Viper. I heard Z talking to him yesterday. So that’s the new boss who owns him now. That’s who Z sold his soul to, and apparently he’s trying to sell mine and Bruiser’s along with it.
“That’s an issue between you and your boss,” I say carefully, like I’m talking to a feral dog that might bite. “You aren’t putting me back in that closet or separating me from our son again.”
I reach behind me blindly, past my son, feeling for the front door handle because if I can just get us outside, then we can run. My fingers brush the cool metal, and hope flares in my chest for just a second.
Which is when Z pulls the gun from the holster.
Bruiser screams, and the sound is so high and pure with terror that it feels like it rips something loose inside my chest. Like he’s just torn out a piece of my heart and I’m watching it fall to the floor between us.
I spin around immediately, wrapping my arms around my son and pushing his head down so he can’t see his dad pointing a gun at his mom. So this moment doesn’t burn itself into his brain the way so many of my traumatic childhood memories burned themselves into mine and never let go.
I never imagined Z would go this far, even after everything else. How can the boy who used to build pillow forts with me and cry at dog food commercials and hold my hair back when I was sick pull agunon me while the child he helped me raise watches on? How did we get here from there?
“What is wrong with you?” I cry, and it comes out raw and desperate. “Z, it’sme. It’sus.”
“You aren’t leaving me!” Z shouts, and that’s when I see it while looking over my shoulder at him and keeping Bruiser’s face pressed against my stomach. His eyes aren’t right. His pupils are too small, just little pinpoints in the afternoon light coming through the window.
That little pipe I saw yesterday. Is it meth? Oh God, there’s nothing left of the boy I knew in those vacant, pinprick eyes. He’s been replaced by this hollow creature.
How the hell do I protect Bruiser against this crazy stranger with a gun pulled on us when I have nothing but my own body to use as a shield?
But something catches my eye in the periphery, registering through the useless panic flooding my brain. Just there, through the window across the living room, behind Z’s shoulder.
Is that?—
I distrust my eyes at first because it can’t be; there’s no way he could have followed me, or would be stupid enough to?—
Oh my God,it is.
My eyes jerk back to Z as Caleb Graham comes running full speed straight toward the large back window with his entire body aimed at the glass like a human battering ram.
I brace my son’s body tighter behind my back and tuck my own head down as Caleb braces his arms in front of his face for the only protection he’s going to get before he cannonballs through the living room window in an explosion of shattering glass.
NINETEEN
CALEB
A plan.
A plan would have been better.
But then after I hopped the fence into the backyard and took a peek inside the window, I saw that rat bastard raise a gun at Harper and her son.
Logic and plans and anything else kind of left the building at that point.
I just had to get to Harper as fast as humanly possible. Which seemed to require going through the window. So through the window I went.
As I wascrashing throughthe window with my full body, that was when the brief thought flashed?—
Oh, an actualplanmight’ve been smarter.
Too late.
Because I land hard on my knees through a crash of splintering wood bits and shattered glass—so much glass—before rolling awkwardly sideways.
And then the loudest noise I’ve ever heard in my life explodes right near my ear.
A gunshot.