"Cash got her," he said on impact, arms going around me.
"How bad is it?" I asked, needing to know because otherwise my imagination would run away with me. And let's just say that my imagination had a lot of awful, sick things to pull out of the cobwebbed corners of my memory.
"Back ripped open," he went on quickly, not sugar-coating it, not treating me with kid gloves. "Stitches. Couple days. Week maybe."
"Was she..."
"No," he cut me off, arms squeezing me.
Okay. She was okay. Her back was cut up somehow but we had people at Hailstorm with medical pasts. They would stitch her up. She would be good as new. She was beaten again, but she wasn't raped. Thank God for small miracles. She would come back from that. If I knew her at all, she would be pitching a fit after two or three days in that bed. Cash would have to get inventive if he planned on keeping her there long enough for her to heal properly.
I felt a strange laugh/snort hybrid escape me as I realized that if there was ever a man up for the task, it was him.
"Tell me they killed the mother fucker."
"Saved him."
"For Lo?" I asked, pulling back and giving him a smirk. "Cash locked him down so she can do it?"
"Yep."
God, he was good. When she healed, when the shock wore off, she would want blood. He was a good guy who must have known her pretty well to give her that.
I felt the weight fall away from my shoulders.
She was okay.
Suddenly, I felt bone-deep tired, more so than I had ever felt before. Maybe it was my body's defense mechanism. Too much had happened so quickly. There was so much I needed to think about, to face. Too much. It was all too much. All I wanted to do was shut down.
"What's wrong?"
"I'm tired," I shrugged, pulling out of his arms and moving toward the bed, kicking out of my shoes on the way. I climbed into the bed, dragging the blankets up and over my head to block out the light, and I passed out.I woke up to a nightmare sometime after darkness had fallen to find that Wolf had climbed into bed beside me again, though not touching me like he had done the night before. I reached for my book and read for as long as my eyes would let me then drifted off again sometime around sunrise.
When I woke up the second time, Wolf was gone. Harley and Chopper were in the bed with me, looking up with groggy eyes when I shot up off the mattress.
"Where'd he go?" I asked them as I reached out to pet them.
Wolf was not the note-leaving type. So I piddled around the house for hours wondering where he was and getting more and more pissed at myself for said wondering.
What was I doing worrying about the absence of a man I barely knew? True, I'd been living with him for like... six days. But still. I'd lived with people at Hailstorm for years and never worried when they went missing for whole days at times.
A small voice whispered that maybe I was curious about his whereabouts because he mattered, because I cared about him. Because I was starting to have feelings about him.
But that was ridiculous.
I didn't have feelings for any man. Not that way. I never had. I never would.
If I found myself feeling all romantic, well, that would be the day that the fucking Earth started revolving around the moon.
"Guys wanna go for a walk?" I asked the dogs as they stretched languidly and hopped off the bed. "I'm gonna go stir crazy in here."
As I led the dogs outside wrapped in Wolf's shirt that was more mine than his anymore, I knew the walking I should have been doing was walking away. I knew that the last thing I should have been doing was staying and playing house. Because I knew all that was going to come of it was a broken home, a broken heart... or two. I was not the kind of girl who got to have relationships. I wasn't the girl who got to have a man's arms around her every night, to drift dreamily into that thing called love, to wrap it around herself like a security blanket.
Wolf was a good man.
I didn't need him to give an Ayn Rand-worthy monologue intimating to me every large and infinitesimally small detail of his life for me to know that. Wolf was a man whose actions spoke volumes when his tongue did not. He saved me. He healed me. He gave without asking for anything in return.
He was good in all the ways that mattered.
He deserved to have a woman in his bed who didn't wake up screaming. He deserved a woman who wouldn't flinch away from his touch at times. He should have someone who wasn't a minefield, hidden explosions all around. One misstep and you could lose an arm, a leg, a heart. I couldn't let him be taken down with my shrapnel.
The dogs led me toward a stream where they bound off and I figured they were hunting so I sat down and waited, contemplating the water that should have been soothing.
I had to go.
It was the second time I came to that realization in the past month.
This time should have been easier. It should have been easier to decide to leave Wolf than it was when I decided to leave Hailstorm and everyone within its fences, people who had become like a makeshift family to the orphan I had turned out to be.
But as I sat by the river and listened to Harley and Chopper barking manically at something from a distance, I realized it felt the same. It felt like I was trying to convince myself it didn't feel like ripping my roots out of the only ground I had ever felt comfortable in, ground that nourished me and helped me grow, ground that I felt safe planted in.