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Holding me.
I couldn’t tell.
“Where is she?” I begged as I pounded my fists against his chest, no strength to the punches as I wailed against him.
He shook his head, and he held me closer as he buried his face in my neck. As if he could stop me from floating away on the deluge of grief. “I don’t know, Emery. I don’t know. I tried to stop them. I fucking tried. I tried so hard. But I failed. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“No, you were there. It was you.”
Misery poured from his being. “I was. I was there that night. I told you I wasn’t even close to being a good man. That I’d done horrible things. But the second I saw what was in the back of that truck…”
He swallowed thickly, the words trembling as he released them. “I saw my purpose for my life, Emery. I knew exactly what I’d been meant to do.”
My head thrashed against the wild grasses and dirt, while my entire being bowed toward him. “I remember you.”
I wanted it to be an accusation, and it somehow came out in some kind of prayer.
“I remember what you said. You were wearing that bracelet.”
He angled back to look at my face. Shame covered him whole. “I know what I said, Emery, but I had to so they wouldn’t catch on to what I had planned.”
Confusion bound me as I tried to process everything that had happened that night. But I had been close to delirious by then. Our senses distorted since we’d been blindfolded for so long, plus we’d hardly been given any food or water. Compounded by the trauma…
I sucked for the air I couldn’t find as it slammed me.
It had been reported afterward that there had been a gunfight between the police and the criminals inside the truck. They’d managed to rescue four girls, while three had been lost.
But I could almost feel it then.
His aura.
His scent.
The ferocity of the man who’d pulled us from the back of the truck.
Find me in the darkness, bring me to the light.
A shattered breath wheezed into my lungs.
It was him.
It was him.
The gunshots and the shouts and the desperation of the man who’d been willing to do anything to get us out.
“I would never, I would never, I would never.” Kane spilled the words out across my chest, peppering them over the top of my shirt like he could pour them directly into my heart.
A jagged cry erupted, a sob of misery and relief.
My fingers sank into his shoulders, desperate to get him closer. “It was you. It was you.”
He pulled me closer. His arms banded around me as he rocked me and whispered as I wept, “I would give anything to go back and stop it before it started. I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“It was you. You saved us.”
Then I shot upright, pushing him back. “Maci,” I rasped.
Kane brushed back the hair matted to my sweat-drenched face, and his emerald eyes flashed beneath the glints of the sun that streamed in through the breaks in the leaves. “She’s safe. She’s with Cash.”