Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75616 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75616 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Luca, a little more tactfully, told me how bad of shape she’d been in when he’d arrived. She’d still been sitting against Judah’s door, armed, completely dissociated.
Understandably, given the events of the night.
Then, of course, as it all came back to her, she’d been sick and hysterical.
Judah had been in his crib alone. Likely crying himself to sleep since his mom was too traumatized to go to him.
I knew she probably felt like shit about that too, even if there’d been nothing either of us could do for him in that moment. Me, bleeding out and unconscious in the car with Damon. Her, in shock, zoned out.
But kids were resilient.
He would be alright.
My family swore that he’d been good at the hospital, eating junk food, and playing games on everyone’s phones to keep him occupied.
And after this, his life would be so much more secure and normal.
He would likely have no memories of the one night he’d needed to cry himself to sleep when he had all the new memories about stores, restaurants, parks, arcades, and play dates with other kids his own age.
He’d be okay.
I’d been more worried about Claire.
Until, finally, she walked into my room. Alone. Eyes swollen half shut from crying, face splotchy from tears.
She looked fragile as she collapsed down onto the chair beside my bed and cried again.
It wasn’t until I started talking about the future that she seemed to calm a bit, focusing on the upcoming good instead of the traumatizing past.
No one had been allowed to stay long, though, and it killed me to watch the way her face fell when she was informed that I needed to rest.
She leaned over me, pressing a soft kiss to my lips.
“I’ll visit as much as I can,” she assured me.
She made good on that, too.
Luca ended up putting her up in a hotel where the rest of my family was staying, and she was always the first one there every day, leaving Judah with one of the others, so she could get a precious hour or so with me before it was time for someone else to visit.
Each day, she looked a little better, a bit less haunted.
By day eight, I was finally cleared to be able to leave, to head home and follow up with my usual doctors. Or more accurately, Lettie. Who’d called one day to inform me that I was all of a quarter of an inch from death, according to what she saw in my file. And that I owed Claire a pair of diamond earrings or something for the gift of my life.
I silently declared that it wouldn’t be diamond earrings, but a diamond ring, I planned to give her.
It seemed as if the small town cops in the area had accepted Damon and my cover story without any concerns.
And I knew from Luca that he had a crew up at the safe house to get everything all cleaned up. A big job, considering there were five bodies to deal with.
Only five, though.
From the driver’s seat, Luca glanced back at Judah and Claire, both of whom were passed out, then looked back at me.
“Dante has been working overtime to figure out why it was only five of them,” Luca said, reading my mind.
“Any luck?”
“Denny staged a coup,” he said. “It helped that Warren was fucking half-insane with his need to get his son and make his ex pay. So, it was easy for him to take over and kick out Warren and his most loyal supporters.”
“Does anyone know how long he and my guard have been in cahoots?”
“It’s impossible to pin down anything exact, with both of them being dead. But Dante found out that he was heavy into gambling, had debts coming out of his ass. So if Warren was offering him money for access to the kid…”
“Yeah,” I said, jaw tight.
“We’re going to do a full internal audit,” Luca said. “Everyone hands over their financial records and all that shit. This won’t happen again.”
No, it wouldn’t.
It couldn’t.
Claire and Judah had been through enough. They deserved a soft, safe life.
I intended to give them that.
As soon as I was able to do more than function.
I was alright. Sore. My lower back, especially, was giving me some trouble. But in a few weeks, it would be like nothing happened.
And then we could go back to how we were. But add in more outings.
“As for Denny, we are watching right now,” Luca said. “Warren was always the more hotheaded of the two, it seemed. Denny is someone who is going to think shit through, weigh his pros and cons. I doubt he’s going to attack us.”
“He can’t just be let to stay here,” I said, anger bubbling up, knowing he stood by and watched Claire get abused, then watched her and her son become prisoners.