But one truth carves its way into me as I leave: I’ll never stop watching over her.
She’ll never know I’m there. But I will be.
She’ll survive. And I’ll be the ghost haunting her perimeter to make sure of it.
My hand closes around the doorknob. My throat forces out a whisper, so soft it barely registers.
“Goodbye, Babygirl.”
I step out into the hallway, heartbreak clinging to me. I leave her with a dead man on the floor and the truth burning down everything we will never be.
Chapter 36
Laurette Devereux
Somethinginside me splits clean down the center the moment he walks away.
One minute his arms were around me, breath warm at my ear. The next he’s turning away, moving down the hallway, and something inside me tears loose.
I sit there naked on the side of the bed, sheet pooling at my feet, watching his silhouette grow smaller. The house has never been this dark and cold.
My bedroom—the place he ruined me in the best ways—looks wrong now. An overturned lamp. A dent in the wall. The place where one man tried to kill me… and he didn’t let him.
The air is wrong—too still and sharp, vibrating with everything that just happened. This isn’t my room anymore. It’s the shell of a moment I almost didn’t survive.
My hand drifts upward, touching the tenderness circling my throat. The pulse there flutters unevenly.
His parting words ring through me, soft and devastating.This is goodbye, Babygirl.
My lips are dry. I drag my tongue across them, but the taste in my mouth is still copper and panic. My hands won’t stop trembling.
I didn’t think I was built for this… for wanting someone the way I want you.
I think I’m falling in love with you, Babygirl. At least that’s what it feels like. Or perhaps I’m already there and just refusing to call it what it is. At the very least, I’m obsessed with you. And that’s never happened before. I’ve never felt this way about anyone.
You’re the one I never saw coming.
The words replay, scraping through my chest. I thought this was heat and distraction, something reckless to keep the loneliness from swallowing me whole.
But somewhere between the danger and the dark and the way he touched me as though I was something worth guarding with his life, something shifted.
My fingers curl against my throat.
I’m falling in love with him.
I lurch forward so fast my foot catches on the rug, sending me stumbling. My hand slaps the doorframe to keep me upright, breath burning in my lungs.
He’s one second from disappearing.
“Don’t go.” It spills out, broken and desperate.
He halts at the front door, the words hooking into him.
“Please, Bastien.”
A single tear falls, hot and unbidden, tracing a line I don’t have time to wipe away.
He goes still at the sound of my voice, but he doesn’t turn. His shoulders tighten, rising with a slow, deliberate breath, as if he’s trying to talk himself into walking through that door.
