I’m losing her.

I can feel it happening with every minute she spends chasing down leads in Redding, constantly scrubbing through email searches, phone calls, public records. She’s slipping through my fingers just like my father, consumed by this demon that’s eating her alive, and just like my father I feel like there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

No way I can save her.

It's like she doesn’t even see me half the time, even though I’ve been by her side constantly for the last two weeks. Little Joannie's disappearance is hollowing out the woman I love, and it's an entire field of thorns in my soul.

The only time I can coax her down is when I kiss her, hold her, make her forget.

If only for a few short hours while I love her to sleep, tease her body till the only thought in her mind is animal pleasure, the only word on her lips is my name.

Gabe.

When she's moaning real sweet for me, I feel like a king again. Just wish it would last.

The moment it's over, and she comes out of her ecstasy haze, staring at me with those bright pixie eyes, we're both seeing the same mammoth in the room.

I feel so goddamn helpless.

But I’m gonna hold on to her as long as I can.

As long as she’ll let me.

And I can’t help how my heart jumps, when my phone rings with her number not long after she's supposed to be getting off work. Usually I'd already be on my way to meet her at her place, but today I got sucked down an internet wormhole of my own, reading up on the psychology of abusive fathers and kidnappers.

I still don’t believe it’s Harmon, but fuck, I’m trying to see what she sees.

Sky knows him better, after all. I try like hell to match Harmon to that textbook psych profile to predict his next move.

Problem is, he doesn’t fit.

But I completely forget Harmon as I swipe my phone and lift it to my ear. “Hey there, darlin’.”

“Gabe?” Her voice is a tight hiss. “Are you coming? I need to show you something.”

The tone of her voice instantly sends my alarm bells into overdrive. I drop my feet off the desk –something I shouldn’t be doin’ in an AirBnB anyway, when Mama taught me better – and lean forward. “What is it? You okay?”

“I’m fine. Just...get here as quick as you can.”

“You gonna tell me what ha –”

No. She ain't.

I’m talking to dead air.

I stare at the phone for a minute, then rub my temples, pocket my phone, and get up to head out to my truck. It’s only through sheer willpower that I don’t run, or floor it out of there at a hundred miles an hour.

This girl’s got me dangling on a string, turning me into an overgrown yo-yo, and now that string's pulled tight enough to snap.

Even keeping right at the speed limit, I get to Sky’s house in record time. She’s sitting on the front step, looking small and forlorn, her knees pulled up and a piece of crumpled paper clutched in her hand. The door behind her swings partially open, and it’s not hard to see, even from my truck, that it’s been bashed inward. The plate around the latch is completely warped, the wood splintered on both the door and the frame.

Someone busted the lock in.

What. The. Fuck?

Tight tension crawls over me like an army of daddy long legs, and I’m out of the truck like a cannon shot. I can’t breathe.

Some sick, demented fuck came after her. Somebody came for my girl.

“Sky?” I tumble closer to her. “You okay? What happened? Nobody hurt you, did they?”

There’s a delayed reaction before she responds, pulling out of that haunted inner world she’s been sunk into for weeks.

“Huh?” she murmurs numbly, looking up from the letter and at me, then shakes her head. “Nah. I wasn’t home when they broke in. I'd have kicked their asses if I were. Nothing in the house was touched. Already looked for prints. They just left this caught in the door.”

She offers me the paper. I take it carefully by the edges, already thinking about fingerprints, but mostly just trying to settle my hackles and the urge to kill something in my blood while I scan the note.

It’s handwritten. Several lines in these big, stabbing Sharpie slashes where you can tell some evil genius was trying to disguise their handwriting.

KNOW YOUR PLACE OR IT WILL BE IN A GRAVE

LET DEAD DOGS LIE OR JOIN THEM

HARMON HID THE GIRL AND YOU’LL NEVER EVER SEE HER AGAIN

Fuck!

Skylar drags herself to her feet, looking up at me with almost manic eyes. “Jesus, I knew it. Harmon has her, and he’s run away to Redding.”

It takes a minute to push my voice past the rising red tide of rage inside me. Someone threatened Sky, and every last little bit of Southern gentleman inside me is burning up like paper in the face of this fire of rage.

I take a deep, slow breath and force myself to focus. Be rational. She’s looking at me like she needs me to believe her, needs me to say the one thing that'll validate all the work she’s put in, make it mean something.

