“Lucy? We took Lucy with us. She was hurt bad.”

Connor scribbled again.

We don’t know. We’ll find out more tomorrow, okay?

Kenna nodded.

A few minutes later, Alys and X showed up with BLTs, and we all dug in.

“I guess we’re not going to Italy,” Kenna mentioned quietly. “The fucker.”

“Who?” I asked around a mouthful of BLT.

She didn’t answer. She hadn’t heard me. This was gonna take some getting used to. I grabbed the pad and paper.

Do you know who the bomber was?

Turning to look at me, her busted eye gave me a weird, sick feeling in my chest. It reminded me of the Sith Lord eyes from Star Wars.

“My guess is that Kyle guy.”

Kyle fuckin’ Whitestone, Rita Holmes’s psycho stalker.

“I thought he’d been arrested?” said Alys from her spot on the floor.

“He’s been in a nuthouse for the last month,” I replied, the inferno rising in me.

Kenna shrugged. Feeling my voice, she leaned back into my chest and scarfed down her sandwich. We finished the food in silence.

Half-eaten sandwich in hand, X’s head dropped back onto the edge of the bed, snoring.

“Come on,” said Connor. He and Alys heaved the soulless ginger to his feet. “Just shout if you need help,” Connor said to me over his shoulder. On the way out, he flicked off the light and quietly closed the door.

Cradling my Baby Girl in my arms, I wrapped her up in all the warmth, safety, and strength I had in me. She drifted back to sleep, knocked out by the Vicodin.

While a shift change had been going on, Kyle Whitestone had slipped out of the nuthouse and headed straight to a storage unit stashed with his homemade pyrotechnics. The motherfucker had had no plans on coming out alive. He’d sewn that shit into a vest and detonated it while bear-hugging Rita.

The woman had essentially vaporized. The only things the search-and-rescue team had found of her were her legs from the knees down, preserved by her designer boots.

The second explosion had killed Charlotte. The ceiling had come crashing down in her room, crushing her. Her remains had been recovered and identified through dental records two days later.

Lucy had died when the last explosion threw Kenna and Gavin across the street. Kenna had told me how Lucy had pulled them into her chest, shielding them from further injury. That shit gave me goose bumps every fuckin’ time I thought about it.

In all, fourteen other staff members of the Center for Radiant Health along with a handful of clients had been killed.

Day four after the shit had gone down, the battle between Kenna and me began. My Baby Girl refused to take any more pain meds.

“I don’t need them. I can’t tell how well I’m healing if I’m fucked up on those things.”

I grabbed the notepad we’d been using and wrote:

It’s to help keep you still, so you won’t overdo shit!

Tossing the notepad at me, she stubbornly replied, “I don’t need them to not overdo anything,” she snapped. “I can smoke weed instead. I’m not taking them anymore.”

It’s killing me that you’re hurting! Please just take them. It won’t be for forever.

“No.” Kenna chucked the notepad across the living room.

I stormed out to the back porch, feeling fit to break something. There was no satisfaction in having a fight when I had to fuckin’ write everything down—and not when Gavin was sitting next to her on the couch, watching the fuckin’ Food Network with the closed caption on. Gavin was one badass motherfucker though. He’d insisted on coming over to be with Kenna. By the third day, we’d just told his brother, Frank, to pack up what he’d need, so he could stay with us. It was good for Kenna and Gavin to have one another. They really understood each other.

“You all right, man?” Connor asked, coming out onto the porch.

“Naw, man. I’m not.”

“You know how she is.”

“Yeah, I know she’s a stubborn little shit! But it’s been four fuckin’ days since she was nearly killed—”

“Like that makes a difference. Dude, you just gotta pick and choose the battles from here on out. If she doesn’t take the pain meds, it ain’t the end of the world.”

“She needs to rest, and the meds knock her out.”

“She hates the way they make her feel. To be honest, I think she’s been taking them this long for you. They’ve been keeping her in a mental fog, suppressing her emotional pain, and she knows she has to face it.”

“Can’t she do that when she’s better?” I asked, exasperated.

Connor shook his head. “She wants to meditate, Phil. She can’t do that while she’s on the meds. They fuck up her frequencies.”

“What the fuck does that even mean?”

“She can’t seek her inner space when she’s that doped up on synthetic garbage.”

“You fuckin’ hippie kids,” I muttered.

Connor shrugged. “We are what we are.”

Rolling my eyes, I said, “Right. I gotta get rid of this energy. I’m hittin’ the weights and shit. I’ll be back later.”

“I’ll tell her,” he said, copping a squat.

At home in my gym, I worked out until I could hardly move. Dripping sweat with my heart pumping and muscles aching, I felt a hell of a lot better. At least I would be ready to face Kenna without wanting to spank her.

Fuck.

Sex hadn’t crossed my mind since I’d sweet-banged her in the shower before the bombing. Kenna was broken, inside and out. That was a sure-fire guarantee for me to not think about having sex with her. Now that I was alone and not gazing lovingly into her Sith Lord eyeball, I could see her as she had been before getting blown up.

Her injuries didn’t make her any less beautiful to me, but it’d squashed the shit out of my sex drive—as it fuckin’ should have. Hell, I couldn’t even remember the last time I had whacked off. But I was gonna fuckin’ do so now.

Blasting the hot water, I sat on the stone bench.

Yeah…

I thought of the first time in here with her after we had waited for the right time to fuck, and she’d dropped to her knees, wrapped her lips around me, and taken the whole fuckin’ thing…the first time I’d sunk into her, feeling my balls tap her ass…

“Oh, fuuuck…” My head banged back against the tiles.

The sweet fuckin’ taste of her sugary slice, how tight she grips me when I’m buried inside her, that tiny little heartbeat that makes my dick tingle, the noises she makes in the back of her throat—it all drives me wild.

“Baby…” I moaned, working my fist up and down my dick, wishing it were her tight little cunt.

Kenna could ride me for hours. She had the strength and stamina to do it and loved every fuckin’ second of it.

“Fuck yesss…” I groaned as the thought of her punishing me in LA danced its ass through my head.

My dick swelled, and my balls drew up, my tailbone sparkling with tingles. Fuck, I was so close. Just thinking of her wet pussy hovering right above my face, her fingers rubbing my sugary slice—

Cum shot out of me, full fuckin’ force, and there was a lot of it. Heart pounding, legs shaking, I was blissed the fuck out. The next time I fucked my Baby Girl, I was gonna bang her so hard that we’d both be walking funny.

The breath froze in my chest.

Kenna was so badly beaten already, her body full of bruises and scrapes…there was no way…

She was the only person in the whole fuckin’ world I could lose control with.

Oh, fuck…there’s no way I’d be able to hold back, not after this long.

There was nothing in the world I loved more than that woman. The way her eyes lit up a fuckin’ room, how her smile made my heart trip up in my chest. Her laugh made me high from just listening to it. The sound of her voice never failed to command my attention. And she asked for nothing. She just gave me her love in the hopes that I’d return it.