Page 148 of Never Alone
"Don't do that to me again."
"I'm going to try."
She kept holding the look. She wanted more.
"Cole." She said it the way you say a name when the name is the whole sentence.
"I'm going to try, Quinn."
She let out a breath. The kind that came out of a person who had been holding it longer than they knew. She set her hand on the porch rail next to mine. Not touching. Two hands an inch apart on the wood, the way they had been in the back of the rig when she had held mine and not let go.
"I told them you were my family."
I knew thethem. The crew that had pulled her off. The men who had decided, in the half-second after hearing her voice change, that she was not going to work this one.
"You are."
She nodded once. The smallest nod, like she had just gotten ayesshe had been carrying the question of for a while.
We stood like that for a while. The light went past evening and into the first part of the night. Someone down the block turned a porch light on. A car passed and didn't slow. The cold settled in deeper, the kind of cold that found its way through fabric to the parts of you that didn't have any reason to be cold.
Quinn didn't move her hand.
I didn't move mine.
Miranda's call came as the sky was going purple.
I answered it in the kitchen. The house had quieted. Tessa was in the front room with Noah asleep against her, Carol on the couch beside her, the lamp on low. Sam was at my elbow at the counter. The place smelled like the coffee Jamie had been making since six.
"Cole." Miranda's voice was the one she used when she had decided what kind of phone call this was going to be.
"Miranda."
I leaned my hip into the counter and looked at the dark beyond the window over the sink. A streetlight a block over. Nothing else.
"I have good news, and I have news."
I felt myself brace. Miranda only used that cadence when one of the two pieces was going to cost something.
"Hit me."
"Good news first: the audit findings are in. The buried records are pulling more than we thought they would. We have documentation now of two prior incidents he had quashed before the one Tessa filed. There's a paper trail going back six years before they were together. It's a pattern."
"Okay."
I set my good hand flat on the counter. The granite was cold through my palm.
"The other news: the three attackers from yesterday morning were picked up overnight at a motel off I-95. Two of them are talking. Both of them named Nicholas as the man who hired them."
I closed my eyes for a beat. I’d hoped for that. I hadn’t let myself hope out loud.
"Cole?" Her voice had softened, checking. She knew the silence.
"Yeah."
"Combined with the assault on you, the stalking, the violation of the protective order—we have enough to file for an arrest warrant. I'm filing tomorrow morning. He's going to be picked up within forty-eight hours."
"Okay."
