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“Get your things,” I told her as I’d told Lavena, but for very different reasons; I was losing. I could feel my hold slipping on the chain restraining my control. She needed to leave before I hurt her even more.
“But…”
“Kami!” Her name snapped out of me, hard and brittle, and pleading, but she didn’t hear that. How could she when all I felt rolling over me was fury and bitter rage at my own weakness?
Her arms dropped to her side, and she pulled away from me. Her fingers tangled together, small and unsure. Her bewilderment, her hurt was my fault. I fucking did that. I stepped over a line I had no right to cross. I made her believe something I couldn’t deliver. It didn’t matter that it was unintentional. It didn’t matter that I had no control over what happened next.
She waited.
She waited for me.
All those years she could have moved on and she didn’t because she thought I could give her the man she used to know, but that Darius Medlock was gone. He was never coming back and I didn’t know how to tell her she’d waited for a ghost.
There wasn’t a hole deep enough in hell for someone like me.
“Go,” I whispered.
Pleaded with my soul.
Kami drew in a breath. Her throat muscles bobbed, but her gaze was level when they met mine.
“Welcome back.”
Without another word, she turned and left me standing in the fading light of day, a fist sized hole in my chest.
It was necessary, I told myself all the way back to the safety of my room, two guns in hand. Kami wasn’t Lavena. She wasn’t Sasha or Kas. She wasn’t trained for my world. She wasn’t equipped. The man I was forced to become had a target on his back and a running clock that could expire at any moment. What did I have to offer her, except heartbreak and fear? She was better off with someone who could give her a normal life with kids who wouldn’t need bodyguards and background checks of everyone they come into contact with. Her house would be a home, not a fortress with enough security to safeguard the president. She would be … happy.
Without me.
She would be safe.
What else mattered?
The guns, mine and Lavena’s, were set in my nightstand drawer and closed in. I sat on the edge of my bed and stared through the thickening shadows at the wall dividing my room from the bathroom. My mind warred with my gut to leave, to follow the plan I had before, to call a driver and start the drive back to civilization. Yet, I didn’t move. I watched the sun bleed and run down the paint to pool across the carpet in shredded tendrils. Night hit fast and hard in the wilderness, a fact I’d forgotten about until my first night there. I toyed with this knowledge, letting it consume all the other thoughts and urges until the conclusion became that I would wait for morning.
It was too dark.
It wasn’t safe.
The driver would have to drive nine hours then nine hours back in the night.
That wasn’t fair.
I could wait a few more hours.
What’s the worst that could happen?
Outside my door, I heard the creak and groan of bodies hauling luggage up the stairs. I could hear the chatter and hushed whispers as they moved past my door. I picked each distinct footstep shuffling over worn carpet. I held my breath, counting thethump, thump, thumpof my heart with every passing second until the last footsteps stopped just outside. The light of the hall slipped her silhouette through the crack under the door to fill my darkened space. I had no memory of pushing to my feet or moving closer until I was inches from the hard surface, inches from the devil on the other side, my lungs tight around my last inhale.
Go away,I begged silently, even as my fingers itched to reach for the knob.
I could wrench it open, grab her, pull her inside and finish what we started that rainy April. I could pin her to the door, my own personal butterfly as I took back every minute we lost. I did none of those things.
She moved away before my madness could take life. The other voices had long since faded, her friends already in their rooms, their familiar spaces, the ones they called theirs on every visit.
Kamari would be no different. She would slip into her room, the room separated from mine by a thin, fucking wall, a wall that muffled nothing, not the sound of her movements, not the sound of her lithe frame slipping beneath cotton sheets, not the soft sighs of her dreaming. It would all be amplified, a surround sound to remind me just how close and yet out of my reach she was.
It wasn’t fair.
