April knew.
Of course she did.
I felt like I’d been sucker punched.
Because that’s exactly what I was.
A sucker.
A fool because I’d just let myself go…let go of all my control and gave it to this girl.
The girl I’d trusted with my fucking life because I’d wanted to give her that, too.
I felt like the brunt of a cruel, sick joke. An outsider looking in on Shea’s dirty little secret. A secret kept from me when I was the one supposed to hold all her truths.
But this girl had just given me lies.
“We’ll…we’re going to get her back,” April whispered almost maniacally, her dark brown eyes wide and scared.
“He took her.” This time the words on Shea’s tongue sounded foreign. Faraway. I saw the moment the reality crashed down on her and her knees went weak.
I rushed forward and scooped her into my arms just before she hit the ground. There was nothing I could do but pull her to me. Hold her. Couldn’t stop the way my nose went into her hair or the way my mouth pressed to her temple. “I’ve got you.”
I’ve got you.
Did I?
She buried her face in my chest, her arms clinging to my neck as if I could be her rock. “He took her, Sebastian. He took her.”
Her breath seeped all over me. Plea after plea. Like she was asking me to make it better.
Asking me to be a part of it now.
I felt torn in a million directions. Shredded. My love for this girl, the devotion that pumped through me with every violent beat of my heart, at all-out war with the voice that kept whispering I didn’t know her at all.
In what seemed like shock, I carried Shea up the walk and started to climb the porch steps. I twisted sideways to get by April who still clung to the railing. She seemed to be frozen in her own shock.
Wood creaked beneath my bare feet as I walked across the porch. I didn’t stop when I hit the polished hardwood floors inside. I headed for the staircase.
I gulped over visions of the nightmare that had just transpired here—The little girl standing at the top of the landing whispering for her mommy, having no clue how her world was about to be crushed.
As soon as I crossed the exact spot where Kallie had stood, Shea yelped as if she were in physical pain.
“Kallie.” Her gasped name hit the air like grief.
I gritted my teeth and pulled her a little closer. “I know, baby, I know.”
Shea’s room was just as dark as it’d been ten minutes before, the covers still rumpled, and the room smelling like sex. As if we were still back in that moment when I was confessing things I didn’t think I’d ever get to feel.
Love for a woman I never thought I’d deserve.
Love for a child who’d caught me up in a whirlwind of tinkling laughter, unending smiles, and a precious, perfect world filled with butterflies.
Fuck. I wanted it.
I wanted it so bad but now I didn’t know up from down. Didn’t know who was who or where I belonged.
Carefully, I set a drenched, shivering Shea on the edge of her bed. Hunched over, she wrapped her arms across her chest as if looking for a way to hold herself together.
“Don’t move.” I went into the adjoining bathroom and grabbed a couple dry towels from the cabinet. Striding right back out, I wrapped one around her shoulders then began to work the other through the length of her hair.
Slowly, carefully, I looked down at her as she looked up at me. Her face was wet from the rain, but there was no mistaking the ceaseless tears streaming down her cheeks.
Caramel eyes latched onto mine, a molten stir of remorse and shame and outright fear. She reached up and wrapped her delicate hand around my wrist. An electric current streaked down my spine. A rush of light and heat and agony. The threads of that unfound tether that tied her to me pulled softly and steadily and somehow urgently.
I stilled my movements, strung up by her silent charge.