I hit him low and hard, driving his body into the floor. Some part of me was aware of Naomi crumpling to the ground.
I needed to go to her. But I couldn’t stop hitting the man beneath me.
My fist plowed into his face again and again until someone hooked me from behind and pulled me back.
“Enough,” Lucian said.
Duncan Hugo ceased to exist to me.
There was only Naomi and Waylay. Waylay knelt next to her, holding her hand to her chest. The tears welling in her blue eyes knifed into my gut.
“Wake up, Aunt Naomi,” she whispered.
I closed the distance and grabbed Waylay, hugging her to me.
“Make her wake up, Knox,” she begged.
My idiot dog crawled his way between them and started to howl.
Lucian was on his phone, holding his fingers to Naomi’s bruised neck.
“We need an ambulance,” he said tersely.
Still clutching Waylay to me, I leaned over Naomi and cupped the face of the woman I loved. The woman I’d lost. The woman I couldn’t live without.
“Wake the fuck up, Daze,” I growled. My eyes and throat burned. My vision blurred as hot tears clouded everything.
I almost missed it. The flicker of those long lashes. Then I was sure it was a hallucination when those beautiful fucking hazel eyes opened.
“Coffee,” she croaked.
Christ, I loved this woman.
Waylay tensed against me, her arm nearly choking me around the neck.
“You didn’t leave me!”
“Thank fucking God,” Lucian whispered, swiping the back of his hand over his brow and collapsing back on his elbows on the floor.
“Of course I didn’t leave you,” Naomi rasped. The bruises on her throat made me want to end the life of the man who’d put them there. But I had a more important priority.
“Welcome back, Daze,” I whispered. I leaned down and pressed my mouth to her cheek, breathing her in.
“Knox,” she sighed. “You came.”
Before I could answer, the side door I’d used to sneak in while Lucian created the distraction burst open. I saw the gun and the gleam in the man’s eyes and knew what was about to happen. Operating on instinct, I pulled Waylay to my front and used my body to pin her and Naomi to the ground.
Two shots rang out in rapid succession, but I felt nothing. No pain. Just my girls, warm and alive beneath me.
I chanced a glance up and saw the gunman on the floor.
“You fucking idiots,” Nash said, leaning against the wall. He had a cut on his face, blood on his t-shirt, and was sweating profusely.
“You did that right-handed?” Lucian asked, impressed.
My brother flicked him off as he slid down the wall. “I told you idiots I’m fucking good at my job.”
“Are we alive?” Waylay asked under me.
“We’re alive, honey,” Naomi assured her.
Carefully, I eased my weight off them. They both stared up at me with identical grins. I pointed at Waylay. “You’re gettin’ a damn birthday party.
And after that, we’re gettin’ married,” I told Naomi.
Naomi’s eyes went wide, and she reached for me, hands frantically prodding my torso.
“What’s wrong, baby?”
“Are you shot? Did you hit your head?”
“No, Daze. I’m fine.”
“Did I hit my head?”
“No, baby.”
“I must have. I thought I heard you just say we were getting married.”
“You think I’m dumb enough to let you two go?”
“Uh, yeah,” Waylay, Lucian, and Nash said together.
“Can I have a dress for the party and a dress for the wedding?” Waylay asked.
“You can have ten dresses,” I promised her.
“You’re going to spoil her,” Naomi said, running her hand over Waylay’s hair.
“Fucking right I am. I’m gonna spoil you too.”
Her smile put pieces back together inside me that I hadn’t even noticed were broken.
“Where’s Duncan?” Waylay asked.
Lucian got to his feet and scanned the space. “He’s gone.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Nash muttered. “This is why amateurs shouldn’t get involved in police business.”
“I can’t wait till I’m a grown-up and I can swear all the time,” Waylay announced.
We all heard footsteps on the stairs at the same time. Nash shifted to point his gun at the door. I pulled mine from the waistband of my jeans and aimed.
Lina and Sloane burst into the room together.
“Christ, I could have shot you,” Nash complained, lowering his gun.
“What the hell are you doing here? How’d you find us?”
Sloane looked a little green around the gills. “We followed Nash.”
“You left a trail of bodies from the parking lot. Didn’t leave any fun for the rest of us,” Lina said, kneeling next to my brother. Gently, she pushed the sleeve of his shirt up. “Popped your stitches, hotshot.”
