Which I would’ve taken my chances with, me being in a hospital and all that. They could work with physical wounds.
Emotional ones were a shit show.
His presence hit me. Physically. Took the air right out of my lungs. And not in a good way.
“Rosie.” He didn’t say the word as much as breathed it. But not delicate and quiet. It was like he’d yanked it up from some visceral part of him, the five letters of my name cutting at his throat as they passed through it.
I couldn’t even manage the four letters of his at that point. I couldn’t manage any four-letter words. I knew what I did would have consequences. With all the stupid shit I did, I knew.
Mostly I didn’t care about the consequences. Or thought they were worth it.
But these consequences, staring me in the face in the form of a broken man I used to know, almost brought me to my knees. Which was saying something since I’d just stood at the bedside of my best friend who nearly died and managed to keep my shit together.
This man always knew how to get me undone, without even knowing he was doing it.
“Luke,” I said, my voice scratchy and low.
One glance at him and I knew he’d changed, but what he did the seconds after I spoke showed me just how much.
He grabbed my shoulders roughly, so slim darts of pain shot up from where his hands pressed into my skin. I didn’t cry out, despite it hurting and being surprised. I had good practice at keeping quiet when in pain. Who knew that what I’d learned from Venezuelan human traffickers would come in handy with the gentle and kind cop I used to know?
He slammed me roughly against the wall, boxing me in with his body.
“Where. The. Fuck. Have. You. Been?” he clipped, each word as physical as his previous grip on my shoulders.
I stared into his blue eyes. The ones that used to be liquid and soft, inviting like a calm ocean in July. These weren’t those. I was looking at hard granite, the stuff that could crush you, that was colder than the wildest ocean in the middle of December.
There was a lot more different about him too. The way he got my attention physically, violently. Yeah, that was new. Even now, when he wasn’t even touching me, his hands resting on the wall beside my head, there was a pulse radiating around him. Similar to the one that hummed from Gage when I got close enough, which was rare.
It was rare because most people didn’t radiate on a level beyond normal. It was the level of murderers, men who walked through the valley of the shadow of death without anything anyone to protect them from evil. They faced it alone. And part of them still resided there.
I’d put Luke there. Me.
He used to wear his dirty-blond hair longer, mussed, boyish almost. It was clipped close to his face now, making the angles of his face harsher, sharper. Stubble darkened his jaw and ran down the cords of his neck that were pulsing with his obvious fury.
He wasn’t wearing a uniform, the absence of a shiny metal shield accusing me with its nonattendance. Instead, he was in all black, as if it was a poetic statement about his transition. Muscles that were subtly defined before now strained at his skin.
I swallowed roughly. “Around.” I was going for flippant, but it turned juvenile, pathetic.
“You’re fuckin’ shitting me,” he seethed. “You disappear, not a trace, not a fuckin’ word to anyone, no one knowing if you’re dead or fucking alive, and the best you can say is around?” He ended on a shout, his previous open palm turning into a fist before he slammed it against the wall above me.
I flinched, not at the violence but at who it was coming from.
“It’s not your business,” I said.
His eyes glittered with a danger I didn’t recognize. Or maybe I did, but I didn’t want to see it residing in him. “Oh, it’s my business. You’re my fuckin’ business. We both know that.”
He glanced around. He’d garnered a couple of concerned stares from nurses. A glimmer of something familiar flickered on his face, letting me exhale a little. Maybe he wasn’t truly gone.
He stepped back, sighing and running his hand through the hair that used to be there. Another shadow of before. “This isn’t the place. But we’re going to talk. You’re going to talk,” he rectified.
I stepped back from my spot in the corner. Nobody, not even the man I’d loved since I was five years old, put Rosie in the corner. I pasted on my most sarcastic ‘fuck you’ smile. “I can’t wait,” I shot back with all the courage I could muster.
I was going to turn on my heel and let him watch me walk away, but he beat me to it, giving me one hard glare before turning on his boot and leaving without a backward glance.
I gaped after him.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was truly gone and only shadows remained.
I couldn’t chase shadows.
But I would.
Because I wouldn’t be Rosie if I wasn’t chasing the next big Fuck-Up.
Luke
He was sure that hospital, with its taunting smell of sterile death and unhurried pain, did something to her. He knew it. Because it did something to him, teased a memory from six years before upward, when he was watching Rosie from the shadows of the hallway of the hospital, standing half in Laurie’s doorway, halfway between two worlds.
One was her regular wild world that had horror and bloodshed peppered in, but somehow manageable, expected bloodshed. Something that came with the territory. Something that she never should’ve had to deal with, in a perfect world. But the world was far from perfect, and therefore she did deal. She did it fucking well. She decorated around the blood and death and violence and somehow made it glow, made it beautiful. To herself and surely as fuck to him.
Not that he could ever let that opinion show.
Especially not now.
Not when another world opened up like a hole in the ground, not only exposing Hell but sucking everyone in. Everyone who didn’t deserve to be there.
Laurie was the first. Rosie had been fighting the inevitable. She’d have to go in there, seeing Laurie, everything that had happened to that poor beautiful and innocent girl.
Luke had dealt with gore in his line of work. Even a small-town cop had to, at some point, but his small town more so thanks to the resident motorcycle gang. Regardless of the fact that they hid the majority of their bodies in shallow graves. He’d still peeled men off the road after motorcycle accidents, seen what remained of a human head after a bullet tore through the skull, turning the brains inside out.
He was as used to death and violence as a person could be.
But seeing what had happened to Laurie, the sheer cold and needless brutality inflicted on her, had threatened to empty his stomach. If there had been anything more but coffee in it, maybe it might’ve stained his shoes. But he’d been up for almost twenty-four hours looking for her, hoping for the best, but knowing the worst was inevitable.
He’d thought he’d been prepared. He’d thought he’d separated himself from the girl he’d grown up with, who’d taken in birds with broken wings and read to the people at the town hospice.
He’d been sorely fucking mistaken.
Cruelty was always hard to witness. To clean up after. It made it really fucking hard to keep faith in humanity when you could taste what humans did to each other.
His faith was hanging on by a fucking thread after that shit. And that thread was standing upright, dry-eyed in a doorway, watching the life seep out of one of her best friends.