Her hand shook as she shoved her hair back. All around her were broken chairs and tables, the wounded, and others who weren't moving. In an instant, the usual Friday evening club scene had been shattered. Then she saw that mane of blonde hair, Brynn Halliday's frozen expression, staring blankly back at her only a few feet away.
“Oh, God...” she whispered.
He pulled her away, around tables and chairs, past a young man who struggled, dazed, to his feet.
She tried to stop him, pulled back. “We can't just leave...Brynn...?”
He held onto her. “You can't help her now.”
She stumbled, almost went down, and he was pulling her back to her feet. No amount of arguing stopped him.
At that moment she hated James Morgan.
Lights flashed by—streetlights, headlights from other automobiles, emergency vehicles—glaring off the rain-spattered windscreen as they drove through the business district, shooting past shops and pubs, nightclubs. Then across a roadway, down several more streets, eventually slowing down, the heating system in the car cranking out heat. It wasn't enough, not nearly enough.
She sat huddled in the passenger seat, arms wrapped around her as if trying to physically hold herself together. She had no idea how long they'd been driving, or where they were going. She couldn't think, didn't want to think about what had happened. Her brain wouldn't go there, as the streets of London passed by in a blur of flashing blue, red, and yellow lights.
Then, only the occasional glow of a streetlamp, before it slipped away into the darkness. Down another street, vaguely aware of a street sign. They'd stopped.
It was the sudden stillness that had her looking up, then the closing of the car door. It was still raining. Then he was pulling her from the car.
They were both soaking wet as he slipped the key into the lock and pulled her inside the ground-floor flat.
He moved through the steeped darkness of the living room, drawing the window shades down before reaching for the light switch.
She hadn't moved but stood just inside the doorway, arms wrapped around herself, staring down, holding on. It was something he knew only too well. Shock, and the natural instinct to fight past it. To hold on to something, the brain trying to process what had happened, make some sense of it, when it was impossible to make any sense of it, and that edge, like standing over a precipice, wanting to let go and just fall into some dark oblivion, yet refusing to let go.
“Sit down, before you fall down,” he said gently, pulling her over to the couch. He pulled off her jacket.
“I'm all right,” she said, then clamped her teeth together to keep them from chattering.
It was just the cold, she told herself. But every time she closed her eyes, she saw Brynn Halliday's body, the blood, her sightless eyes staring back at her and that helpless sensation swept back over her.
“Of course you are,” he replied, tossing her jacket aside and grabbing a sofa blanket. He wrapped it around her shoulders. She was pale, and there were dark smudges under her eyes. Then there was the scrape at one cheek, red against white with blue starting around the edges from that first tumble when he grabbed her.
He could almost see the bones beneath her skin. But it was her eyes and the dark, haunted expression in them that tightened his gut.
“I'll get the furnace going.”
She heard the pop and hiss as it came alive. She focused on it. Then, there were other sounds, a cupboard being opened, the clink of a glass, more sounds, then he was handing her a glass.
“Drink it. All of it,” he said gently. “It will help.”
Drink me!
She felt like Alice who had tumbled down the rabbit hole. She would have laughed at the thought except for the bloody images that refused to go away. This was no fairy tale.
She did drink all of it. Then another, the whisky warming through her belly, then into her hands, a faint glow wrapping around her, around that single light at the table, and James Morgan as he moved about the flat.
He found towels in the bathroom, and cleaned her hands with a wet cloth, then worked the towel through her hair.
“Every time I close my eyes…” she whispered.
“I know.”
She looked at him then, eyes still dark, filled with shadows.
“I keep seeing her lying there, the look on her face. If I hadn't agreed to meet her...”
