She thought I was here to kill her.

She was pregnant—it was obvious despite her denial. And she still expected me to kill her. That it surprised me was strange. For the last two years of my life, everyone upon whose doorway I landed expected me to kill them. Or hurt them. Intimidate and silence them.

How quickly I’d shed that skin. In searching for her, I’d stopped being anything but this man looking for a woman. Every other part of me shaved off by my efforts.

But here she was, screwing those parts of me back to my body. Reminding me of the monster I’d been.

“I’m here to tell you you’re safe,” I said, wishing I could be anything but what I was. Wishing I could do anything to take away that look in her eye of fear and distrust. “No one is after you. No one is after your sister.”

“I don’t believe you,” she spat. Her eyes shooting out sparks. She wore no makeup, and her hair was braided in a long tail down her back, and she looked so beautiful it hurt. It squeezed me, her beauty, and I glanced away.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, staring into the window of a dress shop across the street with unseeing eyes. “I’m sorry you don’t believe me, but it’s true.”

She laughed, humorless and dry. Wind pushed stray pieces of hair across her face and I jealously watched as she pulled them away from her beautiful eyes.

I want to touch you. I’m so cold and you’re so warm and I have no right to ask. No right to even want it. But God, I want to touch you.

“It’s funny, isn’t it? How relative that is? True.” She said the word like it tasted funny in her mouth. Like it tasted bad.

“You’re having my baby,” I said. “That’s true, isn’t it?”

“I’m having my baby,” she answered staunchly.

She stared up at the endless pale blue sky and I stared at her—her swollen belly.

My baby. Our baby.

There was a reaction in my body to this news. To this truth. But I couldn’t feel it now. Or make sense of it. Or understand it. My goal… my only goal was to make her feel safe.

“Do you believe me? That you’re safe? No one—including me, especially me, is going to hurt you.”

“It’s a little late for that kind of promise isn’t it?” she asked, reminding me so clearly of that awful morning when I kicked her out of my condo.

“There are so many things I want to tell you,” I said. “So many things I should have told you.”

“It’s too late,” she said. “It’s so past too late. You told me the truth, that you were a bad man. I even knew that to be true. But I wanted to believe something else. I wanted to believe the economics student. The little boy at a diner with his mom. The teenager who joined the wrestling team just to spend time with his brother. I chose those things to be true, when I knew better.”

“I was those things,” I said.

“But you’re not anymore, are you?” Now she looked at me, her eyes bullets straight into my chest. “I saw the truth that night.”

“I’m out of the organization,” I said. “I don’t work for Lazarus or Bates anymore.”

She laughed, but nothing was funny. “Did you kill Bates too? Is that how—”

I stepped closer because she was talking too loud. She was being too reckless. Her mouth shut fast and I watched her throat bob as she swallowed. She tried to step away but I wouldn’t let her. This wasn’t a conversation she could run from.

“You’re safe,” I whispered. “But not if you talk like that. Not if you’re reckless, Abby.” I begged her to understand that, that this wasn’t a goddamned game. “Do you get that?”

Her neck and cheeks red, she nodded and the wind carried her scent to me, coffee and fried potatoes and her, beneath it. Roses and sparkle.

“I didn’t kill Bates,” I murmured in a low voice that didn’t carry past us.

“Is that supposed to change what I saw?” she asked. “Erase it?”

“No, I just hoped it would make you feel more…” I didn’t know how to do this. How to make anyone feel comfortable around me. Those three days we spent together had been such an anomaly. I’d put down all my walls. All my armor. “…at ease.”

“You told me your fucking gun wasn’t loaded,” she said with a laugh.

“It wasn’t my gun,” I said like it mattered. Like those little details meant anything. “Bates knew I didn’t carry it loaded. He always knew it.” Which made my little protest, my clinging effort to remain at some level the me I needed to be, a joke. A charade.

But I looked at her face, resolute and calm, and I knew it didn’t matter. Not to her. Not anymore.

