His arms shook.
Shook and shook.
While the flames roared and wood crumbled and the structure gave.
No hope for life from within.
Torment wailed.
As loud as the sirens he heard coming in the distance.
Frantic, he breathed against the child’s mouth. Breathed and breathed. His hands too big and clumsy against his tiny chest.
Tears blurred, burning down his ash-covered face.
No. Please. No.
Heavy engines roared up the street, sirens blaring, flashes of light in the night.
“This way! Help! Please!” He shouted it when he saw a paramedic round the side, when the man came up short at the bodies strewn across the ground.
The man’s eyes widened when he saw Jud wailing over the child.
The man jogged across the yard.
One second later, Jud was gone.
Just another monster that disappeared into the night.
I jolted awake to the dream, flying upright. Sweat drenched my skin, and my heart ravaged my chest.
I squinted, disoriented, waking up to the barest light filtering in through the windows.
For years, I’d woken up alone, lost in a nightmare that would forever haunt my life. It tortured me with what I’d been partner to. With what I’d had no power to stop.
Her hands found me in the pinked rays of morning light.
That energy crawled and clashed.
Comfort and torment.
I swung my legs off the side of the bed while Salem crawled to curl herself around me from behind.
The way she’d done before.
This girl with so much understanding.
Way she saw me in a different light. Like maybe she could hold this burden with me the way I was going to hold hers.
“You’re in so much pain,” she whispered, pressing her lips to the marred flesh of my back. Where I’d sustained the burns that had marked me for what I’d done. Scars that reminded me each day of the senseless loss, the kind born of a wicked life.
“She left me when I told her.” Yeah, I’d told Salem this before, but I thought maybe she got it then. My shame. How I was going to ask her to bear some of it. How I needed her to.
She curled her arms tighter around my body. “I see who you are, Jud.”
I could feel her spirit.
Her compassion. Her love. Her worry.
“I hate that she left you over something that hurts you so much.” Her voice was a whisper of compassion. Of strength and belief.
The confession clawed at my throat, though fear tried to snuff it out, to hold it back.
“I’m right here,” Salem promised. “It’s okay. You can talk to me.”
I guessed it was the love in her voice that opened the gates for the words to get free. “Even though Kennedy didn’t know the full details of my past, she’d known there was something.” I huffed out a self-deprecating sound. “Guess it’s written on me. Fact I’m wicked.”
Immorality carved into my spirit.
“You know I don’t believe that.” Salem murmured it. Giving me more of that belief.
I gathered up the hands she had on my stomach and brought them up to press over the uproar going down in my chest. I held them there tight. To the thunder that now belonged to her.
I swallowed around the ball of barbed wire embedded in my throat. “Thought I was doing the right thing—protecting my brother from that life. But it was bullshit…” My voice grew thin as the visions flashed through my mind.
She held on tighter.
“They’d told me I was just supposed to shake someone down. Give them a warning. Get someone back in line who was going off the rails. I swear it. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. When I got there, it was all wrong, Salem. All wrong. They were asking me to do something there was no chance I could do.”
Dread curled through her body, but still, she held onto me, girl wrapping me in this silent support. In this feeling of wholeness that I’d never thought I’d experience again.
“There was a family in a house…they wanted…this boy.” I could barely force the words out. “I was supposed to take out the officers there to protect the family so they could get in and take the baby.”
Shame carved through the confession. Grief and agony that I couldn’t contain. It bounded out into the room from my spirit and echoed back, amplified in the swimming rays of muted light.
I choked on a breath as I forced myself to continue. “Turned out the plan was to set the house on fire to trap the mother inside. Get rid of her. I didn’t know it at the time, until the news reported it the next day, but there were two children in there, Salem. A baby boy and girl. A mom and her children.”
Grief constricted the words, a guttural cry lanced in the middle of them.
“They wanted the boy…but they didn’t want the woman or the girl child to leave that house.”
Her arms stiffened, and she inhaled a sharp, biting breath.
I held her hands tighter to me as I let the confession free. “I tried to stop it. Tried to stop them from taking the boy. From hurting the rest. But no one made it out of there alive. Not one of them survived because I tried to intervene, and I made it even worse.”
She started to jerk away, but I held her closer as the words scraped like fire from my tongue, rushed and pleading, like I could rearrange them into something else even when I knew there was no chance of ever erasing this truth.
“I tried, Salem. When they realized I was going to fight them, it became a battle. I managed to take out all the men who came to end them, but not before the house was set on fire. I tried to get them out—to find them—to help them.”
It left me on a haggard moan.
Or maybe it was just Salem’s.
“Where?” she demanded.
“Los Angeles. Four years ago.”
A choked sob ripped up her throat as she struggled to break free of my hold.
I let her go as realization slammed me.
When I realized she saw me then.
The real me.
And she was going to leave me, too.
I didn’t want to even look at her, to see the fear and loathing that would no doubt be written on her face. But I couldn’t stop myself. Not when she scrambled away like she was the one being burned, choking and gasping and heaving out for the breaths that wheezed from her lungs.
“No,” she begged.
“I told you, Salem. Told you it was bad.” I forced myself to look back at her.
I nearly died right there when I saw her expression.
The horror.
The terror.
Tears streamed hot down her gorgeous face, and her mouth was trembling everywhere.
She slipped off the opposite edge of the bed. “No. No, Jud, no.”
Torment clotted my throat. “Would never hurt you.”
She backed away, her hands clutched to her chest, clawing at her heart like she was going to rip it out.
“Darlin’？” I was such a fuckin’ fool because I pushed to my feet and started around the bed like I could be worthy of holding some of her fear when I was the one who’d caused it.
“He…he…f-f-found us.” The words tripped from her tongue.
A frown curled my brow. “What?”
“He found us. No. He found us.” Frantic, she spun in a circle. She suddenly lurched forward, scrambling around on the floor until she found her shoes.
She jerked them on, hopping around to try to keep her balance.