Something broke in the living room, and I thought hurry up.

But I hadn’t been fast enough. I was standing there when I heard, “What the fuck are you doing?”

I tensed. Shook. Wanted to throw up.

I don’t know what I responded with, but I was aware of what was going to happen before it did. I tried to wake up. Tried to force myself to wake up before… before… but I didn’t, and the metal was as cool as ever as it hit the base of my neck first, and—

I woke up with a gasp in my dark room. Woke up on my back with my entire body strung tight. Woke up with goose bumps all over my arms and my hands instantly going to my face to rub it.

It was just a dream.

I knew it was. I was fine. I was safe.

Something heavy landed on my stomach a moment before Rip’s voice pulled me even further back into the present with a rough, “Luna?”

Crap.

“I’m fine,” I whispered, hearing the lie in how my voice wobbled.

The mattress moved as I figured he rolled. “Bad dream?”

It was still so dark, we must have not been asleep too long, but I still felt guilty for waking him up. It was bad enough when it was just me. “Yeah.” I took a breath through my nose and rubbed my face again, my fingers trembling just a little but more than enough. “I’m okay. I’m sorry for waking you up.”

The warm breath on my upper arm told me he was facing me. “What happened in it?” he asked unexpectedly.

I held my breath, thinking over the details. It only kept the goose bumps on my arm for longer.

“You’re not the only one who knows how to keep secrets,” his voice rumbled.

I froze, staring blindly into the darkness. I had never told anyone about what happened the day before I left. Not even Lenny. Not Mr. Cooper. Nobody.

I hadn’t been in the middle of making macaroni for the girls like in my dream, but…

“Luna,” he said my name carefully.

I sniffed and reached back to rub at the nape of my neck, touching the spot that had never felt the same after that day.

“Baby, you cried out,” a sugar-sweet voice murmured a moment before what I knew were his fingers reached for my arm, sliding down it until his hand took mine and swallowed it whole. “Tell me what happened. It’s not real. You know it’s not.”

I took a breath through my nose, my nape itching again. “It was real, Rip,” I sniffed, feeling him squeeze my shaking fingers.

“Somebody do something?”

I tried to rub my fingers over his rough ones.

“Somebody hurt you?” the man beside me repeated himself.

Every day for years. Hurt didn’t have to be physical, but I didn’t tell him that. He could keep secrets, he said, and I believed him. And maybe I shouldn’t tell him, maybe I shouldn’t say the words out loud and make them more real than they already were just living in my own head but…

But I had to try.

Isn’t that what I had tried to do with Lily and Kyra for years? Try to get them to talk about things so they wouldn’t bottle them up and explode from pressure later on?

I was such a hypocrite sometimes.

“I had a dream my dad…” Hell. How could I explain this? “He was always an asshole. Always, you know? When he was drunk or mad or because I was breathing too loud if the TV was on or if something had gone wrong and I happened to be nearby…”

The fingers covering mine moved to linked us together. His palm warm, so much warmer than mine, it felt like it gave me strength. Or assurance. Or something. Something too nice and necessary. And not mine at all.

But I kept going. “He caught me stealing money from him. My little sister Kyra had a fever, and when I asked her mom for money, she told me to fuck off. I told him I was just taking it to pay for the doctor, but he wouldn’t listen. He thought I was trying to steal his product or something, I don’t even know… but he got so mad, so much madder than ever before… and he said all kinds of things, and when I tried to leave the room, he grabbed me by the hair and he… he….”

The soft spot at my nape itched, but I wasn’t about to let go of Rip’s hand to mess with it. I wasn’t. I wasn’t.

“He put a gun up to my head and told me that if I ever did it again, he would fucking kill me,” I whispered, unable to hold back the shake… and trying to pick at the slice of anger of what that man had put me through, of what he had done to me. “Sometimes, I have dreams about it, but it’s really rare. But the back of my head starts to itch, and I feel like I’m back there again…”

The silence between us stretched far and wide, and if it wouldn’t have been for how his fingers had jerked in mine as I told him the last part, I would have thought maybe he had fallen asleep.

But I guessed he just didn’t know what to say, and I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t know what to say if our roles were reversed either.

I hadn’t even been sure I could tell him.

“I went to my grandma’s house that day afterward, you know. I told her what happened, and she told me to go. It wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned it. She said I would never be safe there, and I made her promise me that she would take care of my sisters as long as she could, and she said she would. And I told her… I told her I’d make sure she got them…” I squeezed his hand. “I couldn’t stay there after that, Rip. I couldn’t.

“I called the cops the next day while the girls were in school—while I should have been in school too—and told them there were drugs at my house. I told them where to find it and how there were kids living there. And they came… they came and they arrested my dad and their mom. He screamed at me that he was going to fucking kill me… and I found out later on in the paper that they ended up arresting his brother too.” I had known from the moment I’d been little what my dad did. How the cops were always on his case, according to him. They had told me a thousand times that I better keep my trap shut or else.

What I didn’t share was how I had warned my sisters I was leaving. How they were going to go live with Grandma for a while. How things were going to be so much better. How I told them I was sorry they couldn’t come with me, but I had only been seventeen.

She had never offered to let me live with her for whatever reason she’d had, but she had volunteered for them.

So I did it.

“That was what I didn’t want to tell you. How I ratted him out. How he went to jail for three years because of me. Because I don’t feel bad for what I did. Not even a little bit. I wish he would have stayed in jail for longer. That’s why I went to go get my sisters. Because my grandmother called when she found out he was getting out, and she knew they wouldn’t be safe with her, not with him so close. And so, we made it work and I went to go get them…”

I sniffed again, letting the anger fuel me, letting it remind me of what I’d done and would never look back on. “It’s okay if you think I’m disloyal or a piece of shit for turning my own dad in, you know.”

His fingers jerked while tangled with mine again, and I had no preparation for how he replied. For the strength in his tone, for the assuredness. “I’d never fucking think that about you,” he said in that incredibly husky voice, full of… something. Something I wasn’t sure of. “You did the right thing. You did the only thing you could have. There’s nothing you got to feel bad about. You hear me?”

Did I hear him? Was he serious? I couldn’t help how small my voice sounded, how small I freaking felt. “You still want to be my friend then?”

“Christ,” he hissed before making a choking noise. “Goddamn, Luna.”

I didn’t get a chance to think his words over before the hand holding mine left, and the next thing I knew, a hand snuck between my rib cage and the bed and another went to my hip, and he pulled me toward him. Onto him.

Lucas Ripley pulled me halfway onto his body, or at least that’s how it felt when his bicep turned into my pillow and his hip and thigh a part of my mattress.

“You kill me, girl,” he murmured in the roughest voice I’d ever heard. “I swear to God, you’re a fucking puzzle I thought was all in the box, but every damn day I find a piece or two hidden all over the place.”