His fingers tightened around mine. “I didn’t feel comfortable leaving you alone.”
I leaned forward in disbelief. “But you live in Portland, Ash. Where the hell have you been sleeping at night?”
“On Carrie and Grayson’s couch, baby,” he whispered, stopping at the light. He looked at me, his features soft. “There was no way in hell I was going to leave you alone. Not after you just lost your friend.”
“But your life…what about your needs?”
Another chuckle left him as he lifted his eyes to the sky. “She still doesn’t get it.”
“What, Ash? What don’t I get?” I pushed.
The light turned green, but we were the only ones out. Since the funeral this morning, downtown had been empty, a ghost town. He didn’t take his foot off the brake. His jaw worked as he watched me, taking me in. “We’re not talking about this right now.”
“No,” I snapped, yanking my hand from his. “You can’t just put your life on hold to take care of me, Ash! That’s not fair to you. You’ve been sleeping on a couch for the last ten days, and you didn’t tell me?”
“Angel—”
“You can’t just uproot and desert your life because of me.”
“Baby, I did that five years ago,” he confessed harshly.
I stared at him, my heart jumping into my throat. “Wh-what?”
“The second I lost you, my life was over. Spent three years hunting you, turning over this entire country looking for you. Red Snake exhausted every damn resource we had trying locate you, Angel. Every lead we came across ended up being a dead end, and after a while, my anger morphed into grief. The day you walked into the Rossy’s was the day after I’d given up on you.”
Lost me?
He—he hunted me?
My mind, memories, the past, all of it swirled together, raging inside my skull as his words seeped into me, mixing with my blood. He broke our gaze, and I fell back into my seat. My breath caught in my throat as questions shot off, each one more damaging than the last.
Why had he hunted me?
Why had he been looking for me?
I looked down at my lap, panic jumping under my skin, prickling and poisonous. The answers slammed into me, the conclusion to the clusterfuck of the last five years of my life.
They’d never gone back for him.
They’d promised me they would.
They’d left Ash there to die.
Chapter Seventeen
Angel
Ash shifted his truck into park and leaned back in the seat. He rubbed his jaw and sighed. “Angel. Angel, beautiful, look at me.”
My mind was numb.
My fingers were tingling.
And despite my effort, I couldn’t break this stare with myself in his side mirror. My eyes were dim, the bags under them dark and prominent. On any other day, I would be ashamed of the state of my skin. There was a time I would’ve given anything to have a little water splashed on my face, and since then, I’d trained myself to take care of my skin, my body, my hair. All of me. I’d had to convince myself that all of me was precious and deserving of love and tender care. I’d spent my time here in Astoria teaching myself how to do that.
Then Felix had told me he was leaving.
My routine had gone up in smoke.
