She pushed on like the man hadn’t spoken. “Why would you do that? I helped you. I risked myself for you. I risked Jenna.” Static roared inside her head and white-hot rage filled her chest. Lunging, she swung her fists at Shane. “It’s your fault this happened!”
“Crystal. Stop. I’m sorry,” he said, taking her blows. “I know. Just stop, you’re gonna hurt yourself.” His voice was tight, sad, desperate as he caught her wrists in his hands.
“I thought I could trust you,” she said, not meaning to voice the thought but not regretting it one bit when Shane flinched.
“You can. I promise.”
“Oh, you promise? Well, then.” She threw up her arms, her heart breaking twice over. First, for the loss of Jenna, and second for the loss of the idea she’d had of Shane. How stupid she’d been. How reckless. And now the only person in the world she loved—and who loved her—had been kidnapped . . . and who knew what else. Tears squeezed her throat until it was hard to breathe. “I did everything you asked of me. You didn’t have to make me . . .” Fall in love with you.
“I will explain. Later.” Shane grasped her by the arms and looked her dead in the eyes. “I know I fucked up, but those bugs were here in part so I could help if something like this happened. We heard Bruno bust his way in here. That’s how we knew. We tried to get here in time to save Jenna.” He swallowed hard, like failing to do so cut him. Deep. “We tried. But right now, we have to get you out of here.”
“I’m not—”
“Crystal, you don’t have a choice. Bruno will come back. But where we live is safe. And we can figure out how to get Jenna back.”
Get Jenna . . . back? They could do that?
For the first time in long minutes, the chaos in her mind subsided. The rage dulled. The hurt faded away. A new image flashed into Crystal’s mind—Shane and the dark-haired man hauling the injured blond guy up the steps and out of Confessions. “How?”
His thumbs rubbed gently over her arms where he held her. “I don’t know yet. That’s what we need to figure out. And we shouldn’t waste any time.”
Saving Jenna was all that mattered. Crystal nodded and followed Shane to the door, only darting back to retrieve her purse and her sister’s prescription. Oh, God. She doesn’t have any medicine with her. But Crystal couldn’t think on that long, because the five men circled tight around her and guided her out the door, down the steps, and a short distance across the lot to a big SUV.
Crystal ended up in the backseat between Shane and a big, athletic-looking man with dark brown skin and an absolutely lethal expression on his face. Edward. The one who had guarded Jenna the night she’d come to the club.
When he caught her looking, he met her gaze, and his brown eyes were fierce. “We will do everything we can to get Jenna,” he said, as the truck tore across the lot, the sound of the engine like a freight train.
The vow kept the worst of the panic at bay, but not all of it. Because she’d been held against her will by the Church gang. She knew what most of the worst-case scenarios looked like. Saw the reminder of it every day in the mirror. And her soul bled at the idea that she and Jenna would have any of that in common.
All her work. All her precautions. All the sacrifices Crystal had made to keep this very thing from happening. None of it had mattered. In the end, she hadn’t kept Jenna safe. She hadn’t kept her promise to their father.
The rough ride jostled her in the seat. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t hold it together. A whimper caught in her throat, and hot lines of tears spilled from her eyes.
“Come here,” Shane said in a low voice, lifting his arm around her shoulders and tilting her chin toward him with his other hand. “It’s not okay right now. I know it’s not. But it will be.”
“We have to get her, Shane. We have to.” She heard the pleading in her words and felt it pouring out of her eyes, and she wasn’t ashamed to beg. Not for Jenna’s life. “Please. I wouldn’t be able to live if anything happened to her.”
Shane nodded, and his expression was equal parts enraged and heartbroken, just like she felt. “I know,” he said.
As the world raced by outside the windows of the SUV, his words rekindled her anger. “No, you don’t. You don’t know. You can’t know what it’s like to have your sister ripped away from you, and to have that be your fault!”
Shane grimaced like she’d punched him. An odd tension Crystal didn’t understand filled the truck’s cabin.
“Yeah, I do. I know exactly what that feels like.” His soft declaration ratcheted the tension further. Crystal looked around at the other men, trying to figure it out, but they’d all turned away.
With deft flicks of his fingers, Shane unbuttoned the top of his shirt and tugged the left half to the side. His actions revealed the tattoo she’d asked about that night in his truck, the one she hadn’t been able to make out and he’d said represented a sad memory. Crystal’s stomach rolled as her gaze traced over the image of a winged broken heart stabbed through by a dagger.
Grief rolled into Shane’s gaze. “When I was thirteen, my eight-year-old sister Molly disappeared from our house while I was babysitting her. I’d told her to leave me alone. The police searched actively for about three weeks, but the false leads that broke and rebroke my mother’s heart went on for years. We never saw Molly again.” Grasping Crystal’s hand, he brought it against the warm, hard skin of his chest over his broken heart. “I understand,” he said in a strangled voice, his eyes glassy.
“Oh,” she said, his pain washing over her until it was hard to breathe—and harder to restrain herself from comforting him. “I’m sorry.” Crystal threw her arms around Shane’s neck and scrabbled into his lap. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“So am I,” he said against her hair. “But you have to know. I would lay down my life to make sure we get Jenna back.”
Face-to-face, they held each other, whispering words of comfort and apology. Crystal had been so right and so wrong. Even if he’d done something he shouldn’t have in bugging her apartment—and that still stung, Shane was a good man. She hadn’t read him wrong. But Bruno Ashe? He was an evil piece of shit. “I didn’t mean what I said,” she rasped, needing him to know, to believe. “It’s not your fault . . .”
Shane shook his head. “You were right that I invaded your privacy. And I’m sorry,” he said, stroking her hair and wiping a tear with his thumb. “But I was so afraid for you that I justified what I did as being for your own good. I understand if you can’t forgive me or trust me, but you have to at least know that I never meant any harm.”
“I know,” she said. “I believe you.” Crystal buried her face in his neck and breathed him in. His scent, his heat, his strength grounded her, gave her what hope there was in this hopeless situation.
No, she had to believe there was hope. She simply refused to accept any other outcome.
Jenna had wanted to pack up and leave this morning. Crystal had been the one to urge caution. Thinking back to that conversation nearly broke her heart. They could’ve been gone by now, and Jenna would’ve been safe. So if she lost Jenna—when it was her carelessness in Bruno’s office that had set off this whole chain of events, she knew one thing for sure.
Crystal would never, ever forgive herself.
SOUL-DEEP RELIEF FLOWED through Shane’s blood as he held Crystal in his arms. She was a slight little thing, and soft. And her presence went a long way toward quieting the ancient grief and guilt always stalking around at the back of his mind.