his worry over her running had been spoken out loud. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”
“No.”
Her nod was unsteady. “He found me. I don’t know how he found me.”
Connor shot a look back toward the man. Still there. Still smiling. He needed to get over there and wipe it right off his goddamn face, but he was glued to the sidewalk. She was going to run and he had to stop her. How? How could he stop her when he hurt her by touching her, when she was already having a panic attack and the slightest touch could make it worse? “I need you to come back to me, Erin. Look at me and trust me.”
“I can’t come back. He knows I’m here now.”
She’d misunderstood him, but her response chilled him to the bone. She meant to run and never come back. Leave Chicago. Leave him. Around him, the world contorted, passersby’s voices sounding unnatural. “We’ll go together. Don’t do this. I won’t let him near you, Erin. You have to know I’d die first.”
Her gaze cleared. “Exactly.”
And then she ran. Until that moment, until Connor was chasing her through street vendors and harried locals, he hadn’t fully understood exactly how adept Erin was at escaping. Her slight form weaved in and out of business suits and tourists with maps like an exotic jungle cat, sleek and agile. He could hear the jingling of her boots, taunting him as he followed her path. Back in the SEALs, he’d undergone training that should have made it simple to catch up with a single female, stop her from running. It shouldn’t have been this difficult to track her movements, especially when people were giving them both wide berth, sprinting as they were down the busy sidewalk.
One second, he had sight of her blond hair and the next, she was gone. Disappeared.
Connor spun in a circle in the middle of a crosswalk, scanning the streets frantically. Looking for any sign of which direction she might have taken. Hoping people would turn their heads to indicate she had just run past. Hear the sounds of her bells tinkling. But there was nothing.
Gone. She was gone.
The demons she’d slain inside him regenerated…and roared to life.
Chapter Eighteen
Erin ignored the stabbing pain in her heart as she circled back toward the courthouse. She tried to banish the devastation on Connor’s face when she’d run from him, but it wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t helping. It hurt. She wanted him to go away so she could focus on what she needed to do. Just focus. As she’d booked it down the sidewalk, she’d fought the need to turn around and run straight back to Connor. The farther she’d gotten from her stepfather, the more her head had cleared. She didn’t want to run away. Not permanently. Not when it made her feel like her insides were being shredded with every step.
Which meant she had some work to do.
This, her stepfather, was her cross to bear. No one else’s. She’d left him alive and with a shit-ton of incentive to hunt her back down, although she still had no idea how he’d tracked her to Chicago. She would be finding out soon enough. She’d handle her problem and get back to Chicago and Connor. And fuck it, her friends. She had friends now. A job. People who were counting on her. If you’d told her a month ago she’d have a live-in boyfriend who slept in her bed, that she’d be witnessing weddings, she would have laughed until she turned blue. Now it was her reality and she liked it. Loved it, even.
She loved Connor.
Fuck, there it was again. His face. I won’t let him near you, Erin. You have to know I’d die first.
Dammit, think about something else. Something less painful. No, more painful. The only thing that would stop Connor’s pleas from ringing in her head would be to replace them with a harsher memory. Kind of like hobbling yourself to detract pain from a broken arm. Might as well make it something useful. Memories could be a powerful motivator if you picked the right one.
As she pilfered a Chicago Cubs hat from a street vendor and tucked her hair up inside it, she thought back to her twenty-first birthday. She’d been one week into serving her first sentence in Dade. A visitor had been the last thing she’d been expecting. An inmate had the right to refuse a visitor, but she’d been suffocating. The promise of