I wish I fucking could. I wish the cold, bitter truth didn't have my balls pinched in a vise.

“Darlin’, I don’t think so,” I say, trying to be gentle, looking down at the note again. “Why would Harmon talk about himself in third person? Makes no sense.”

She blinks. “What?”

“It says ‘Harmon hid the girl.’ Not ‘I hid the girl. See?’” I point to the line.

A frown wrinkles her brow. “Well, of course he wouldn’t say ‘I hid the girl.’ That’s practically an admissible confession. Besides, he’s in jail, so he probably had someone else send it. You just know –”

“Is it a confession, Sky? Only if you’re assuming it’s from Harmon. Just sending this is a confession, yeah, if it’s him. But that's a mighty big if. He’s not smart, but he ain’t dumb neither. Not dumb enough to basically hand himself over to a life sentence.” I shake my head.

I hate bursting her bubble, but there’s hope here if we can get some info out of this note. “Know what? I think it’s somebody else trying to throw you off their trail. They want you looking at Harmon, darlin', not them. If they wanted credit for the kidnapping they’d have said ‘I’ and then left you to figure out it was someone else gloating. This ain’t that. This asshole's genuinely scared you’re gonna find them. They're trying to send you off chasing tails in the wrong direction.”

“Who?” she demanded, her voice breaking, high and sharp with desperation. “If it’s not Harmon, if it’s not one of his shitface friends, then who?” She takes a shaky breath, her face crumpling in this mixture of grief, fury, and hopelessness that cuts a hole in my heart. “I can’t start at ground zero, Gabe. Jesus Christ, I –”

“You don’t have to, darlin’. You don’t.” I'm quick to reassure her, pulling her close, wrapping her up close with the note still clutched in my fist. She feels even smaller than usual against me, this fragile hollow shell lighter than air and frailer than brittle glass. My throat feels tight, but I try to keep my voice soothing as I say, “This letter’s a lead. We can turn it over to the police, and they can dust your door and the letter for prints. Handwriting analysis, too. Looks like they tried to fake it, but that leaves markers. They’ll be able to tell us something.”

“Like ‘middle-aged white male’ is going to narrow anything down. Gabe, that could be almost anybody!” Her voice is muffled against my chest, bitter. Her fingers curl into my shirt.

“Yeah, but prints will tell us who that middle aged white male is. Any prick sloppy enough to pull this is gonna be sloppy enough to leave tracks.”

I nudge my knuckles under her chin, guiding her to look up at me with those heartbreaking blue eyes. When I’d wanted to see past the icy surface, I never wanted it to be like this – ice cracked to leave raw liquid pain seeping through the fissures.

This girl’s got more heart than anyone has any right to, and all this pain is wringing that precious heart dry. I'm not gonna let it empty into a desert.

“Call it in,” I say quietly. “We’ll talk to the cops, and then I want to pack you up and take you to my place for a while.”

Her eyes flash. “Your place? But –”

“It’s not safe here.” I gotta get this out fast, before this stubborn little firecracker has a chance to start a real argument with me. “They know where you live. They know how to get to you if they want to do something more drastic. Me, they’d have to follow me, and I’d have caught them. You’re safer with me. Sky, don't fight what we both know.”

“I don’t want to be safe!” she flares. “I want to find Joannie. And if that means being here when her kidnapper comes for me then –”

“Then tell me how you're gonna help Joannie if you’re in the hospital, or dead?” I shake my head. “Don’t make that choice, Sky. We gotta do this smart. Use patience, use our heads, not our anger.”

Her lashes tremble, and for a second, I can see the moment when she hovers on the verge of bursting into primal fighting tears, furious and wild. Her Navy discipline comes out at the last second, and she takes a deep, slow breath and releases it before fishing her phone from her pocket.

“Fine,” she says. “Whatever.”

I catch the three numbers she types on the screen before she turns away from me, glaring mutinously past the house and toward the beach.

Okay. I'll take my 'whatever' with a side of 'fuck you' if it gets her to listen.

She can be as spitting mad at me as she wants, just as long as she’s safe.

After a brief, muttered conversation with the cops, she stalks inside to start packing. I wait outside, smoothing the note carefully.

Don’t want to smudge any prints.

I read it over and over again, but I can’t get anything new from it. It’s a cipher, all right, but it’s the first real confirmation we’ve gotten that there’s somebody besides Harmon involved. No way he could’ve done this from behind bars, and I don’t think he’d waste his one phone call getting some goon to pull a prank to scare Sky off.

