13. Lily #2
“Neither did I, three days ago.” I pull Mrs. Reid’s card from my bag and press it into her hand, closing her trembling fingers around it. “Call her. She’ll help you protect yourself, and the kids, from whatever he does when he realizes he’s cornered. That’s real. Start there.”
Elena looks down at the card like it’s the first solid thing she’s held in years.
“Why,” she says. “After what I did. After how I spoke to you. Why would you help me?”
“Because he made us hate each other on purpose.” I’m tired enough that it comes out as plain truth. “He needed us pointed at each other so we’d never sit down and compare notes. I’m done being his weapon. You should be too.”
She nods, just once, and walks away without another word, the card clutched against her chest. I watch her go, this woman I hated for so long, who hated me right back, and I find I have nothing left over to hate her with.
Just exhaustion, and something that might, eventually, with enough distance, turn into something like understanding.
Then Lucas’s hand finds the small of my back - possessive, protective, his fingers spreading wide enough that his thumb grazes the curve of my hip - and the exhaustion loosens. My body, which should be focused on survival, tilts back toward his hand like it has its own agenda.
He leans close. “You’re shaking.”
“It’s just the adrenaline.”
“Liar.” His breath is warm against my ear, and I shouldn’t be thinking about his mouth right now, shouldn’t be remembering the way he used it last night, but my body doesn’t care about appropriate timing. “You’re thinking about the hotel.”
“I’m thinking about survival.”
“You’re a terrible liar.” His hand slides an inch lower, and my breath catches. “Later. When we’re safe. I’m going to make you forget every terrible thing that happened tonight.”
The promise lands low in my belly.
“Come on,” he says against my hair. “Before the journalists get here and we become tomorrow’s edition after all. Let me get you out of here.”
***
The car is quiet in a way that feels like the eye of something.
Lucas pulls us out of the lot and onto the river road, away from the lights and the gathering vans, and for a few minutes neither of us says anything.
My hands won’t stop shaking. Now that the danger’s behind us, my body has decided to fall apart on its own schedule, the way it always does, adrenaline draining out and leaving the tremors behind.
He reaches over without looking and threads his fingers through mine, anchoring my shaking hand against his thigh.
“You were going to hit him,” I say finally. “That guard. You were one second from going over that railing with him.”
“I know.”
“You could have died. Or killed him. Or handed Victoria the only version of tonight she could have won.”
“I know.” His jaw flexes. “And then you put your hand on my back and said my name, and the whole thing just-” He exhales.
“You’re the only thing in the world that can pull me out of that.
Eleven years of that rage living in me, and one word from you and it lets go.
That should probably frighten me more than it does. ”
I look at the side of his face in the passing streetlight. The man who spent three years watching me disappear and saying nothing. The man who finally chose, and is still choosing, every hour, in real time.
“Pull over,” I tell him.
“Lily-”
“Pull over, Lucas.”
He takes the next turnout, gravel crunching under the tires, the river spread out wide and dark below us and the city throwing its light across the water like spilled coins.
He kills the engine. Turns to me. And whatever he was about to say dies when I unclip my belt and climb across the console into his lap, my dress riding up around my thighs, my hands framing his face.
“Twelve hours ago you whispered my name into a hotel pillow,” I say against his mouth. “An hour ago you put your body between me and a man twice your width without thinking about it. I need to feel you breathing. I need to know we both walked out of there. Is that allowed?”
“You climbed into my lap on the side of a public road,” he says, but his hands are already at my hips, holding me there like he’s been waiting for permission to. “I think we’re well past allowed.”
I kiss him.
It’s nothing like the desperate crash of the hotel, and nothing like the slow worship that came after.
This is alive, this is we survived, this is two people checking each other for damage with their mouths.
His hands slide up my back and into my hair, and I make a sound against his lips that I’d be embarrassed by anywhere else, and he swallows it whole and gives me one back.
“I never said it right,” I tell him, pulling back just far enough to see his eyes. “On the sidewalk. When you said you loved me, I gave you a maybe. I think I might love you too. Like it was something I could hedge.”
“I remember.” His thumb traces my cheekbone, and his voice has gone rough. “I told myself a maybe from you was worth more than a yes from anyone else.”
“It wasn’t a maybe.” I press my forehead to his, both of us breathing hard in the dark.
“I love you. Whole thing. No escape hatch. I have loved you since you fixed a necklace clasp you’d already fixed just to have a reason to stand behind me, and I was too scared to let myself know it. I love you, Lucas Burton.”
His breath leaves him like I hit him.
“Say it again,” he says.
“I love you.”
“Again.”
I laugh, watery, and kiss the word into his mouth instead, I love you, and his arms come around me so tight it’s hard to breathe and I don’t care, I want to be exactly this crushed, this held, this chosen.
The windows fog. The river glitters. For one suspended minute there is no Victoria, no drive, no ambush, no headline coming for us in the morning.
There’s just his heartbeat under my palm, going as fast as mine, and the impossible warm certainty that we made it out, that we get to keep going, that whatever’s next we face it from inside the same set of arms.
I should have known better than to trust a minute.
My phone buzzes against the seat where it fell out of my bag.
I almost ignore it. The world can wait. This, this, deserves to last longer than a minute.
But it buzzes again, and again, and the name on the screen stops me cold.
Mrs. Reid.
Who I left standing in the pavilion fifteen minutes ago with her own phone already raised. Who has no reason to be calling me this fast, this soon, unless something else has gone wrong.
The wrongness of it registers a half-second before I answer.
“Lily.” Her voice has gone gentle in the specific, terrible way that means something is coming that I won’t survive cleanly.
All the steel from the pavilion is gone out of it.
“I’m so sorry to be the one. It’s your grandmother.
She’s taken a turn this evening. The doctors don’t think she’ll last the night. ”
In Lucas’s lap, with his arms still around me and his heartbeat still under my hand, I stop breathing.