The Devil Gets His Due (The Devils #4)(66)

I smile. “That’s me!” I’d love to keep chatting but there’s a fifty percent chance of Graham having a public tantrum if I actually stop. I keep moving as the show comes to its end, waving to people who recognize me, and I’m over halfway across the plaza when someone jumps in my path.

“Can I get your autograph?” the woman asks. She’s so excited and eager that I don’t have the heart to remind her I’m no one.

“Um, sure? Do you have a pen?”

She starts to fish through her bag, but the mere act of us stopping like this has drawn everyone’s attention. They were all in agreement that I was a nobody, and now the crowd is rethinking it based on one woman’s bad judgement. God, what must life be like for Mindy and Mills? They can’t walk to Starbucks in the morning without makeup. They can’t go to a grocery store and buy donuts and Froot Loops. They can’t chill with a friend who sleeps outside their building.

A circle forms around us, and someone else says they want an autograph, too, and then behind them the people who were dispersing suddenly turn to surround us, hoping to see someone famous.

It could turn bad really fast—which is precisely why Graham didn’t want me to do this. I’m no one, but there are hundreds of people here who can’t even see me but will push and fight simply to find out for themselves.

I look behind me for Graham but he isn’t there. Some part of me was assuming he’d fix anything that went wrong, and he probably knew that. I put myself in danger, I put our baby in danger, and then I told him he had no say in the matter…while expecting him to magically extricate me if things went awry. It was so stupid, and so unfair.

The crowd keeps pushing as I sign the first autograph, and the second.

I see no way to get to the restaurant now. I’m surrounded on all sides. My hands drop to my stomach as if that can protect my daughter when it obviously can’t. If the crowd keeps pushing, we’ll be crushed to death, and these idiots will still be shouting, “Who is it?” and pulling out their phones.

I turn again. “Graham?” I shout, and it’s only when I hear the panic in my own voice that I realize how scared I am, how desperate I am to be out of here, away from all this. Two seconds later, he’s knocking people out of the way with a violence I didn’t know he was capable of, and when he reaches me, I press my face to his chest.

I half expect him to respond poorly, to say, “I told you this would happen!”, but instead his arms band around me as if he knows. “Are you okay?” he asks against my ear.

I shake my head. I’m not and this right here—his chest under my nose and the smell of his skin and his soap—feels like safety, better than everything else I thought I wanted combined. “Make this go away,” I whisper.

“Okay,” he says, and then he’s got me against him and we’re shoving through the crowd.

A guy grabs my arm and Graham’s got the guy by the throat with his left hand while still holding onto me with his right.

“Drop her arm,” he barks in a tone no sane man would defy, and the guy does. Holding me close, he continues to move us forward, ready to extinguish anything that gets in our way, and when we finally near the restaurant’s entrance he glances at me.

I’m still shaking. I couldn’t show up like this if I wanted to, and I don’t even want to. “Let’s just go,” I whisper.

He pulls me over to the side of the building where a few limos are idling, and throws the door open of the first one we reach.

“Hey!” shouts the driver. “You can’t—”

“She’s pregnant,” Graham barks, “and this is an emergency. So you can drive, or you can call the cops, but we’re not getting out of this fucking car the way things are at the moment.”

I bury my head against his chest, thanking God he came with me and that he was so…so Graham. So fierce, so protective, so unrelenting.

And some ancient part of me says, “Keeley, you knew this is who he was. You chose him because of this.”

“Thank you,” I whisper.

“Of course,” he says, then he gives the driver my address.

“We still need to get your car,” I remind him.

He swallows. “I just want you home first, okay?” His hand stretches over his eyes as his thumb and middle finger press to opposite temples. “Fuck, Keeley. That…could have been bad.”

He stares out the window for the rest of the ride home, his jaw locked tight. I’ve never seen him this stressed, not even when I told him I was pregnant, and I don’t know how to break through the ice surrounding him right now.

I’m quiet too, because the one thing I thought I wanted…I definitely don’t want. Did I blindly adopt my mother’s hopes and dreams? I think maybe I did. And then I blindly pursued medicine simply to prove Shannon wrong. I probably could have used some therapy when my mom died, because as it stands, I don’t know if there’s anything I’ve done in my life that’s actually authentic, that wasn’t inspired by spite or sorrow or sheer childlike enthusiasm.

When we get to the apartment, I kick off my heels and go to the kitchen. “Are you hungry?” I ask. “I can make a mean grilled cheese. Well, I can start one and you’ll take over when you smell it burning, but my intentions are good.”