Page 12 of Protected By Razor

“Okay,” I manage.

It comes out smaller than I meant.

He stops. He looks at me then. Really looks — the way he did in the hallway that time when I was eighteen and he’s never done since — and something in his jaw moves.

Then he sits down on the couch and picks up his phone, and the moment’s gone.

I go to the sink and run cold water over my wrists and try to remember how to breathe.

There is another note for me at the front desk of the clinic when I come back from lunch the next day.

Not on my car this time. Inside. Past the main door, onto the counter where Marissa doesn’t remember anyone leaving anything. Folded once. My name on the outside.

Last warning.

My hands started shaking before I’ve even put it down.

I go into the back office and I locked the door, and I call Razor.

“Where are you?” he says before I can speak.

“Clinic. I’m fine. I got another note.”

There’s a pause. Then his voice comes through the line and it’s not his normal voice. It’s lower. Slower. Colder.

“I’m coming to get you.”

“I can drive??—”

“I’m coming to get you. Sit tight. Don’t leave that office. Ten minutes.”

He hangs up.

I sit on the floor with my back against the door and I hold my phone against my chest and I try to slow my breathing, and some awful part of me is registering — right now, in the middle of this — that his voice going like that did something to me. Something I should not be feeling while I’m locked in an office with a last warning sitting on my desk.

I am not okay.

He drives me home on his bike because I’m too shaky to trust behind a wheel. I’ve been on the back of a bike exactly twice in my life, and now I’m pressed against the back of a man I’ve wanted since I was sixteen with my arms around his stomach and my cheek against the leather of his cut and his hand coming back once to cover mine and squeeze.

It’s a ten-minute ride. I don’t breathe for any of it.

When we get to my building he kills the engine in the car park and swings off. Takes the helmet off my head, because myfingers aren’t working. Doesn’t look at me. Takes my elbow and walks me up the stairs like I’m made of glass.

I let myself into the apartment.

I drop my bag.

I stand in the middle of the living room and my face starts to crumple because I’ve been holding it together for six hours and I can’t anymore, and I don’t want him to see it but there’s nowhere to go in this tiny apartment and I’m already making a sound I can’t stop.

“Hey,” his voice. Close.

“Sorry. Sorry, I??—”

“Darcie.”

“I’m okay, I just??—”

“Look at me.”