“I know,” I answered, unlocking the door and stepping through it. “But I’m not ready to let you go.”

“Good enough reason for me.”

She made a pillow of my chest as I sloshed down the hall, my hair, suit, and the rest of me so drenched I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be dry again. It was one of the proudest walks I’d made.

The door was waiting open for us, and inside I found a silvering man the polar opposite to Julia. He wasn’t a Dr. Jekyll at all, but like the small town docs that used to make middle of the night home visits when I was growing up in the South. He even had the old school black leather bag William and Joseph still carried around with them.

“My god,” he said like a curse when his eyes floated to Emma. “What happened to you, child?”

“My ex,” she replied as I situated her on her bed.

His hands glided down her arms, drawing an imaginary line between the bruises. Then he looked at her face and his face twisted. “Did he come at you with a hammer?” he asked, swearing under his breath. There was the first indication he and Julia shared the same DNA.

“You should have gone to the emergency room right away, Emma,” he said, scolding her in that non-threatening, affectionate way a father does. “And I’m presuming you’ve called the authorities to get the monster behind bars?”

Doc Grey and I were going to get along just fine.

“Not yet,” Emma answered, focusing on the ceiling.

“Why, pardon my French, the hell not?” He was already reaching for the phone in his pocket, about to do what Emma couldn’t right now, and I wouldn’t because she’d begged me not to.

“I will,” she said, closing her eyes. “I promise I will, just not quite yet.”

“Not quite yet?” Doc Grey repeated, his face formed in disbelief. “Emma, your body was beaten as close to death as a body can be before giving over to it. This isn’t something you wait to report a week later.”

Her head moved against the pillow. “I’ll report it tonight, I swear. I just can’t handle more than one thing at a time right now. Let me get through this,”—her eyes pointed at his opened bag—“and I’ll call them after. I don’t want to go into an interrogation room bleeding and gaping open in spots. I don’t want to be pitied.”

Her eyes fogged over, travelling back in time to a certain night when she’d lost both her parents in different ways. “Fix me up, patch what needs to be patched, so I can go in there with my head held high.”

“Child,” Doctor Grey said, patting her hand, “you came through that door with your head high.” He didn’t push calling the men in blue right then after that, he just began riffling through his bag in silence.

“Julia, my dear?” Doctor Grey said into his bag. “I think you are in serious need of some fresh air.”

That, and a new pair of nails, judging from where she’d gnawed them down to. Poor Julia, this night had really taken it out of her. The hollows beneath her eyes were blacker than usual and her eyes scampered around more neurotically than normal. She was doing justice to her goth heritage right now.

“Young man,” he said, glancing at me once.

“Hayward,” I provided, extending my hand. “Patrick Hayward.”

Doctor Grey set a roll of bandages on Emma’s bed to shake my hand. “Am I to assume you are the new man in Emma’s life who would never so much as raise your voice to her?”

“Yes, sir,” I answered.

Putting two fingers to Emma’s pulse, he nodded once. “You don’t need to be here for this,” he said, his fingers moving just outside the largest gash gaping over Emma’s cheekbone. “Would you mind escorting my daughter outside and watching after her? It seems Stanford is not the safe haven I was foolish enough to think it was.”

That was an impossible question to answer without offending someone. Why would I want to leave with Julia when Emma was here? Wherever Emma’s here was was where I belonged.

“Go ahead,” Emma said, interrupting my thoughts. “You can grab some dry clothes out of Austin and Dallas’s room on the first floor on your way out.” She wove her fingers through mine then, squeezing them, seeing I was not in the mood to go anywhere. “I’m in good hands. Trust me.”

And there were those words. I did trust her, but I didn’t want to if it meant leaving her. Trust was a complicated thing that could really screw with your head. In the end, though, I decided to follow through on trusting her.

“All right,” I relented, looking at the doc. “Call me if you need anything. Anything. And call me the instant you’re done if we’re not back before.”

“It’s a few stitches and a handful of bandages, son,” Doctor Grey said, meaning to assure me, but it did the opposite. “It’s not open heart surgery.”

That was an ironic phrase to use because that’s just like what I felt was taking place on me.

Heaving a sigh, I opened the door, holding it open for Julia. “Be right back,” I promised, kissing Emma’s hand as I followed Julia out the door.

“Be right here,” she replied as I closed the door behind us.

Julia was already halfway down the hallway, walking with the disjointed movements of a zombie. I followed a few steps behind her all the way to Austin and Dallas’s room on the first floor.

“Do you have a key?” I asked in front of their door.

Twisting the handle, the door clicked open. “The Scarlett boys don’t have to lock their door. The first and last guy who borrowed a pen without asking ended up nak*d, tied to a tree in the middle of campus, and coated in honey and feathers.”

