Chapter 46
GRIFFIN
I hold my breath as I watch Sasha’s eyelids flutter. I sit up in the chair next to her bed. Outside her room, two women in scrubs walk by, chatting softly, their shoes squeaking on the floor.
The plastic clamp on Sasha’s finger glows red.
Numbers tick on the monitor next to her.
They’ve kept her here for observation due to the massive bruise on the side of her head.
I want very badly to give a hundred of these to the man who did this to her, but I need to at least wait until he’s out of surgery.
When her eyes open, they immediately lock on me.
She smiles, and my breath catches in my throat.
“Hey, Angel.” I bring her knuckles to my lips. For a moment I just close my eyes, my whole body completely awash with emotion.
“Hey,” she says. “You okay? Is it Chester?”
My guts roll inside me. I shake my head. “They still won’t let me see him.”
He got taken away in a separate ambulance. I couldn’t be in two places at once, so I asked Ford to go with him while I rode with Sasha.
“Ford says they’re keeping him sedated for now. He just overexerted himself. That’s all.”
“He saved my life,” she says, her voice cracking.
I nod. He did. And I’ll forever be in his debt.
Chester must have known he couldn’t run all the way to my place on the path, so he’d gotten in his car. Ford and I figure he must have seen the man called Brick pulling out of my driveway and followed him to the old hunting cabin behind the Rolling Hills.
He was a fair distance away from where he’d parked, though. Yet somehow, in his condition, he still managed to hike through all that rough brush to save Sasha’s life.
And her brother’s.
“Is he going to wake up?” Sasha asks me, her voice barely a whisper.
“Yes,” I say confidently. I stand up and pull her against my chest, cradling her head against my heart.
He has to.
I’m not sure who I’m trying to convince. Everything I’ve been running through my head all night circles round again. Guilt at not getting to Sasha in time. Chester saving the day.
Chester being so sick and none of us knowing it, not even him, and now it’s too late to do anything about it.
My eyes are wet when I pull away from her. I knuckle the tears away and lower myself back down in the chair. “Jesus. I don’t remember the last time I cried.”
Sasha takes my hand. It looks huge and brutish in hers. And I notice the polish on a few of her nails is chipped.
Last night, she told me how she got out of the ties.
That was after I ran to her faster than I’d ever run to anything or one in my life.
I tore through that brush, my heart pounding, Sasha’s name the only word I knew.
She was safe. Christ Almighty, after all of it, she was somehow okay.
I picked her up and held her so tight she had to tap my cheek so I’d let her breathe.
She kissed me then, with a tenderness I didn’t deserve.
Right. That was the last time I cried.
“Fuck,” I mutter, shouldering the last of the wetness away. I reach into the drawer beside her bed.
Sasha’s eyebrows go up when she sees what I pull out. “How’d you pick such a close shade?”
“How can you tell it’s not the right one?” I hold the little bottle of nail polish up against her nails.
“That’s a compliment! It’s very close.”
“I asked my sisters,” I say to the question still on her face. “Cass told me it wasn’t going to match, that you did jelly polish or something, but I can try it anyway.” I shake the bottle.
Sasha rolls her lips between her teeth and nods, her cheeks still wet. “How’d you know to shake it like that?”
I unscrew the top. “I’m assuming it’s the same configuration as most paints and solvents.”
Sasha closes her eyes, nodding, and I can tell she’s trying not to laugh. But maybe that’s exactly what she needs right now.
“Do you want a touch-up or not?”
“Yes,” she says. “Sorry.”
I wedge the bottle in my palm and take hold one of her delicate fingers. One by one, I stroke the color over her nails, doing a pretty fucking good job if you ask me. I’m good with precision tasks. But I’m a little nervous, so I flub up her pinkie, getting the tiniest blob on the tip of her finger.
“Fuck.”
“It’s fine,” she whispers, using her opposite thumb to scrape it off. “Too bad you don’t have your goggles.”
I grumble. “They’re not goggles.”
Now she snort-laughs, and I have to shush her. “It’s too early to be snorting.”
But I feel the smile creeping on my own lips. I guess I was right—it feels good to grasp at whatever happiness we can find right now.
Finished, I blow on each of the nails I painted. Cass was right. It’s not an exact match. But it’ll have to do.
“You done?” she asks softly after I stop blowing. I haven’t let her hands go.
