Chapter Five
It had been months since I’d heard silence. There wasn’t anywhere to go to get Birdie out of my head. If I wasn’t worrying about her, obsessing over her, I was obsessing over her memory. Dreams brought the thought of her curves or the taste of her excitement. Quiet had been replaced with terror a long time ago, but when the scent of blood filled my lungs, the thoughts had never felt so far away.
The silence only came when I couldn’t handle the truth. Somewhere inside of me, I knew that all I’d ever tried to do was take care of her. For fix months, Birdie and I sat in that library in silence. For six months, I got to watch her, got to feel her warmth, got to live in her smile. Six months was all I got with her, and it had indebted me for life. I left her because I didn’t want her to get hurt. She would have given me everything if I asked for it, had too much faith for a woman so fragile. I left because staying would have ruined her forever, and somewhere, maybe we both knew that protecting Birdie was the only purpose I’d ever known. I was poison to her. As long as I was around, she was in danger of losing the thing that made her so remarkable. But the truth wasn’t far away— not anymore.
If I had been there, I could have saved her.
If I had been there, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt.
When the sound first came, it didn’t feel right. The tiredness had a way of making me doubt everything around me, and when the crunch of gravel filled the house, I told myself it was just my fear. I just needed more sleep, more food, a proper rest. The night had stolen everything I had left. I was a corpse on the ground, but when that rot came again, there was no denying it. I was almost tempted to ignore the banging on the door, but as my attention turned to the room at the end of the hall, I jerked to my feet.
He’ll take her away from you if he finds out how sick you are.
You’ll be alone forever.
A hand jutted out to smooth down my hair, and a controlled breath brought colour back to my face. A stray hoodie covered the blood stains on my shirt, and as I tugged the door open, I reminded myself to keep my hands in my pocket. There’d be no hiding the stains on my hands. With the way Omar pushed into the house, though, I wondered if it even mattered. He must have smelled it out in his fucking cruiser, must have known the disgusting things I’d done the second he laid eyes on me.
It was the same look Birdie used to give me.
The same look I prayed she’d give me again.
When the cop pushed his way inside my home, I wouldn’t fight him. There was no point now, and if he was here, it meant that he had come as a friend. A real cop, one who understood how dangerous I was, would have brought an entire fleet.
Maybe he should have.
“What the fuck did you do?” My jaw stiffened as his eyes narrowed. “What the fuck did you do, Mick?”
“Don’t yell at me.”
“When I told you to handle this, I didn’t mean—”
The man wouldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence. But maybe he just didn’t want to be a culpable witness. Frustration hissed through his teeth, and Omar’s hands ran over his skull. His attention wouldn’t come back to me until he noticed the muddy shoes I’d left by the door— the ones I was too quick to try to hide from his gaze.
His body softened, and when he looked back up to me, his desperation knotted my stomach. “Just tell me where she is and I can fix this,” he pleaded. “Mick, I can’t help you if you don’t—”
“She’s fine,” I bit. “Don’t give me that fucking look. I said she was fine.”
“There’s blood everywhere.” Copper filled my mouth, and once more, the fog separated us. “They’re looking for a body, Mick.”
“Then let them.”
I was certain he saw it when our eyes locked, certain he saw the same beast that had sent so many to the ER. His jaw stiffened, and when my face remained even, Omar eventually caved. “Shit.” His hiss brought him further into the house, and his hands ran over his head again. “This shit isn’t going to go away, Mick. That scene was a fucking nightmare.”
“It rained last night.”
“Her tires were fucked, Mick. Rain doesn’t cover that.”
“What’s wrong with her tires?”
His brow furrowed, words catching in a tightened throat. Dark eyes glanced over his shoulder, but I wouldn’t need more than a glimpse to recognize them. He was studying me. He was weighing possibilities, and as he glanced around my house, he weighed them again. My shoulders didn’t crawl down my back until his hand rubbed over his features, until his frustrated sigh filled the room.
“Both of her front tires popped at the same time.”
“Like a spike strip?”
A stressed laugh squeezed through gritted teeth. Omar wouldn’t look at me as I pulled him deeper into the grave, wouldn’t take his eye off the door at the end of the hallway.
“It doesn’t have to be a spike strip,” he admitted. “You’d be surprised how much damage you can do with a few nails and a piece of wood.”