“Promise you won’t do it again,” she finally says. “I don’t have anyone else, Nash. I need to know I can trust you.”
And even though it fucking kills me, even though I’m spying on her with the best intentions, I take her face in my hands, look into those gorgeous blue eyes and...
I tell her everything she wants to hear.
All of itlies.
43
Carter
“Tell me what you remembered that made you tuck and roll into moving traffic last night,” I say over breakfast.
After my slipup, I decided it’d be best to wait before asking questions.
I stayed awake long after Hailey fell asleep in my arms, agonizing over the lies I’m feeding her. It’s for her own good. The truth will only make her leave, and she’s not safe away from me.
I’m not entirely sure if she’s forgiven me for breaching her privacy or if she’s only pretending we’re okay, but she stayed the night, and she’s stillhere. That’s a good sign.
She clears the last crumbs off her plate, starting to keep a healthy food intake level.
“Here?” she asks, glancing around thecafeteria.
Students come and go, their chatter grating my ears. I’ve been here for weeks, but I still struggle with noise in the morning. My days here are flipped. Back in Chicago, mornings are quiet, evenings are loud.
It’s the other way around at Lakeside.
Plates clatter, spoons clink against bowls, and the occasional laugh crescendos above the constant hum of voices. The only good thing about this setting is the bittersweet aroma of coffee in the air.
“No one’s listening,” I say, resting both elbows on the table. “What did you see that scared you so much?”
“A gun,” she whispers, taking a sip of her coffee.
“Keep going.”
She rolls her eyes, then quickly makes an apologetic face, remembering how fucking hard that gets me.
I was on her in a heartbeat last time she did that. I dragged her into my room, pushed her face into the pillow and fucked her until she came three times. I’m rock hard right now, but we’ll deal with that later.
“I saw someone shooting,” she says.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see the face. Just a gun firing and a bullet leaving the barrel. It felt like I was right there...” She sets her cup aside, the words coming faster, her eyes bigger, brighter, and scared. “As if it was happening right then. Like I was ripped away from your car and dropped... I don’t really know where.”
I grab her hand, tracing my thumb across her knuckles because she looks like she’s falling back into that memory.
“The noise...” She shudders softly. “So loud. Like the gun went off right by my ear. I’ve never felt fear quite like it.”
“Were you indoors?”
She shakes her head. “I’m not sure. Maybe. I saw the gun and—” She frowns, her gaze unfocused. “Everything else was blurry. I think there was a wall, maybe a window, a light somewhere...”
I squander the urge to sit her on my lap and wrap her in my arms. This is important. The first memory that might hold an actual clue, maybe the key. Darkness, a gun, a wall, maybe a window... not much.
“Dead on impact but Babyface put a few bullets in his head just in case.”Rhett’s words bounce around my head.
He shot Alex in the car. There’s no way he dragged him out because the police report said they found Alex behind the wheel.