“No.” I glance at the ring on her fingers, then meet her eyes. “Sasha, I want to get married for real. I mean, I want to stay married. I want you to be my wife.”
I cringe at how fast the words come out.
But Sasha’s eyes well up. “Griffin—”
“Wait,” I say. “Before you say anything, I have to tell you a few things.”
She smiles, her face so bright.
My heart aches. Because I know what I’m about to tell her might make her say no to what I’m going to ask. But I have to lay everything on the table for her. No more holding back.
“I want you to know I love you,” I begin. “I’ve already told you this, but I want to say it again. I love you. More than anything. And I’ll give up everything to have you in my life if you tell me to.”
I look down as I rub my thumbs over the backs of her hands. “But there are some things I need to do, and I don’t think I’ll be the man you know—and the man you deserve—if I don’t do them.”
When I look back up, she’s looking questioningly at me.
“I no longer have a job now, or a home. But I love the work I do. I…am the work I do, and I need to keep doing it.”
Sasha told me in the ambulance over here last night that she knew about my business. She also passed on everything her brother had told her about how things went down.
“Ford doesn’t know this yet, but we’ve talked about it before, so I hope he’s going to go for it.
And if he doesn’t, I’m going to do it on my own.
I want to start up our own organization, bring all the talent who want to come with us from McCrae.
But we’re going to run it differently than Lionel did. ”
I have to take a second to focus, because talking about Lionel hurts in a way I’m not ready to address yet.
Ford told me they found his car last night at the bottom of a ravine off a highway in New Jersey. His wallet was in the glove box, but there was no sign of him. We know it’s just a matter of time before his body turns up.
I meet Sasha’s eyes. “I won’t keep things secret from you unless it’s safer for you not to know. And not if you don’t want to hear it.” I hesitate. “It won’t always be easy, though. Because we want to focus on a specific area, which isn’t a pretty one.”
“I can handle it.”
I hold her gaze. When I met Sasha, I don’t think I would have believed her. I would have thought she only wanted it to be true. But now I know how strong she is.
“It’s human trafficking, Sash. It’s what Creelman’s organization specializes in. Ford and I—we want to do what law enforcement can’t.”
Ford and I have talked about it at length in the past. We want to expose the assholes who work in the dark shadows; to protect the innocent people they harm, in ways that might walk the line between what’s legal and what’s just.
“We’re not going to be vigilantes, but we won’t shy away from giving voice to the voiceless when it makes people uncomfortable.”
Sasha squeezes my hand. “Griffin, there’s no way I’d ask you to stop making the world a better place. I trust completely that you know what’s right.”
I look down, my stomach churning. “That’s not the hard part, Angel.
This work—it’s better if we can be where they are.
So we can act fast.” I meet her gaze again.
“There’s a town called North Road, Ohio.
It’s in the middle of nowhere. Pretty country, and I think you’ll love the town, but the closest cities are hours away. ”
Sasha’s face shifts to understanding, then trepidation. “You want me to move to a smaller town than Quince Valley?”
Ford and I agreed this was where we needed to be. “Eight highways converge nearby. It’s a favored hand-off location. But it’ll work because we’re not cops. We won’t let anyone know we’re there.”
We won’t be doing raids. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be stopping what’s happening. We’ll focus on saving lives in ways that’ll leave them not knowing who hit them. We’ll destroy their operations from their rotten cores.
“Last night,” I continue, “I thought about this every time I found myself dropping into the oblivion of what-ifs about what had happened. It made me feel like I had control over something. That I could still do something good after how much I’ve fucked up. But I won’t do it without you, Sasha.”
I watch her throat bob as she swallows.
“I know you’re a big city girl. I understand the position I’ve put you in, and if you don’t want to do this with me, that’s okay.
I just want you to think about it. There are a lot of people there—mostly young women and girls—that need help that’s different from what I can provide them.
I was thinking maybe…” I feel embarrassed saying this part when I might get it all wrong.
“That thing you and Glo talked about. Getting them nice clothes. Helping them make a fresh start.”
She smiles softly. “You remembered me talking about that?”
“I remember everything you talk about.”
She’s still a moment, then she opens her arms. I lean in, and she brings my head to her chest.
We sit like this for a moment, me trying to fight off these fucking tears, while she strokes my hair. I wonder, in some sick, desperate part of me, if this is her way of saying goodbye before she says no.
If it is goodbye, I need to get everything out.