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I’ve got you.
I’ve got you.
Police security is already flanking Lukas, trying to escort him out through a side door. His attorneys cluster around him, but he isn’t gone yet.
I shove forward. Bodies bump against me from every direction, but I don’t care who I hurt. I’m a woman possessed, a stubborn salmon swimming upstream, a very small person with very sharp elbows and very few fucks left to give.
“Lukas!”
Through the gaps between bodies, I catch flashes of him—his silver hair, the set of his jaw, his hands, huge and scarred.
They’re still pulling him toward the side door. In seconds, he’ll disappear into the bowels of the precinct. I have maybe thirty seconds, maybe less.
I glance over my shoulder toward the main doors, where Kir vanished moments ago. He just learned his entire life was built on a misunderstanding; he needs someone right now. If for no other reason than to see proof with his own two eyes, he needs the papers I’m carrying in my jacket pocket.
But in the end, I can only go one way.
“Lukas!” I can’t hear myself amidst the chaos. I squeeze between a cameraman’s tripod and a detective’s broad back. Someone steps on my heel and my shoe comes off, but I don’t stop to fix it; I just kick it away entirely and keep plowing ahead barefoot. “Lukas!”
The floor is freezing against my bare sole—one shoe on, one shoe gone, hobbling like Cinderella out of the ball. I ditch my second heel without breaking stride.
A uniform tries to block me with an outstretched arm. “Ma’am, you need to stay behind the?—”
I duck under it.
“Ma’am!”
“Sorry!” I call back, though I’m not sorry at all. The side door is ten feet away. Eight. Five. Lukas’s attorneys are funneling through it single file, forming a wall of itchy charcoal wool between me and the only person in this building who matters.
His silver head is still visible above the crowd. He hasn’t gone through quite yet.
The door is like a portal between worlds now. If I stay on this side of it, I keep being the broken-hearted Rae I was always meant to be.
On the other side of it isLukas.Lukas Lazarev and everything he represents.There’s a lot more risk on that side of the door, but it’s also the only place that has anything resembling reward for me.
One of the cops reaches for the door to pull it shut, and I scream out his name one more time.
“Lukas!”
I launch myself into the narrowing gap just as the door swings closed. It clacks me hard in the corner of my temple, so I fall through with stars pinwheeling in my vision.
“I need to see him,” I gasp, looking up from where I’ve collapsed onto my hands and knees. “Please. I need?—”
The cop’s mouth opens to refuse, but then one of Lukas’s attorneys glances down, takes in the scene, and murmurssomething to the officer. His grip on the door loosens. The door opens wider.
I crawl through.
I use the closest stretch of wall to haul myself up to my feet. The crew assembled is gawking at me like I’ve lost my ever-loving mind. They might be onto something, actually. I’m feeling a wee bit loopy myself.
They all look gaunt and pale in the institutional fluorescent lighting. As for me, I’m probably looking far, far worse. I’m barefoot, mascara-streaked, dizzy, possibly concussed.
And Lukas…
Lukas looks like I’ve never seen him before.
What’s left after he’s lost everything? Deep shadows in his face. Deeper lines around his mouth. His shoulders are finally starting to buckle beneath a weight that would have crushed anyone else a long time ago.
But his eyes—God, hiseyes.
