In the apartment, I closed myself into the bathroom, needing a minute to myself. And, quite frankly, needing someone other than Seth around to check out a wound in my ass, of all places.
Right then, in one of my lowest moments, hurt, but also mad at myself and ashamed of myself for not being able to stop that poor woman from getting taken, was when he showed up.
Valen.
Some part of me wanted to tell him to fuck off, to accept help from anyone else.
A larger part of me, though, wanted him.
So I opened the door.
Then there he was.
An older version of the boy I had once known, a boy I’d fallen so hopelessly in love with, that I lost myself inside of him.
He was both soft and firm at the same time.
And it just… cracked something inside of me.
I didn’t cry.
Almost as a rule since I left town, I didn’t cry. I just… didn’t have any tears left, it seemed like.
But I found myself soaking through Valen’s shirt in that bathroom.
I’d never been more thankful for anything than I was for Danny when she demanded Valen head back separately.
“This ride is going to suck,” Danny warned, looking at me in the rearview.
Every moment since it happened sucked. I was pretty sure moving or existing was going to suck for a while.
“Let’s get it over with,” I said, and Danny nodded and got us across town with Valen following right along.
“Scoot,” Danny demanded to Finn as we parked. “Go find your Ma. She’s probably losing her mind right now. Now you,” she said when we were alone, turning in her seat to look back at me. “You okay?”
“I didn’t save her. I… if I was a second faster, maybe—“
“Maybe then their angle would have been better and you would have gotten a bullet in the chest or the head,” Danny said. “There’s no way to know how this might have gone if you saw the truck a second faster or you got to your gun faster or Abigail got a chance to run, or Seth and Finn were outside. There’s no way to know. And you can’t beat yourself up over how it went. You did the best you could in the moment. Now it is up to the others to do their best and find her.”
“But Abigail—“
“Probably feels guilty that you got shot. All this guilt. It’s a waste of fucking time and energy. The only people who should be feeling guilty are the assholes who did this. So no more guilt. What we can do now is hope, right? And heal up.”
With that, Danny climbed out of the car, and there was Valen again.
“Come on. A couple dozen more steps,” Valen encouraged me, reaching for my hand so I didn’t have to scoot so much, letting him take some of my weight as I climbed out of the SUV.
We took a short pause at the bar because Voss had climbed behind it, fixing me a drink and handing me a pill.
“Don’t argue,” Valen demanded.
“I wasn’t going to,” I told him, tossing the pill and chasing it with the whiskey, enjoying the little burn it provided. “Have you ever been shot?” I asked, finding myself unable to stop the question.
“Me or him?” Voss asked, since I was looking more in his direction than Valen.
“Both. Either.”
“I have,” Voss said, nodding. “A few times.”
“A few times? Christ, dude, how awful are you that you make that many enemies?” I asked, getting what I imagined was a rare smile out of him.
“Tend to rub people the wrong way,” he said, shrugging it off.
And, yeah, there was definitely some truth to that. His and Dezi’s animosity was a prime example. Even though there didn’t seem to be any real root to it. They just rubbed each other the wrong way.
“I haven’t been,” Valen admitted. “Been stabbed and beaten to high hell plenty, but haven’t gotten myself any bullet wounds. Did pull one out of Voss’s shoulder once, though. So I know a thing or two about how to help yours heal right. Which means you need to stop fucking moving around, and go lie down.”
His comment should have rubbed me the wrong way. I hated being told what to do. I always had, even as a kid, but that grew stronger as I got older. Especially toward the male population.
But when Valen got a little bossy?
Especially when it was coming out of a place of concern?
Yeah, it was way hotter than it had any right to be.
“You’re going to have to take the lower bunk for a while,” he added. “Think your stubborn ass can handle that?” he added as he started to nudge me forward.
I could have sworn Voss mumbled something at Valen then, but it was too low and gravelly for me to make it out.
“What was that?” I asked as Valen followed my painfully slow pace as we made our way to the prospect room.
“Nothing,” Valen insisted. “Just reminding me of something before he heads back over there,” he said, reaching past me to open up the door.
“There’s nothing wrong with my arms,” I reminded him, even if I was actually charmed by the gesture.
“For fuck’s sake, Lulu, let me be the good guy just this once, okay?”
“That must be a hard role for you to play,” I grumbled, hating myself a little for it, but sometimes there was no stopping the old bitterness from seeping out.
Valen, uncharacteristically, let it slide. Probably because I was hurt. And because I’d let down my guard enough to cry on him.
“That pill should kick in about forty minutes from now,” Valen said as he reached up to my bunk, pulling down my pillows and blankets. “Which, I imagine, is going to feel like forever,” he went on, putting all my stuff into place. He even went and found my phone charger and wound the cord through the wire headboard, so it would rest right in front of me. “You need to call your parents,” he told me.
The sound that came out of me then was hard to explain. A groan and a grumble mixed into one.
“They might not be as well-connected anymore as some of the other people in town, but you know they are going to hear about it sooner or later. And they will be pissed they didn’t get the information from you.”
That was true.
My dad was nothing if not overprotective.
My mom was a little bit more… go with the flow when it came to me and what I did with my life. But, yeah, she was still a mom. And her daughter getting shot was not going to be something she shrugged off.
“I know,” I said, sighing as I pulled out my phone and plugged it in. “I will. As soon as…” He was gone. “As soon as the meds start to kick in. It doesn’t seem like the cops got called, so my dad wouldn’t have heard about it from his police… acquaintances.”
It would have been wrong to call the cops his buddies. Granted, he’d been working for the NBPD as a Cyber Crimes Expert Consultant since well before I was even born, but my dad just wasn’t really someone who made friends easily. And, you know, he hadn’t exactly retired from his other business when he first started working there, so he didn’t want anyone to get to know him too well and risk them figuring out any of his secrets.
But he did know a lot of the cops. And they would absolutely say something to him if they got word—either through legitimate sources, or the ones that greased their crooked palms to look the other way to their criminal dealings—that something happened to me.