This screams amateur, which doesn’t make sense.

Amateur...or some jackass pretending to be.

Who the hell’s gonna be smart enough to evade Sky and the cops for months, but dumb enough to pull a newbie move like this?

We must be getting close.

I got a picture in my head now. Somebody who's never done nothing wrong before except maybe littering, jaywalking, skipping out on a traffic ticket.

Shit. We ain’t looking for a criminal mastermind. We’re looking for someone upstanding, smart enough to be an outlaw, but without the guts. He's planned this for months. Maybe it’s specific to Joannie, or maybe it’s any kid will do and he planned the place, but not the kid.

Probably set up all his contingency plans, then laid in wait till he saw his moment. Eventually, it was time to make a move. Snatch the kid, then disappear, lay low.

Everything’s going just fine. He's got her. But just in case he keeps an eye on the headlines and gets to know more about the family he's done broken.

Starts stalking ‘em, learning ‘em.

That’s the thing with people who do shit like this. Even when they don’t fit the profile of psychos, they still gotta insert themselves in the investigation because they gotta know what’s going on.

The difference between this guy and a classic psychopath is that he doesn’t need to be known to law enforcement or the victims. He’s just gotta know what’s going on. It’s about safety, not ego. He needs to keep one step ahead.

Only, when his plan goes south, when the usual suspect turns up clean and he knows now we’ll be looking for someone else, he panics. All his carefully crafted escape routes are falling apart, right when he thought he was gonna get away with it.

He’s acting on impulse. He's running on fear.

Before he had months to plan, but now he feels like he’s got seconds to get away and the Feds are breathing down the back of his neck. Worst thing he’s got to worry about is a little spitfire woman who will fucking gut him alive if she ever gets her hands on him. She’s the dog with a bone, the one who won’t let go, the one who’ll find him.

She’s the one he’s got to get rid of.

She's the one I have to save from his lunatic ass.

But he doesn’t have the balls for anything deeper than kidnapping, so he’s gonna try to scare her. And that’s his mistake.

Because I know Skylar Szabo, and Skylar Szabo don’t scare.

She just gets madder.

One thing's for sure: Mr. Dumbass is right to be afraid.

I can see all that in the letter, like I’m building a criminal profile, but one thing I can’t see is a face. Somebody like this wouldn’t have a face. It’s a stranger, probably, unknown to the Szabo family while by now he’d know everything about them. I’m seeing this as a crime of opportunity.

I just need this fucker to slip up one more time and fill in that blank where a face should be.

There’s still something bothering me about the letter.

Something about the phrasing. I've been sitting here thinking, working every bit of my grey matter, for the last half hour.

The note feels forced, artificial. It ain’t right. The term is let sleeping dogs lie, not let dead dogs lie. You’re supposed to let sleeping dogs lie because if you wake ‘em up, they might bite you. That’s enough of a threat, but this one’s saying let dead dogs lie or Skylar’s gonna join them.

Leave a dead body alone, or you might end up dead too.

Dead body.

God, don’t let this fucker be implying Joannie’s dead.

Of course, I’m gonna keep that thought to myself.

Sky stays in the house till the quick burst of sirens, on and off again, alerts us right before two cop cars come pulling around the bend. We end up with three nearly identical uniformed officers, same dark hair, same crew cut, same tired we really don’t want to be here look, and one forensics guy with a small case and a hard-put-on stare. I can see Sky’s about to get herself arrested for assaulting an officer with their lazy indifference, so I run interference and do the talking as much as I can.

It’s the most frustrating hour of my life, while they ask her about potential witnesses and then follow up with questions like it’s somehow her fault she lives off this little track with no one around to see, as if she’d moved into this house just to make it hard to trace a potential crime.

Bullshit. They're just being thorough, probably, but it pisses me off royally.

I’m about ready to risk disorderly conduct by the time they’ve put the note in a sealed evidence bag, dusted the door and frame for prints, inspected around the house, shut their damn yaps, and concluded there’s no other signs of forced entry. Nothing the perpetrator left behind that could be useful.

They promise to call back once they’ve processed the evidence, but it’s not hard to see from the slump of Sky’s shoulders that she doesn’t have much hope, or faith.

I don’t blame her. There was an undercurrent with these cops.

