Drop Dead Gorgeous(105)

I hear Alver call out, “Clear.”

Barnes yells out, “Zoey?”

“She’s here,” I answer. “Behind the car.”

Barnes runs around the car, skidding to a stop in front of us. “You good? Injured?” he barks at Zoey.

She seems surprised at his intensity but stammers, “Yeah, but we need to get Yvette to the hospital.”

“Shit,” he snaps, but without missing a beat, Barnes picks up Yvette from the ground, one arm under her knees and one behind her back. I’m impressed by his strength, especially when he covers the ground with wide strides toward his car.

I try to pick up Zoey too, but she shoos me off. “I’ve got it.”

“Zo, you’re limping,” I plead, every wince she makes stabbing me in the heart.

“I’m fine, Blake.”

Fuck, that tone. She’s right beside me, but her voice might as well be echoing from how far away from me she really is, back in her fortress behind defensive walls.

“Lean on me at least.”

She does take that option, though she stubbornly hops toward Barnes’s car. I help her sit down in the back seat with Yvette, wanting to crawl in after her so I can hold her. I’m not ready to let her go yet. Not when she’s mad.

Not when she’s not mine.

Barnes orders Alver, “Get the crew out here and start your paperwork. Good shot, old man. And call the State for their coroner.”

Coroner?

Good shot?

I look back to the field to see the other officer standing guard over a deadly still Sebastian. He’s got his gun out like he thinks Sebastian might be faking it, but there’s a pool of blood growing larger beneath him in the pale grass.

I guess Alver protected Zoey after all, taking the shot to save her. I give him an appreciative look. He might not be Zoey’s biggest fan, and I’m still not his, but he was instrumental in getting us here tonight, just in time to help.

Zoey tries to climb back out of the car. “I can do it.”

But Barnes stops her with a hard look, his jaw popping. “Zoey Walker, you know good and goddamned well you cannot handle the crime scene of a crime you were involved in, and you can’t process the body of the man who kidnapped you.”

Barnes is thunderously angry, honestly sounding like the father of a teenager who’s pushing some known boundaries, but Zoey doesn’t back down. Like the grown ass adult and professional she is. “Fine. But I want to see every document. And I want to observe the autopsy.”

Barnes dips his chin in agreement, so she pushes one step further. “And I want every test known to man run on Sebastian. I want to know every single potentially toxic thing he’s touched in his entire lifetime.”

“Why?” I question, fear blooming fresh. “Did he give you something?”

“Not me. Yvette,” Zoey answers, looking into the car at the sobbing woman. She drops her voice, kindly adding quietly, “He was poisoning them both for the money. It was all Sebastian, not Yvette. He was manipulating her, playing on her confusion from the metals.”

With that, she sinks into the car, pulling Yvette into her arms and pressing her cheek to the woman’s blonde hair. Barnes shuts the back door, climbing into the front seat, but I can’t . . . not yet.

“Zoey?” I plead.

She sighs. “Not now, Mr. Hale.”

A hot knife slips into my gut, spilling my blood at her feet. Are we back to this, so far gone that she won’t even call me by my name anymore?

If so, I will fucking work to get her back the way I worked to get her the first time, step by step, brick by brick, taking down those walls until I’m back inside her. Because she’s it for me. Zoey Walker is my love, my life, my till death do us part, even if some stupid curse I don’t believe in means my death is imminent.

If it is, I’ll haunt her fucking ass until she joins me in the afterlife because I’m not nearly close to done with her. Her eyes cut my way, and I see the barest sparkle there, the tiniest lift of her lips, and I realize . . . she’s fucking messing with me.

After being terrified she was going to die tonight, after she probably thought the same thing, still in the aftermath with blood pooling and the smell of gunpowder in the air, she’s kidding . . . about us.

About love.

About death.

About forever.

I love her so fucking much.

“Fine, I’ll wait, Miss Walker. But soon . . . we’re going to have a little chat, you and me.” I give her my patented eyebrow lift and am rewarded as I watch the questions melt from her, shoulders dropping and a happy sigh escaping.

She’s with me.

We do need to talk about this morning, but she’s with me.

“One more thing, Zo.” I reach in my back pocket and pull out the coaster I grabbed from the courtroom floor this morning and hold it out as an offering. “Thought you might want to hold onto this for luck.”

She looks at the coaster then back to me. “I’m already feeling pretty lucky,” she says with a small smile, “but I guess you can never have too much luck.”

She takes the coaster and tucks it into her chest. Yvette lets out a sob, and finally, I can close the door on them. I climb in the front seat this time, and Barnes gives me a knowing glance. “Thought I told you to stay in the car?”