Hope.
“Dada.” He held the child. Loved her to the moon.
He wanted to be good. Everything for her.
But the flames leapt, climbing the walls and licking at the ceiling.
Smoke billowed. A heavy darkness that filled the air and choked out hope.
Consuming.
Disorienting.
A black plague that annihilated everything in its path.
Still, he rushed, searched, fumbled through the disorder from one room to the next.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Fear crushed, as suffocating as the smoke that filled his lungs. He pulled his shirt over his face, his eyes wide and unseeing, the world a blur of fire and white-hot pain.
It didn’t matter.
He pressed on.
Pushed.
Forever passed.
A second.
A moment.
Misery the time that ticked on the clock.
A roar rose from the depths of him. “Where are you? Please. Fuck. Can you hear me?”
The whooshing of the flames screamed back.
He was on his knees. Blind as he searched.
Torment wailed.
As loud as the sirens he heard coming in the distance.
Tears blurred, burning against his charred flesh.
No. Please. No.
I jolted to upright on a choked gasp.
A rasp of pain.
Fevered, my eyes darted around to take in my surroundings. My senses were shocked to find I was no longer tumbling through the years that tormented me, but rather my ass was in the comfort of my own fucking bed.
Pale ribbons of pink streamed in through my bedroom window, a slow dance of warmth, while I felt like I was being burned alive.
Sweat soaked my flesh and my sheets while my heart raged with grief.
The scars on my back screamed like they were still red and raw.
Those? I could handle.
It was the ones written on my conscience, on my heart, embedded in my blackened soul that made me feel like I was getting torn apart.
I sucked for air. To draw oxygen into my lungs when they felt like they’d been charred and singed and scorched all over again. Like I was back in that day that had turned to the darkest night.
It was the moment my mind always returned to. Where the dreams lured me into a nightmare that’d been real.
It was when I’d lost my soul. My purpose. My right.
My head dropped forward, and I focused on trying to slow the rampage in my heart, the chaos that raged.
I deserved it, though, so what the hell did I expect?
Yet, still, I tried. Tried to be better. To pay a penance for the sins that could never be made right.
I’d wait—wait for the day when maybe it would be enough.
Lumbering to standing, I started for the shower. I knew I was fucked when in an instant a face infiltrated my mind.
The face of a girl who had spun me into a thousand mangled knots.
The one who’d be downstairs in the office when I got there.
The one I couldn’t seem to scrape from my thoughts.
There was something about this Salem. Something dangerous. Something I should avoid. And I was the masochist who wanted to find out.
TEN
SALEM
I’d been working at Iron Ride for the last three days.
I’d been right.
Darius had been pissed.
But even though he’d been all surly and grumbly and annoyed, there was enough work to make him forget why he was upset at me in the first place.
Hell, there was enough work to keep us all distracted for the next five years.
After the interaction with Jud on Monday morning that had left me completely rattled? That was precisely what I’d done. I’d thrown myself into getting the office whipped into shape and tried to pay as little attention to the man who rocked my whole world every time he got into my space.
Stoically trying to pretend like each smile wasn’t driving me mad.
Like each smirk wasn’t making me contemplate things I had no business contemplating.
So, I dove into the stacks of receipts and contracts and unpaid invoices, doing my best to organize them, to make sense of them, inputting them into the accounting software and trying to get it to balance since there had been no less than fifteen unanswered emails asking for that information from Jud’s accountant.
Not to mention the number of late notices I’d sent out on Iron Ride’s behalf to customer accounts that had never been paid.
My spirit had both lifted and sank with the amount it was adding up to, and I’d barely made a dent.
It only made the man who owned these floors like a hunter more mysterious. His life beat clearly found in the pulse of the motorcycles and cars he restored. I peered through the glass door that separated the lobby from the shop to where he was at the far, opposite side.
He was knelt over, his big body this force as he worked the metal.
My stomach tightened.
I guessed I recognized it, why it would be so easy for this part of his business to slide.
He was an artist.
A sculptor.
A crafter.
His care wrapped up in the rugged, fierce beauty he had to offer.
He shifted, and his shirt stretched over the wide, wide expanse of his muscled back.
My mouth went dry.
Before I stared so long drool would drip onto the desk, I forced myself to return my attention to the computer where I was inputting his positives.
None of this mess appeared to be hurting him, anyway.
His accounts were plentiful. Enough that it’d taken me a moment to process the balances.
It was weird, he’d just given me access to it all, his trust so easy.
That was something I didn’t come close to understanding.
How to just…give.
Because giving was dangerous.
I forced myself to focus on the task at hand. Slowly but surely, I made my way through a box of receipts that had been stuffed in the corner. Lost in the work. In using my hands. In being a part of something that felt like it mattered. As if I were making a difference for someone else.
Someone who was making a difference for me.
Only I stilled when a sense whispered across my flesh.
An aura.
An innuendo.
It was close to chills lifting on my skin, though not quite as intense.
It was just this disquiet that gusted through the muted intensity of my focus.
Slowly, I pushed from the stool where I’d been sitting at the desk that ran off to the side of the main high counter. I eased closer so I could peer over the top and out through the windows that I knew were a shimmery pitch from the outside.
Because of it, there was no chance a soul could see through the tint.
Still, my heart thugged like lead when I saw a car sitting on the far side of the curb. It wasn’t directly across the street, but a bit farther to the left, mostly concealed by the thick foliage of shrubbery and trees.
But I saw it—the tail-end of the same black car I could have sworn I’d seen outside our house earlier this morning.
Again, up the street.
I’d barely acknowledged it then, where it’d sat up the road like any other.
But this?
Alarm sparked in the place where I would forever be on edge, and it sent a tremor rocking through my being.
A warning that blared.
My being buzzed, jumpstarting the fight or flight reaction it always did.
But me?
It was always flight.
I had to get out of here.
I had to get out of here.
Run. Run. Run.
I stumbled back from the counter as panic seized the air in my lungs.
In an instant, I felt as if I were suffocating.
The world spinning. The floor trembling.