Like they knew this lead wouldn’t go anywhere, and they weren’t gonna even bother to try.

They were just going through the motions.

Skylar’s silent after they leave. I wrap my arm around her shoulders and squeeze. “Come on, darlin’. Get your things, and let’s go.”

“Gabe?” she whispers, her voice soft, lost, disbelieving. “I'm...I'm gonna have to tell Monika the truth, won't I? I’ll never see Joannie again, will I?”

Something breaks inside me, and I feel my own eyes burning. Leaning down, I press my lips to the top of her head and try to muffle the rough ache in my voice as I murmur against her hair.

“We will, Sky. We will. You won't have to tell your sis a damn thing till her little girl's home. Mark my words.”

We will see her again, I tell myself one more time. Just for good measure.

Yes, we fucking will. No matter what I have to do.

It’s a miserable few days at my place, and they turn even more dark and hopeless with every hour the cops turn up nothing on that note.

Sky’s not even up for the usual distractions, and at night she lies there like a wet dishrag in my arms pretending to sleep. I don’t even try to pretend.

I just lie there and worry about her, but she doesn’t say a damn thing to my hangdog looks every morning when she gets up and slogs to work.

I’m not quite sure when she snapped. I just know one night she doesn’t call, doesn’t come back. I tell myself not to call her. She doesn’t owe me a damn thing. What we’re doing is just temporary and I know that, even if there’s nothing temporary about the hooks she’s dug into my heart.

They pull me toward her constantly, emotional gravity, hurting with every sharp point digging deeper and deeper into me.

We don’t have the kind of relationship where she’s supposed to let me know if she’s working late so I can save dinner and won’t worry something nasty happened to her, with how dangerous her job is.

But goddamn, part of me wishes we did.

I can see it. I can see life in that little shack of hers, finally settling down, finally finding a place to stay.

I can see sitting on her rickety back porch facing the beach, propping my feet up on the porch rail and taking in the sunrise over the waves, a Sunbeam stole from the heavens in my arms. I can see waking up before her, making her breakfast, and kissing her goodbye on the way out. I can see seven p.m. texts telling me she’s working out some knotty thing and won’t be home till after midnight, so don’t wait up, get some sleep, love you baby, goodnight.

I can see myself waiting up anyway, a covered plate of jambalaya warming in the oven and drying out when we forget all about it because even when she’s tired and her hair’s a mess, she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and all I want to do is kiss her awake before loving her to sleep.

I want to write that in my book, but I’m afraid to.

‘Cause it’ll never happen. It just ain't in the cards.

And I don’t want to get confused some twenty, thirty, forty years down the road when my brain ain’t right and the things in this book make me miss something I never had.

Fuck.

I can’t be letting my head drift like this. Point number one, right now, is finding out where Sky is. I’m still her bodyguard, whether she likes it or not, and that nagging feeling I’ve had since the note showed up is telling me something’s wrong.

I try her cell, but no answer.

Fuck again.

A text turns up nothing after ten minutes of waiting for a response. Swearing under my breath, I dial Landon.

“Hey,” he says. I can hear the sounds of something sizzling, probably a skillet. I’m interrupting dinner. Damn. “What’s up?”

“Sky,” I blurt out. “She working late tonight?”

I can hear the frown in Landon’s voice. “Nah, man. She went home before I did. Clocked out right at five. She’s not with you?”

“No. She normally comes right back to my place after work, too. She’s not answering her phone or texts, either.” I try to keep my voice calm, level, even though I’m running my fingers through my hair fit to pull it out.

Landon must be able to hear the edge of panic because his voice turns hard, focused. That voice I remember from hot days under desert suns, scoping mission parameters with our pal, Eden. “Do I need to mobilize a team?”

“No. Maybe. Fuck. I don’t know.” I take a deep breath. “Let me do some checking around, and I’ll let you know soon.”

I hang up the phone and rack my brain for where Sky might be. I should check her house first, then maybe hit up some of the bars where she’d been trawling for info on Harmon.

Yeah. That’s a good plan.

I don’t even remember getting in my truck. All I remember is peeling out of the driveway of my place and hitting the highway. I shouldn’t be this goddamn freaked, but after that animal busted her door in and left that note, all I can think about is every horrible, atrocious thing that could happen to her if I’m not there to protect her.

