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Merrick sighed and squeezed her fist. Answers weren’t going to bless his sorry ass while he was standing here in the cold, and he wasn’t going to risk Tamsyn getting sick waiting for him to sort out his muddled thoughts. “Promised you we’d explore the club tonight, didn’t I?”

She shimmied around him until she stood between the railing and his body. Before he could straighten, she tilted her head back, touching her lips to his in a gesture that was more comforting than arousing. She knew something was troubling him, but how would she react if she understood the reason?

Still, it didn’t stop him from tasting her, closing his eyes and savoring the sweet, hesitant brush of her soft lips. He didn’t push her, didn’t force it beyond the gift she was offering; he accepted it in the spirit in which it was given.

She’d been in his life for a month now.

He couldn’t imagine her not being in it.

How the hell did one little stray walk into a man’s life and change it so irrevocably that it felt as though he’d be losing a limb—or worse—if he lost her? Fuck, at this point, he’d rather surrender an arm or leg if it meant seeing her smile when she woke from a nap or watching excitement bloom in her eyes when her favorite show came on.

“Thank you, darlin’,” he whispered when she eased back. “I needed that, more than you know.”

She pressed her hand to his heart, then to her own. When she cupped his cheek and gave him a look that blatantly said,You can tell me…

It wrecked him.Shedestroyed him with nothing more than compassion and her eyes.

“I have to make a decision,” he told her, unable to hold the words back. “It’s a difficult situation, and I don’t know if my choice will be the right one.”

Oh, that brought her eyebrows down into a worried frown. She mused that over for a few seconds before tapping two fingertips on her chest.

“Yes, it involves you.”

Fear illuminated her face better than the porch lights ever could. Flinging her arm out, she pointed to the mountain, twisting away from him and stepping back, almost falling in her haste.

Merrick snagged her wrist, hauling her against him before she hurt herself. “No. No, Tamsyn. That’s something you never have to worry about again. No more community, no more trades, no more being treated as something less than human.”

Horror replaced fear as her legs buckled.

Catching her, he settled her on his hip and began to pace the porch, rocking her as his boots clomped on the wood. “Planning on keeping all that a secret, were you? Naughty girl. I know about some of what you went through up there; Anarchy’s been a busy bee, digging up all the dirty deeds Jedidiah and his friends want to keep hidden.”

Her sharp inhale exposed her distress.

“There are things in motion now, darlin’. People involved who believe the women and children trapped there deserve a better life than what they’ve got. Because of you, because you did a fucking courageous thing and ran away despite the dangers, they’ll have a chance to find their own freedom.” He kissed her forehead when her lip quivered. “Maybe you were just trying to save yourself, little owl, but you’ve ended up doing a lot more than that.”

A tiny head shake, a glimmer of tears.

“Are you worried about your father?”

That dried up any notion of tears, he noted. There was no love left in her for the man who’d sired her, raised her, if there’d ever been any to begin with—kind of hard to love someone who only kept her around to sell her to the highest bidder.

“Had he traded you off when you ran?”

The slight hesitation made him pause and backtrack, reading deeper into the stilted shrug she eventually gave him. It wasn’t a yes or no, so the answer was somewhere in middle ground.

Merrick cocked his head. “No, that was what forced your hand, right? He told you there was a deal on the table and he was gonna take it?” He grunted when she nodded. “How much warning did he give you? A day, a week?”

Tamsyn snorted in derision, holding up a single finger then tapping it on his watch.

“An hour?”

It made sense, he supposed. The asshole probably hadn’t expected her to run, but if the community elders didn’t inform theproductsthat they were being sold until the last minute, the stock had less time to cause problems or plan an escape.

“Do you know who bought you?”

Revulsion curled her lips, sparking in her eyes until they glowed with a hatred he didn’t think she was capable of feeling, let alone barricading it down where it couldn’t be seen. She scrawled letters over his chest, too fast and jerky to decipher.

“Again, darlin’. Slower this time.”