Kane chuckles in agreement.
I take a long, rough pull of the cool night air.
It’s over.
This ugly chapter is done, and now comes the rest of our story.
24
HOME TO ROOST (KANE)
One Week Later
Sometimes, I still can’t wrap my mind around waking up next to this fuck-hot woman, alive and whole and hopelessly in love with me.
How?
Just how?
The early morning sun spills through the gaps in the curtains, painting her in soft gold like she belongs in heaven’s VIP room.
Never thought it would be so easy to get her into my bed in New York.
I thought there’d be more to figure out, more time to process the hell we just lived through.
More arrangements, more negotiation to reshape the pieces of our lives to fit neatly.
Surprise. It turns out attempted murder really fucks with a person’s priorities.
And no, we haven’t figured out everything yet.
We’re working on that, one day at a time.
But after everything that went down, we needed to share our space.
We needed to bewhole.
And we made it happen, faster than I could blink.
Margot left with me the day after the Babins and Lee Glazkov got taken into custody after endless sit-downs with the police.
Not that it needed much detective work.
Lee had social media posts scheduled with a thousand-word manifesto about what happened and why. What he intended to happen, my murder in cold blood.
Looking back, it felt obvious that his will to kill was weakening.
Yes, he was irate and fighting hard like the depraved psycho he is, but it still takes a special ruthlessness for a man who’s never killed anyone to pull the trigger.
Anger alone can’t always cut it.
Now, though, I wonder if I read him wrong.
Or maybe I just figured out there was a small buried part of him who wanted another chance at life.
I smelled his desperation—too much like mine—even if his was twisted into deranged violence.
Thank God I wore him out before he let his anger shoot first.
