There was a pulling sensation in my chest that I didn't exactly recognize, but was starting to suspect was the beginning of something that everyone else worked toward in life, to something I had never given much thought to.
Love.
Sappy and not like me.
But true nonetheless.
Of course, I couldn't have known that there was something coming, something that was going to change everything, something that was going to threaten everything we had just barely started...
Chapter Eleven
Chris
I should have expected the welcoming committee when I got back to Hailstorm.
I would have expected it if I had been thinking right. But, to be honest, I had driven the whole way home on autopilot, in a daze, alarmingly unaware of my surroundings.
Not because of the anxiety.
Nope.
This world was because when I'd parked outside of Finch's place to drop him off, he had leaned forward, gently framed my jaw with his hands, and given me a slow, tentative kiss. When he met no resistance, he deepened it, harder, more demanding, making every inch of me feel buzzy and warm, creating that chaos of attraction from head to toe yet again.
Then he pulled away, gave me one of his devilish smirks, told me he would call after he settled in, then grabbed his bag and was gone.
So that was why I wasn't in my right mind all the way back to Hailstorm. Even through parking and unpacking my car.
But news spread fast in a place like ours, and by the time I made it back to my room, shuffling all my bags with me, I opened the door to find my parents waiting for me.
"Oh, I know that look pretty well," Mom said, giving me a warm smile that made her eyes dance. "So, you had a good time with this Finch gentleman, did you?" she asked.
Finch would probably laugh at being called a gentleman, but there was no denying that was exactly what he was. This man who was patient as could be with me, who was willing to be even more patient in the future.
"Lo," my father said under his breath, trying to cover it with a cough, but trying to get Mom back on point.
"Right. So. We have a question."
Oh, God.
I really hoped they weren't about to ask me about sex. That would be incredibly uncomfortable.
"Okay," I said, shrugging my purse off my shoulder.
"We heard chatter this morning. Underground chatter, mind you. But we heard some chatter about someone being killed in their pedo shed."
She knew?
Not about his death, that was perfectly like my mother to know.
But she knew about the connection to me?
How?
"I knew a lot about the people who took you, Chris. They were the types who had been on our radar for years. Once it all... went down, once you came to live with us, I put your Aunt Janie on this hard. And you know Janie..."
I did.
My Aunt Janie was the only person I knew who truly understood what I had been through, having been in a similar situation herself. And much like me, Lo took a very young Janie in, helped her heal, trained her. And she got one of the world's best hackers out of the deal. So if Aunt Janie knew about some traffickers, if she knew what they had done to me, she would not rest until she found them, found the people they were connected to.
"Yeah, I know how she works," I agreed, nodding. She went days on end without sleeping, drinking too many energy drinks, avoiding everything else until she got what she wanted.
"So she came across some names. She looked into them. She found out the sick shit they were into. We pieced it together. Michael. And some other people. We didn't come to you with it because we knew you needed time and space from it. And then, well, you never came to us about it. Not really. So we just sat on it, figuring maybe you didn't know who they were, didn't want to know. We were wrong."
"I only know a few names," I admitted. "Others... I just know things about them."
"Well, if you ever want to sit down with Aunt Janie and me, we can try to fill in some other blanks. I should have known you would want to know. You want to know everything."
"We didn't know you would want to know so you could take them out," my father said.
"Why didn't you take them out?" I asked, looking between the two of them. I knew that neither of them was opposed to killing. Hell, the day they came to help save me, to get Ferryn and me out of that basement, they had killed their fair share of people there.
"Because I was worried that you might want to do it," Dad told me, shrugging a shoulder.
"But you left men like that out in the world who--"
"No, honey," my mom cut me off, shaking her head. "We didn't leave men in the world who got to keep abusing little girls. As soon as we knew who they were, we put people on making sure that didn't happen. Which was why I didn't have the money to fund your little task force, Chris. I was running one of my own. Each time one of these sick assholes found a trafficking connection, I had to send someone out to take out the traffickers while we created car problems or work problems or general life problems for the dickheads while our guys got where they needed to be to handle things. I'm shocked in all these years, Ferryn and I haven't crossed paths."
I was too.
But more than surprise, I felt an overwhelming surge of love.
For these people.
This once happily childfree couple who came across me and decided they wanted to take me and all my baggage and all my damage into their home and make me their own.
It hadn't been easy in those early days, I knew.
Especially with Cash.
I'd taken more to Lo for obvious reasons. She was female. She didn't hold the same threat that men did for me. And more than that, she was a survivor in her own right, someone who had built herself up, and made something amazing out of her life.
It was easy to love her, to cling to her, to confide in her, to let her help me.
With Cash, it wasn't so easy.
First, because I'd never had a father in the first place. The concept was foreign to me, even if there had been parts of me that had longed for one in my youth.
But second, clearly, because I had just spent months in hell where the only men I saw wanted to hurt me. In hideous, unimaginable ways.
Even if I knew he was a good man, a moral man--if for no other reason than I knew Lo would never have a man in her life who was anything else--I felt panic surge when he walked into a room with me. I flinched if he reached for something near me. I slept with my door and windows locked with heavy pieces of furniture blocking them.
I couldn't pinpoint the moment where things had started to shift for us.
It felt like forever that I had lived with that knot of fear about him in my gut.
But he was always there, always patient, never overstepping any lines, never trying to force connection.
He gave me his support. He offered his advice if he thought I was seeking it. He sat and watched movies with me. He taught me how to drive. He taught me how to shoot. He told me stories about his youth, about being in the MC, about meeting Lo, about how they came together.
But when I pulled back, he let me. When I flinched, he never got angry. He just let me be. Let me learn to trust.
Until one day, I slipped in the shower, going down hard, dislocating my shoulder.
I immediately yanked down the shower curtain, covering my nudity, because at that point I was still struggling to accept that I had a body, let alone embrace it.