“Can barely feel it,” Nash lied through his teeth.
Sloane spotted Naomi and started toward us. But Lucian was already in motion crossing the room like a god about to crush a mortal.
They met in the middle of the room, stopping inches apart.
“I told you to stay in town,” he snarled.
“Get out of my way, you big…” Her voice trailed off, and I saw she was staring at the body Nash had dropped. Her face went white.
“Sloane.” When the librarian didn’t look at him, Lucian grasped her chin and firmly turned it toward him.
“Knee. Balls. Nose,” Naomi whispered to me.
“That’s my girl.” I gave her a squeeze.
“Naomi, you okay?” Lina called from where she was tending my brother.
“I’m pretty great,” Naomi said, looking up at me with the kind of smile that could light up a man’s life.
“I fucking love you,” I whispered to her. She opened her mouth, but I shook my head. “Nope. You don’t get to say it back yet. Figure I have at least a week of telling you before I’ll deserve to hear it back. Got it?”
Her smile got impossibly brighter, and her eyes filled with tears.
“Sorry,” she sniffled, bringing her hands to her face. “I know you don’t like tears.”
“Think I’m okay with these,” I told her and lowered my mouth to hers.
“Barf,” Waylay complained.
Naomi shook with laughter against me. Blindly, I reached over and found Waylay’s face with my hand and gave the girl a gentle shove. She tipped over, laughing.
There was another flurry of activity on the stairs, and then the doorway filled with cops. “Drop your weapons!”
“About damn time,” Nash muttered, dropping his Glock and holding up his badge.
I SAT on the back of the ambulance in the middle of the night next to Naomi while a detective asked us yet another round of questions. I couldn’t stand to be more than a foot or two away from her. I’d almost lost her and Waylay.
If Grim hadn’t come through… If I’d been one minute later… If Nash hadn’t been that accurate with his right hand…
All of those ifs, and yet I was still here, holding on for dear life to the best thing that ever happened to me.
“What the hell is this? A parade?” asked one of the uniformed officers. A motorcycle rolled in. Followed by another and another. A dozen total. They were followed by four vehicles.
Engines cut. Doors opened. And Knockemout showed the fuck up.
I blinked a few times when I saw Wraith helping my grandmother off the back of his bike. Lou and Amanda climbed out of their SUV and started running. Jeremiah, Stasia, and Stef were right behind them. Silver and Max jumped out of Fi’s minivan along with Milford and four of Honky Tonk’s regulars.
Justice and Tallulah got off their respective bikes and hurried forward.
“Can we wrap this up?” I asked the detective.
“Just one more question, Ms. Witt,” she said. “A patrol car picked up a woman claiming to be Naomi Witt. Caught her trying to steal a Mustang two blocks from here. Do you have any idea who she might be?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Naomi groaned.
I spotted Nash and Lucian leaving a huddle of officers. My brother nodded for me to join them.
I gestured for Lou to take my place. “I’ll be right back, Daze,” I told her.
Naomi smiled up at me as her dad hustled over, Amanda on his heels. She paused long enough to give me a loud kiss on the cheek and a hard smack on the ass.
“Thank you for saving my girls,” she whispered to me before turning her attention to her daughter. “We brought you coffee, sweetheart!”
“You about done fucking things up?” Stef asked me.
“I just told our girl that we’re getting married. So yeah. I’m about done.”
“Good. Then I don’t have to destroy your life,” he said. “I leave you alone for less than two weeks, and look what happens, Witty.”
“Oh my God, Stef! When did you get home?”
I felt a hand in mine as I crossed the asphalt and looked down. Waylay had linked her fingers through mine. She had Waylon’s leash in her other hand. My dog looked like he just wanted to lay down and sleep for a month.
“Did you mean it about the dresses?” she asked as we walked toward my brother.
I released her hand and pulled her into my side with an arm around her shoulders. “Sure did, kid.”
“Did you mean it about what you said to Aunt Naomi? About loving her and stuff?”
I stopped us and turned her to face me. “I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life,” I assured her.
“So you’re not going to leave us again?”
I gave her shoulders a squeeze. “Never. I was miserable without you two.”
“Me too?” she asked.
I saw the spark of hope that she just as quickly pushed aside.
