“Because the idea of having a baby made me happy. She’s mine, and I wanted something that was mine.” I wanted her because she was all I was allowed to keep from my old self. I liked my old self. I don’t even know who this new Ekatia person really is, but I’m trying hard to be Ekatia for my baby. “Some days, she’s the only thing that keeps me going.”
Connor’s eyes soften. “You’re a good mom.”
Oh. I didn’t expect him to say that. “Thank you.”
Suddenly, someone bangs on top of the car. I jump up as if jolted by an electric current as a man shouts and thumps his fist on Connor’s window.
“Move or get out of the car so I can beat the shit out of you, you piece of shit!” the man screams, almost foaming at the mouth.
“God loves me, I swear it. Wait here.” Connor swings his door open and hits the man with it. The man’s lip cracks, spattering blood on the window, but that doesn’t stop him from shouting at Connor. If anything, it makes him angrier. He swings and punches Connor in the face.
Connor returns the punch. One, two, three. The man’s head bounces back and forth on his neck. Connor steps back and rolls his shoulders. The man swings and gets Connor under the jaw. His body slams into the car.
I cover my mouth to trap a scream.
Connor pounces right back and pounds the man with his fists until the man collapses. I can’t see what’s happening anymore. I can only see Connor’s elbow when it comes back up.
I rush out of the car and try to hold him back, but the sight of the man’s bloodied face makes me freeze. I’m a nurse, so I see blood and human waste all the time, but it’s not the same as seeing it coupled with a beating.
Connor pounds on the man. If he continues, he’ll kill him. I’m sure of it.
Then suddenly, he stops and looks up at me.
Time stills. Those same blue eyes I saw in the car are totally different now. They’re devoid of humanity. It’s like staring into a void. Into a person who is dead inside.
Tears slide down my cheeks.
Connor looks down at the man, then up at me. A blink, and he steps away, then surveys the gathered crowds.
“Get back in the car,” he says.
I do. I sit in the passenger seat and sink into the seat, my hands shaking even harder than before. I don’t know how I’ll work today.
Connor slides in next to me and grips the wheel, knuckles scraped and bloody. He drives away and sighs. The noise he makes sounds as if the incident was a mere inconvenience. I sigh like that when I arrive at the checkout without my reusable grocery bag and I have to purchase a plastic one. A minor annoyance. This is how Connor sighs now.
“You know,” he says as he eases back into traffic while I turn in my seat to see if the man’s getting up from the asphalt. I can’t tell because people have gathered around him. Police cars and an ambulance fly past us. Nobody stops Connor. The man was probably not a native of this city, or he would have recognized one of the Crossbow twins.
“People must be more careful about how they approach others. Maybe I had a faulty engine,” Connor says, “and I couldn’t have started my car, but that asshole came raging at me. He didn’t ask if I needed help.”
I stare at him. “You almost killed that man.”
Connor pulls up at the hospital emergency room. “If you hadn’t been there, I would have.”
“Thank God I was, then.”
“Maybe you’re that man’s guardian angel.” His face and hands are bloody as he says that. Blood drips onto his shirt.
“Come inside, and I’ll clean you up.”
Chapter 4
Renne
Finding parking near Selnoa General is like winning the lottery.
Connor circles twice until a spot opens right in front of a new bakery that used to be Dina’s hair salon.
It’s the exact same space where only last year, Connor parked right after I vacated it. Dina was with him, and they went into her hair salon to grab supplies. Minutes later, the hair salon exploded. In the aftermath, Dina and Connor ended up in the hospital on the same floor where I was working. Then they were held as hostages until Declan Crossbow singlehandedly rescued them.
