Rushing and racing and spiraling.
His mouth trembled as promises fell from his lips. “I will kill them, Faith. I will hunt them down and destroy them before I let them hurt you or Bailey.”
A tremble ridged my spine, and I found myself voicing the question I didn’t even want to entertain. “What is it they really want from us? I don’t have anything anyone could possibly want.”
Why did I get the devastating impression that he knew? My mind filled with the vision of him in that intersection, going for that car with a gun drawn.
Stricken, he blinked at me, and the accusation flew from my mouth—gratefulness or confusion or blame—I didn’t know. Whatever it was, it left me on a whimpered cry. “You had a gun.”
His head jerked to the side before he slowly pushed to his feet.
The man towering.
A blistering shadow in the darkened depths of Bailey’s small room.
He stalked my way. Slowly, though his strides were purposed.
A shiver rushed across my skin, and my back banged softly into the wall. His voice was rough, caressing across my face like a sharp promise. “Yes, I had a gun. I told you that I was here to protect you. I won’t leave you defenseless.”
My eyes slammed closed for a second, trying to find my senses.
I could feel the questions twisted across my face in deep lines when I opened my eyes again and stared up at the man who looked so dangerous and forbidding standing there.
“Tell me what’s happening, Jace. What did Mack tell you? Do you know who hurt Joseph? What do they possibly think I could have?” My voice cracked on the last.
A consuming kind of grief was sucking the life from my spirit. Stealing away the flickers of joy I’d felt the last couple of weeks. That shimmer of hope that had risen from the depths of me.
As if maybe we could escape all the grief and sorrow. Never forget but find joy in the shadows.
The questions were coming too fast for me to entertain that any longer, though.
“What did he do?” I finally whispered the culmination of it all.
As soft as he tried to make them be, his words scraped across my soul.
A lash.
A blow.
“Joseph was never honest with you, Faith.”
Tears streaked free, and my mind was tumbling back to those days when Jace had been taken from me. When Joseph had warned the exact same thing about Jace.
What was I supposed to believe?
Jace’s mouth pinched. As if he were holding something in. Holding something back.
My eyes slammed closed, the accusation a low, pained cry. “What aren’t you tellin’ me?”
God, I was a fool.
Falling so fast and so hard.
But that was the way this boy had always had me. Hooked in his grips with nothin’ but a glance of those knowing, fierce eyes.
It seemed impossible with the savage state that he was in, but I was sure it was hurt that blanketed Jace’s being when he jerked back. As he blinked at me as if he were trying to see through his own questions.
His own torment and grief and guilt.
What was happening?
What did he know?
Jace paced, roughing a hand through his hair, his voice quieted as he hissed the words. “If I knew who was responsible, I would erase them, Faith. If I knew exactly who Joseph was involved with, I would have had Mack beating down their door the second this happened. But I don’t.”
He hit his fingertips against his chest, pain wheezing from him on his sharp breaths.
“The only thing I know is Joseph was never good enough. Never deserved you. And I never should have given him the chance to let him steal you from me.”
Steal me away?
I stood there shocked when he blew out of Bailey’s door as if it’d all become too much of a burden for him to bear any longer.
Footsteps pounded down the hall, and I craned my ear, listening for him to take the stairs and disappear out the front door the way I’d been terrified that he would do all along.
Forever.
But then I felt it. Jace came to a sudden stop.
As if he hadn’t expected to do it, either.
His hesitation bled through the old walls before I heard the creak of the hinges of the neglected door.
The room I’d scarcely been able to bring myself to enter for all these years except to clean it every now and again, hit by a landslide of memories every single time I went in there.
There was nothing I could do to stop myself from moving that direction.
Drawn to the magnet.
Drawn to the light.
I was a shaking mess when I came to the door that was left open an inch.
When I nudged the crack wider, I found Jace standing in the middle of the room with his back to me, staring out at the garden of roses that filled the window as if the gorgeous scene had been framed.