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CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

F orbes started at the apparition.

The ghost.

There was no other explanation. Unless he’d bled to death and hovered somewhere between this life and eternity.

He hoped not, considering how his shoulder throbbed.

The woman standing in front of him couldn’t be there. She couldn’t be real.

She stepped closer, lowering her gun. Her gaze barely flicked to Brooklynn, who’d called her a name that made no sense.

The apparition moved closer and dropped to her knees, staring at him as he was staring at her. Light came from the moon above and the flames behind. A few red and blue flashes penetrated the darkness. It wasn’t much, but he didn’t need more. He knew this woman.

The teenager.

The girl.

All grown up. Somehow, alive and well and…

“Forbes?” Her voice was the same. Just the same as before.

“What…? How did you…?” His voice was rough from the smoke and cracked with emotion. He pitched forward into his sister’s arms. “Rosie.”

Beside him, Brooklynn gasped.

Forbes held onto his big sister, and in an instant he was eight years old. Hearing her voice, feeling her tugging, tugging him to the closest hiding spot in the house.

“In here,” she’d said. “They’re coming. Don’t come out.”

He hadn’t known who they were, but somehow, she had. And she’d known they were coming. And she’d escaped.

She’d escaped.

He didn’t understand.

Now, he gripped her tightly, afraid that if he let go, she’d disappear again. All the bad things would happen again.

Except he wasn’t eight years old, and she wasn’t eighteen, and the killer lay face down in the dirt behind them.

He looked at the spot, just in case Leo decided to rise from the dead.

Apparently, that was a thing now, considering Rosie was here.

Forbes was confused and elated, and angry and brokenhearted. It was too many emotions for him to deal with.

Brooklynn’s hand slipped over his good shoulder an instant before she pressed something to the bleeding wound on his back. It hurt, but he didn’t care. She was safe and alive. Rosie was here?—

Nothing else mattered.

If he could just keep these two women close, right with him, forever, then all might be well.