Mary is resisting my tug toward the truck, and Cole is whining about a kitten and rescuing the kitten and fuck my life.

I swoop him up in my arms, and pull Mary along. “Octavia needs us. Come on now.”

She said she’s fine. She’s at home now, with her family, and she only wanted to warn me—that someone attacked her, and threatened her to keep away from me.

Told her that everyone around me dies.

What in the fucking hell.

I don’t even care that I’m gonna break up the family meeting, barge into her house unannounced and scare them all off.

I’m scared myself. Fucking terrified. I need to check on her, see for myself that she’s okay, and nothing, fucking nothing can keep me away from her tonight.

Yeah, so the kids were about to turn in, and I’m disrupting their day schedule. If this deviation from their daily fucking ritual scars them for life, I’ll live with it. And the award of the Best Dad of the Year goes to…

I drive slowly, forcing myself not to step on the gas. Endangering my kids isn’t worth it. Let the only scars they bear be psychological.

Christ, a therapist would have a field day with me.

Thank fuck I avoid their kind like the plague. If one got hold of me now, I’d be locked up, maybe even in a straitjacket—because I’m vibrating with rage. When I get my hands on the guy who touched Octavia and frightened her like that, the guy circling around my family like a goddamn shark, all bets are off. I’m gonna wring that motherfucker’s neck.

Yeah, see? A good thing I avoid therapists. And fuck, I can’t stop my mind from spinning around in useless circles, jumping back and forth.

Always coming back to Octavia, and my kids, and the riddle of the messages.

The town is tiny. I’m outside Octavia’s house in two minutes. Grabbing my grumpy kids from the backseat, I storm up to the house and lay in on the doorbell.

The person who opens the door is not Octavia. That’s the first thing that registers, and I stare at the blond, slight girl who stares back at me, eyes wide.

Forcing my last remaining neurons to work, I bring forth her name. “Augusta?”

Her mouth quirks, and suddenly she looks quite a lot like Octavia. “Just Gigi. And you’re Matt Hansen. Come on in.”

I don’t ask her how she knows who I am. I mean, a bearded guy with two little kids appearing on the doorstep—who else could I be?

“You shouldn’t open the door to strangers,” I mutter as I follow her inside.

“Sir, yessir,” she says with a grin. “You’re really hardcore, aren’t you?”

Hardcore? I frown as I step inside their living room, Mary squealing when she spots Octavia and trying to free her hand from mine.

I release her and she shoots up to Tay like a dog after a rabbit. Octavia grabs her and lifts her on her lap, and now Cole is trying to dive off me head-first, so I lower him before he manages to slip out of my grip.

When I look up again, I find several pairs of eyes watching me.

But I only care about Octavia’s bright blue gaze. Cole is trying to climb onto her lap, and she helps him up, giving me a faint smile. She looks pale, I note, and there’s a scratch on her cheek. And her throat. A red line there.

Christ.

I keep cataloguing the hurts I can see, feeding my anger, keeping still in the middle of the room with her family all around when all I wanna do is stride up to her, pick her up in my arms and keep her safe.

What will her family think? Her mother, sitting primly in a loveseat, her face an older version of Octavia, her graying hair pulled back. Her blonde sister who’s still grinning like the cat who caught the canary and is planning how to eat it. And her brother, Merc for Mercury, with his blond hair and light blue eyes who’s looking at me calmly, as if he expected me to show up.

If so, he’s the only one. The rest of the family are staring at me like I’m ET with a beard.

Octavia is okay, I tell myself again. She’s fine, right here, my kids in her arms, but I can’t get my heart to stop racing, my rage and fear looking for an outlet they can’t find.

And she comes to me. She gets up, takes my kids’ hands and comes toward me. “Are you all right?” she asks.

My eyesight blurs. She was hurt because of me, and she is concerned about me. I don’t fucking know what to do with this.

That funny breathing thing my lungs do? It’s the opposite. It’s as if my chest is expanding, and I’m inhaling all the oxygen of the world.

I love her.

She’s in my arms before I have time to process the thought, the feeling, the concept, my kids squirming at our sides, poking their heads and hands between us, but they’re not pulling us apart, only merging us more tightly together.

