Chapter 12
Adrien was in the hallway.
He heard the commotion.
He heard Clare’s voice sharpen.
Then he heard a sound he had heard once before, 6 weeks earlier in a restaurant.
He ran into the room.
Clare was on the floor.
Again.
She had put herself between a desperate man and the person he had come to kill.
This time, that person was Adrien.
Daniel stood over her with a weapon in his shaking hand, horror already forming on his face.
He had come to kill Adrien Voss.
Instead, he had hurt the woman who had given him coffee and asked how she could help.
“Clare.”
Adrien dropped to his knees.
6 weeks earlier, he had knelt beside a stranger.
This time was worse.
This time he knew her.
This time Clare had become the reason he believed he might still become someone worth saving.
“No. No, no, no. Clare, look at me.”
She was conscious.
Pale and hurt, but conscious.
Her first question was about Noah.
“Is Noah here? Is he safe?”
“He’s at school. He’s safe. He’s fine.”
Adrien pressed his hands against the wound and called for Maya to get an ambulance.
Then he looked at Daniel.
Daniel stared at Clare.
“She got in the way.”
Adrien knew his name.
“Daniel Cain. Your wife. Your daughter. 25 years ago. I know.”
Adrien had found Daniel’s name 6 weeks earlier and had been too afraid to approach him first.
He admitted it.
This was his fault.
Daniel had come for him, and Adrien understood why.
But Clare had never done anything.
She was the best person either of them would ever meet, and she had taken what Daniel intended for Adrien because that was who she was.
Adrien forced Daniel to look at what had nearly happened.
This was what revenge was turning him into.
The same thing Adrien himself had become.
A man willing to destroy someone innocent to feel even.
Daniel looked down at Clare.
The weapon fell from his hand.
Then Daniel Cain sank to his knees.
25 years of hate cracked open.
Underneath it was grief.
“I’m sorry.”
Maya entered and secured him.
Daniel did not resist.
The ambulance arrived in 4 minutes.
To Adrien, it felt like 400 years.
Clare kept trying to speak.
He told her to save her strength.
She refused.
“If I don’t—”
“Don’t.”
“If I don’t, Noah. You take care of Noah. Promise me. Not with money. You raise him. You and Lily. You show him the world isn’t only what it did to you. Promise me.”
Adrien was crying openly.
“You’re going to raise him yourself.”
Clare had saved Lily.
She had saved Noah.
She had saved Adrien.
She had turned something back on inside him that had been switched off for 20 years.
He would not allow the first person who had ever looked at him and expected nothing to die because of something he had done before he ever met her.
“You fight. You fight the way you make everybody else fight. You stay.”
Clare managed the shadow of a smile.
“Bossy for a guy who owes me his whole self.”
Then her eyes closed.
The paramedics lifted her.
Adrien ran beside the gurney holding her hand until they forced him to release it at the ambulance.
He watched her leave exactly as he had 6 weeks earlier.
And once again he made the same bargain.
Take it from me.
May you like
Take anything.
Not her.
