I didn’t expect him to answer, not really. Not after three years and no contact, not on his old number.
But he did.
“Harleigh Rose?”
I breathed short puffs of panicked air into the phone.
There was a pause and I knew that wherever he was, he would be shifting to the left, curling his shoulder into his ear to create a protective barrier, us against the world. Only then did his deep, smooth voice deepen further as he said, “Rosie? Tell me what’s happening.”
A sob bloomed in my throat, the petals clogging my airway and the thorns tearing up my throat as I choked on the wet rose of his name for me.
Rosie.
Like I was some sweet, young, innocent thing with pigtails in her hair instead of human blood and plasma.
“Lion,” I gasped through the wreckage of my throat. “I did something bad.”
These were the words I always said when I called him to get me out of trouble.
Countless misdemeanors throughout my youth: underage drinking and public intoxication, bodily assault (that pencil stabbing and some other—warranted—attacks), trespassing and some minor theft.
They were the same words but a different tone.
Usually, I was a brat, taunting him with my rebellion, trying to get a rise out of a man who was interminably calm.
Not now, and he knew it.
“You at your apartment?” he asked.
I nodded my head then realized he couldn’t see me. “Yes.”
“Twenty minutes,” he said in a way that made it a promise. “Hang tight, Rosie.”
He hung up before I could ask him how he knew where my apartment was or that I even had one.
The phone fell from my numb fingers as I looked down at Cricket again.
He was dead.
I stared into glassy brown eyes and gave into my shock.
It seemed to me that I blinked and he was there, looming in front of me like some righteous angel come to condemn me to hell. The waning sun filtering in through the windows cast a halo around his broad fame but obscured his face in a veil of shadows. I didn’t need to see it to know he was handsome. I’d memorized his features a long time ago, the broad crest of his forehead over the strong brows, the pure jade green of his eyes and the way they creased at the corners in a constant brooding squint or in a rare grin that broke open the planes of his face so that his blazing spirit poured through like light through cracks in the darkness. He was handsome enough to be famous but worn in a way that made him sexy, like a weathered cowboy or a sheriff from the Wild West. He even smelled like that, warm and comforting like sun-kissed man and freshly tilled earth.
Even submerged in a deep haze of shock, I knew him.
I’d know Lionel Danner anywhere, anytime even if I was blind, deaf, and struck dumb.
“Jesus Christ,” he cursed as I blinked up at him.
He was in front of me in two long strides, his rough tipped fingers delicately pinching my chin. I stared up at him as he took stock of me with implacable eyes, noting the blood drying on my skin and clothes, the dead carcass that was Cricket lying on the floor at our feet.
He seemed more concerned with me than the very dead body.
“What the fuck did that piece of shit do to you?” he grumbled low in his chest.
I blinked and wished that I could find my voice because I wanted to laugh at him.
I wanted to tease him and ask why he wasn’t assuming it was me, as it always had been, who had done something wrong.
I wanted to cry and ask him what hadn’t Cricket done to me?
But for the first time in my life, I had no voice.
I was just as much a body without soul as Cricket was dead on the ground.
“Rosie,” he said, more of a breath than sound.
I watched him from deep within myself as he shifted into a crouch before me and his fingers on my chin slipped in the blood splatter then tightened almost painfully.
The hurt grounded me, but it was the vivid clarity of his green eyes that pulled me like a hand from the depths of my wretchedness.
“For once in your goddamn life, you are going to listen to me and obey. I’m going to get you up out of that bloody swamp you’re sittin’ in and put you in a chair. Then I’m going to call this in. While we wait for the police to show, you’re going to look me in the eye and tell me what happened here. You hear me, Harleigh Rose?”
I was nodding before I could even process his words.
His glare hardened. “Wanna hear that voice.”
“Why do I need to look you in the eye?” I asked, surprisingly steady.