“Goddammit, Tay.” I bury my face in her hair, tug her against me, my dick hard despite my worry, because it can’t be any other way around her. “What the fuck. I thought…”

I can’t even finish the sentence.

I tip her head up and kiss her, not caring anymore what her family thinks of me, the bearded savage who ravaged their daughter. Did they even know before tonight, before now, that we’re more than employer and employee? That I fucked their daughter? That I care for her more than I admit even to myself?

She breaks the kiss, strokes my bristly cheek. “I’m okay,” she says.

The hell she is. “I’ll kill Ross.”

And to hell with John insisting I lie low for a while.

“Shhh.” She laughs quietly. “I said I’m okay. And I don’t think it was him.”

At some point she starts to pull away, but I don’t let her, keeping an arm around her. Can’t bear to part from her again, not after this. She tugs me toward the sofa and we follow, me and the kids. We sit together, side by side, the kids flanking us.

Like a family.

Her mother is frowning at us, and yeah, I bet she had no idea about how things really are between us. Hell, I wasn’t sure until tonight.

I had an inkling, sure. My dreams, my reactions to her, my thoughts around her, they all told me what I now know.

She’s become part of my life, part of my heart. Losing her now would probably kill me. Finish the job.

And I don’t care, or think about turning back.

Too late for that.

* * *

“You sure you don’t know who attacked you?” Gigi asks her. “You said his voice was familiar.”

“It was?” I turn to Octavia, who shrugs. “Are you sure?”

“Not really.”

Turns out I walked right into the middle of her recounting of the events. Figures. The moment she called me I dropped everything, took the kids and headed straight here. The attack was twenty minutes ago, tops.

I rub my hand over her shoulder, down her arm, and she leans into me.

Her brother clears his throat, glancing from us to his mother and back. “So… no idea who that was? It wasn’t Ross, you said. Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. Also, I think Ross is taller.”

“Maybe one of his buddies?” Gigi says.

“Why would one of his buddies do that?” Merc asks, sounding baffled.

“How would I know, dumbass? Maybe he owes Ross a favor? Maybe Ross sent him to drive suspicions away from himself? Tati said she went and confronted him today.”

“You what?” My jaw clenches and my teeth grit with the curses ripping up my throat. “Tay, what did you do?”

She squeezes my hand, reassuring, and I take a breath. Since when do I need her reassurance so much? It curbs my anger, reminds me that I’m angry on her behalf, not at her.

Not at the whole damn world, at everyone and no one. Not anymore.

She’s changing me. Poking at all the claws and fangs. Fearless. Pulling me out of the dark after all this time.

This goddamn girl…

“I just went and told him to stop harassing us,” she’s saying, her small hand still in mine, her gaze level as if daring her family to comment on the gesture. “He denied doing any of it. And that was it. I left and headed home.”

But there’s something she’s not saying. I’m so damn attuned to her by now, I know she’s holding back. She has a tell, I realize. She’s gone very still, barely breathing.

What happened out there? Why won’t she tell her family? The urge to get her alone is getting stronger by the second.

“It has to be Ross,” I tell her. She went and faced him, and then she was attacked. It’s clear as day. That motherfucker Ross went into a rage and tried to hurt her.

She thinks it’s not him? Fuck that. Of course it’s him, the little coward.

“I told the police all this, what I saw, what I thought,” she says. “On the phone.”

“And what did they say?” Merc asks.

“That I should file a report as soon as I can, and that I shouldn’t walk outside alone at night.” A flush colors her cheeks. “As if I haven’t been doing that all my life. It’s safe here.”

“Obviously not anymore,” her mom says sternly, and I glance at her. Something tells me she’s not normally this severe, if the laughter lines around her mouth and eyes are anything to go by. A happy little family. The doting mom, the funny little sister, the pensive younger boy.

And Octavia… They’re scared for her, and I’m the cause. I need to solve this fucking riddle, but how can I protect her without pushing her away?

I’m done pretending. Tired of fighting it. Fighting how much I need her in my life.

And yet I’ll do anything it takes to keep her safe.