Page 55 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“He hit you in the side,” I say. Flat. Precise.

A pause.

“He hit me in the ribs. The wound is lower.” He says it like this is a meaningful distinction. “Different zip codes.”

“Carnage.”

“I've had worse.” His voice doesn't change. I believe him and I hate that I believe him. I hate even more that I know he's telling the truth, that the accumulated damage of his life means a punch to the ribs in a dark parking lot registers somewhere on the scale between inconvenient and unremarkable. “I'm fine, Tor. I promise. You can yell at me about it tomorrow when we both have the energy for it. But tonight I am coming with you. Alex and the guys will be stationed down the street in case we need them. Harper is at the house with the girls. Everything is fine.”

I look at the road.

“I shouldn't have let it happen,” I say. “Any of it. You lying in that bed bleeding. Him—” I stop. Swallow. “I should have planned better. I should have known the phone was bugged and he was listening⁠—”

“You put yourself between us,” he says. Quiet. Certain. “That's what you should have done. That's exactly what you did. As for everything else, it’s in the past and we can’t change it. We need to move forward now and focus on taking out the real threat.”

I ignore the last part. “You shoved me out the way earlier so he could shoot you and not me!”

“Because that's what I should have done.” There is no argument in his voice. No drama. Just the simple, uncluttered logic of a man who has decided something and doesn't need to justify it. “That's the arrangement, darlin'. That's how this works. You put yourself between people and I make sure you're still standing when the smoke clears.”

I look at him.

He doesn't look back. Just watches the road.

“That's not a sustainable arrangement,” I say.

The corner of his mouth moves. “No. It really isn't.” His voice drops to barely above a whisper as he mutters, “But losing you isn’t an option.”

The new safe house he takes me to is a converted farmhouse twenty minutes outside of Somerset that belongs, technically, to a shell company that belongs to another shell company that Halo set up so meticulously that even Alex Denver's accountants had to look twice.

It is, in other words, the safest place that I can currently be.

Which is why it doesn't feel safe at all.

Safety is something that happens in your body, not in buildings. You can be in the most fortified structure in the country and feel like you're standing in an open field in a lightning storm. I know this from experience. I know it from Walter House, where every door was locked and every window was secured and I spent a year feeling like the most exposed person alive.

What I feel right now is not quite fear. It's the aftermath of fear. The physical exhaustion of having held yourself rigid against something for too long and then being released, and now every muscle is loose, shaky and untrustworthy and you're not sure you're standing straight.

Carnage opens the front door and the warmth of the house reaches me before I step through it.

I stop in the doorway.

I'm still wearing Xaden's hoodie.

I look down at it. The Stormsend Ravens crest on the chest. The navy-blue fabric that still smells faintly of cedar, salt water and something darker underneath that I am deliberately not thinking about.

I should take it off.

I don't.

Carnage clocks it. He clocks everything, always, with those pale blue eyes that don't miss a single thing. He looks at the hoodie for exactly one second, then he looks at my face and he makes the decision not to say a word about it. I love him for that, I genuinely and completely love him for that.

“Kitchen,” he says. “Sit down.”

“I'm not injured⁠—”

“No, but you're running on adrenaline, you haven't eaten since this morning and you're pregnant.” He says it plainly, without ceremony, the way he says most things. “Sit down, Tor. Let me make something.”

I sit down.