Chapter Fifteen
I’D KEPT MY eyes on her through the thing with the fed, which is the only reason I got to her in time.
That was the difference between this trip and every one before it.
Since the radiator, I hadn’t let her out of my sight for a breath, not to watch the corners, not to run plates, not for a damn thing.
Devil sent me out to watch the perimeter and I’d decided the perimeter was her, all of her, every second, and anything that wanted close could come through me first. So when the fed stepped out from between those cars, I clocked him, clocked Horse moving, and made the call quick. Brenda was Horse’s. Horse had her.
Amy was mine to watch.
So I watched her.
Watched her step in front of Brenda without one damn thought for herself, all five feet of her squaring up between Brenda and a federal agent like she had any business being somebody’s shield, and I had to lock my jaw against the urge to cross that garage and drag her behind me.
Fiona moved up on Brenda’s other side, Horse came in a second later, and the fed folded up after Brenda cut him off at the knees with whatever she said to him.
Then Horse put his hand on his woman in front of God and everybody at last, fifteen years too late and right on time, and none of that was my business.
So I kept my eyes where they belonged.
Which is how I saw the exact moment Amy stopped being in the parking garage with the rest of us.
She’d stepped back to give Horse and Brenda room, turned, done that sweep of the space people do when the adrenaline’s up. I know that sweep. I do it too. Her eyes went down the row toward the pillars. And then they stopped. And everything about her changed.
I’ve watched a lot of people go into shock.
Bled-out brothers, women pulled out of bad houses, men who just watched something they can’t un-watch.
I know the look from the outside and I knew it on her before she made a sound, the color going, the eyes fixing on something that isn’t the room, the body forgetting it’s a body.
She’d seen something down that row. I didn’t know what.
I threw one look where she was looking, there were pillars, parked cars, a sedan pulling through and not one thing my eyes could grab, but it didn’t matter what I saw.
It mattered what she saw. And whatever it was had reached into her and pulled the floor out.
Her knees started to go and I was already moving.
I don’t remember crossing the garage. One second I was forty feet back doing my job and the next I was down on my knees on the oil-stained floor in front of her, getting there before she hit it, getting my hands on her shoulders.
Not grabbing. Never grabbing. You don’t grab somebody in that place.
Grabbing is the thing they’re already drowning in.
“Amy. Hey. I got you.” Low. Slow. Her eyes were wide open but there wasn’t anything in them that could see me yet, so I got down lower, put myself where she’d have to find me when she came looking.
“You’re in Charleston. Parking garage. Middle of the day.
You’re with me. Look at me, sweetheart. Just me. ”
Nothing.
Her breath was coming too fast, little pieces of it that never got anywhere, and Brenda was saying her name behind me, high and scared, Fiona talking too, the damn garage suddenly full of voices Amy couldn’t use.
I shifted until my body blocked as much of it as I could, gave her one thing instead of twenty.
And then I did the thing I hadn’t done in months, the thing from the beginning, from back before I ruined it, back when the only thing between me and her was a lot of bad nights and my two hands.
I took one of hers off where it was clawed into her own chest and I pressed it flat to the middle of mine, held it there under my own hand, and I breathed.
Big, slow and obvious, so she could feel my chest go up and down under her palm.
“Feel that? That’s all you got to do. Just that. Follow it.” Up. Hold. Down. “In through your nose for me. There you go. Now let it out slow, like you’re cooling soup. That’s it. That’s my girl.”
My girl.
Slipped out before I could stop it, same as it used to, and I didn’t have room in me right then to give a damn whether I had the right to say it. She’d caught another breath. That was what mattered.
She caught the breath. Lost it. Caught it again.
Her eyes came halfway back and found my face, found my face, out of everybody, latched onto it like it was the one fixed point in a spinning room, and I held still and let her use me for it, let her stare at me and match her chest to mine and claw her way back up the rope one breath at a time, the way she used to, her body remembering the road even after all this time.
Her body always did trust me, even when every good reason she had said not to. Undid me then. Undoes me now, worse.
It took a while. I didn’t rush it. I stayed down there on my knees on the filthy concrete with her hand on my chest, my hand over hers and I breathed for her to follow until the follow got easier, until the air started reaching the bottom of her, until the color came back and the shaking went from the big kind to the small kind and then to almost none.
“There she is,” I said, soflty. Same as I used to. “I got you.”
And I watched her realize where she was, who she was holding onto, and what had just happened in front of everybody.
The mortification hit her like a second wave.
She yanked her hand off my chest and pulled herself in small, and I let her.
Of course I let her. It’s the one thing I’ve always been good at, letting her go.
“I’m fine,” she said, to the floor, to nobody, in a voice with no floor under it. “I’m sorry. I’m fine. Something just — I thought I saw — it was nothing.”
Nothing.
Bullshit.
Nobody comes apart like that over nothing. Not Amy. Girl could hear a bike backfire without blinking, stare down men twice her size if she had somebody else to protect, put herself between Brenda and a federal agent without taking half a second to think whether the man might hurt her.
Whatever she’d seen down that row had scared nineteen years off her in about half a second.
I’d watched it happen.
First the radiator. Now a face in a parking garage.
Maybe they weren’t connected, but I didn’t believe that anymore.
Didn’t know how they connected, didn’t know who she’d seen or why a clean hole in a Honda radiator had anything to do with somebody standing in the shadows of a parking garage, but something was moving around Amy.
Something outside the threat we’d all been watching. Something she knew.
Something that knew her.
That was the part I couldn’t get past.
I’d spent days trying to make the radiator fit Drago and Zeynep and couldn’t do it because Amy didn’t belong anywhere in that story.
Now she’d looked down a row of parked cars and seen somebody who scared the grown woman clean out of her, and I still didn’t have a name or a face or one damn useful thing I could put my hands on.
But I had enough.
Somebody had a thread on her.
And kneeling there on the concrete with the memory of her hand still hot against my chest brought back the beginning whether I wanted it to or not.
Those first bad nights after Brenda brought her in, Amy behind a locked door scared to sleep because sleep was where he waited for her, me sitting on the other side with some tea she probably didn’t need because knowing somebody was there mattered more than whatever I’d put in the cup.
Some nights she opened the door. Some nights she didn’t. Didn’t matter. I sat there anyway.
I used to be the man she let stay.
Then I decided I knew better.