His breath froze in his throat, his lips parted over mine in stunned confusion.
I slipped off the counter and gently pushed him away so I could step back.
He swayed, his hand moving to the weapon protruding from the top left of his chest.
“Rosie,” he whispered and there was so much bewilderment in the word, my heart collapsed under the weight of it and I started to sob. “Why are you doing this?”
I wasn’t doing this. It was done.
But I said, “Never gave a fuck about you, Danner,” because I didn’t want him to get up and follow me if he could, if he was stupid enough to do so after I stuck him like a pig.
I watched as he tried to take a step forward and fell sideways, slamming to the ground on his opposite shoulder and rolling with an anguished groan to his back.
Hero barked at me, growling and yipping beside his master, unsure if I was the threat or under attack as well.
I don’t know what I expected except that I’d always thought of Lion as immortal, a deity of old, made of flesh and bone but animated by something stronger, surer of spirit than mere mortals ever possessed. I guess that’s why I was so stunned when red blood flowed out of the wound gouged in his muscle-plated chest and spilled in silky torrents down his front.
I blinked at the sight of Danner caught like a fly in the web of his own sticky blood. Then I blinked again at the sight of the thick handle of the butcher’s knife sticking out of his flesh.
The butcher’s knife I’d put there myself.
I wanted to go to him, prove to him that we weren’t the modern re-telling of Romeo and Juliet yet, that I wouldn’t let him die and that I wouldn’t be moved to kill myself if he did.
But that would’ve been a lie.
So, instead, I dug my phone from my back pocket, took a picture as Danner lay there in shock, bleeding out on the floor, then walked straight out of the house and onto the back of Reaper’s bike.
“Good girl,” he praised as I showed him the photo.
But the words were daggers in my ears.
Because I knew that no matter what happened, I’d never be a good girl again.
Danner
I knew before I opened my eyes what had happened, but I didn’t know if I was alive or dead. Part of me hoped I was dead. If I could fall head over ass in love with a woman who was capable of literally plunging a knife into my heart, death was the most peace I could hope for. Otherwise, I’d spend the rest of my life like a mad archeologist going over every square inch of my past with Harleigh Rose to see where I went wrong.
I didn’t want to believe she would do something like that to me, of course I didn’t, but there wasn’t exactly a reasonable excuse for her to stab me with a fucking butcher’s knife, was there?
“You open your eyes, we can have our chat quicker than not and I can get the doc in here to do a check on ya.”
Fuck.
It was official.
I wasn’t dead.
There was no way I could be, because I’d lived a good life, I didn’t deserve to go to hell and that was the only place cruel enough to tie me in eternal damnation to a man who had been my career-long enemy.
Zeus Garro.
I peeled my sandy eyelids apart and sure enough, there he sat in an almost comically small orange chair beside my hospital bed. He looked rough, bags under his stale eyes, his normally wind-swept tangle of brown and gold hair more than its usual mess.
“Look like shit,” I croaked.
He threw back his head and laughed the same way Harleigh Rose did.
Pain lit up my body like a light board, concentrated in my heart and the throbbing wound under my left clavicle.
“Always said cops don’t have a sense’a humor, but you been provin’ me wrong for years.” He shook his head, pushed back a lock of errant hair and leaned forward on his forearms. “She left ya a note.”
“What?”
“H.R., she and King used to do this thing when they were kids. Leave each other notes in weird places, inside shoes, books, shit like that. King came home last night, found a note in the keyhole’a the front door, that one led him to one she left in her apartment, hidden in the ceilin’ fan.”
He jerked his head to the tray attached to my bed and angled to the right of me.
I looked up from the note with blind eyes, seeing Rosie standing over my body with tears streaming down her face and a look of painful resolve in her eyes. I remembered the weird vibration she was giving off when she walked in the door, how she kissed me desperately, aggressively as if she would never get enough of me.
“Girl knew what she was doing,” Garro interrupted, jerking his chin at my bandaged shoulder and upper left chest. “Stuck you close to the heart so they’d know she meant business, but through nothin’ important. You’ll be sore, need some therapy for the shoulder, but they had you in surgery for an hour and said you’d be fine.”
“Who found me?”
“She sent a message from some private number to Cressida sayin’ to meet at your address if she wanted to chat. Cress’s a soft touch so even though we’d shunned ’er, Cress went. Got there as the bikes were pullin’ away, called King from ’er car and the ambulance from inside when she saw ya bleedin’ out.”
Jesus Christ.
“Now, that’s all squared the fuck away, why don’t you tell me what the fuck you an’ my daughter been up to the past two months?” he growled, leaning forward on powerful arms to get near my face. “Might be laid up, but I’m the kinda guy don’t mind addin’ to your misery.”
“Jesus, Garro, I was just fucking stabbed by the love of my fuckin’ life, why don’t you give a guy a fucking minute here?” I snapped at him, then winced when I pulled at my shoulder.
He stared at me, the stillness of a predator about to strike. “Love of your fuckin’ life?”
Fuck, at least I was in the hospital already so they could give me the paddles of life after Garro tried to kill me.
I sighed heavily. “Yeah, Garro, you think the man I am I can’t love the woman she is? ’Cause I know she’s your daughter, but I’ve taken care of her as a girl, watched out for her as a teen and now loved her as a woman. She’s mine in a way, honestly, I don’t give a fuck if you approve or not. She’s gonna stay mine.”
“You sayin’ this lyin’ in a hospital bed with a stab wound she gave ya,” he pointed out, but there was a smirk in his voice and I watched him rub a thumb over his thick wedding band, knowing that he got me.
“She had an impossible choice and she made it the only way someone as brave and loyal as Harleigh Rose could make it. She hurt me to save me and save her family. She’s broken her own heart over and over to make sure of it.”
“Thinkin’ you better fill me in now, Danner” he growled. “And tell me just what kinda shit she put herself through for me and mine, and fuckin’ why she did it?”
I tipped my head to the ceiling and for the first time in my life, I told Zeus Garro everything.
Over the next few days, I recovered painfully though not solitarily in the hospital.
I had many visitors.
My mother was there frequently, so upset about the wound that I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was Harleigh Rose who’d done it.