Page 4 of Cruel Kiss

I don't answer. I can't. I just keep my fists in Ronan's shirt.

"You got him good, by the way," Navi adds. "Stuck him like a Christmas ham. The knife's still—" He stops, takes in my pale face, and reconsiders. "Well, the details aren't important, I suppose. You did a good job, though."

Ronan pulls back just enough to look down at me. His hands come up and frame my face, tilting it toward the hallway light, as he takes inventory of me—the split lip I can taste now, the cheek that's going to be a bruise by morning, the rug burns on my knees that are starting to sting through the shock.

His jaw grinds as he views the damage. His eyes go somewhere cold and terrible and far away, and I understand that the man he just was—the fast one, the one who folded a two-hundred-pound man like a coat—is right there under the surface, one breath away. If the thing on the floor weren't already dead and gone, Ronan would do it again, slower and far more painfully.

"You did good," he whispers. "You did the right thing."

"I wasn't going to let him get to them," I insist, lower lip wobbling. "If he'd gotten past me… If he'd gone to them… to my… to my…"

Then, at last, the tears come. They rise up through and out of me, and I can only fold back into Ronan's embrace until they're finished with their course. It's only his arms keeping me upright. Without him, I'd be back on the ground. My legs are done, cooked, finished. But at least they held me up long enough to keep a killer off the top step. I've never been more grateful for my body, not once in my whole life.

"I know," he says. He's rocking me a little, side to side. "I know,kotyonok. You did everything right. I'm here now. Nothing else gets past me. Nothing."

But even in the depths of my PTSD, I can't quite forget the rest of the day's events.

"You don't get to say that," I sob into his shirt. "Youlied, you did all of this, you—" I hit him, once, weakly, my fist against his chest. "I told you I never wanted to see you again."

"I know."

"Imeantit."

"I know you did." His arms don't loosen. "You can still mean it tomorrow. Mean it as much as you want. Tonight, just let me hold you."

And God help me. God help me and forgive me and my dead mother's mother forgive me.

I do.

I stand in the middle of the worst night of my life, in a hallway two men are quietly scrubbing clean of a killer's blood, four feet from where a stranger died trying to get to my children, helplessly shaking in the arms of the last man on earth I ever wanted to touch again.

Because he came.

Because the bedroom doors are still closed.

Because behind them, both of my children are still breathing, unbothered, like nothing in the world could ever reach them.

So, for tonight—for tonight, andonlyfor tonight—that's the only piece of data that matters.

2

CALI

The men work fast.

I stand at the top of the stairs and watch them buzz around, mostly because I can't seem to make myself look away. Ronan tries to turn me toward the wall, to spare me the sight of it, but I put my hand flat on his chest and shake my head. I need to see this. I don't know why. Maybe it's because for the last three months, everything has been donearoundme, andtome andforme, decided by other people while I stood there helplessly.

So I watch.

Two of them carry the tarp down the stairs. They grunt with the weight of the corpse. When they push through the door, I see the waiting van.

It's parked at the curb outside my broken front door, dark and unmarked, the back doors already flung open. One of Ronan's men is standing next to the vehicle, tossing in a bag of things that presumably came with the stranger. It hits the floor of the trunk and a few of its contents spill out.

A coil of zip ties. A roll of duct tape. A wool blanket.

"That's his?" I ask. "That bag?"

Ronan follows my gaze. "Yes. What about it?"