I trailed Julia into the very college guy dorm room, right down to the beer posters featuring models bursting from their bikinis and the stale scent of body odor and laundry piled in the corner. “No one would dare step foot in this room uninvited unless they were prepared to face extreme public humiliation.”

“Except for us,” I said, smiling tightly at her, as I shuffled through the few clean garments shoved into a dresser drawer.

“Yeah, except for us,” she said, heaving down onto a bed. I’d guess it was Dallas’s due to the Dallas cheerleader poster above the bed on the ceiling, but that seemed too cliché even for a guy like him. “This is a night of firsts, right?” The few note laugh she let out was sharp and neurotic.

“Jules?” I said, selecting the lesser outfit of two evils—boardshorts and a Stanford sweatshirt were only about a thousand times better than baggy jeans and a bedazzled muscle tee. “How are you holding up?”

“Let’s see,” she said, clicking the heels of her shiny purple boots together like she wanted to catch the nearest tornado out of this dark land of Oz. “My friend looks like she was mauled by a tiger, I ignored that internal voice that’s been telling me since freshman year that something just wasn’t on the up and up with Ty’s and Emma’s relationship, and I failed my friend in all the important ways, so I guess I’d have to say I’m holding up about as well as a house of cards in a hurricane.” She sighed, tapping her heels together faster. “Thanks for asking.”

“Jules,” I said again, slipping out of the clothes plastered to my body right in front of her because she was focused on staring two holes in the ceiling. The gothiest of goth men could have been twisting his nipple rings a foot in front of her and she wouldn’t have noticed.

“This is all my fault, Patrick,” she whispered, her boot clacking diminishing. “I should have told someone. I should have confronted Ty. I could have asked her if my suspicions were right. I could have at least asked her,” she repeated in a self-incriminating tone.

“Crap, Jules,” I said, cinching the shorts tight since Dallas’s or Austin’s shorts were size extra-beefy. “You feel like you’re to blame, and I feel like I’m to blame. And maybe we are in some way because we failed to act when we could have, but there’s no maybe about who holds all the blame for failing Emma in every way a person can.”

“I should have kneed that guy in the balls every time the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end when he was around,” she said, sitting up in bed, looking at me like she didn’t even notice I’d changed. “That would have been on a daily basis.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a lot of catching up to do,” I said, plopping beside her and squeezing her knee.

“Damn straight,” she muttered, leaning her head on my shoulder in a way that felt child-like. “I hope Emma’s brothers save a piece I can take it out on.”

The door exploded open right then, bouncing off the wall it smashed against. Three grim faced Scarlett brothers barged in, blood smatters creating patterns over their clothes and faces. They barely took any notice of Julia and me sitting on the edge of the bed, so I suppose it was safe to assume we’d been issued a get out of jail free card given the gravity of tonight.

“We are finished. Ruined,” Austin said under his breath, sliding his hands behind his head and gripping it like he was going to rip his hair off.

“Give it a rest, Austin,” Tex sneered over at him, looking up and down the hall before closing the door. “The only thing you lost tonight was a career in middle management. Dallas is going to lose any chance he had of working for the government as a certified genius who screws supermodels, and I lost any chance I had of playing in the big times.” Tex gave Austin’s chest a half-hearted shove. “So do me a favor and shut the hell up.”

And this was the point I felt was a good time to interrupt. “What happened?” I asked, already deducing from their conversation and clothing they’d found Ty and delivered a message.

Dallas’s eyes narrowed into mine. “Revenge happened.”

“We messed him up good, man,” Austin said, pacing around the room with his hands still laced behind his head.

“What did you do to him?” I asked slowly, looking to Tex since he seemed the calmest of the three.

“Nothing that he didn’t deserve,” he sneered.

I swallowed, continuing to look at Tex. “Did you kill him?” I was already at war with myself over which answer I wanted to hear. I didn’t want to arrive at an answer before Tex gave me his.

“He had a pulse when we left,” was his answer. Seemed cryptic was going to be the tone of things tonight.

“Yeah, barely,” Austin said, stopping to glare at Tex before resuming his pacing. “Who knows if he still did by the time the ambulance arrived.”

“You guys called an ambulance?” I asked, wondering just how deep the Scarlett brother stupidity ran.

Tex nodded once. “I’d rather face aggravated assault charges than manslaughter.”

The mood of the room went from sullen to heavy. Suffocating heavy. The Scarlett boys had done just what I’d wanted them to do, what I’d wanted to do myself—ram Ty’s face so hard against the wall separating life from death that he’d regret every last strike he’d landed on Emma.