Page 70 of Midnight Danger

“Sleep, Zee. I’ll be right here when you wake up.” Her lips caressing mine was the last sensation I felt before I fell into the darkness filled with strange images and flashes from the past. My last conscious thought was an irrational fear that I would never get to see our child.

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Chapter Twenty-Two

Cassandra

Jordan and Ash disappeared a few hours ago, leaving Megan and me to channel hop and sit in silence. The tick of the clock on the wall slowly drove me insane, the constant noise more than I could bear right now. I wanted to scream, to punch something, to rewind time to the night when I visited Xavier’s business. That was the pivotal moment that changed everything in our relationship.

We went from a hot and steamy romance with no real attachments to discovering truths that bound us together. The truth was ugly and treacherous, constantly trying to confuse and corrupt you. I wanted to go back to the happy days of mindless oblivion.

Part of me whispered the truth that we’d have found this path eventually, especially since I’d already been pregnant at the time. It just felt like the past few weeks had been filled with injury and death.

“I killed a man tonight,” I randomly blurted out.

Megan turned toward me with her mouth open and the controller still in her hand.

“He had a wire around Zee’s throat trying to kill him as they struggled. His gun fell to the ground and…” I couldn’t say the words again. “He was going to murder my husband.”

Megan sat and stared at me for several seconds before she blinked. “Then it was better that he died instead of Xavier.”

And that was my current moral dilemma. I sat here beside my injured, unconscious husband and felt no remorse for what I’d done. Where were the feelings of guilt and despair? Did this mean I was a bad person?

“Cas.” She waited until I finally looked at her. “We talked about this in the past when we were at university. You saw shadows everywhere you looked, it was the reason why you went to the firing range and learnt to shoot. You were just too soft to actually get a gun.”

I lifted Xavier’s legs and tucked myself under him, needing to feel his pulse under my fingers as I held his wrist. “I wanted to be able to protect myself, yet, when they came for me, I was helpless.”

“You weren’t helpless when they came for Xavier,” Megan pointed out.

“I froze, Meg. He grabbed him and I watched that wire bite into his neck, and I froze. Only the gun clattered to the floor and broke me out of the horror of the situation, Xavier would be dead right now.”

Megan moved until she knelt in front of me. “You can’t think like that, Cas. He’s alive and Jordan is sorting out this shitstorm the way he always does. We need to take this as a win. These men have Jordan worried, and that man never blinks twice he’s that much in control.”

My hand that wasn’t on Xavier’s pulse grabbed Megan’s hand. “What are we going to do?” I asked.

She shook her head slowly. “No idea. I can do a lot of my work remotely from Jordan’s apartment, but I need to go into work for face-to-face meetings. You need to sit your pregnant, unemployed ass here and let Zee protect you.”

“We both know I’m terrible at doing nothing.”

A faint smile appeared on Megan’s mouth. “Then take up a hobby. You can learn to knit or crochet clothes for the baby.”

She had a point. I walked into this marriage with my eyes open. Xavier had shown me who he was, and he knew everything about me. It was more than most people had before they walked down the aisle and said, “I do.”

The minutes ticked slowly around the clock. Megan curled up on the other sofa and finally fell asleep. Xavier muttered every so often, his hand reaching for his throat, but the cold compress sat gently on his neck. Pressure mounted in my chest making it difficult to breathe, my mind plagued by the thought of Xavier leaving my life. Everyone I loved died and left me. My eyes burned with unshed tears.

Around three in the morning, Jordan and Ash reappeared.

I stared at them, my eyebrows raised in question.

“We had to wait, as they were tearing the place apart looking for the stones,” Jordan said. “He’d fallen into an awkward place to move. We had to activate the fire alarm after I retrieved the jewels to divert their attention.”

“Would they not see you on CCTV?” I asked.

“Nah, we were carrying signal jammers.” Jordan settled himself beside Megan, lifting her head onto his knee. “His body’s been incinerated.”

Nausea crept up my throat. “I’ve never killed anyone before.”

Jordan studied me. “That may be true, but either that was one hell of a lucky shot, or you’ve fired a gun before.”

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