“I never killed anyone,” I said. “Not until that night. And it doesn’t change anything. But that is true. And I’ve wondered over and over again in the last three months if I’d told you why I was the person I was, if it would have mattered. If I’d told you about my father and his debts and what they would have done to my brother, if it would have made this moment not happen.”

“Nothing can change what happened, Jack.”

“Except you’re pregnant,” I said. “And that changes everything.”

* * *

I swallowed back my childish denials. Because who was I kidding? I was having Jack’s baby. We both knew it.

“You went to the doctor? Is everything okay?” he asked, like he wanted to see an ultrasound.

“How do you know that?” I asked, chill sweeping over my body. “That I went to the doctor.”

“Because you were talking about it on Facebook,” he said. “That and other things you shouldn’t have talked about on Facebook.”

Right. The murder.

“Is that how you found me? Facebook?”

“That’s part of it, Cheetara.”

He was teasing me. Oh, how sweet that was, that he was teasing me over that name, and I suddenly wanted to tell him all about my sister and me playing Thundercats when we were kids. I wanted to make him laugh with the story of how my sister made me a lasso.

But I swallowed all of that. All those words.

“I thought I was being so careful,” I said, feeling ridiculous. The Cheetara code name. The fact that I’d tried to keep my secrets to myself in order to not burden my sister any more than I already did, only to fling them out into the world for her to handle. Honestly. If it wasn’t so terrifying it would be hilarious.

“Tell me,” he said. “Just tell me the truth. Are you healthy? Is the baby healthy?”

“Why do you feel I owe you that? The truth? When you have never given me the same? How is that fair, Jack?”

It was starting to get cold, the wind blowing down the street from the mountains to the east of us. He ran his hand over his face and I stopped myself from telling him he looked tired. I stopped myself from caring that he looked like he might fall over at any moment.

“My father was killed by Lazarus,” he said, dropping his hands to stare at me. Right at me too, like I couldn’t look away from him and the naked nature of his gaze. This was the man in those nights at his house. This was the man whose skin I knew by heart. It was shocking to see him again.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Jesse and I were in college. Mom was already dead and they found Dad shot in the back of the head in the passenger seat of his car.”

I put my fingers to my lips, holding back my sounds of sympathy.

“Jesse and I came back from school and we were cleaning stuff up. Getting the house ready to sell and all that stuff. Going through pictures. It was… endless, you know,” he said. “I just couldn’t believe how much stuff my parents had. How many things they’d kept and how far we’d all spun away from each other. Anyway, we were mostly done, Jesse and me were both getting ready to go back to our schools, Jesse really fucking reluctantly, but I didn’t want to hear it. I just wanted to get back to classes, finish my degree and put all this shit behind me. No, I needed Jesse to just…go.”

“What happened?”

“Bates showed up.”

I sucked in a breath of air and then another, forcing myself to breathe.

“My dad owed Lazarus a half a million dollars.”

I thought of that tattoo under his arm. 500,000.

“And we had two weeks to pay it back, or one of us could work it out in trade, or one, perhaps both of us would get shot in the head in the passenger seat of some car. That was the deal Bates presented to me. There was no way we had that kind of money. No way we could get that kind of money. So I sent Jesse back to school, telling him I’d handle it, and I dropped out of school and went to work for Lazarus.”

“Oh my god.”

“Mostly, I was like a trophy he kept around. A warning to his other associates that debts got paid no matter what. That no one’s child or wife was safe.”

“What happened to Jesse?” I asked.

“He quit school, came back, tried to pay off the debt by risking his life in those fucking fights. And it didn’t matter. I was already in it. I already couldn’t get out.”

“Didn’t he try and stop you?”

“Of course,” he said with a wan smile. An exhausted broken smile in his exhausted defeated face.

I don’t care, I told myself, curling my hands into fists so I wouldn’t reach for him. Push back that tangle of curls over his forehead.

“That night,” he said. “The night you saw…what you saw…we’d spent the night before that in Oakland, picking up what we thought was a shipment of drugs. We got the container open and it was…” He looked away, up to the sky as birds flew overhead. “It was women.”

I felt myself gag.

“They were all dead.”

“Stop,” I said and he did. He closed his mouth. Coughed and didn’t say any more.

