Page 77 of If This is Love

“I appreciate the apology,” she said in a toneless voice, looking at Skye. “I’d personally like to move on, and I’m sure everyone else would, too.”

Skye was wearing a plastic smile and deer-in-headlights eyes. She slid her eyes to me and stretched her smile so wide it turned into a cringe. “You okay, Gabe?”

I coughed into my fist. “Yep.”

“Okay,so…” Skye went on apprehensively, “um… over the past few weeks, Emma and I have been in contact with an organization in Nebraska that’s been helping resettle a group of displaced people. They have some women who escaped sexual slavery at the hands of an extremist group in Iraq.” She paused cautiously. “They’re a religious minority known as Yazidis from a region of Iraq that’s close to Syria.” She paused again to glance at some documents on the table in front of her, and then looked back up at me. “In the Sinjar region. Luke has mentioned that you’re famil—”

“Yeah,” I cut in brusquely, the burn still flaring, and Gunner suddenly roused himself, sitting up and resting his head in my lap, and this was going nowhere good really fucking fast. “I’m familiar.”

My palms were so clammy they were leaving a foggy film on the table, and I jerked them to me, crossing my arms over my chest. I bristled in pure reflex, my gaze drifting and my skin screaming while a hundred thousand red-hot pokers the size of sewing pins stabbed into my neck and shoulders. I squeezed my arms tighter together, automatically flexing my back muscles to try to relieve the burn without actually doing anything that hinted at it bothering me.

Skye nodded hastily and timidly tucked a lock of her red hair behind her ear, and now she was fucking scared of me, too.Nice fucking going.“I was wondering if while you… you know… were there, you had a chance to interact with any Yazidi people. My hope is to replicate the temples they’re familiar with as best we can. And what we’re hoping you can help us with is—”

“Yeah, Iinteractedwith them.” My teeth clenched without warning, and Gunner buried his face between my arm and my torso. “There were no temples. There was nothing left. There were barely anypeopleleft. The ones who survived were locked up in abandoned schools and other buildings that had been turned into makeshift prisons. I don’t think I have to tell any of you what sort of things were done to them.”

“Oh.” Skye gulped, and I cut my eyes toward Emma, and she and her husband both already fucking hated me, so fuck literally everything.

“I don’t know anything about that kind of frivolous shit. Isn’t that why you’re here?” I snapped, my surly auto-mouth taking over, and I was going down in flames, and there was no parachute. It was like being a belligerent drunk without the fun of being drunk. “You were locked up with those people, right?”

Emma was just staring into space with her strong jaw set and icy blue eyes glazed over.

Austin shoved his chair back and pitched forward to plant his palms on the table. “I am abouttwo secondsfrom jumping over this fucking table and—”

Emma pushed out of her chair so forcefully that it rolled into the wall behind the table with a loudsmack. She wedged herself between Austin and the table, stabbing her index finger into his chest and backing him up, growling at him in a voice that somehow cut deep down to the ugly parts of my soul. “Stop making my shit your shit. None of this happened to you. It didnothappen toyou.”

“Ems…” he said, drawing out her nickname while he lifted his hands neutrally and passively backed up. “Sweetheart… Emma…”

Emma pushed him all the way to another corner of the room, and Skye was clutching her forehead, elbow on the table while her phone rang on speaker, the sound of it breaking through the tense atmosphere and rattling me to my knotted-up core. Gunner was growling, and Ruth’s beautiful hands were pressed against her beautiful lips.

“Baby girl?” Brennan’s voice came from out of nowhere, stripping me of any semblance of a connection to reality, and all I could hear was Skye’s unfinished sentence from a moment ago when I snapped at her.

And what we’re hoping you can help us with is—

I wasn’t even in this conference room anymore. I couldn’t hear Emma losing her shit at Austin, couldn’t hear Brennan saying worried terms of endearment over the phone, couldn’t hear any of it other than the tortured cries of people just like the defeated redhead crying over the phone to her husband because she needed me to help her, and Icouldn’t.Just like all those other young ladies and little girls who’d foolishly put their faith in me.

We’re hoping you can help us.

Help us.

Please help us.

You have a weapon, you’re a good man, you can do something.

A gutturalWOOFexploded in my ear, jarring me, and I drifted my gaze slowly through the chaos, searching for Ruth like she was my north star.

And there she was, right next to me, looking at me through crystalline amber eyes that I swore to God were reaching for me.

That was ridiculous, so I reached for her instead, my hand finding hers through the fire and the fury of my mind and holding on for dear life. “Ruth. I need to go home.”

I couldn’t see anything but her eyes, and yeah. My own north star right there in front of me.

“Yeah, friend. Let’s go home.

I’m pretty sure I staggered out of the conference room mumbling something to Skye that sounded like, “Just tell me what you want it to look like, and I’ll make it happen.”

I didn’t know what was happening. Gunner was there, doing his job, and Ruth was taking me home. Which was so weird because homejust felt like anywhere I was when she was with me.

* * *

---