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Miss Timid.
“Fuck.” Guilt crept over me. I could have told Ollie last night from Rodregez’s. He could have saved her while I was busy with Cat and at Beyond Heaven. “I should have had Rodregez tell you last night. She’d be alive.”
A tiny whimper left her almost blue lips as Ollie pressed two fingers against the pulse point in her neck. She sucked in a wheezy breath through lips embedded with glass.
“Holy fuck. She’s alive?” I couldn’t believe it.
Ollie quickly shuffled out of his jacket and placed it over her body, trembling with the chill that seeped out from death’s open door.
Her eyes opened, brown and bloodshot. They closed again, and then she repeated the action, blinking in the scene. The windshield had shattered inward. The percentage of glass on her lap, some shards disappearing into different body parts. A blunt tree branch stabbed through the back window, breaking that, too.
She blinked until her sight became clear, and then panic set in. Her skinny fingers clawed at anything, including Ollie’s arm.
He was a fast mover and managed to restrain her in seconds.
Her legs pushed back, managing to do little to get her away.
“Calm down,” I told her, and her head snapped to me.
“You,” she whispered, her voice heavy with stress. “Are you looking for Aribella?”
“Her name is Cat, and no. She’s safe.” I leaned across the hood, my eyes meeting hers, desperate to avoid my gaze.
“I never hurt her. She was just loud, and it would get us into trouble.”
“We aren’t here to judge you, hon.”
Hon was Ollie’s version of babe, a word he often gifted to the victims whose names weren’t spoken.
“Do you have a name?”
Her head flipped to Ollie, grateful for his jacket, as she clutched it and pulled it higher up to her throat.
“They call me—”
“That’s not your name,” he interrupted.
“My name was Clara. After my great-grandma.” A tear fell, and she wiped it quickly. “We’re not supposed to cry. We get punished.”
“You won’t be punished anymore, Clara.” Ollie let me see his words, her name.
“Rothbart home?” I wondered.
Clara turned her head back to me. “He’s not back yet. Just Candee and the boys.”
“Joseph and whatever his fucking brother was called are dead.”
“Llewrehtom?”
Ollie’s eyes widened because he found that name as odd as I did.
“He’s really gone? Both of them?”
“Both of them. I promise.”
“And I need you to make a promise for me, Clara.” Ollie had a request. “I’m going to very carefully move you and put you in our van. It’s down the road. I need you to promise you’ll wait there. If you can do that, we’ll be able to take you somewhere safe. Can you do that?”
She nodded desperately. “I don’t want to be here. I don’t have anywhere to go. I was kicked out of my house six months ago. My parents didn’t like my boyfriend. They said he was bad. They were right. He sold me.”
