“What if she doesn’t want to?” I ask.
I realize how stupid the question sounds the second it leaves my mouth.Since when did I give a fuck about what anyone else wanted?
River’s expression hardens. “She doesn’t have a choice.”
He’s right. I know he is. She doesn’t have a choice, and neither do I.
I look at the screen one more time. At the freeze-frame of Bambi running away. Her eyes wide with terror. Helpless. Exposed. Exactly the position I never wanted her to be in again. And here she is, anyway. Because of me.
“We need to go get her now.” I say. “Before someone else does.”
River nods. “I’ll come with you. Let me just pull the car up front.”
I nod, even though I hate everything about this.
River heads for the door and I push off the couch to follow him, but Briggs stops me short. “You sure about this?”
“About what?”
“Bringing her here. Into this.” He gestures vaguely at the house. At the life we’ve built. The empire. The violence. The shit we do that normal people don’t come back from. “You know what that means, right? Once she’s in, she’s in. There’s no going back.”
“I know.”
He studies me for a moment. “Yeah, but does she?”
It doesn’t matter if Bambi knows what she’s getting into. She’s in danger, and her safety supersedes everything else. Including her freewill.
I’ll make sure Bambi leaves that apartment tonight. Even if I have to drag her out of it, kicking and screaming.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Dahlia
The scentof smoke drags me from sleep. Not the screaming fire alarm. Not the heat licking across my skin. Smoke. Thick, wrong, invasive, and filling my lungs like wet cement.
I bolt upright and gasp.
Bad fucking idea.
My lungs reject the action, and I cough violently. Each breath, broken glass and razor blades that shred through my chest and scrape my throat raw.
I force my eyes open, trying to see through the haze. Smoke is everywhere. Rolling across the ceiling in thick gray spirals. Seeping down the walls like lava.
What is this?
I swing my legs over the bed and my feet hit the floor. The hardwood is warm. Wrong. Everything is wrong.
“Fallon!” I try to shout, but my voice comes out strangled. Raw. Like someone took a sander to my throat. I stumble toward my bedroom door and yank it open.
The hallway is an inferno. Flames devour the far wall near the kitchen. Orange and alive and so fucking hungry. They crawl toward me like they recognize me, like they’ve been waiting for me to show my face. My body freezes as my mind slips to a different fire on a different night.
This can’t be happening.
Not again.
Heat slams into me like a physical shove, pulling me out of my memory. I stagger back and jerk my arm up, shielding my eyes from the embers and ash floating in the air.
The smoke is so thick I can barely see two feet ahead of me. My eyes burn. My throat burns. Every breath feels like I’m inhaling glass.
