Page 72 of While He Breathes

I know I said I would give her a chance whether to stay or go, but even if she chooses the latter, she’ll never be free of me.

I’ll be right there, keeping her safe, making sure no one dares to fuck with her.

“Orion,” Killian says carefully, obviously seeing how close to the edge I’m walking. “I need you to keep it together so we can find her.”

“Find her?” I force through gritted teeth. “What do you mean, find her?”

His eyes flicker with something I almost mistake for fear, but it disappears too quickly for me to identify it. “It looks like they had a plan of their own. They got her out of the bar so fast we didn’t have a hope of intercepting them.”

I never understood the concept of your life falling down around you until right now. There have been many times when things have fallen apart, but it didn’t feel like the walls were closing around me, or that my heart was going to break out of my chest, or that I couldn’t breathe through the rising terror.

No, this is new to me, and no matter how hard I fight against it, the fog of panic drags me closer.

“Orion!” he snaps, his hands grasping my shoulders and forcing me to look at him. “Keep it the fuck together. For Ember. You have to keep it together for her.”

I force a nod, but I’m not sure my head moves at all. “The trackers,” I whisper, not trusting my voice to be that of the cold unfeeling crime boss I claim to be.

“We have a team following them right now. If she’s in that van, we’ll get her.”

“And if she’s not?”

Uncertainty crosses his face, and he doesn’t reply immediately.

One of the rules we made in the early days was that we would never lie to each other. If there was something hard we needed to discuss, we wouldn’t pussyfoot around it. This is the first timeeither of us has ever hesitated, and my body tightens as I prepare for his response.

“If she’s not in that van, we’ll find her. You have my word that we will not give up until she’s back where she belongs. With you.”

I give him a jerky nod before pressing my eyes closed.

Killian’s right about one thing. I can’t fall apart. Not until she’s in my arms. Not until I can protect her from the world. Not until I can spank her ass for ever concocting this plan.

Because there’s an alternative I can’t bring myself to think of.

An alternative where she doesn’t come home at all, and I don’t survive.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

EMBER

It takes longer than I would like to drag myself to the surface.

My awareness comes back far quicker than my bodily functions, and every single second of being able to feel, hear, and smell, without being able to move or see, is worse than the last.

I shouldn’t be surprised that Lucas had his own plan and that he managed to pull it off. The asshole is far too good at scrounging together a plan that works when there’s no way it should.

The first thing I realize when I begin to wake is that I’m no longer in the clothes I wore into the bar. The soft sweater I pulled on has been replaced with something that itches, and the jeans that fit me almost too well are long gone.

The tennis shoes I slipped on as I left the bedroom are also missing, which makes my stomach roll with dread.

That’s where the trackers were.

We assumed that was the safest place for them, that there was no situation where I would be barefoot.

Clearly, we were wrong about that.

The next thing I notice is the hard ground beneath me.

They couldn’t have put me on a couch or something? Would that have been so hard?