Page 43 of Full Throttle

“You guys have power?” Worry filled me.

“Yeah, I took one of D’s generators,” he told me, chuckling a bit.

“D and the girls good?” I pressed.

“Yeah, yeah. Everyone is good.”

Relief filled me, and I looked out towards the arch. The sun was shining, and I was grateful for it. I needed the fucking ice to melt so I could get the hell out of here. Silence lingered between us for a moment.

“How are you holding up?” Lee finally asked me. There was something in his voice that had my defenses rising.

“What do you mean? I’m fine. In case you forgot, Dominique is the one who’s injured.”

“Yeah, and you two have a complicated past and you’re stuck in a tiny ass loft above a bar in a damn frozen tundra,” he quipped.

I bit down until pain radiated through my jaw up to my temple.

“Look,” he sighed. “I don’t know why you decided to stay with her, and that’s your business…” He trailed off, and I braced for his next words. “You just—you never talked about her before, and now she’s here.”

“She wasn’t important before Jer decided to bring her on,” I clipped, anger creeping over my shoulders with a wicked smile on its face.

“You said that you two grew up together, Cain,” he said, as if reminding me of the biggest and brightest part of my shitty upbringing.

“Know that,” I pushed out through my teeth.

One mention about our past from another person, and I was already fuming. I bent my head back to the sky, inhaling through my nose. As I exhaled, looking straight ahead once more, I hit him with the truth. “She was something to me in the past, but that was it. She fucked up, and I moved on,” I told him, ignoring the pain in my chest.

“She fucked up,” he parroted.

“Yeah,” I bit off. “Now, we’re here, and Jer told me last night that she decided to stay. She’s a grown fucking woman, and as much as I would like to, I can’t make her leave. She’s found a place here, just like I have, and we’re going to have to learn to deal with it.”

“What did she do?” he asked.

“I thought it was none of your business,” I snapped.

I was greeted with more silence.

A sigh left me, my breath like vapor in the air. “I’m here to look out for her and nothing more. Once the roads are clear, I’m out of here, yeah? Then you and everyone else can take care of her.”

“You don’t want to be the one to do that, then?” he asked incredulously.

I shouldn’t be here in the first place—not after what happened the other night. Guilt flooded my insides like a toxin, seeping into my bloodstream. “No. I don’t.”

“Right,” he muttered before moving on. “Any word from Xander?”

I gave him the minimal info my brother had recently given me, and he pulled Jer and Dontell onto the line. For the next few minutes, the four of us plotted our next move against Kavi, all of us ready for this shit to be over. During the conversation, images of Dominique lying unconscious in that burning car flooded my mind, torturing me with each lick of the flames.

Dominique’s voice was muffled on the other side of the bedroom door as she pushed out, “Whatever it takes.”

She’d gotten up from her spot on the couch, shoving her notebooks in her bag before she walked back to the bedroom with her crutches over an hour ago. Something in her voice had my hand halting in mid-air as I went to knock on the door.

“I don’t know. I just—I can’t be near him anymore,” she sighed.

My jaw tightened.

So the feeling was mutual.

“Are the streets clear?” she asked as I bent my head, closing my eyes. “Dominique,” I called, raising my voice.

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