Chapter 17
MAGNOLIA
Idon't know how long I sat on my kitchen floor with Duke in my arms before the world came back.
Grief does something to time. It puts it somewhere you can't reach.
One moment, I was on my knees in the blood with all that gray weight gone slack against me, my face buried in the ruff of his neck where it still smelled like him, like warm dog and dust and everything safe I'd ever known.
The next, Cash was crouched in front of me, close, his hands open and slow the way you'd approach a spooked animal, saying my name in a voice that had been saying it for a while.
"Mags. I need you to hear me. Can you hear me?"
I nodded. I couldn't talk yet. My whole chest had turned to stone.
"He saved us, Mags. Duke saved us."
And that broke something loose in me that the shock had been holding shut.
I bent over my dog and I wept in a way I hadn't wept since I was a child, ugly and total.
Cash didn't try to stop it. He just moved in close and put himself around me—around both of us, me and the body of the dog who'd saved me—and made himself into a wall I could fall apart against.
I found out, in that hour, what Cash Dane was for.
Because at some point, he eased Duke out of my arms, gentle as anything, and laid him out on the floor and did a thing I'll carry the rest of my life.
He didn't handle him like a body. He handled him like a person.
He straightened the old legs and smoothed the fur down flat along his side where the blood had matted it, and he closed the cloudy eyes with two fingers, slow.
Then, he put his hand flat on Duke's chest and bowed his head and stayed like that a moment, saying nothing I could hear.
The whole time, his face wore something I had no name for—a stillness that wasn't cold at all, a reverence, like a man standing at an altar he actually believed in.
I'd glimpsed it earlier, in the worst of it.
When I'd come back down the hall and seen him kneeling there in the wreckage with his face down close to Duke's, his voice going low and steady and sure.
I hadn't heard the words. I don't think the words were for me.
But I'd seen the shape of the thing, and I saw it again now.
It undid me in a different direction entirely.
This lethal, terrifying man—a man who had killed two people in my kitchen with his hands and a knife and never once lost the beat of his own heart—was the tenderest thing I had ever seen at the edge of a death.
He wasn't afraid of it. That was what got me.
Everyone else in my life flinched from dying, hurried past it, changed the subject.
Cash walked right up to the worst moment there is and stood in it, calm and present and unafraid, and made it gentler just by refusing to look away.
I reached for my phone. It was on the counter where I'd dropped it, and my hand did it on its own. I had my father half-dialed before I stopped.
I wanted my dad. I wanted him the way you want a parent in the middle of the night when the worst thing has happened—the colonel, who'd understand a soldier dying at his post better than anyone alive, who'd know that a dog like Duke had died the way he'd have chosen if you'd given him the vote.
My dad would understand this loss down to the ground.
He'd honor it. He'd say the right, hard, true thing.
And I couldn't call him. Not now. It was the middle of the night, and there was blood on my floor and two dead men in my kitchen and a house full of things I could not begin to explain over a phone.
All a call would do was drag my father out of sleep and into a fear he could do nothing about from four hours away except drive too fast in the dark.
There was nothing he could fix tonight. I'd only be handing him my terror to hold.
He'd already spent a life holding other people's.
So, I set the phone face-down on the counter. Later. I'd call him later, when I could tell it as a thing that was over instead of a thing that was still bleeding.
And then, I did the thing I had never once in my life known how to do.
I turned around, and I put myself into Cash's arms, and I let him hold me up.
I have spent my whole life being the one who holds—the one who sits in the dark with the shaking thing, who stays, who is steady so somebody else gets to fall apart.
I did not know how to be the shaking thing.
I did not know how to let my knees go and trust that a person would be there.
But I was out of everything else, and there was this enormous, still man who had killed to keep me breathing and then knelt down and prayed a dog into the ground.
Every cell in me understood, finally, that he was not going anywhere, and that it was all right to lean.
So, I leaned. I put my whole weight on him and let him take it.
He took it like he'd taken me out of the air in that courtyard—easy, certain, like he'd been built and set aside for exactly this.
His arms came around me and his chin settled on the top of my head.
I felt his heart going under my cheek, steady now, slow, the anchor of it.
For the first time in longer than I could remember, I let somebody else be the strong one.
They came fast.
I heard the vehicles first, more than one, and then the house filled with men—big men, quiet men, moving through my shattered front door with the competence of people who had done terrible cleanup in worse places than this.
Cash didn't let go of me, but I felt him change, felt the current pass between him and them, brother to brother.
The biggest of them came straight to Cash, dark-haired and bearded, built like a load-bearing wall, and gripped the back of his neck and said something low I didn't catch.
I understood without being told that this was Brock.
There was a leaner one behind him with a sharp jaw and eyes that catalogued my whole ruined kitchen in one pass and started, silently, to make it a solved problem—Ryker, that one turned out to be, the kind of man who fixed things you didn't ask how.
And there was one with an easy, handsome face who came and crouched by me, the only one of them who seemed to remember there was a grieving woman in the room and not just a scene to manage.
"Ma'am," he said, gentle, a little bit of a drawl in it, a warmth the others kept further down.
"I'm Tommy. You're safe now. You're surrounded by the most dangerous people in the state of South Carolina and every one of them is on your side.
" It startled a wet, broken laugh out of me, which I think was the whole point of it.
The last one hung back a beat, taking the measure of the room the way the others took the measure of exits—blonde hair, a stillness to him that reminded me of Cash.
He crouched by Duke first, before he ever looked at me, and set a hand briefly on the old dog's side, a soldier paying a soldier.
Only then did he stand and find my face.
"Maggie." He knew me. Of course, he knew me. "I'm Marcus. Claire's husband." Something eased in me at Claire's name, an anchor thrown from the ordinary world. "We'll see he's handled with honor. You have my word on it."
I nodded. I couldn't have spoken to save my life.
Somewhere in the middle of all that competence and care, with the men moving around me like water around a stone and Cash's arm still locked around my shoulders, Beans and Tiny came pressing back in from wherever they'd been herded.
They shoved themselves against my legs, trembling, needing to be near me the way I needed to be near Cash.
I got down and put my arms around both of them, my two survivors, and pressed my face into their fur.
"They're mine," I heard myself say. To Cash.
To the room. To myself, mostly. "Beans and Tiny.
They came to me as fosters. I keep telling people they're just passing through.
" My voice cracked straight down the middle.
"They're not passing through. I'm adopting them.
Both of them. Tonight, tomorrow, whenever the paperwork—they're mine and they're not going anywhere and neither am I. "
It wasn't about the dogs, and every person in that room seemed to know it.
It was the only thing I had, right then, that I could reach out and take hold of and refuse to lose.
I'd just watched the world prove it could come through my door in the dark and take a thing I loved.
I was answering it the only way I knew how—by claiming, out loud, what was left.
By planting my feet in the wreckage and saying, this is mine, and I am keeping it.
Cash crouched down beside me, into the pile of trembling dog and grieving woman. He didn't tell me it would be okay. He just put his hand on the back of my neck, warm and steadying, and said the truer thing.
"They're yours," he said. "And I'm going to spend a long time making sure nobody ever takes anything from you again."