fear gripped him. He’d never heard Sam sound like that before. Shy, sure. Embarrassed, of course. Afraid? Not like this. Never like this.
She sounded so small, so broken, that it caused his chest to clench violently.
“Baby, what could you be sorry…” he started, but his attention was drawn to her front door.
The words died on his tongue.
A new fear ignited inside him as he attempted to gently pull her away from him. It had only been moments since he’d walked away, but in that narrow window of time, had she been hurt? Did something hurt her? He needed to check for himself. He needed to scour every inch of her.
His efforts to pull back only caused her to cling to him more tightly, as if she were afraid he would slip away if she released him. Yet, rather than this making him feel better, it only made him worry further. As if she were trying to hide something from him.
When he finally managed to peel her back enough to look into her eyes, his hands framed her cheeks. “Are you okay? Are you hurt anywhere?”
She shook her head, her bottom lip trembling. “No… I just found it like this…”
He pulled her back to him, shutting his eyes shut momentarily as he did. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Sam. I’ve got you.”
She was okay. She wasn’t hurt.
Charlie’s heart felt like it finally began beating once more.
He tightened his grip around her. Her body shook beneath his touch, more pronounced as he held her there, and the fear that had stabbed into him—the one that had consumed his entire being—slowly began to morph into something else. Something much darker.
His gaze turned back to the door.
It had been split down the middle, as if forcefully kicked in. The tattered remains of one half hung precariously from the door frame, dangling uselessly in the air by its hinges while the other half lay discarded inside the apartment.
It couldn’t have happened that long ago, given the nature of the destruction.
No one would be able to walk down this hallway without seeing it—or hearing it happen.
It must’ve been just before they’d gotten there.
Meaning that there was a chance that whoever did this was still inside.
That they were inside waiting for Sam to…
There was no way in hell he was going to let her check it out. His self-control teetered dangerously on the edge as he leaned back and saw the tears glistening down her heart-shaped face.
“Let me go in and see if anyone’s still in there. I’ll be right back,” he said as he flicked a loose tear from her cheek.
“N-no!” she shrieked, the sound surprising coming from her, and it somehow only managed to add fuel to the fire swelling in his gut. “Don’t go in. What if someone’s still inside with a gun or something?”
He almost hoped that they were still inside.
It would give him something to hit.
He shook his head, unable to stop the hand that came up and rubbed his thumb across her cheek. “I’ll be fine. You stay here, and I’ll go check it out real quick.”
“No, Charlie…”
“Call the police, and let them know someone’s broken in,” he instructed, forcing a calmness in his voice that he didn’t really possess at the moment. “I’m just gonna check it out. I’ll be right back.”
“But…” She attempted to protest once more.
It took everything in him to pull away. “I’ll be fine, promise. Just stay here. I’ll be right back. Okay, baby? Just stay right there.”
He stepped over the remains of the door, the sound of Sam’s voice growing distant behind him as he walked inside.
The place was wrecked, no two ways about it.
Almost everything lay in ruins. What was left of her furniture was scattered across the apartment in splintered wreckage.
Only the couch appeared to be relatively intact, though the cushions had been torn apart like a rabid dog had been set on them.
Feathers blanketed the area like a flurry of snowflakes strewn about.
Even Sam’s clothing hadn’t been spared, with torn fabric intermixed amongst the downy chaos.
What in the living hell happened here?
Charlie crept from room to room, being sure to check behind doors, inside closets, just to make sure no one was there. All the while stepping over the leftovers of Sam’s entire life in the process.
But, thankfully, no one was there.
He went back to stand in Sam’s living room.
It was eerily quiet, despite the destruction laying at his feet.
The whistle of wind filtered through the broken glass windows lining her living room, the sound sending a chill up his spine despite the warmth of the sun pouring through.
The sunlight cascaded through the empty void, causing the living room floor to almost twinkle from the shards of glass littering it.
It became abundantly clear that whoever had done this had no intention of stealing anything. There wasn’t much left to steal from the looks of it. That would’ve been less jarring.
No, whoever had broken in had intended to destroy everything in their path.
And, Charlie feared, they had likely wanted Sam to be in that path.
When he returned to Sam in the hallway, finding her with her phone pressed to her ear, another woman was now standing next to her.
Older than both he and Sam by quite a few years, the little tottering woman stood next to Sam, patting her back gently.
One of Sam’s neighbors, likely, though Charlie couldn’t pinpoint which.
He wanted to thank her, but upon seeing him exiting the apartment, the woman protectively pulled Sam away.
“Hey, stay there! She’s on the phone with the police!” she called out, grabbing a walking cane leaned against the wall behind them and pointing it at him. “Don’t you move!”
Charlie opened his mouth, about to explain, but Sam quickly placed a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “No, no, he’s with me. He was just… He was just checking to see if anyone was… if anyone was still inside. He’s with… He’s my… He’s my boyfriend.”
The other woman eyed Charlie but softened. She took a step backward to allow Charlie to cross the few remaining steps and scoop Sam back into his arms, tucking her safely into his body.
The woman remained there next to them, looking between the splintered door and the two of them in concern.
Charlie mouthed a thank you to her as Sam tucked her head beneath his chin.
“There was a tenant’s meeting downstairs…” she explained, voicing an answer to the question lingering in the air. “It wasn’t announced, but there was a dispute between two neighbors down the hall this morning. Everyone’s still downstairs. I just came back to grab my medicine.”
Well, that explains why there wasn’t anyone nearby.
Sam’s phone was still pressed to her ear, the faint echo of another voice on the other end as she continued answering questions.
He listened to her struggle to suppress the tremble in her voice.
The strong, opinionated woman he always knew and loved sounded as if she were ten years old all over again.
Afraid and hiding underneath his kitchen table after another fight with her family.
A fierce protectiveness ignited in him in a way that made him feel particularly murderous at that moment.
Whoever had done this now had a much larger problem to deal with.
Him.