Page 28 of Protected By Razor

I brush her hair back with the one hand that doesn’t have somebody else’s blood on it, and I look at her, and I look at her, and I don’t know what’s happening in my chest but it isn’t anything I’ve got a name for.

“They hit you,” I say. Quieter. I should have been here.”

“You are here.”

I press my mouth to the top of her head. I close my eyes.

Behind me I hear the brothers coming up the stairs. Three sets of boots. Rogue first, Lock, Ghost. They come through the door. I hear Rogue say Jesus Christ very quietly. I hear Lock already on the phone. I hear Ghost say he alive? and Rogue say barely, and then the brothers get to work and I stop tracking it because Darcie is in my arms and that is the only thing in the world.

“They knew my name,” she whispers. “They said it was because of me the club was??—”

“Stop. It’s not because of you. None of this is.”

Her fingers knot in the fabric of my shirt.

“I was scared,” she whispers. “I wasn’t sure you’d get here.”

“I was always going to get here. Do you hear me? Always.”

Kate comes over at eleven.

She walks through the door and stops in the middle of the living room and takes in the state of it — blood on the wall, broken glass on the carpet, Darcie under a blanket on the couch with a cut on her lip — and her face does a thing.

She doesn’t say anything.

She crosses straight to Darcie and gathers her up and holds her, and Darcie cries quietly into her shoulder. I stand in the doorway with my bandaged hands and I let them have it.

After a while Kate looks up at me over Darcie’s head. Her eyes are wet.

She closes her eyes and holds Darcie tighter.

When she leaves she hugs me at the door — proper, arms tight round my ribs, her face in my shirt — and when she pulls back she says, quiet: “You’d better be good to her.”

She goes.

I lock the door behind her. Chain. Deadbolt. When I turn around Darcie is standing in the middle of the living room watching me.

“Come to bed,” she says.

She falls asleep with her head on my chest.

I lie there with my arm around her and after a while her voice comes, soft, she wasn’t asleep after all.

“Razor.”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you.”

“I wasted ten years,” I say.

Her breath catches.

“Ten years of looking at you and telling myself I couldn’t. Ten years of deciding for both of us. I was wrong. About all of it.”

“Don’t.”

“I should have??—”