Chapter 8 #2
“Of course. I didn’t mean to keep you.” Coleman smiled at Lucy. “It was really good to see you, Luce. Take care of yourself.”
She didn’t correct the name this time.
“Goodnight, Andrew.”
He turned and walked unhurriedly back around the corner.
I watched until I couldn’t hear his footsteps any longer. My hand stayed on Lucy’s back the entire time.
The tiger was screaming.
HUNT. CHASE. HE TOUCHED HER SPACE. HE brEATHED HER AIR. KILL HIM.
Soon, I promised him.
“He’s gone,” I said.
Lucy stepped forward, and the loss of contact sent a spike of something brutal through my chest.
She walked three steps toward her car. Stopped. Stood there with her back to me, keys in one fist, bag on her shoulder.
“Lucy?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re shaking.”
She turned around. “He’ll come back,” she said. “He always comes back. That’s what he does. He shows up, says the right things, acts like a human being, and everyone around us thinks I’m crazy for not giving him another chance. And then when we’re alone—”
She stopped.
“When you’re alone, what?”
She looked at me for a long time. Her face was doing something I couldn’t read; not closed off, but careful, like she was deciding something.
“You want the truth? The real truth?”
“Yes.”
“People don’t, usually. They want the version where it wasn’t that bad. Where I’m exaggerating. Where it takes two to tango, and maybe I said something to provoke him, and maybe it was just a rough patch and a couple's fight, right? That’s the version people can live with.”
I said nothing. Waited. Kept my body still, my face open. The same way I sat with witnesses who needed time to find the words.
She looked down at her hands.
“He used to hit me.”
Every muscle in my body locked.
“Not at first. At first, he was perfect. Attentive, generous, made me feel like I was the center of his entire world. And I was so lonely, Warrick. My dad had just died, and I had worked so hard to pay off his medical bills. I’d just started a vet tech course, and no one would speak to me, and here was this man who made everything feel easy.
” She shook her head. “But then it all changed. It started small. A grip on my arm that was too tight. A shove when he was frustrated. And he was always sorry. Always had a reason. Always made it my fault; that I’d pushed him, I’d embarrassed him, I’d said the wrong thing at the wrong time. ”
I couldn’t speak. If I opened my mouth right now, what came out would not be words.
“The first time he really hit me, I walked into a cabinet door. That’s what I told the ER nurse.
Cabinet door.” She looked up at me. “I was so ashamed. Not of what he did. Of the fact that I stayed. I stayed for another year after that, because he cried and said it would never happen again, and I believed him. Because I needed to believe him. Because if I didn’t believe him, then I had to admit that the man I loved was hurting me. ”
Inside, my tiger was tearing the walls down with his teeth. My nails ached, darkening, the tips pressing out against the skin. I curled my hands into fists and shoved them into my jacket pockets before she could see.
“The night I left, he’d been drinking. He had some work colleagues round.
I asked if I could study in his office, get away from the noise.
He told me he needed me to help entertain.
After they left, he didn’t say anything; that was the worst thing.
He just grabbed me by the hair and slammed my face into the kitchen counter. ”
She hung her head, eyes on the ground.
I looked at her for a long moment. At the way she was holding herself, braced for what I was going to say.
I knew what she was waiting for; the response she’d gotten before, from the people she’d tried to tell.
Why did you stay? Why didn’t you leave sooner?
Why didn’t you see it? All the questions that sounded like concern landed like a verdict.
“Lucy.”
She didn’t move.
“Lucy, look at me.”
She slowly lifted her eyes to mine.
“What he did to you; none of that is on you. Not the first time, not the last time, not the twelve months in between. You didn’t stay because you were stupid or weak.
You stayed because someone you loved was hurting you, and your brain did what brains do when the person who’s supposed to be safe becomes the threat.
It tried to make it make sense. That’s not a flaw.
That’s being human.” I held her eyes. “Lucy, the blame belongs to him. All of it. None of it—none, you hear me—belongs to you.”
She didn’t say anything. But something in her face shifted—a small loosening around her mouth, her eyes going wet for half a second before she blinked it back.
“You sound like Dani.”
“Dani has good instincts.”
That got me something almost like a smile.
My hands were shaking in my pockets from the effort of not Shifting, not chasing after Coleman.
Lucy needed me here. She needed to hear that it was not her fault, to believe it.
After what she’d just told me, the trust she’d given me by saying any of it out loud, there was no way I could leave her right now.
But I could feel the claws, fully extended now, cutting into my own palms. The pain helped.
Gave me something to hold onto while the rest of me came apart.
“Thank you,” I said, “for telling me.”
She studied my face. Whatever she saw there, she didn’t flinch from it.
“You look like you want to kill someone.”
“I do.”
“You’ll have to get in line.”
She turned toward her car.
“Lucy,” I said. She stopped. “Don’t go home tonight.”
“I wasn’t planning on it. I need to stop at my place first, but then I’ll go to Dani’s.”
“I’ll follow you.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I’ll follow you. Home, Dani’s, wherever you go. I’ll be right behind you.”
She looked at me for a second. Then she nodded, got in her car, and pulled out of the lot.
I stood there with blood running down my palms from where my own claws had gone through the skin, and I made a promise to a woman who couldn’t hear me.
He will never touch you again. That is not a hope. It is not a plan. It is the last true thing I will ever do.
I got in the SUV, wiped the blood off my hand onto my jeans, and followed her taillights onto the main road. I kept close enough to see her, far enough that she wouldn’t feel caged.
My phone buzzed. It was Davan. I picked it up on speakerphone.
“Boy.”
“Davan.”
“You at home?”
“Driving.”
“Heading where?”
“Following someone.”
“Following someone,” he repeated, and I could hear the chair creak as he leaned back. “Scott says you’ve got a surveillance case in Millbrook. A woman. An ex of your target. Says you’ve been on it for almost a week.”
“That’s right.”
“He also said he stopped by yesterday and saw you inside the building. Fixing things. Making yourself useful.” A pause. “That doesn’t sound like surveillance, Warrick.”
Lucy’s brake lights flared. I eased off the gas and matched her speed.
“It’s a case.”
“Mmm.”
The Mmm was doing its usual work. I watched her signal right onto her street and said nothing.
“I’ve known you since you were thirteen years old. You’ve never embedded yourself in a case. Not like this. So I’m going to ask you something, and I want you to answer me honestly.”
“Ask.”
“Is she just a client?”
He was asking if I had feelings for her. I considered lying, but Davan would know. He always knew.
“No.”
Davan went silent for a beat.
“All right, then.”
“Davan—”
“Bring her to the next gathering.”
Lucy’s car slowed ahead of me. Her apartment building. I pulled to the curb, killed the headlights.
“She doesn’t know what I am. What we are.”
“Then she’ll meet a room full of nice people having dinner, and she’ll never have to know anything else if that’s how you want to play it. Your choice. It would just be nice to know you weren’t walking this life alone anymore.” Another creak of the chair. “We’ll have a plate for her, either way.”
I pressed the heel of my bloody hand against my forehead.
“I need to think about it.”
“Don’t think too long. Saturday comes whether you’re ready for it or not.”
The line went dead. Davan never said goodbye.
I sat in the dark watching Lucy head for her door, and I thought about how much easier my life had been ten minutes ago, when the only thing I’d been planning was a murder.