"Mila." Imani's got a hand out, close to me, not touching. "Mila, breathe. You're not breathing."
I'm on my feet.
I don't remember standing.
The chair's gone over behind me, there's blood roaring in my ears, Imani's saying my name and I can't answer, I can't do onething except the thing my body's already chosen, which is get to Finn, because I can't hold this by myself, because for the first time in ten years I don't want to.
"Where's Finn?" I ask, and my voice comes out in pieces.
"The garage. Mila, sit down one second, let me?—"
I'm already gone.
He's under a truck when I come through the door and he's out from under it the second he hears me, because he knows my walk now the way I know everyone's.
He takes one look at my face and he's up off the creeper and across the floor with his hands already coming up.
"What is it? What happened?"
I stop in front of him.
And every word I ran across the club carrying is gone, all of it, and I stand in a cold garage in front of the man I've spent ten years hating and loving in the same breath.
"I was wrong," I say.
"Wrong about what?"
"In the sunroom. I told you it wasn't them." The tears come hot and fast and I don't fight them, I let him watch all of it. "I told you to set it down. That the men who took me weren't Ironwood. That it had nothing to do with you."
His face is changing. He's beginning to understand.
"Itwasthem, Finn." My voice tears straight through. "The man I fought the night I got out, the reason I got out at all—he was Ironwood. Trask's blood. He was in my mother's kitchen the night they died, and he paid to spend a night with me. It was them the whole time. And I told you it wasn't."
I can't finish.
I came here and gave it back to him—the guilt, the whole rotten weight of it he'd finally started to put down—because I couldn't hold it by myself for one more second.
I watched it hit him, and I'm sick that I'm the one who put it there.
And I'd do it again anyway, because he's the only person alive I want to fall apart next to.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Rooster
She's standing in front of me with the worst thing I've ever heard still coming off her.
I don't put my arms around her. She hasn't told me I can, and I'm not going to guess.
So I stand in the garage with grease on my hands and my whole chest caved in.
I let her watch me take it.
"Say something," she says.
"I don't have anything yet." My voice comes out wrong, thin at the edges, and I have to stop and breathe through my nose to get the rest of it. "Give me a second. What's out of my mouth first is going to be about me, and this isn't about me."
Her jaw tightens at that, and her shoulders come down half an inch, both at once.