“Way, you’re smart. You’re brave. You’re gorgeous. And I’m gonna hate it when you start dating. I fucking love you. And not just because you’re part of a package deal.”
She looked so solemn it almost crushed my heart.
“Will you still maybe love me if I tell you something? Something bad?”
If Duncan Hugo put his hands on Waylay, I was going to hunt him down, chop them off, and feed them to him.
“Kid, there is nothing you can tell me that’s going to make me not love you.”
“Promise?”
“I swear to you on your kick-ass sneakers.”
She looked down at them, then back at me, the corner of her mouth turned up. “Maybe I kind of fucking love you too.”
I hauled her in for a hug, holding her face against my sternum. When she wrapped her arms around my waist, I felt like my heart was suddenly too big for my fucking chest.
“But don’t tell Aunt Naomi I said it that way.”
“Deal.”
She pulled back. “Okay. So here’s the thing…”
Two minutes later, I escorted Waylay over to Nash and Lucian. An EMT
had closed Nash’s stitches. Both men had butterfly bandages over various visible cuts and scrapes. The three of us were going to be hurting tomorrow.
And the next day. And probably the next.
“Naomi said Tina and Hugo were looking for a flash drive with some kind of information on it,” Nash explained. “No one seems to know what information was on it or what happened to the drive.”
“Waylay, why don’t you go see if your aunt needs anything,” Lucian suggested.
I tracked the direction of his gaze and saw it was pinned on Sloane, who was hovering near Naomi, her parents, and Stef.
“Actually, Way has some information she wants to share,” I said. I gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Go ahead, kid.”
She took a breath and then bent down to untie her shoe.
“They were looking for this,” she said, straightening with the heart charm now in her hand.”
Nash took it from her. He held the charm between his fingers, then frowned. Carefully, he pulled it apart at the middle. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“It’s a flash drive,” Waylay explained. “Mom was all worked up about this drive that she brought home. Kept saying she was finally gettin’ her payday and that soon she’d be driving a big-ass SUV and eatin’ steak for every meal. I got curious and I peeked. It was just a list of names and addresses. I thought maybe it was important. So I copied the file onto my drive just in case. She’s always losing sh— I mean things.”
I nodded at her to go on.
“Mom got mad at me for something stupid and cut my hair as punishment. So I decided to punish her back. I took the drive so she’d think she lost it, and then I hid it in the library but not in the historical fiction section like I told Duncan. It’s actually taped to the bottom of one of the archive drawers. I didn’t know they were going to break into Aunt Naomi’s and kidnap us and stuff. I swear,” she said.
Nash put his hand on her shoulder. “You’re not in trouble here, Waylay.
You did the right thing telling me about this.”
“He said he was gonna shoot Aunt Naomi if I didn’t tell him where it was. I was trying to tell him, but he taped my mouth shut,” she said.
I growled at this new information.
“None of this is your fault,” Nash assured her again.
But it was her mother’s, and I wasn’t sorry that she was in custody. I did, however, decide it wasn’t a great time to tell Waylay about it.
“There’s one more thing,” she said.
“What’s that?” Nash asked.
“Your name was on the list.”
Lucian and I exchanged a look.
“We need to see the list,” Lucian announced.
Nash reached out and covered Waylay’s ears. “The fuck you do, assholes.
Police business. Come on, Way. Let’s clear it with your aunt, and then we can get Sloane to let us in the library.”
“Okay,” she said. “Knox?”
“Yeah, kid?”
She crooked her finger at me, and I leaned down. I tried not to smile when she got done whispering in my ear.
“Got it. I’ll see you at home,” I said, giving her hair a ruffle.
We watched Nash guide her over to the ambulance.
“We need that damn list,” Lucian said.
I felt my lips curve.
“What?” he asked.
“That’s not the only copy. She also uploaded it to the library’s server.”
He stood stock-still for a beat, then let out a bark of laughter. Sloane’s gaze flew to him, and I realized that Lucian rarely laughed. Not like he used to, when we were kids and everything was a punchline waiting to happen.
“You are going to hate your life when she starts dating,” he said.
I couldn’t fucking wait.
We started back toward Naomi, who was on her feet under a blanket and holding a coffee. Despite everything I’d seen tonight, despite everything I’d done wrong, the smile she directed at me lit me up from the inside out.
I slapped Lucian on the shoulder. “Hey. How do you feel about being co-best man?”
