Finally, I could relax.
Finally, I could breathe easily.
“Hailey!” Satan called from outside.
He came shoulder to shoulder with me and looked down. He, too, seemed to visibly relax.
“We gotta get out of here before the cops come,” I said. “King probably knew he could escape before police showed up. But they come, we’ll be the ones in trouble.”
“Fucking hell,” Satan said, but he knew I was right. “Let’s get out of here. Hailey, Melissa. Come with us.”
They nodded and rose. I took Melissa under my arms, and Hailey went under Satan’s. But before we left, I went to the corner where I knew I’d seen footage from. I had to squint some, but I saw it.
A little dot that could easily be mistaken for mold or just dirt, one that had a camera embedded in it. I took the butt of my rifle and smashed it in, and the thing crumpled to the ground.
“He said not—”
“We’ll take care of it,” I said as police sirens wailed in the distance. “Let’s get out of here.”
* * *
An hour later, Melissa sat across from me in my apartment on my couch. Satan had taken Hailey back to her place. The cops would still want to speak with us at some point, as eyewitnesses would have surely seen us there, but we generally had a good relationship with them. The only issue was telling them the King’s Men did it wouldn’t lead to anything, as city cops against a criminal mastermind wasn’t a fair fight.
But that could wait for another day. For now, the most important thing was making sure the woman in front of me was fine. And while she was physically fine, she hadn’t said a word since we’d gotten to my place.
I’d given her water and something to eat, and she’d consumed that, so it wasn’t like she was so numb as to not do any of that. She just probably needed time to get over the shock of everything.
And who could blame her?
“How are you feeling?”
I’d already asked that question twice before. Both times, she said fine. Each time was merely meant to make sure she hadn’t gotten worse. I didn’t think she’d add anything more to it.
“Am I going to have to depend on you for protection?”
That, I didn’t expect. I grimaced.
“If you step away from me, King no longer sees you as meaningful to me and thus will probably not bother you,” I said. “But if you stay with me, then yeah. Things might be bumpy while we fight King and his MC. But you know I’ll protect you. I came for you today. I’ll come for you every fucking day if I have to.”
Melissa nodded, her gaze looking ahead but not really at anything, beyond a thousand-yard stare. I assumed that was all she had to say and stood up to give her space.
“You said earlier that you wanted to know if I was in or out,” she said. “And that you wanted a hard answer.”
“I—”
“I want in,” she said. “But.”
She gulped. I felt like I was about to.
“I want to know that I’m in because you care about me and not because you care about me not dying. I don’t want us to be together out of fear, whether it’s fear of King or fear of rejection or hurt. I want us to be together because of how we feel about each other. How we see a future for each other, even beyond the tough times. Is that something you can promise me? Or are you only promising me that you would be with me because you’re afraid otherwise, King would kill me?”
Why couldn’t it be both? But when I looked into Melissa’s eyes, I knew I couldn’t give an answer that flippantly. I took a second to collect my thoughts, reminded myself to be calm, speak to her better than I had before, and tell her the absolute fucking truth.
“Right before I rescued you, I thought about you,” I said. “I thought about how I wanted to be with you and how I regretted telling you you had one shot. When you want to protect someone from imminent threat, it’s weirdly selfish. Like, you’re doing it because you feel obligated to do it. But there will come a day when King is gone, I promise you that. And when that day comes, I have to acknowledge that if things end, it could hurt like hell.”
I shook my head.
“But you know what? That’s worth the fucking risk. Being with you and the happiness that comes…fuck, Melissa. The good times we had? I fucking think about them a lot. I’ve dealt with a lot of shit with you and in the club recently, but the one thing that keeps me grounded is the good times with you, even if I don’t always realize it. So do I want to be with you for you and not just out of protection?”
I smiled.
“Yes.”
Melissa gave a faint smile. She looked down. She drew a breath.
And then she looked at me with the most loving, emotional eyes I’d ever seen.
