“Good,” he responds, the word sounding assured and very deliberate. “Now here’s what I want you to do. You listening?”
“Yes,” I reply, panting. My hand trembles, but the gun is solid in my hand, easing some of the rushed panic. I can shoot a gun. I’ve done it before. I’ve taken a life, bullet after bullet buried into a man who would have killed us first. Sometimes I still see his face, nightmares filled with the sight of the hole in his cheek and his dim, lifeless eyes staring through me.
“Go and close my door. Lock it.” He waits until I obey to go on. “Put the phone on speaker and set it somewhere. I want you to check the bathroom. Make sure it’s clear.”
“Okay,” I answer, tightening both hands around the gun, just the way he taught me, as I inch toward Killian’s en suite. “I’m going in now.” My voice is shaky, but he doesn’t draw attention to it. After flicking on the light and checking the shower, I announce, “It’s clear.”
“Now, the closet.”
I repeat these tasks, making sure every nook and cranny of Killian’s bedroom is empty of anyone but me. After, he demands, “Go to the corner—the one by the window—and wait there for me. Back to the wall, got it?”
“Yes.”
“I’m almost there.” After a stretch of silence, he adds, “Don’t stop talking.”
“Okay. Yes.” It feels like that’s all I’ve said. Yes. Okay. Yes. Okay.
He seems to understand. “Tell me about what happened.”
As I wait, I relay to him the details of the box. Of almost stepping on it. The golden bow. How I thought Tristian had left me something. I tell him about opening it and realizing what was inside. A slender finger, chopped clean at the knuckle and nestled in a bed of satin.
By the time I’m done, he’s pulling up to the house.
“I’m coming through the door,” he says, sounding rushed.
“Be careful!” I try to keep my shout to a whisper, but the thought of Killian walking into an ambush makes my lungs constrict. “He could be out there.”
“I’m coming straight to you,” he says, disregarding my worry. “Don’t freak out, I’m running up the stairs.” I can hear him, his footfalls quick and heavy and drawing near, and I dart across the room to meet him at the door.
The first thing he does when I let him in is take the gun from my hands and tuck it into the back of his jeans.
The second thing he does is haul me into his chest.
I breathe in the clean, masculine scent of him, amazed at the way my chest loosens. I wonder when that happened. When did I stop seeing Killian as a necessary evil, and start seeing him as someone I felt safe with? Was it the cabin? Was it afterward, the night at the Velvet Hideaway when he shot his own father to protect me? Or was it right now, right here, his concise, collected orders to protect myself?
Either way, I feel it—this tight, panicked prey-instinct unwinding at the pressure of his powerful arms around me.
He pushes his nose into my hair, inhaling. “You’re okay.”
“Yes.” Yes. Okay. “I mean, I’m…I’m fine.” Now that he’s here, arms folded around me, my cheeks heat. There’s a severed finger out there in the hallway, but I can’t shake the feeling I’m overreacting.
When he pulls away, he cups my face, searching my eyes. “You want to wait here while I check the rest of the house, or—”
I shake my head. “I’ll come with you.”
His mouth forms a grim line. “Why don’t we start upstairs, work our way down, get an extra gun, huh?” He gives me this little chuck on the chin that should feel patronizing, but instead just makes my mouth twitch.
“Lead the way.”
I follow him for the next hour as he painstakingly clears each room of the massive house. I watch the muscles beneath his shirt flex and coil at each corner we round, every door he pushes open. It’s different from how he is on the field, as if he’s slipped on another skin. This one is precise and deadly, a stark contrast to the raw, uncontrolled fury of Killer Payne, star quarterback.
In the end, it’s almost a disappointment to find nothing.
“He had to have had a key,” Killian says when we reach the den. He dumps the box with the finger on the table and glares at it. “We locked this place up like Fort Knox before we left.”
Shivering at the sight of the ‘gift’， I ask, “Cameras?” Tristian had sworn they were all disabled, but a part of me doubts that’s the case.