Page 65 of Savior
The goddamned hotelis like sleeping in a freezer. I throw myself onto my back and growl at the world in general. I don’t want to get up, but I don’t want my dick to freeze off either. I turn to where Sienna had fallen asleep after hours of the mindless tangle of sex, but I find it empty and just as cold as the rest of the godforsaken room.
“Sienna!” I call out, hoping she went to the bathroom and will turn the air off for me on the way back. I figure I can barter sexual favors in return. I discovered several of her favorites the night before. “You in the shower?”
As my brain starts to kick into gear, I realize there’s no wet splash from the shower that I’ve grown accustomed to in the mornings since I’ve been staying with her. There’s no hum from the blow dryer she uses to style her hair.
A vague unease unfurls in my stomach.
What the hell?
I throw off the blankets and stalk naked to the bathroom in spite of the cold. It’s quiet as a tomb inside, and when I open the door, I find it just as devoid of life. The hotel we chose was cheap and small, so there’s nowhere else she could possibly be.
I jerk on clothes angrily and snatch up my cell phone. When I try to dial her number, her phone vibrates on the tabletop.
“Fuck!”
After I jerk on socks and a pair of boots, I clip on my ankle holster and stride from the room. There’s really only one place we came here for, so there’s only one place she’d be.
And when I get to her—if she hasn’t already gone and gotten herself killed—I’m going to lock her up in jail if that’s what it takes to keep her ass safe.
I have no idea where I’m going, so I call Colson as soon as I wait for a taxi.
“Please tell me you aren’t already in trouble,” he answers.
“Don’t fucking start,” I hiss. “I need the address from the background file on Miami for the murders at Sienna’s house.”
“Lost her already?” he says as I hear papers shift in the background. I ignore him and lay on the horn for an elderly couple in front of me going ten miles under the posted speed limit. “All right, 982 Orange Avenue. Good luck,” he says.
I hang up the phone without answering and swerve around the old couple. As I weave in and out of traffic, I input the address into my GPS and hope the damn thing isn’t too far away.
Ten minutes later, I swerve to a stop at an apartment complex. It looks like it hasn’t been lived in since Sienna left it the night her sister was murdered. Vines are snaking alongside the walls, windows are busted out and the door itself is yawning wide open.
Cursing under my breath, I pull my gun out from the ankle holster and take a tentative step into the doorway. Dust motes swirl through the air and hazy light shines in through broken boards over empty window sockets. I clear the living room, then move toward the kitchen.
I’ve cleared houses countless times as a Marine and as a cop, but none of them have ever cut me to the core with the sharp edge of fear like this place does. A part of me recognizes what happened to Sienna in a visceral way, and my every instinct is screaming at me to find her and protect her.
Kitchen cleared, I move to the hallway. With each step I take, I remember Sienna’s first person-account of the night she walked this same hall. How the man grabbed her, dragged her to her sister’s room to view her butchered remains, and then nearly did the same to her. With careful steps, I clear the adjacent bedroom and bathroom, then move to the last room, the one I’ve been dreading the most.
With careful movements, I push open the door and sweep left to right. Sienna is sitting on the floor so still I damn near have a heart attack.
In two quick strides, I’m by her side and lifting her into my arms. She doesn’t even fight me. She just melts into my embrace.
“What the hell did you think you were doing?” I ask hotly, unable to let her go.
Her body trembles against my own. “I needed to come here,” she says, her voice soft. “I needed to know I could do it on my own. Stop running from it. I needed to face it.”
“But you didn’t have to do it on your own, dammit.”
She pulls back to look up at me with watery eyes. “I know.” Then she kisses me, and a laugh bubbles up. “Don’t you see? I knew you’d be there for me. I knew you’d be here when I got back. Having you here for me is what gave me the strength to face the thing I’ve been running from all this time.”
“Don’t youeverdo something so stupid again,” I nearly shout. “I swear to god, I nearly died a thousand times over by the time I got here.”
She wraps her arms around my waist again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to scare you. If it weren’t for you, I would have never been able to do this.”
I grunt. “Well don’t thank me. I won’t take credit for this idiocy.”
“Let’s go home,” she says, her face shining up at me.
And how can I be mad at that?