He would keep it inside if that was what I asked for.

“Then what?” I asked.

“You saw what happened next.”

“No. How did you get to that point? In the office?”

“Lazarus was threatening war on everyone we met. Every dock worker, every security guard. I thought we were all going to be killed. But we got him back to the Moonlight and we all kind of lost our minds. Bates… just started beating Lazarus. Like… I’d never seen him do anything like that before. And then he told me if I killed Lazarus, the debt would be paid. I could go.”

“And so you shot him? So you could be free.”

“I’ve been running that night over and over in my brain for months, but I think… I think I shot him because I wanted to. Because he was such a cancer. An evil. And the world was better without him in it. I shot him because in my upside down world, it was the right thing to do. Bates just gave me the excuse.”

“But he set you free.”

“For the price of Lazarus’s life and my silence, yes. He set me free. I have to stay out of the city for a while. You should too, because of what you saw.”

“He texted me,” I told him. “He told me to meet you at the Moonlight. That’s why I went. I wouldn’t have gone, but I was so scared for you. After that message—”

The message when he told me he loved me. Neither of us said a word about that. We stiffened. He coughed. We might never be able to talk about that voice mail. It might just be a thing that happened in the past. Like those three days in his house.

Memories. That’s all.

“I think he brought you to the Moonlight,” he said, “because he knew I was lying to you and he knew how you felt about me. And he wanted you to see who I really was.”

“Why is that any of his business?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t understand Bates. I never will.”

We stood there for a long time, silent and breathing. The world spinning around us.

“I pushed you away, Abby,” he said, “because I never thought I’d be free. I couldn’t let you get attached. I couldn’t get attached, because I believed I would always be owned by Lazarus.”

The door to the café opened and Margaret stuck her Mrs. Claus head out and swore at me.

“The hell you doing, Abby? You got those boys in there wanting to call in the National Guard.”

“Sorry, Margaret,” I said. “I’ll be in in two seconds. Tell Dale and Doug that I’m fine. That everything is fine.”

She muttered something foul under her breath and went back inside.

“That’s my truth, Abby,” he said. “I’ve done terrible things, telling myself I was keeping my brother safe. Paying my father’s debts. I’ve turned myself into someone I never dreamed I’d be. And I’m not telling you that to make you sympathetic, but just to make you understand how I didn’t, not once, know what to do with you. How to want you and not hurt you. How to let you be in my life in any way. I messed up, I know. But I don’t know if I could have done it any differently.”

I understood that. I didn’t want to, but I did.

“And I know you want me to leave. I understand that. But I can’t, princess.” The endearment made me flinch. It made me cringe and ache. Because part of me so badly wanted to still be his princess. “You’re pregnant. And you’re alone.”

“Lots of women have babies on their own.”

“Not my baby, Abby.”

His eyes… oh, his eyes. His eyes told me he wasn’t going anywhere. His eyes told me he would not leave, and he would not push me away. Never again.

Something had happened to me since coming out here. I stopped wondering what my sister would do if she were in my place. I stopped wishing I was smarter about some things. Leaving the city and running out here had pulled away some of the doubts I lived with. Largely because there wasn’t any time anymore.

That version of me, so beautiful but so insecure—it seemed like a long time ago. A different person, even. I didn’t see my beauty when I looked in the mirror anymore, I just saw my face.

I just saw me.

And I looked at Jack and I tried to just see him, but it was difficult because he wasn’t easily seen. He was buried deep and down. And out of sight.

But I’d seen him, those three days in his apartment, I wasn’t making that up. I’d seen him.

And that man, the one I’d seen, he deserved the truth.

“I’m healthy. The baby is healthy.”

“Thank you,” he whispered, his eyes damp.

“I have to go back to work,” I told him and opened the door.

“I’m not leaving,” he said. “I’m staying in town until we get some things figured out.”

Probably he wanted to talk about the baby and the future and custody and money, and I didn’t care about those things.

Well, I did, sure. But mostly… mostly I cared about him.

I ran hundreds of miles, and here I was right back in the same spot.

In trouble. With Jack Herrara.