It’s like my heart remembers to beat again, when I see her old beat-up Buick parked outside her place and the lights on in the window. I pull my Dodge in behind her car, kill the engine, and take a minute to just breathe so I don’t go barging in there like Tarzan, yelling myself all hoarse.

I don’t even know what to say to her. Maybe I should just leave. I’m her bodyguard; I’m not her keeper – and she won’t take kindly to me trying to cage her.

No. Fuck it.

Maybe she’ll laugh it off as me being an overprotective lunk, kiss me in that way she has, and come home with me for dinner.

I step out of the truck and knock on the door. I hear cursing from inside, and there’s a delay before she answers that worries me.

When she opens the door, it’s barely half an inch. Just enough for one hard, wary blue eye to look out – and it doesn’t soften in the slightest when she catches sight of me.

My intuition screams trouble. Trouble with a capital Sky.

“What?” she asks flatly.

“Well, good evenin’ to you, too, darlin’.” I spread my hands. “Not gonna let me in?”

She eyes me up and down as distrustfully as if we’re strangers. Not people who know each other’s lips and how it tastes to lick sweat and heat and hunger from each other’s skin. Then she steps back, letting the door swing open on its own.

“Fine.”

She turns and stalks away. What the hell's going on here?

I’m all kinds of sideways right now, but I follow her in anyway and shut the door, securing it with the chain. The latch and lock are still a mess of twisted metal and splinters.

“You mad at me for something, darlin’?” I ask, as I trail her toward the bedroom.

She tosses a look over her shoulder that says yes even when she says, “No. What would I have to be mad at you about?”

“Dunno. But you didn’t come back to my place after work and didn’t call to let me know where you’d be.”

“You’re not my father, Gabe. Or my husband,” she bites off. “I don’t owe you that. Can't I have a life without a babysitter?”

Steam heats my ears. Something's got her riled up, and an ugly lead weight in my gut tells me I'm not gonna like what that something is. Not one bit. Still, I've got to figure it out.

“Right, Sky, but technically I'm still doing the job Landon hired me to do. Ain't here to treat you like a child. I’m just trying to keep you safe.”

“I’ll keep myself safe.” She rounds on me with a snarl, and that’s when I notice, as we step into her bedroom, that she’s got a half-packed duffel bag on her bed. “Frankly, I'm sick of being babysat, nannied, and flipping cockblocked at every turn. I'm sick of wasting time! I need to do something, before it's too late, and I don’t need you tagging along.”

It hits me then.

She’s leaving, and she’s already mad at what she knows I’m gonna say before I’ve even said it.

“You’re going to Redding,” I croak, throat dry.

With a seething glance, she flings her closet doors open and starts ripping clothes off the hangers and throwing them limply toward the bag. “Not that it’s your business, but yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I need to do something useful. Because I can’t let that asshole slip farther and farther away. Because I can't wait until it's really, truly too late.” She turns away from the closet and starts stuffing the flung clothes into the bag in messy wads, her voice thick and cracking. “A bunch of my Dad’s old biker friends are up there. I’ll twist their arms if I have to. Get them to put out more feelers and dig up more intel.”

“Sky.” I reach for her, but she jerks away from me, rounding the other side of the bed, putting it between us and still attacking that bag. I let my hands fall helplessly. “Redding’s just gonna upset you more if you go there and wind up chasing your tail. Let it go. Let’s get out of here for a weekend. Relax, clear our heads. We’ll think better for it, maybe come up with something new, get right back at it with fresh eyes and find what we missed. A person can't run themselves down trying to force shit like this. The clues might be right under our noses, but we're too tired and burnt out and pissed off to see 'em. You need rest, focus. We could spend a few days in wine country...”

“I don’t have a few days!” she flares, flinging a shirt with renewed force. “Don’t you get it, Gabe? This is wasted time, every second he gets away with Joannie. I can’t let him get more lead time on me. I can’t.”

“And what if this is a dead end?” I try to keep my voice calm, soothing. “What if whoever took Joannie's just buying time, sending you chasing Harmon to no good use?”

“It’s not,” she says tightly. “This is Harmon pulling shit to throw us off the trail. He stashed Joannie with a friend, and I’m going to find him before it’s too late.”

“And if that friend doesn’t exist?”

“He does.”

“Sky...” I sigh. “I’m just not sure. My intuition says this ain’t right. It's too clean, hoping to find anything up there.”

