I felt the crack in my heart start to seal over and I could only describe it as excruciating.
Stupid, stupid me.
“Right,” I said through gritted teeth, moving off the bed with rigid purpose.
“Lo, don't do this...” his voice pleaded, his hand reaching out and closing around my wrist.
I turned back, my other hand moving over his hand, grabbing, and twisting hard. “I didn't do this,” I countered, dropping his hand and enjoying it a little when he had to rub it with his other hand, “you did.”
With that, I grabbed my clothes off the floor and made a dart for the bathroom. I slammed the door and locked it.
“Idiot,” I hissed at my reflection, barely bothering to register that the cuts had scabbed over and the bruises had gone from the graphic blue and purple to a faded yellow and green.
I turned on the water, unwrapped my ribs, and stepped under the spray, staying there until the tap ran cold. Showered and dressed and convinced I was ready to be a cold, indifferent bitch if I needed to be, I went downstairs to, well, look for a fight.
All I was greeted with was fresh brewed coffee with a sticky note attached to the pot. “Nice try. But you haven't pushed me away yet. Be back later. Shit to do – Cash.”
He just expected me to stick around for him? Well he was going to be sorely disappointed when I wasn't there, wasn't he?
It wasn't all spite. I genuinely needed to get out. I had logged into the Hailstorm system and got the information on the properties belonging to Henchmen members. Now that I found Wolf's place, I needed to go there and check on Janie for myself. Fuck Cash and his reluctance to share the information. I didn't need him. I didn't need any man and that was the way it should be.
I picked up my cell and called a cab seeing as Cash stole my car yet again. I gave it a couple minutes before making my way toward the door and pulling it open.
“You made another mistake, Wills,” Damian's voice met me, making my entire body run cold as I turned my head to see him leaning against the side of Cash's house. “You're never going to learn, are you?”
The shock made my reaction slow and he was off the house and shoving me in to Cash's living room before I could draw a breath. All I could think as I slammed hard into the couch and heard him kick closed the door, was what Cash was going to think when he saw chaos and blood all over his house.
Even facing my worst fears, he was on my mind.
God damn it.EighteenCashDamian Crane was a god damn hero.
I felt an unfamiliar knot tighten in my stomach as I read through the articles about his service, how he saved countless lives, how he came home after duty only to be stabbed twelve times in his own bathroom.
“What the fuck are you up to now, Lo?” I asked the inside of her car as I flicked through the websites on my phone, trying to find something out, trying to get any piece of dirt I could find to untie the knot, to make it so that Lo wasn't on the hunt for a fucking American hero.
There was nothing.
He was a Marine. And when he finally came back home, he worked at a private security firm. There was nothing to suggest criminal activity. Nothing to suggest he was anything other than a model citizen.
There was only one article mentioning his family- his dead father who was also a Marine, his mother who was battling dementia, and his wife Willow.
For the fuck of it, I typed 'Willow Crane' into the search bar.
What came up made the knot disappear, but only because I felt like I got a swift kick to the god damn guts. Because what came up was a bunch of pictures of a young, gorgeous, soft Lo. There was no mistaking her- the long blonde hair, the strong legs, the great rack, the brown eyes. The only difference was the eyes didn't have the mask down over them, blocking out all emotion. No, Willow Crane's eyes were so sad, so haunted as she stood next to her husband that I almost couldn't believe it was the same woman.
“Jesus Christ,” I murmured as memories flashed into my mind, one in particular.
Wolf was in the kitchen, freaking out because he thought I hit Lo and Lo had said something in a tone that was way too sharp, way too defensive. Do I seem like the kind of woman who would stay in the house with a man who beat her?
“Fuck,” I growled, zooming in on the picture. If you looked really closely, you could see the bruises on her arm, just above the elbow, peeking out from under her sleeves. “God damn it.”
She married Damian Crane. And the asshole beat her.
It went so against the Lo I knew, the woman she had made herself, that it was hard to imagine. But looking at her picture, she looked so young, so much softer in the body without all the hours of training she did at Hailstorm. She looked... soft and... sweet. No way did she stand a chance against the giant, hulking mass that was her husband who had been trained how to do combat by the best special operations team our government had to offer.
I clicked back through the articles, finding the one about the stabbing- twelve knife wounds. Overkill. A crime of passion. I knew with a kind of absolute certainty that I didn't usually possess, that Willow Crane had been the one to do it. And, in doing so, she stopped being Willow Crane and started being Lo.
What the fuck did I do with that kind of information? Approach Lo? Ask her about it? Risk her shutting down on me?
It really didn't take much thinking to realize he had been the one who had beat her a few days before. That was why she wasn't involving Hailstorm. She didn't want them to know about her past, to know she used to be a battered woman. She didn't want anyone to hear that and think of her as weak. Never mind the fact that she stabbed that fucker twelve times and got away, built a life where no one could ever hurt her again, never mind that she was the strongest woman I had ever met and that was really saying something since I knew exactly what kind of torture Summer had been subject to. Summer had three months of that. Lo had years of enduring beatings and... fuck... I didn't want to think about the other things that might have happened to her.