He Laughed While I Was Hit novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Dock

Brennan found me in the chapel yard with the sweater pressed against my chest.

He did not ask a single question.

He took off his jacket, put it on my shoulders, and walked me to the car with a hand at my back.

In the dark, on the road home, I told him everything Fiorella had said.

The slip of paper, the PIN, the boy.

He listened with his eyes on the road.

"Open it," he said, when I finished.

"She said not unless I'm safe."

"You're with me."

"Rocco's men watched me walk into a church tonight." I turned the little gray phone over in my hands. "If I open it and it's what I think it is, he'll know. And she'll pay for it."

Brennan's knuckles whitened on the wheel.

"Then we wait."

"We wait."

We drove through the gate at midnight, and he checked the lock twice.

Two men in dark jackets stood at the end of the drive.

He had hired them that morning, and he did not apologize for it.

I did not go to bed.

I went out onto the dock at the bottom of the lawn, in his jacket and my own bare feet, and sat at the edge with my heels over the black water.

The lake was perfectly still.

I heard him come down the boards behind me and stop.

"Can't sleep either?"

"No."

He sat down an arm's length away, and for a while we looked at the water.

"You said I could leave whenever I wanted," I said.

"You can."

"You don't hold anything over me."

"No." He picked at the tape on his knuckles. "I told you I'd keep the rules."

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