“Fuck your intuition.” It’s low, seething, and when she looks up at me, that ice is back in her eyes.

I haven’t seen it in what feels like forever, especially directed at me, and it’s like an icicle stabbed right in my heart to see this clear, chill blue looking through me like she doesn’t even know me.

“Sky,” I say, but the second I take a step forward, she takes three more back.

“No. You aren’t Joannie’s family. I am. I can feel her, Gabe. Feel her getting farther away from me!” Her voice chokes, and she turns her face away, like she can’t even stand to show emotion in front of me now. “I don’t need your approval to go look for her. I don’t need you. I never asked for you to come, and I don’t care if you think it’s a bad idea. I don’t care what you think, period. I need you out of my life. I never invited you into it in the first place, and you just keep getting in the damn way. You just keep...” She swallows roughly, hiding the last word. “I can’t think straight around you. Maybe it's not your fault, but I can't carry on like this. I can't lose her because I got myself wrapped up in something I should've been smart enough to sidestep all along. So...I'm not trying to hurt you. But you can stop being my bodyguard, stop playing at this boyfriend shit, and stop getting in the way of what I need to do.”

I can’t move. I can’t speak.

It’s like I’m an anvil, and she’s just hit me with a massive fucking hammer of hurt, and the reverberations echo through me. Playing.

Playing?

She thinks all this time I’ve spent with her, every touch, every kiss, is just playing? And now I’m just an unwanted asshole chaperone who gets in the way?

I feel like a goddamn dumpster. Trash she just wadded up and threw away like it was nothing.

I can’t help my first instinct to shut down. Not show anything.

You don’t show the wounds, they can’t fucking grind their knuckles into them and make you bleed even more. Dunno if that’s a military thing or if I've just been this way my whole life, ‘cause I always was way too damn soft. If I didn’t learn to close it off, harden up, wall off, I’d have been a human punching bag my whole life.

And I close it off now behind mile-thick concrete walls as I look at Sky, steeling my voice. I don’t sound like me, when I speak again. I almost sound like her, cold and emotionless.

“I’m doing my job,” I tell her. “That’s it. I’m being paid to protect you, Sky, and you're right. I can’t stop you from making your own mistakes no matter what I’m being paid.”

“You already cashed the check, right?” she fires back bitterly. “As far as I’m concerned, you’ve earned your keep. If you’re waiting for me to leave a tip on the nightstand for being a good fuck, it’s not going to happen. So, you can get the hell out. Leave me alone.”

Fuck.

I pinch my jaw so tight I think my teeth might crack. She knows how to hit me where it hurts. I brought that one on myself, though. Bringing up the money. Reminding her exactly what our entire relationship has been.

A transaction, one way or another.

Guess we’re both in it only for what we get out of it, yeah. Except, now I know I’ll never get what I really want out of this tangled, frustrating, maddening, wonderful mess with this woman.

I’ll never get to know what it feels like to have her love me.

And I can’t stay here for this. She doesn’t need to ask me to leave twice.

I turn and walk out, letting the door slam shut behind me.

For a long time, I sit in my truck, just staring at her house.

I can’t breathe. I can’t make my fucking lungs work, my head is roaring, and I don’t trust my hands to stay steady on the wheel.

I gotta get this out of me.

It’s like there’s a demon in my chest, getting larger and larger, till it’s gonna claw out through my rib cage. I fumble my book out, flick the cap off the pen, and lash at the blank white pages.

She’s so goddamn perfect for me.

Even the parts that hurt.

She’s also damned near impossible to have.

Sky's a roller coaster. A hurricane. The most fucked up miracle and the holiest hell I ever had.

I want her even when she's spitting mad, cursing me out of her life. I want her even when my pride tells me to flip this shitshow the finger and just drive on up the coast, leaving it all behind.

I want her worse than the air I'm not getting in these bones because I'm too furious, too confused, too lost. I don’t know what to do.

No. That last part's a lie. I know what to do. I know what I have to do.

I look up. She’s standing in her window, just a silhouette, but I know she’s watching me.

I can feel the anger and charged, bristling emotion stretching between us. It leashes me to her, and I know damn well that even if she’s done with me, I can’t be done with her.

Not in this lifetime.

Not till I help her do what she’s gotta do. Not till I help her find Joannie, and bring that little girl home. Because I’m not gonna lose her like I lost my Dad.

I can’t.

No matter what I have to do.