It broke my heart to hear her being so matter-of-fact about it, like she had already resigned herself to her fate. I wanted her to fight. But I suppose she was in her own way.
“But I can be with you, all the time. I can focus on you, just on you, and not the band, not the shows, not my music.”
She pressed her hand into my leg harder. “But you have to. This is your life, Sage.”
“You’re my life,” I blurted out. I hoped to God she couldn’t see me blushing like a fucking girl because what I’d just said was borderline hokey. But it was the truth. “You are, and I will put the rest of my life on hold if it means keeping you safe.”
She reached up for my face, her soft fingertips tracing along the rough stubble on my jaw. “You are an amazing man. An amazing musician. You are my golden god and every day you surprise me. We, what we have, surprises me. As long as you keep…being there for me, I’ll be as safe as I can be. You’ve done so much for me, more than you’ll ever even know. But canceling your tour isn’t the answer here. I already have guilt. I don’t want any more. If anything, watching you play live, being with you in all these foreign places, no matter what is going on at the time, keeps me sane. It keeps me going. And it tells those fuckers that we aren’t giving up. They can throw whatever they want at me, but I’m not breaking.”
I brought her hand to my lips and kissed it. I wanted to do so much more than that for her. We waited until Tricky and a queasy Garth came back, then I took her back to the hotel. Kicked Max out of the room. And gave her three orgasms hot on the heels of each other. It was the least I could do.
The three of us woke up in the middle of the night to the phone ringing. I heard Max roll over in his bed and pick it up. “Hello?”
There was a pause then he said, voice tired and groggy, “Okay, I’ll be right there.”
He leaned over and flicked on the light, blinding me. Dawn raised her head off my chest and blinked at us wearily. “What’s going on?”
Max got out of bed, pulling on his jeans and a flannel shirt before I had to see anything I didn’t want to. “It was Jacob. Said it was really important.”
I looked at the clock. “It’s three-thirty in the morning.”
Max shrugged and let out a sigh. “Yeah. Well, it sounded…urgent. I’ll be right back. You two stay put.” He quickly grabbed his room key and shut the door behind him.
I looked down at Dawn in my arms—she was already sleeping again. I gently placed her on the bed and got up to use the washroom. I was a little on edge as I did so, flashes of the monster in Dawn’s bathroom flashing in the darkened spaces of my brain.
Once I was done, I went over to the window to open it, since the room was getting stuffy with heat of three people sharing the same air. Our window faced a narrow street on the quieter side of the building. A lone cat was walking along it, rubbing up against the opposite building. And beneath the lone streetlight stood a woman. Tall, thin, slender—a complete silhouette. But she was watching me. I could tell she was watching me.
Angeline. It had to be her.
I looked behind me at Dawn, breathing heavily in her deep sleep. I didn’t want to leave her alone here without Max, but I knew he couldn’t be gone for too long. I looked back out the window again, and Angeline was slowly walking away. I needed answers. More than anything, I needed to know what was going on.
I grabbed my keys from the nightstand, slipped on my pants, and ran out into the hall, gently closing the door behind me and locking it. The hotel was quiet this time of night, guests in their rooms trapped in deep slumber, the front desk empty. I walked out into the street, nearly stepping on a rat that was scuttling past, and hurried up the street, turning the corner and going down the next one.
Angeline was walking away from me, her form disappearing in the empty spaces between the streetlamps. I ran soundlessly in my bare feet, the cobblestones cold under them, and caught up to her as she neared the next lamp.
I grabbed her harshly by her shoulder and spun her around so she was facing me and I could make out her features in the light.
“You,” I hissed.
It was her. But she sure as hell didn’t look very good. Her hair was straggly up close, tangled, and there were gaunt spaces underneath her cheekbones. Thin lines of tears marked her cheeks, and her nose was bleeding.
“Bonne soirée, Sage,” she said, trying to sound sly and sophisticated, but her words came out choked.
I didn’t know what to say now that I had her. This wasn’t what I was expecting.
“Who are you?” I whispered harshly. She didn’t say anything, so I shook her harder, my fingers digging into her arm. A drop of blood splattered onto the ground between us.
She eyed it absently then looked at me with watery eyes. “I’m almost done. And when I am done, I will be free.” She then went off into a tangent in French, just words that she spit out that didn’t seem to go together. The only word I recognize was mort. Death.
“Free from what? What do you want with Dawn?”
She gave me a lazy smile and another drop of blood fell from her upper lip. “I don’t care for Dawn. I did care for you, just un peu. But Dawn, she is their business. And I am almost free of their business, too.”
I took in a deep breath, trying to keep myself from flipping out in frustration. “Who are they?”
“You know who they are. Everyone knows who they are.” The blood began to pour more freely from her nose, streaks of red on white, and her eyes went up to the hotel windows. “You can go and ask one of them yourself. It’s with Dawn right now.”
My eyes flew to the windows. I counted up and saw the window to our hotel room. The light was on in the room, and a large form was moving to the curtains. I caught a glint of yellow eyes before it snapped the curtains shut.
I must have screamed or I don’t know what, but I turned and I ran fast as hell away from Angeline, around the corner, almost falling on my face, and back into the hotel. I took the stairs two at a time, praying I wasn’t too late, hoping it was just Max I saw, cursing myself for leaving her alone.
Once at the floor, I sprinted for the room. I didn’t even bother trying the handle to see if it was locked; there was no time. I threw myself against the door shoulder first and used all my strength and fury to bust it down.